BrandKnew April 2016

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

Scan these QR Codes to download the Brand Knew App IOS

Android

brandknewmag.com

Published by

04.16#45

07

Dear Friends: Temperatures soaring. Expectations on the rise too. This issue articulates why Tim Cook is the professional that he is as he takes Apple through changing, turbulent times. All fashionistas take note, it’s not LVMH or the Burberry’s of the world that is changing the fashion industry but Google- read about it here. The VR threat is now become a happy reality for marketers. Virtual Reality is now making strong headway and you can know more in this issue. For all brands obsessed with instant customer service, Twitter shows how the platform can be used to great effect. For all those obsessed with building your agency brand, the article on the subject shares one key lesson. As AI and Robots invade our every day lives, we talk about the associated opportunity for copywriters.

We also do bit of deep diving into the creation of the Rio Olympics 2016 brand logo in this issue. Rebranding is a compelling necessity for a lot of marketers and in this edition we discuss the successful strategies that should accompany a rebranding programme. There is loads more packed in and you would relish the content just as we did putting it together.

09 11 15 17 21 23

Till next, the very best.

25

Suresh Dinakaran @sureshdinakaran

@Brandknewmag

linkd.in/1dsjYaW

isdbranding

bit.ly/1h95tgO

isdglobaldubai

suresh@groupisd.com Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Regional Director: Krishna Chugh Regional Director: Vinit Chugh Country Head, India: Sanjay Kothandaraman Digital/Social Media Marketing: Khaleef Mayowa Junaid Web Specialist: Prasanta Kumar Sahu Online Support: Mahendra Kumar Behera

Brand Knew is published by

27 29 31 33 37 39

For Advertising Enquiries: info@groupisd.com or call + 971 4 386 7728 All Copyright of the content in this issue rests fully & comprehensively with the respective contributors and/or media platforms at all times, as the case may be.

www.brandknewmag.com | www.groupisd.com Download Mobile App from

41

CONTENTS

Strategies for Leading your Company through a Successful Rebrand Cadbury ‘memevertising’ campaign should have creative agencies feeling nervous How Google is wooing the fashion industry Why copywriters could fare well in the age of robots Searching for Tim Cook’s Energy Bar How emotions can lead to successful video advertising How AI Is Making Its Way Into Marketing Study: Marketers are clueless on cross-channel measurement You need to do this one thing to build your ad agency’s brand …

Can Corporate And Creative Cultures Ever Truly Merge?

How a decade of Twitter schooled brands in immediate customer service How The 2016 Olympic Logo and Font were Created Celebrity endorsements carry less sway with US consumers How Marketers Can Manage Data Better for a Single Customer View Book, Line & Sinker

Strategies for Leading your Company through a Successful Rebrand

By Stephen Sheinbaum

brandknewmag.com

08

Rebranding a business is a great opportunity for a company to show how it has evolved over time and debut its forward-thinking vision and mission to its constituents. It also is a tremendous undertaking, which requires precise strategy, exact timing and a great amount of preparation that must be communicated from the top all the way down.

CEOs must make sure that everyone on the rebranding team understands why the rebranding is happening, and what new company vision will be communicated. The team should know when to bring in outside experts and what resources they will need to effectively present the rebranded company to the world.

Companies sometimes rebrand for the wrong reasons.

RadioShack was trying to stay relevant in a rapidly changing world of electronics retailing in 2009 when it attempted a rebrand. But the new name—The Shack—came under some harsh criticism and it did little to stem the company’s financial distress.

“Some companies are good at reinvesting in employees, but it’s about helping them become better employees.”

A rebrand shouldn’t be a reaction to something new, but an initiative that is set in motion because it embodies the core values and direction of your company. By recommitting themselves to producing America’s most reliable, high-performance motorcycles in the 1980s, Harley-Davidson built a massive community of die-hard Harley fans and investors that are loyal brand enthusiasts to this day. Before starting your rebranding, revisit your mission statement and see if it aligns with what your company seeks to provide once the rebranding dust has settled.

Telling a Story, Finding a Hero Not every rebranding involves a new logo, but if yours will, think about the story your new design will tell. Nike’s swoosh logo, which was the result of a 1971 rebranding, has inspired many other companies to try to incorporate a similar flowing line in their icons. For many observers, the swoosh evokes thoughts of an athlete in motion—the story that Nike sports gear supports every day. However, when Capital One added an inverted swoosh to its logo in 2008, it was hard for many observers to see the relationship of the new image to its core mission as a financial institution.

When Bizfi rebranded last year, we changed both the name and the logo. The switch from Merchant Cash and Capital to Bizfi signified the expansion and diversification of our financing product set. Our graphics team created the Bizfi logo with a leaf in place of the dot over the final “I” to symbolize our dedication to providing capital to small businesses to promote their growth.

David Ogilvy, the father of modern advertising, believed that

all brands should position their product as the “hero” of its marketing. When you rebrand, check to make sure your hero is still the focus of your story. It’s a single-minded approach, but it remains every bit as effective now as when Ogilvy first posited it.

It’s OK to Seek Assistance Transitioning your company is a monumental undertaking, and as good as your internal team is, an outside point of view from someone with different strengths can make the difference between success and failure of your rebranding efforts. The world’s biggest brands have relied on brand consultants, and your company may want to consider this as well.

An outside firm is, first and foremost, a fresh pair of eyes on your product or service. It can share the experiences of other companies in your industry or it may bring perspective from brands like the one that you seek to become. It might also give you the customer’s perspective.

Presenting your New Brand to the World I sometimes wonder what David Ogilvy would make of all the marketing and advertising tools now at our disposal, and all the outlets for brand communications. There are many wonderful options, but with them we have lost the certainty and consistency which used to come from releasing one message to one dominant media outlet.

Traditionally, a company will put out a press release to announce to the public that it has rebranded. That still needs to be part of a rebranding effort, but it no longer is the only step. Your rebranding may need a commercial, or it may choose to create a guerilla marketing campaign that builds buzz. YouTube has put a whole new spin on brand marketing through video and companies are actively experimenting with short video clips about its brands on social media. And of course, there are rebrandings bolstered by celebrities.

When Weight Watchers wanted a new story for its approach to weight loss last year, it struck a deal with Oprah Winfrey, who has been very public about her struggle with weight gain over the years.

Whatever avenue you choose, make sure it aligns with your values and your organizational goals.

Stephen Sheinbaum is the founder of Bizfi, an aggregation marketplace that offers many kinds of alternative funding, from short-term finance, to longer term loans, equipment finance and lines of credit. Since 2005, Bizfi has originated in excess of $1.6 billion in funding to more than 29,000 small businesses.

Cadbury ‘memevertising’ campaign should have creative agencies feeling nervous

By Rik Moore

Cadbury’s new campaign, ‘Tastes Like This Feels’, follows Coke in promising consumers a tangible benefit - but it’s the use of YouTube footage that has the greatest consequences, says Rik Moore, head of creative strategy at Havas Media.

By landing taste in their creative, Cadbury are priming their customers, ready to be prompted once at point of sale, be that digital or physical, as taste is a quality that can be used to fight off price-promoting competitors.

If your business results show that taste matters to your customers that much, then in makes sense to turn that insight to your advantage.

This focus on taste has very loud echoes of the change in tagline that Coke brought in recently, moving from ‘Open Happiness’ to ‘Taste the Feeling’. What I think the shift to “Taste” for both brands shows is the move towards delivering a tangible benefit, which is increasingly important.

The new Cadbury’s ad is spot on for communicating what the product stands for in 2016, but the way it does it should give creative agency heads sleepless nights.

Using YouTube-style footage in ads is nothing new, but this is a massive household brand putting it at the heart of its creative. It’s memevertising on the grandest scale. This comes with a world of pros and cons, all of which should give creative agency CEOs the fear.

The big focus so far seems to be about the change in line.

This feels more evolution than revolution.

The key factor is that taste is a functional differentiator for Cadbury, something Mondelez have recently found to their cost. A survey by IRI in January 2016 showed that a change in the chocolate used in Cadbury’s Crème Eggs reportedly lost the brand £6m in sales of that product last year.

If your business results show that taste matters to your customers that much, then in makes sense to turn that insight to your advantage, and make that differentiator the hero of your campaign.

Differentiation is essential More and more, millenials and Gen Z want to see something beyond emotion - they want tangible output Finding a differentiator and championing it is essential in this category, particularly with the growth of online grocery shopping. Chocolate is a highly impulsive category.

This doesn’t help online transactions, where it’s a world of favourites-lists and price promotions. It is believed 12% of shoppers go into the confectionary aisle online.

To address this, advertisers need to think about product findability, category occasion visibility, and brand visibility.

It is this third factor that the taste differentiator can really support from a behavioural economics perspective.

More and more, millenials and Gen Z want to see something beyond emotion. They want tangible output in return for their investment. In this instance, taste delivers that.

The bear essentials If I was in charge of an agency that had built a business on making beautiful, big budget TV campaigns, this would make me extremely nervous.

This move towards engaging these audiences has also clearly informed the memevertising approach to the creative. This is where the potential issue lies. A superbrand like Cadbury using YouTube footage in its ad sets a precedent for others to follow.

However, it is imperative that marketers recognise the subtlety of the piece. The Cadbury ad has simplicity, but simplicity that has required a lot of craft – finding the clip that absolutely works for the brand, aligned to the right soundtrack (which cannot have been cheap to sync).

It also allows fantastic cost-effective scalability to the campaign, as once you establish the parameters, anything can illustrate “Tastes Like This Feels” – it’s a new spin on MasterCard’s “Priceless”.

However, gone are the high production values of Joyville. If I was in charge of an agency that had built a business on making beautiful, big budget TV campaigns, this latest evolution in Cadbury’s messaging, and the knock-on implications that has for the industry, would make me extremely nervous.

There’s also the small matter that I doubt the bear got paid for being in the ad. If that’s true, that’s risky for Fallon – if The Revenant taught us anything, it’s that you definitely don’t want to make bears angry….

This article was first published on marketingmagazine.co.uk

How Google is wooing the fashion industry Google Could Beat Apple At Fashion—Just Like It Did Phones

By Mark Wilson

While the Apple Watch has made its way to Vogue and Beyonce’s Instagram, it’s Google’s Android Wear that’s quickly catching on with designers at large.

This week at the elite watch conference Baselworld, Google signed on Michael Kors and Nixon to further diversify the lineup. That means in the 20 months since Android Wear originally debuted, Google has enlisted nine tech companies and four fashion labels to produce 18 unique Android Wear watches of their own—and that’s not counting a multitude of sizing, color, and band options.

Meanwhile, Apple still has one watch, made by Apple. If you’d like, you can buy a band from other designers like Hermes. But the hardware? The aesthetic? The watch itself?

That comes from Apple.

History Repeats Itself It’s a familiar story. Google has always offered what the industry calls an open platform—anyone can take Android and stick it on any piece of hardware they want. Meanwhile, Apple offers a closed platform—where no one can build more than a case or an app for an Apple hardware/software product.

Each strategy has benefitted each company in its own way.

With a closed system, Apple gets to uphold high standards and charge a premium for the experience. Its users are loyal.

Its products last a long time. One billion of its iOS devices have been sold around the planet to date. Meanwhile, with an open system, Google gets breadth. Android devices are produced by dozens of manufacturers, each breaking

groupisd.com

12

beginning to see the fruits of the open Android strategy in wooing the fashion world.

“Watches and jewelry are a part of my design DNA—I’ve been designing both for years, and our customers know and love our accessories. When we decided to get involved with wearable technology, it was understood that we would create our own,” Michael Kors says. The success of his label’s Runway watch, which debuted in 2006, has been in jeopardy with competition from the Apple Watch, and yet, what impetus does Michael Kors have to give up their watch business to get into the Apple Watch band business? “We wanted our singular aesthetic for our wearables launch,” he says. “It just made sense that we’d continue to design our watches—working with a great partner for the technology piece of it.”

That sentiment was echoed by Nixon, a company known for its high casual men’s line of timepieces as well as older, performance-oriented smartwatches for surfing. Nixon just announced its first Android Wear watch, The Mission. their backs to produce, market, and compete to sell Google devices. So prices drop. Install base expands. And Android becomes the biggest mobile platform in the world, with 1.4 billion users that actually make Apple look relatively small, depending how you slice the data. That’s not counting its other crown jewels across mobile at large, like Search, Maps, or AdSense.

“One of the other things we realized when we started Android Wear was, when you think about things people wear, they have really diverse styles. It isn’t the case that one style fits all, in any clothing or accessory or other kind of apparel,” David Singleton, VP of Android Wear, says. “A lot of our DNA working on Android has always been to create an ecosystem of partners to work together to create something bigger than the sum of its parts, and that’s what we’re trying to do here.

That strategy worked for Android Wear’s first fashion partnership, Fossil, which cites its Fossil Q Founder as its top-selling watch, period, of the 2015 holiday season. At $295, it’s more or less the Bentley of Fossils.

But watches are just one small swatch of a much larger piece of fabric. Google’s open platform is poised to leave a much larger impact on the $1.2 trillion fashion industry than it has on smartphones—because while everyone is happy to use the same phone as the person sitting next to them, fashion is a form of personal expression. Even those who ride the latest trends don’t want to be matchy-matchy with everyone else on the street.

Imagine a world where humanity only dresses in four different outfits— black, white, gold, and rose gold.

Or put another way, imagine a world where humanity only dresses in four different outfits—representing the black, white, gold, and rose gold finishes of an iPhone. That doesn’t look like freedom. That looks like prison.

Why Should Fashion Cede Design To Apple?

Now that Android Wear is almost two years old, we’re

“It would be great if Apple weren’t a closed system! Because we’re Apple fans, too,” Tyson White, VP of product at Nixon, says. “But we’re just as happy with Google and the Android Wear platform.”

In fact, the team at Nixon had spent the last three-and-a-half years talking to specialists across the consumer electronics industry, trying to figure out the best approach to build beyond their original smart surfing watch and bring their dream product—The Mission—to market: a sport watch that could give real-time reports on water and snow and deep-track activity, for surfers and snowboarders, all while standing up to the rigors of these extreme sports.

Nixon eventually decided it could handle building its own hardware and updating it over time, but only if it had a core operating system that could grow and develop alongside it.

“We wanted to build equity in a platform where we could update the hardware and the form factor, but we built our own ecosystem aligned with an OS that’s going to last a long time,” he says. “There was no other option better than Google.”

Android Wear is poised to become the only viable OS not just for the fashion industry’s smartwatches, but for the fashion industry at large.

Just creating an Apple Watch app couldn’t work for Nixon, because aside from the problem that it’s not Nixon’s hardware or aesthetic, the Apple Watch (like every other smartwatch on the market) wasn’t durable enough for their use case. “When we tested the Apple Watch and countless others, I’d always trip out when I’d go to the sink and watch my hands. I was worried I was going to fry it,” White says. “Most are splashproof at best.”

“If we just built a watch that had its own OS to do the stuff we wanted it to do, in a year’s time, it’s going to be outdated, in two years time, it’s going to be obsolete,” he continues. On the other hand, adopting Android OS now would allow Nixon to side with Google early to “continue down a potentially infinite path” in intelligent apparel.

Google Is Providing The Thread For Designers To Weave The Future And that never-ending path is really what the potential of Android Wear is all about. Today, smartwatches on whole are a small business compared to, say, smartphones. But if you look at what Google is working on—technology like touch sensitive fabrics and accessories that sense gestures— it’s obvious that technology will one day be woven into our clothing as simply as polyester blends.

White minces no words that the Nixon is “absolutely” predisposed to continue working with Google into the next five or more years, as these visions are realized for market.

Meanwhile, Michael Kors’s brand feels wearable technology will be a “big business” in the future, so it just “makes sense” for it to partner on the tech but control the design.

And what gets concerning about the viability of Apple’s strategy—if we really are to consider it a fashion company now—is how its closed approach not only will limit overall adoption of the Apple Watch, but limit the extent to which Apple can keep afloat in the sheer depth of wearables to come.

In this regard, Android Wear is poised to become the only viable OS not just for the fashion industry’s smartwatches, but for the entire fashion industry at large. And when the core components of smart garments become so cheap that there’s little difference between a pair of Levi’s and a pair of smart Levi’s, Apple will need to decide whether to finally open iOS, or whether it can sell enough mock black turtlenecks that it won’t matter.

Mark Wilson is a writer who started Philanthroper.com, a simple way to give back every day. His work has also appeared at Gizmodo, Kotaku, PopMech, PopSci, Esquire, American Photo and Lucky Peach.

Why copywriters could fare well in the age of robots FORMER NIKE DESIGNER D’WAYNE EDWARDS SAYS BRUCE LEE HAS IMPACTED HIS CAREER AND DESIGN.

By Russell Davies

We’re on the edge of inventing a new form of expression between humans and machines, says Russell Davies.

than hardware, so the physical stuff of robots progresses a bit slower.

I’m talking at the APG Annual Conference in a couple of months. Its theme is “strategy vs robots” so I’ve been thinking about robots and wondering what to say.

That’s why a lot of the really fast moving stuff is happening away from the hardware, in the way they talk to us and we talk to them. After all, when you talk to Siri or Amazon Echo you’re talking to a small computer connected to a network connected to a much bigger computer. There’s no reason that small computer couldn’t be in a robot. Here, for instance, is a prototype of a voice controlled Roomba.

This is normally what we mean by “robots”:

This is the stuff that fascinates me, because it seems to be an emerging creative skill set. It’s something that people who make products and services are going to have to think about.

Your domestic stuff is going to talk to you. How should it do it?

How robotic should it be? How jokey? How serious? Should your fridge know what to do if you tell it you’re being abused?

Cars are starting to talk to people – manufacturers have been thinking about that in fiction and reality for decades – but what should a VW sound like? What about a BMW or a Seat?

I made this at a robot trade fair in Lyon in 2011, organised

by SYROBO, the French Federation of Service Robotics.

Go to this year’s fair and it won’t be that different. It’ll be bigger, the robots will do a lot more stuff, but they’ll look pretty much the same: either industrial, humanoid or swarmy.

Maybe you’ll see something like Spot – or like these tiny bugs pulling a car – but you won’t see anything you’d mistake for a person. That’s just because software gets better much quicker

brandknewmag.com

16

As soon as you start to think about this a couple of things crop up:

1. What’s the relationship between the object and the voice?

Should it be small object, small voice? What’s the mental model we’re carrying around about these things? One thing that’s immediately apparent – we’re very happy to believe, or at least behave like we believe, that these things are alive.

The tiniest hint of movement or agency and we assume that there’s some sort of animated spirit in there. I explored that once with a Robert Frost poem:

– it only requires a minimal face, minimal interaction and minimal movement and you immediately like it and want to interact.

2. How much of the voice do you script and how much do you programme?

The stuff that’s really getting faster all the time is Artificial Intelligence (in all its different flavours and versions) – computers are getting good at talking to us like they understand. Thus we no longer have to script them like a voicemail system (when X happens say Y) – they can be given a range of responses to choose from and, to some extent, be allowed to learn or make up the right thing to say.

Computers are already writing news stories based on data feeds, and they’re starting to read them out. And then we’ll have self checkout machines that don’t just use the same few canned phrases – they’ll start to talk to us about our shopping and how many loyalty points we have available.

THIS IS GOING TO BE AWFUL. Or at least it’ll be awful for a long, long time, until someone gets it right.

I tried experimenting with this stuff a few years ago and made ScienceStoryMagic, an imaginary service providing news and lifestyle updates based on what it knew about your consumer preferences. It got dystopic pretty quickly.

That robot is a Sony Rolly, a spin-off from their abandoned Aibo robotic pet project. The Rolly was also abandoned.

It was hugely expensive and didn’t do much – you could programme it to roll around a bit and flap its arms (or grippers or whatever they are).

But, as you can see, stick a bit of speech in there, do some really basic programming, and you kinda believe that a dark and meditative poet of the rural and colloquial has been reborn as a piece of robotic Japanese whimsy.

My favourite illustration of this is the KeepOn, originally designed to understand how to forge relationships between children and robots, then turned into toy, then an advertising campaign. (I used to show this video a lot at advertising conferences, I wonder if the EDF thing is my fault? Sorry about that.) KeepOn’s genius is that it doesn’t try too hard

But I think it proves the thing that gets me really excited about this stuff – we’re on the edge of inventing a new way to do writing, a new kind of expression, a collaboration between writers and algorithms. The natural endpoint of this isn’t a machine that talks exactly like a human, it’s a machine that talks exactly like a machine – but one that’s worth having a relationship with. And there are some people out there with exactly the skills to do this, people who can use words but not be precious about them, people who can write on behalf of abstract entities, who can find exactly the right small phrase for the right big feeling. Copywriters – we might have a future!

Anyway, I suspect the APG haven’t lined up Steve Hilton and Kate Fox to talk about BigDog’s potential as an advertising vehicle, they mean “robots” in a wider sense – algos, software eating our jobs, all that kind of stuff. So you should come along – I’ll bring a robot.

Russell Davies is a writer and strategist. He previously worked at Wieden & Kennedy, Nike, and the Government Digital Service.

This article was first published on campaignlive.co.uk

Searching for Tim Cook’s Energy Bar A TALE OF HOW EMULATING OTHERS CAN GET A LITTLE...OUT OF HAND.

By Dan Blank

In 2009, Wired ran a story on Tim Cook, the wizard behind the scenes at Apple. For years, the story of Apple’s success had always been firmly pegged to Steve Jobs’ design genius, and there were stories of how he boldly protected his ideas so they wouldn’t be corrupted by compromises from other departments. But then we began hearing about the less sexy part of Apple’s success: the rigorously honed supply chain that set Apple apart from their competitors. And of course, we began hearing about the guy behind that system: Tim Cook.

The article in Wired was written as Steve Jobs’ health forced him to hand over more and more of the day-to-day

management responsibilities. Tim was the chosen heir and a mystique was starting to build up around him. He was now the man. The Wired article mentioned that details of Tim’s personal life were scarce, but this line jumped out at me, grabbed a hold of my psyche, and wouldn’t let go: “Tim… is relentless in terms of energy… and like his boss, Cook is a health nut, chowing down on energy bars.”

Suddenly, I was dying for an answer to the burning question, “What was the energy bar?” When Steve Jobs turned to Tim, Tim turned to this energy bar. These guys had transformed Apple from a loser company to the most valuable company

groupisd.com

18

in the world—and it was all on the back of this energy bar!

down on one of his energy bars, right?

At the time, I had just launched my own one-man company which helps creative professionals hone their vision and connect with an audience. My wife and I had recently started a family, and she left her job to be home with our young son.

It was a time where I felt fueled by inspiration, but like Tim Cook, I had to turn my vision into a practical reality of dayto-day success.

No luck.

Yes, of course, we all know that we’re supposed to “Fail fast, fail often.” We’re supposed to try new things, learn quickly, and not give up our dreams. Success comes from being in the muddy scrum on the playing field, not sitting on the sidelines carefully calculating and never getting in the game.

But wouldn’t it be nice if things were a little bit easier than all that? Wouldn’t it be great to have Tim Cook’s energy bar?

Wouldn’t it be nice if things were a little bit easier than all that? Wouldn’t it be great to have Tim Cook’s energy bar?

The less I found, the more I became convinced that the energy bar was being kept secret because it was such a powerful game changer. There had to be an answer—and that’s when I realized I knew exactly where the answer to my question was: In the trash bags outside Tim’s house.

Ignoring the cautionary buzz in my brain—“I’ve become a stalker”—I flashed on the truth that there were probably hundreds of wrappers just sitting there, waiting for me. I heard Ferris Bueller whispering, “You can never go too far” and like Indiana Jones in his quest for the Ark of the Covenant, I imagined hopping on a plane, slipping on some Levi’s 501’s and a mock black turtleneck, and casually strolling by Tim’s house on a random Tuesday morning, and… wait… this was in fact going too far.

“I’ve become a stalker” In the moment when I realized that being a child of the 70s and 80s didn’t give me the problem-solving abilities I needed, I went back to searching the web and eventually stumbled upon a Quora thread seeking the same answer.

This was a fellow seeker! A congregant of “The Church of Tim Cook’s Energy Bar!” I wasn’t alone in my hunt—and seeing this other guy’s desperation made me suddenly realize how futile my search was.

I went back to try to understand my folly—and was fascinated by what I had ignored. Even in the quote above from the Wired story, I left quite a bit out. It turns out, I’m an unreliable narrator, especially to myself. This is the full quote:

In recent years, the practice of seeking out the maximum return of value for the smallest input has come to be called “hacking,” or “life hacking.” You can hack anything—your workout, success, your toast, even how you tie your shoes. It’s fun, empowering, and you can gain social cred by impressing your friends with innovative ideas they missed. “Are you still peeling your banana like THAT?! Let me show you this incredible life hack… you will never peal your banana that way again!”

Tim Cook’s energy bar felt like the ultimate life hack. I had to find it. I turned to Google.

“Tim Cook energy bar.”

“Tim Cook bar.”

“Tim Cook (insert name of popular energy bars).”

“Tim Cook eat.”

When my Google search didn’t work, I launched an image search. When Tim arrived at an iPhone launch event to greet retail workers and customers, surely he would have to chow

“Cook is a health nut, chowing down on energy bars and bicycling and weightlifting to keep himself in shape. When he is not working, he’s working out.”

Why did I ignore that fact that the energy bar was a tiny part of Tim’s overall health regimen? I suddenly understood that I had been asking the wrong question. I had been asking for shortcuts, for hacks, when what I needed to be asking about were daily practices that , over time, lead to powerful results.

Over the last four years, I’ve worked with hundreds of creative professionals behind the scenes helping them to turn their visions into reality. I’ve worked with writers and artists, photographers and graphic designers. What I have learned is that everyone shares the frustration of limited resources and everyone wants to find “the easy way.” But there is no easy way—and that truth can catch up with creative professionals, especially at mid-career.

There is no easy way—and that truth can catch up with creative professionals, especially at mid-career.

It’s all too easy to look at how hard you’re working and how

for eating well, moving, and finding time to become more aware of the fullness of existence beyond your daily work schedule.

Step 2: Do a communication re-boot We are so busy doing things, so busy managing our own fears, that we rarely hone our ability to translate that to effectively communicate with those around us—and as a result we waste a massive amount of energy trying to explain ourselves, apologize, and even come to terms with our own emotions. We usually communicate deeply only when there is a problem.

“Can we have a talk?”

“Can you step into my office?”

far you still seem to be from the success you dreamed about.

You’re tired, treading water, not making any real progress.

And is it you, or does everyone else seem to have found inroads to success? Are all of them eating Tim Cook’s energy bar?!

The reality is that the amount of work coming at you isn’t going to change—but you can change the way you approach it, and your approach can yield significant results. It can, in fact, transform what you are able to achieve and put you closer to the satisfaction you seek in your work.

The correct question to ask is: How can I manage my energy for maximum benefit?

I have found a three-part process to become relentless in terms of energy, even without Tim Cook’s magical energy bar:

Step 1: Optimize for energy—not money or time.

It’s a mistake to scramble for more time or grab for more money. The fact of the matter is that you can never attain more than 24 hours in a day, and regardless of how much money you have, you will always be surrounded by those who have more.

If you are currently a working mother of three kids and feel overwhelmed by it all, think back to when you were 17 or 23 or 31. Did you feel any less overwhelmed then? Probably not…

Think back to when you were 17 or 23 or 31. Did you feel any less overwhelmed then?

You can make far bigger gains if you optimize for energy.

Start with foundations: sleep, nutrition, movement, and mindfulness. This is the boring stuff that often gets lost amidst life’s daily schedule. Most people don’t get enough sleep, and what’s worse, they never address the issue. If your body and mind can’t rest, that means you are starting the day on half a tank of fuel. You are distracted, lethargic, and forced at the outset to begin pushing yourself through too much work without enough energy. The same equation holds true

We communicate deeply and honestly when we have to. But why not communicate this way more often—and save all that stress and energy from poor communication? I would recommend that you write down the names of the 10 most important people in your life (home and work) and identify simple ways to improve communication with them on a regular basis.

It doesn’t have to be complex, just an extra date night with your spouse, a monthly lunch with your boss, a few extra minutes touching base with colleague to understand what is most important to them. Remember, listening is at least half of all communication—but it’s the half that will save you a ton of energy down the road.

Step 3: Connect energy back to time.

To do this, start time blocking your calendar in a new way.

Block for emotion, not just tasks, which allows you to achieve a sense of satisfaction, instead of overwhelm. For instance, if you have to work on a big slide deck for a presentation of your work, don’t just schedule an hour into your calendar if you are really worried about this task. Instead, DOUBLE the amount of time you think it will actually take. Place that block of time somewhere in the day where you normally feel the most confident, the most ready to take on the world.

The result will be a feeling of success, not just productivity.

In order to time block effectively, you first need to understand your own emotional habits and preferences as they relate to time. Do an energy audit, which gives you the data you need to begin making decisions around your actions. What are your best hours and how are you using them? Spend a week evaluating these things every hour of the day. “How do I feel?” “What do I feel like doing?” Find your sweet spots and block your calendar to maximize efficiencies.

P.S. I have found an energy bar that I love, though I still have no idea if it is the one Tim Cook eats. I’m pretty much at the point of buying Quest Protein Bars by the case load, and can highly recommend the Cookies & Cream flavor. Every time I take a bite, I like to think that I’m that much closer to Tim’s success. At the very least, I’ll have the crumbs on my mock black turtleneck to prove it.

Dan Blank, the founder of WeGrowMedia, has helped hundreds of creative professionals and organizations such as Sesame Workshop, J. Walter Thompson, and Random House communicate their vision and maximize their impact.

How emotions can lead to successful video advertising Video marketing has been on the rise for several years now and it is only expected to grow even more.

By Tereza Litsa

According to Cisco, video traffic will account for 80% of the total consumer internet traffic by 2019, which makes brands to examine every possible way that could lead to innovative video campaigns.

The power of emotions Emotions always played an important part in building a bond between the brand and the consumer and there’s no exception in the case of video marketing.

Emotions in video advertising Not every sentiment is equally powerful in advertising though, with positivity leading to more effective results than negativity.

According to stats compiled using data from Unruly Pulse a new dashboard launched in beta today by video ad tech company Unruly, happiness is the most popular sentiment among people when watching a video and strangely enough, hilarity is the least common sentiment.

Apparently happiness is contagious, as consumers are more willing to like a brand or buy a product after watching a video that elicits the sentiment of happiness to them.

For example, “Friends Forever” by Google’s Android last year made consumers four times happier than the average branded video and it was actually the most shared ad of all time with more than seven million shares.

Image by Alexas_Fotos, CC0

As with any form of advertising, emotions are frequently facilitating the transmission of the right branded message to consumers, with each brand’s ultimate goal being to increase views, sales, and loyalty among users.

According to Robert Plutchik who constructed the Wheel of Emotions in 1980, there are eight basic emotions and human feelings are the results of these emotions.

There seems to be a strong link between the sentiments a video advertising evokes and the sharing intent it creates for the users, as the emotional appeal makes consumers more willing to share the video, along with the feelings it sparked to them.

According to Dr Karen Nelson-Field in Viral Marketing: The Science of Sharing, videos that are affiliated with strong emotions have double the chances to be shared than the ones with a weak emotional appeal.

What’s more, the sharing intent that comes along with the emotional targeting may be translated into an increase in sales, attention, and interaction, which are all highly desired for every brand.

brandknewmag.com

22

engagement, but this time, the reactions ranged from hilarity to surprise and even to disgust.

For instance, Heinz’s “Weiner Stampede” Super Bowl commercial won the audience and the social media buzz this year among serious competition, but what’s even more important is the fact that it ranked first in the question about purchase consideration.

According to YouGov BrandIndex, “Weiner Stampede” won very easily the first position among consumers in terms of the purchasing intention and this is significantly correlated to the range of emotions it offers throughout the video.

However, the campaign is considered significantly successful if its goal was to increase the reach and the engagement, although it seems that the purchase intent was not equally successful, as the ad was not among the 10 Super Bowl ads that scored the highest purchase intent.

There is not an ideal set of emotions to fit to every video campaign and what’s more, every strategy is unique for a specific audience.

Depending on the age and the gender of the audience, the preferred emotions to be evoked vary and this also affects the desired results of each campaign.

Heinz’s video campaign combines the feelings of warmth, happiness, affection, joy, and amusement in a way that it brings an effortless virality.

It’s the authenticity of the emotions that makes consumers trust a brand and engage with it, or even consider to become a customer through it.

According to Unruly, male viewers aged 25-34 in the UK are more likely to feel pride, amazement and contempt while watching video ads, while UK women aged 25-34 are more likely to feel happiness, pride and inspiration.

Moreover, emotions are different for boomers, as they are more likely to feel confusion and surprise comparing to other age groups, while millennial men seem to be the most emotional while watching video ads!

Takeaway And although positive emotions are usually more effective, negative emotions may still increase both share intention and engagement and Doritos’ “Ultrasound” is a great example to observe.

Doritos decided to create a controversial campaign this year for Super Bowl and it didn’t turn out to be a bad idea, as it drove the highest volume of social buzz, with more than 163.000 Twitter mentions.

It was another case of strongly relying on the emotional

What we can learn is that it’s important for a brand to understand the thoughts, the expectations and the reactions of its audience before creating a video advert, in order to ensure that it maximises the chances to succeed.

The right focus to the authentic human experience in video advertising may lead to impressive results, so don’t be afraid to embrace your feelings next time you’re brainstorming for a branded video.

Tereza Litsa is a Writer at ClickZ.

How AI Is Making Its

By Angela Rumsey

Artificial intelligence is firmly in the spotlight this year as global tech firms continue to invest and set out their AI ambitions. As the technology takes hold, how is it making its presence felt in marketing?

No longer the preserve of science fiction, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming technology fact. So far in 2016, AI technology has grabbed headlines as the focus of Apple’s first acquisition—in the form of Emotient Inc—and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has resolved to build an AI assistant to run his home and help him at work.

Google has also gone down in the history books after its DeepMind team developed an AI programme capable of defeating human world champions of complex Chinese board game Go. It’s an achievement reminiscent of IBM’s milestone moment when its cognitive system IBM Watson thrashed human contestants in the U.S. game show Jeopardy in 2011.

So as AI finds backing from the world’s large tech firms, what are they buying into? Data scientists use a range of terms to describe AI and its related technologies, such as machine learning, deep learning, and cognitive computing.

What they have in common is the move away from rulesbased programmable systems towards those requiring human-like intelligence, whether that’s visual perception, speech recognition, or decision-making. Specifically, they are systems that learn from the knowledge they acquire and are able to infer meaning and act upon it.

While there is a long journey ahead for AI and all it could achieve, the technology is gaining an early foothold in marketing. From market research through to personalisation, AI is becoming pervasive as marketers look for ways to improve data insights and scale responses without unnecessary costs.

Market Research Accuracy By combining the sciences of deep learning, computer vision and cognitive neural science, U.S.-based Emotient has developed software that measures micro facial expressions such as joy, anger, and surprise to infer real emotional responses, attention, and engagement.

Advertisers are using the new technology to gauge reactions

to new creative and replace traditional market research techniques.

“Emotions drive spending, but we’ve always struggled to understand how people really feel,” said Emotient CEO Ken Denham.

“Billions of dollars are spent every year acquiring customers and trying to understand them and what they feel about products and the customer experience.

The reality is we’ve been guessing.”

When deciding which of three new fragrances of laundry detergent to launch, one FMCG company used Emotient’s AI software to measure participants’ facial expressions when told they could take home one of the fragrances. The technology accurately predicted the preferred fragrance, which contradicted the results of focus groups and surveys the participants had done. “It’s very difficult for people to tell you what they really feel,” said Denham.

The BBC has used AI as a new form of market research to drive B2B sales conversations. New Zealand-based AI firm Parrot Analytics worked with the British broadcaster’s BBC Worldwide division to determine demand for some of its programming internationally. Viewer sentiment for certain shows was measured based on the nature of activity across social

groupisd.com

24

s Way Into Marketing media sites and blogs, leading the BBC Worldwide team into new dialogue with potential customers.

Natural language analysis also underpinned carmaker Kia’s use of IBM Watson to guide its decisions on which social media influencers to work with for the recent Super Bowl.

Real-Time Automation The rise of programmatic advertising is creating a greater need among advertisers and marketers for AI-led automation tools.

By 2020, more than half of all digital video advertising revenue in Europe will be programmatic, according to a study by analytics firm IHS and video inventory management platform SpotX. In the U.K., programmatic’s share of digital video revenues is set to increase from just over 32% in 2016 to more than 60% over the next four years.

As such, AI and its technologies are increasingly becoming part of the day-today tools for marketers, with mobile video platforms such as LoopMe using AI to optimise ad placements across devices and by viewers.

When integrated with programmatic ad exchanges and direct publishers, this is giving marketers new opportunities for real-time campaign optimisation.

Personalisation At Scale AI is increasingly being deployed by marketers to improve and scale personalised customer interactions, making use of the improving technologies around visual perception and natural language processing.

Online retailer Shoes.com is using Sentient Technologies’ AI to enable product discovery for its footwear customers on Shoeme.ca. The merchandising application was launched in November, whereby customers browsing a range of boots can click on various product features they like to see more personalised recommendations, powered by Sentient Aware, the company’s visual filter tool.

The technology is providing detailed insights for use across the business. “By engaging around product, it allows them to understand the customer’s intent and individual product preferences,” said Nigel Duffy, Sentient CTO. This helps the business move beyond what Duffy calls “groupalisation”, when a customer receives a personalised offer based on the average preferences of a group rather than one truly based on his or her own preference.

Conversational AI processes the interactions between customers and company to create a highly engaged customer experience and forms the basis for Digital Genius’s work for Unilever. The company created an SMS-based AI personal recipe assistant called Chef Wendy for its Knorr brand in developing markets where Internet access is limited.

The text-based conversation is enabling Unilever to build up profiles and a detailed database for future promotions, while scaling its brand-to-customer interactions without a necessarily big increase in cost.

Another of two-way AI interaction is outdoor brand and retailer The North Face’s use of the sophisticated IBM Watson technology through its partnership with Fluid. At the tail end of last year, the company beta-tested an interactive online shopping tool that asked shoppers context-seeking questions.

The natural language tool helped guide the shopper journey and replicated an in-store experience online.

During the 60-day trial, 50,000 consumers used the service, spending two minutes longer than before on the site.

Satisfaction levels were high, with three-quarters of customers saying they would use the tool again.

“I think this tells you that consumers are ready for some type of AI,” said Cal Bouchard, senior e-commerce director for The North Face.

Angela Rumsey is a B2B journalist specialising in marketing and retail.

Study: Marketers are clueless on cross-channel measurement

By Mike O’Brien

A new study from Origami Logic highlights how much marketers struggle with cross-channel measurement. How can they make data less overwhelming?

In today’ digital world, there are endless possibilities for marketers. However, that variety is a double-edged sword, as the lack of limits makes it difficult to measure marketing efforts across channels.

According to new research from Origami Logic, which released its Exploring the Keys to Successful Marketing Measurement and Optimization report this morning, 61 percent of marketers don’t think their measurement methods are effective. More than half consider their biggest challenge to be having too many systems that capture and measure signals. Close to 40 percent also struggle with being able to take action based on the results, as well as how long it takes to get those results.

What’s the problem?

For Kohki Yamaguchi, head of product marketing at Origami Logic, those issues all stem from the same place: being overwhelmed.

Part of it comes from measuring signals – including impressions, conversions, CTR, ROI and cost-per engagement- too infrequently. Only 16 percent of the survey’s respondents look at their cross-channel measurements on a daily basis. The largest group – 23.2 percent – measure things on a monthly basis. However, 35.36 percent aspire to measure their crosschannel marketing signals every day.

brandknewmag.com

26

“The situation is getting worse because the digital marketing space is exponentially increasing in complexity every single year,” says Yamaguchi. “There are so many channels and platforms out there sending all these varied signals that marketers are spending huge amounts of time consuming that data, and putting it into reports and spreadsheets.”

Within each channel, the number of platforms continues to grow, as well. The majority of marketers have three or fewer signals for most channels, such as display, social and email. However, 31.49 percent track four to six signals on the web and 18.78 percent track up to 10 on social. When it comes to mobile and video, nearly 30 percent don’t even know how many signals they track.

What can be done about it?

The complexity is compounded by how much time marketers are spending deciphering the various signals and campaign results. More than half of the marketers surveyed spend between two and five hours doing this each week. Yamaguchi doesn’t think that’s enough.

“The major problem that’s causing this signal lag is the fact that collecting all the signals and putting them in Excel is being done manually. We believe that marketers need to automate as much of that as possible,” he says.

Alison Lohse, co-founder and chief operating officer at Conversion Logic, agrees that greater automation could help marketers measure their data more effectively. Another tactic they can employ, she adds, is thinking about measurement earlier.

She thinks seeing, and having to comb through, all the data at once is the really overwhelming part. She compares measuring marketing channels to plumbing.

“It’s almost like when you move into a house and you have retrofit versus being able to architect fit. How does the information flow?” asks Lohse. “Even if you’re wading into the data, instead of solving each individual pipe, it’s better to take two steps back and build a schematic.”

Looking at your data from two steps back, Lohse points out how important it is to make sure you’re measuring the right data.

She thinks too many marketers overwhelm themselves by not having enough focus, particularly when it comes to mobile.

“Sometimes data can introduce questions; it’s almost like finding a problem you didn’t know you had,” she says. “Just because something raises a question doesn’t mean you should answer it. Think about the marketing question. I think a lot of people struggle with how data serves their business, not how they serve the data.”

Mike O’Brien is US Editor at ClickZ

You need to do this one thing to build your ad agency’s brand …

By Michael Gass

If I were the owner of an advertising, digital or media agency, to build my agency’s brand, I would WRITE! This isn’t a new discovery for me. Since the beginning, I’ve written my way into a thriving new business consultancy. My blog provides a consistent flow of inbound leads. I’ve never had to make a cold call for any new business. The reason – I’ve always written helpful content to a clear-cut audience.

“Fortune 500 companies have an average of 17 agency relationships.”

- Association of National Advertisers (ANA)

Prospects are looking for expertise. The commonality among experts is they WRITE! There isn’t a more effective way to build your brand than by becoming a thought leader to a specific target audience.

Agencies understand the importance of building a brand and creating a differentiated market position but they seldom do it for themselves.

Since 2007, I’ve worked with well over 200 agency owners to create content for new business. The process helped them to better define their audience, create a strong point of differentiation and gain a positioning of expertise quickly.

“I’ve known of Michael and his work in helping creative firms improve lead generation through social media for a few years now (I finally met him earlier this year) but recently I started to get reports from agency

principals who had worked with him. I was surprised to learn that the impact Michael was having on their businesses was not in their use of Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn but in transforming the principals into writers who write meaningful content.” – Blair Enns, author of The Win Without Pitching Manifesto

Last year, it seemed like everyone jumped on the content marketing bandwagon. Almost 90 percent of companies now see the importance of content marketing and have implemented it in some way, allocating about 25 percent of their marketing budgets to their content efforts. However, most fell into the trap of creating content for the sake of creating content.

Ad agencies are target-less. They have no definitive audience. The content being written is generic. This kind of target-less content has very little appeal and receives virtually no traffic.

Small to midsize agencies all look and sound the same. They have no real point of differentiation. For agency owners who want to differentiate their agency, the best way to do it is

by WRITING!

Michael Gass, Business Development Consultant | Speaker | Author of Fuel Lines

Can Corporate And Creative Cultures Ever Truly Merge?

NO. AND THAT’S OKAY, WRITE ACCENTURE’S OLOF SCHYBERGSON AND BAIJU SHAH.

By OLOF SCHYBERGSON AND BAIJU SHAH

It has been said that the No. 1 job of a CEO (and the entire C-Suite, really) is to cultivate culture. The notion being that if a strong culture exists, everything else—employee morale, customer satisfaction, and more—will fall into place. But what happens when you bring together two vastly different cultures in a merger? In real life, they say opposites attract, but does that apply to business?

That was the issue we faced in 2013 when Accenture Interactive—the digital agency of the global professional services company Accenture—acquired Fjord, a design and innovation consultancy. Infusing design into business was obvious to us, but we now had the daunting task of integrating a design boutique—filled with free-spirited creatives, open studios, collaborative workspaces, and the like—into a then 261,000-person firm best known for large-scale technology and business consulting. We told our people it wouldn’t be smooth. For our clients, we had to merge design sensibilities (think designer optimism vs. consultant pragmatism) and different disciplines (technology, business strategy, design) into a cohesive team. Studies show that 50% to 80% of mergers fail, and culture integration is often to blame. We knew the risk of messing this up was real. And we didn’t have experience with something on this scale. So how did we

marry cultures? The short answer: We didn’t.

Instead, we worked to foster a culturally diverse environment in the hopes that it would draw out the best parts of our newly merged workforce. Here’s how we did it.

A UNIFIED VISION We knew we had a variety of skills (and cultures) at play. So our strategy was to create a shared belief system. Our vision?

That we would best serve our clients if we took a humancentered approach to all our work. Once everyone adopted that end goal, we believed we would be able to pool together our disparate skills.

Initially, there was discomfort. For instance, consultants prefer recommendations that are information-rich and based on analysis, data, and best practices; designers focus on narrative and make recommendations based on insights and intuition. But this tension was flipped into a positive as teams realized that different problem-solving approaches could be a strength. United under a single vision, we were able to address big challenges, such as removing the anxiety from buying a home and managing diseases such as ALS and diabetes.

groupisd.com

30

PROTECTING AND CELEBRATING WHAT’S SPECIAL No matter their size, background, or culture, all companies enter a merger armed with their own strengths. The key is to recognize what to combine and what to keep distinct. This can be especially tricky in a merger between a large company, like Accenture, and a smaller firm, like Fjord. But what happens when the larger corporation, instead of robbing the smaller brand of its identity, chooses to foster it? In our case, Fjord’s open-space studios and design methodologies were two areas to protect. They inspire creativity and bring clients into the design process.

TEACHING EACH OTHER A NEW LANGUAGE At first, the marriage of Fjord and Accenture was like two people speaking different languages. But through strategic initiatives, the language barrier started to break down. (It helped that Fjord joined Accenture Interactive, which is culturally most similar to Fjord and provided a bridge to the rest of Accenture.) Now, Accenture is reimagining its

entire employee experience, including enterprise systems and internal processes. For instance, we used Fjord’s design thinking methodologies to overhaul HR’s dreaded annual performance review. And inside Fjord, we created a dedicated business unit called Fjord Evolution that teaches companies how to elevate the importance of design in their organizations. These initiatives helped familiarize the two sides of the organization with each other’s processes and goals.

YOU CAN’T INDOCTRINATE CULTURE It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, and aligning two completely different working styles can prove tricky. But instead of entering into a battle of “who does what right,” we have tried to embrace different perspectives.

Culture is dynamic, living, and breathing—not something that’s static and belongs in a jar in a museum. We’re a work in progress, and we’re just getting started. With every new project and through every new employee, our culture evolves.

We proffer that companies shouldn’t get too hung up on culture unification. Business strategists can still show up in business attire, technologists can show up in khakis, and designers can arrive in jeans, if that is what keeps them authentic and comfortable. A lot of pressure is taken off when you accept that a large company is a culture of cultures and recognize that you don’t have to force a round peg into a square hole. After all, getting culture right is not just a key point of differentiation for a company; it’s the enduring point of differentiation.

Olof Schybergson is founder and co-lead of Fjord and Baiju Shah is managing director of Accenture Interactive and co-lead at Fjord.

Photos: Thomas Barwick/Getty Images & Rawpixel via Shutterstock

How a decade of Twitter schooled brands in immediate customer service

By Daniel Farey-Jones

As Twitter clocks up its first decade, some brands are looking for more sophistication in its services while others are still confused about what to use it for.

“Most clients are still figuring out the role for Twitter,” says Nik Roope, executive creative director and co-founder of digital agency Poke.

“After all the commotion over the years you would have thought companies would have figured it out but most haven’t.

This hasn’t been helped by new platforms entering the fray, fracturing demographics and shifting use and culture of the incumbent platforms like Twitter.”

But talk the likes of Tesco and Audi and you sense these are brands that do have a clear idea of what they get out of the platform. It’s mainly about customer service, according to the supermarket chain’s digital marketing director Toby Horry.

“A lot of customers are using Twitter as a service channel and we’ve really embraced that, so we now have a lot of people who may historically have been telephone-based customer service who are now operating largely in the Twitter space,” he says.

Where conventionally Tesco might have taken a couple of days to respond to customer service queries, Twitter allows the brand to be “very immediate”.

Twitter keeps brands on their toes Audi has also settled into using Twitter as a direct channel to individual customers.

“We’ve moved away from considering Twitter as a platform that provides a wide reach, like Facebook for instance,” says Emma Page, the car brand’s digital and social media communications manager.

“If Twitter were to disappear next month, we’d lose a platform for managing customer care and conversing directly with our fans.”

Twitter has heightened people’s expectations about customer service and speed of response to complaints, according to Roope, who believes its open nature is key to its future.

“Twitter, as the only really open forum, is good for encouraging discourse, and for keeping brands on their toes,” he says.

These words are echoed by Audi’s Page, who comments that Twitter has evidenced how diverse the brand’s audience is.

“There are Audi fans and automotive fans who are all hugely knowledgeable, ready to let us know which models

they particularly like or dislike, engage in debate about the competition and generally keep us on our toes,” she says.

Adds Roope: “Being more conversational, Twitter forces brands to understand how gesture and behaviour are at least as important as ‘content’ in these spaces.

“With the intensity of attention, Twitter is a crucible for evolving the way brands speak more generally – no matter how strict your brand’s tone of voice and attitude is, everyone more or less softens up on Twitter and is forced to become more customer-centric.”

Brands want more customer service tools Twitter’s management itself embraced the customer service role last month by introducing new direct message and customer feedback tools. The former allows customers to immediately begin a conversation with a brand over direct message and the latter allows brands to privately solicit users’ feedback after an interaction.

Tesco’s Horry says he would like to see Twitter come up with further developments in customer service, as well as more interesting creative formats (such as Twitter Moments, which Tesco has taken part in) and better targeting, which touches on Tesco’s use of the platform to push out brand content.

“Platforms like Twitter are now as much a paid environment as an earned [media] environment,” says Horry, who before joining Tesco four months ago was managing director of digital agency Dare.

He says Tesco’s future focus will be on becoming increasingly agile in responding to customer needs, whether for service or helpful content.

“As the targeting functionality of Twitter and other platforms improves we’re keen to make sure that the right people are getting the right content and people who don’t want content don’t get it.”

At Audi Page is planning to get to grips with Twitter’s live streaming tool Periscope, which she believes will give brands more opportunities to connect to fans and customers.

“The possible lifting of the 140-character restriction could be another game-changer, giving our messages and conversations more room to breathe,” she adds.

“Having said that, there is an art in keeping things brief.

Vorsprung durch Technik is only 23 characters, after all, yet it says everything you need to know about Audi.”

This article was first published on marketingmagazine.co.uk

How The 2016 Olympic Logo and Font were Created What happens when two firms, from two continents have to work together to design something for the entire world to see?

By Matt McCue

The Olympics is a place where dreams come true — including for designers, who create everything from the logos to the tickets, the mascots to medals for every Games.

To finish all of the Olympics collateral in time, the Olympic design committee outsources the different jobs to various local firms. These projects can overlap across mediums, leaving two firms to indirectly throw in together on a project.

Case in point: the Rio 2016 logo was made by Brazil’s Tátil Design de Ideias (Behance profile) , while the Olympic font — and yes, there is an exclusive Olympic font — was constructed by Dalton Maag, a British typeface firm that has a satellite office in Brazil. The process offers a unique case study on collaboration, one where two firms from different cultures must work off each other to produce final products that will surely be seen by hundreds of millions of people.

I. The Logo When Tátil Design creative director Frederico Gelli discovered

that there were 138 other agencies competing to win the bid to design the 2016 Olympic logo, the first idea that came to mind was to simply give up. “I thought it would be impossible,” he says. The Olympic committee required a nearly-completed logo to submit, tough to do without even a single round of client feedback.

But he decided to give it a try anyways. Over the next two months, everyone at his agency was encouraged to chime in with with their thoughts and ideas, and the final result was actually chosen as the 2016 Olympics logo. “The logo was not designed for designers, but for everybody in the world,” says Gelli. “It represents Brazil’s energy and how we receive people.”

Gelli says the hardest part of the entire process was keeping their winning idea under wraps during the four months between when it was chosen and when the Olympic design committee made the official announcement. Only 10 members of Gelli’s firm knew, so he and his nine colleagues

brandknewmag.com

34

created a fake project that they were all supposedly working on. Secrecy was at such a premium that they cordoned off a space in the studio that was only accessible via a fingerprint entry scan lock.

Now that word is out, Gelli can be much more open with the details behind the project. Below he walks us through his company’s process.

logo was born as a graphic representation since this would be its main application. Once the team got to the logo’s final shape, however, Tátil jumped back into 3D modeling to see what the logo would look like in 3D form and discover new possible applications for the form. “We wanted people to be able to see the 3D essence in the 2D version,” explains Gelli.

On the Color Pattern The Inspiration “I had the idea of the 3D logo when I was swimming at Ipanema Beach,” says Gelli “I was under the water, and when I came up, I saw Dois Irmãos (Two Brothers Hill, above). And I said, we are in the middle of sculpture city, we need to make a harmonizing logo. All of the curves of the logo shapes come from the mountains in Rio de Janeiro — not only the main one Sugarload Mountain, but all of the the mountains.”

On the Infiniti Design “This is an archetype. You can find this symbol in caves a million years ago and in children’s schools today. This make the logo so strong because it has a good meaning in all the cultures — with union and force. People see a lot of different meanings in it that we didn’t intentionally put there. The mayor of Rio said he could see Rio in it,” Gelli says with a laugh, “What?”

“We have a very colorful city and culture. The colors are connected with our nature. Green is connected to our nearby forest, Tijuca Forest, one of the biggest in the world. Blue represents our ocean that inspires us. And the yellow/orange comes from our warm temperature.”

The Biggest Challenge With the logo solidified, the next step was to design a limited logotype character set. The entire typeface would be fleshed out by another firm, so Tátil had to focus on an elegant but visually compatible accompanying “Rio 2016.”

“In the beginning we had a strong logo symbol, so we decided to make the logotype really clean without personality to create a stage for the symbol,” says Gelli. “The logo was the protagonist and the type set it up to be the star. But the feedback from the Olympic design committee was for our logotype to have the same DNA as the logo. So we hired an expert typographer to join our team and we drew 150 different logotypes on paper to see if we could find one that had the same DNA of the symbol — the curves, the nature, the drawing of the logotypes — before we chose the current one.”

II. The Font Roughly 18 months after the Rio 2016 logo was developed

by Tátil Design, Dalton Maag got the prompt to design the full font. Dalton Maag’s meeting was held with James Bondesque secrecy. The company’s creative director Fabio Haag thought he was going to talk about a corporate design project, only to be told at the table that this project was actually for the upcoming Olympics.

On the Importance of Using 3D Modeling in the Process Although Tátil had a 3D concept from its earliest sketches, the

“Our prompt was that the font had to be an exact replica of the letters in the logo,” says Maag, who knew it would be a challenge due to its reverse creative process. “Usually you make the font and then do the logo,” he notes. Dalton Maag

had 3 letters — R-I-O — and 4 figures — 2-0-1-6 — to use as a roadmap. Here is how Haag and his six-person team built the rest of the 2016 alphabet and special characters — nearly 500 in all.

The Challenge

ligature of ‘s,’ ‘f’ and ‘o,’ which plays off the ‘1’ and ‘6’ of the Rio 2016.”

Troubleshooting “Another big challenge was to refine how the letters connect, like if there was one unit difference, it was not good enough. I would make really big letters on large prints, then change the connection between letters, and then go back to the computer and make the change on the smaller font. In order for a font to look like it was hand-written and spontaneous, we created a lot of alternative characters. There are two versions of ‘b,’ ‘d,’ ‘p,’ and ‘g’ and the version that is used is based on what letters precede and follow it, so the connections look natural.”

The Importance of Sketching

“The difference between a logotype and a font is that, in a logotype, the letter combination is set, but in a font, every letter needs to work nicely next to any other and match,” says Haag.“In the logotype, some characters are very fluid, like the ‘R’ and the ‘2’, but the ‘1’ is very straight and the ‘o’ is on a steep angle. Finding a balance that would work as an harmonious system was our biggest challenge.”

“In order to figure out how the font should look, it was important to understand how it was written. We realized that replicating the logo is not about writing a certain thing with a pen, but about brushstrokes and large movements with speed. For example, the ‘n’ is like a wave. Anywhere on a classic script font you would have a trace, like a stem, and then you would go back and make a join — there is no subtleties, no small curves. Everything is big and large. Going through the paper exercise was very important to see how the original logo was written and to find out the rationale behind it, to see how it resulted in those letters.

How Dalton Maag Began “You could say, we already have the letters ‘R,’ ‘i,’ and ‘o’ and we want to make letters that look like them, so we could just expand on them. But the tricky thing is that we can’t use the same letters because they might not connect, or have the same weight and proportions, as with the rest of the letters in the alphabet. So we started using different words — ‘passion’ and ‘transformation’ — that had multiple ligatures to see how one letter could connect and match with another.”

“Choosing the right words was key to the success of the concept,” continues Haag. “Here you have ‘passion,’ and below it you can see a lot of similarities in “Rio 2016.” We then came up with 23 different font concepts and started comparing them to one another using “passion.” Then, on the 24th concept, the hero concept, we used the word ‘transformation,’ [Transformação] because it is a triple

III. The Takeaway “On this project we were extra careful to be super right, because it will be seen by billions of people. But we didn’t treat the project any differently than others were work on. I thought we would nail the concept much quicker, because we knew the design and just needed to expand on it. We didn’t realize we would have to create 23 different versions to get there. The font is property of the client, as it is a key asset of their identity, so it cannot be licensed. That said, we quoted this as if it were any other project for a private company and got paid properly.”

Matt McCue is the senior writer for 99U. Previously, he contributed to Fast Company, Fortune and ESPN The Magazine. He lives in New York City, but he is willing to travel long distances for a good meal.

Celebrity endorsements carry less sway with US consumers Consumers Trust Non-Celeb Influencers More

By Erik Sass

Influencer marketing is on the rise but some approaches are more effective than others, according to a new survey of 14,000 U.S. adults conducted by Collective Bias earlier this month, which found that a sizeable segment of respondents were more likely to heed recommendations from noncelebrity influencers than celebrities.

Overall 30% of U.S. adults were more likely to purchase a product endorsed by a non-celebrity blogger than a celebrity influencer, and the proportion increases significantly among younger adults: 70% of adults ages 18-34 said their highest preference was for an endorsement from a “peer” or nonceleb blogger.

On that note around 60% of respondents said they have consulted blogs or social media to find out about products before retail shopping, with men about twice as likely as women to consult blog reviews or social media. Thus 34.4% of men have purchased consumer electronics at retail after reading a blog review of social media post, compared to 15.4% of women.

Conversely, just 3% of consumers would consider buying a product at retail if it was endorsed by a celebrity influencer.

At the same time, other traditional forms of advertising didn’t rank much higher, with just 4.5% of respondents citing digital display ads, 4.7% citing print ads, and 7.4% citing TV ads as the most influential channels for marketing messages when it

comes to buying products in store.

As noted, there’s been a flurry of activity in the influencer marketing arena. Earlier this month The New York Times Co. announced the acquisition of HelloSociety, a digital marketing agency focused on social media influencers and mobile channels, from Science Inc. Also this month, Time Inc. and YouTube fashion network StyleHaul, which maintains a network of influencers in the beauty and fashion category, announced a multiyear partnership to create advertising programs targeting Millennials.

In January WPP’s GroupM and Fullscreen, which operates a digital platform for content creators on YouTube, announced the creation of an influencer marketing partnership called Playa. And in December Hearst Corp. joined forces with video advertising technology platform Reelio to create new, highly targeted networks of online influencers.

In another study by Zefr published in September, 60% of marketers said they will increase spend on influencer marketing in 2016, and 22% said it is a top-ranked customer acquisition tool.

Erik Sass is editor of Publishers Daily

How Marketers Can Manage Data Better for a Single Customer View SEVEN DATA QUESTIONS EXECS SHOULD ASK THEIR DIGITAL MARKETING TEAMS

By Kevin Dean

groupisd.com

40

Today, with digital marketing at the forefront of many company marketing strategies, the deceptively simple concept of the “single customer view” has taken the marketing and sales world by storm. Driven in part by a need to ensure maximum ROI from digital marketing programs, the single customer view (essentially an aggregation of all data about the customer) is also credited with enhancing customer service, creating new sales and cross-selling opportunities, finding new customers and of course driving sales.

Companies are collecting such a high volume of data, executives might be lulled into thinking that they already have what they need to create a single customer view, and further, that their customer data is helping to move the marketing needle. Eighty-one percent of marketers say that they have trouble achieving a single customer view, and over half of marketers from enterprise brands see effective linkage as the main barrier to creating a truly cross-channel marketing strategy, according to new research from Experian.

So before signing off on that next big digital marketing program, here are seven data questions executives should be asking their digital marketing teams to ensure that they are moving closer to the goal of the single customer view:

1. How good is the data for this campaign?

The data part of any campaign deserves just as much attention as the strategy and ideas behind it. Bad data can lead to an inability to communicate and even impact revenue with lost productivity and communications spend. The good news is that if marketers use successful tactics for generating accurate first-party marketing data, this valuable data set can provide a great deal of consumer insight on its own.

2. How much time are we spending on validating the data? Many organizations are so focused on data collection and management that the quality of that database gets put on the back burner. The irony is that without prioritizing quality, activating on all that data you’re collecting becomes impossible. In short, companies need to slow down to ensure that they have the time to validate and cleanse the data.

3. How close are we to the single customer view? Ideally, the single customer view is a complete picture of the customer and their interactions with the company. This includes all relevant data pertaining to that customer, including contact information, preferences, as well as a deep understanding of the behaviors and buying preferences of any customer’s particular cohort. So for example, if a company wanted to launch a promotion that rewards its most valuable customers, it would be critical to have an understanding of what the customer has bought, as well as any subsequent interactions regarding the product or service, such as comments via Twitter or online chats with a

support representative.

4. How do we deal with data we collect about our customers? First-party data is what is provided to companies from their customers through a variety of systems and channels, such as CRM, social media, online sales, customer inquiries, etc. Yet data collection methods and responsibility for data accuracy is not shared across silos, leading to a lot of disparities. Companies need to work on developing consistent strategies for dealing with data, regardless of its source.

5. Is our data “fit for use?” Essentially, this question is about whether or not the data is appropriate for the campaign. So if the campaign is directed at soccer moms, the source of that data needs to be a place where this target really spends time, say in a department store website, not on an online-gaming platform. Often data is sourced inappropriately, and through the wrong channels, thus creating bad results when the program is launched.

6. Are we using third-party data correctly?

Often, companies believe that they can “fix” all of their data problems with third-party data. Yet to be really effective, third party data has a different function. If first-party data is collected correctly and accurately, the need for third-party data shifts. It acts as a supplement, helping organizations to better understand and target their audiences. Thirdparty information gives marketers intelligence related to the motivations, beliefs, interests and preferences of consumers, including their own customer base. These data points can include things such as lifestyle characteristics, purchase influences, media habits and more. Third party data should be used to enrich in the right places.

7. Validate, validate validate. Especially when it comes to third-party data, companies must insist that the data they get is validated and tested. They should ask for performance metrics on the data, and ensure that it is on target and connected with their key audiences.

Marketing teams are under pressure to show that their campaigns are connected to real, actionable data.

Activating campaigns on inaccurate data is costly and can be damaging. It is crucial that companies target their efforts in a way that does not alienate their customers or prospects.

More marketers today have the means to extract actionable business intelligence from their data but realize that they need a complete customer view in order to do that effectively.

Kevin Dean is president and general manager-targeting, North America, Experian Marketing Services.

Book,

&

Line

Ask: The Counterintuitive Online Formula to Discover Exactly What Your Customers Want to Buy...

Create a Mass of Raving Fans... and Take Any Business to the Next Level

By Ryan Levesque Ask is based on the compelling premise that you should NEVER have to guess what your prospects and customers are thinking. The Ask Formula revealed in this book has been used to help...

Launch: An Internet Millionaire’s Secret Formula To Sell Almost Anything Online, Build A Business You Love, And Live The Life Of Your Dreams

By Jeff Walker “Launch” will build your business---fast. Whether you’ve already got a business or you’re itching to start one, this is a recipe for getting more traction.

Think about it---what if you could launch like Apple or the big Hollywood studios? What if your prospects eagerly counted down the days...

The Membership Economy: Find Your Super Users, Master the Forever Transaction, and Build Recurring Revenue

By Robbie Kellman Baxter In today’s business world, it takes more than a website to stay competitive. The smartest, most successful companies are using radically new membership models, subscription-based formats, and freemium pricing structures to grow their customer base and explode their market valuation in the most disruptive shift in business since the Industrial Revolution.

Sinker Growth Hacker Marketing

By Ryan Holiday This book points out that many of the megabrands of today haven’t spent much of anything on traditional marketing. Instead, they figure out how to reach customers who “sell” other customers on using the product. While I’m not certain that the techniques Holiday espouses will work in every (or even many) business situations, the book is worth reading simply to understand how companies like Dropbox and Twitter suddenly burst out of nowhere.

DotCom Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Company Online

By Russell Brunson, Dan Kennedy (Foreword) If you are currently struggling with getting traffic to your website, or converting that traffic when it shows up, you may think you’ve got a traffic or conversion problem. In Russell Brunson’s experience, after working with thousands of businesses, he has found that’s rarely the case.

Low traffic and weak conversion numbers are just symptoms of a much greater problem, a problem that’s a little harder to see (that’s the bad news), but a lot easier to fix (that’s the good news).

The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

By John Warrillow This book shows you how to master the psychology of selling subscriptions and how to reduce churn and provides a road map for the essential statistics you need to measure the health of your subscription business.

Whether you want to transform your entire business into a recurring revenue engine or just pick up an extra 5 percent of sales growth, The Automatic Customer will be your secret weapon.

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

Inbound Marketing, Revised and Updated: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online

By Gabriel Weinberg , Justin Mares

By Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah

Startup advice tends to be a lot of platitudes repackaged with new buzzwords, but Traction is something else entirely.

As Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares learned from their own experiences, building a successful company is hard. For every startup that grows to the point where it can go public or be profitably acquired, hundreds of others sputter and die.

Attract, engage, and delight customers online “Inbound Marketing, Revised and Updated: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online” is a comprehensive guide to increasing online visibility and engagement. Written by top marketing and startup bloggers, the book contains the latest information about customer behavior and preferred digital experiences. From the latest insights on lead nurturing...

brandknewmag.com

42

The New Rules of Marketing & PR

By David Meerman Scott The benchmark guide to marketing and PR, updated with the latest social media and marketing trends, tools, and real-world examples of success The New Rules of Marketing & PR, 4th Edition is the pioneering guide to the future of marketing, an international bestseller with more than 300,000 copies sold in over 25 languages.

It offers a step-by-step action plan for harnessing the power of modern marketing and PR to communicate with buyers directly, raise visibility, and increase sales.

The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business

By Mark W. Schaefer Mark W. Schaefer, college educator, consultant, and best-selling author of five marketing books including Social Media Explained and The Tao of Twitter, has delivered a path-finding book exploring the six factors that will help you break through the overwhelming wall of information density to win at marketing now…

The Tao of Twitter, Revised and Expanded New Edition: Changing Your Life and Business 140 Characters at a Time

Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less

By Mark Schaefer

By Joe Pulizzi

You’re busy and you don’t have time to decipher the confusing world of Twitter. In less than two hours, Mark Schaefer’s bestselling book will show you how to connect and start creating meaningful business and personal benefits right away!

“Epic Content Marketing” takes you step by step through the process of developing stories that inform and entertain and compel customers to act--without actually telling them to...

Social Media Explained: Untangling the World’s Most Misunderstood Business Trend

Born to Blog: Building Your Blog for Personal and Business Success One Post at a Time

By Mark W. Schaefer

By Mark Schaefer, Stanford Smith

The best-selling social media book of 2014!

Too busy to spend hours trying to learn the fundamentals of social media marketing? This is the book for you! Mark Schaefer, author of the best-selling books “Return On Influence” and “The Tao of Twitter” unravels the most misunderstood and confusing business trend in this fun and easy-to-read book.

Launch a business and ignite a movement with a powerhouse blog!

Born to Blog is filled with practical, street-smart techniques and ideas to help you create and manage a winning business blog. Learn how to attract a loyal following, promote your blog, and write powerful content that generates new business.

Media: From Chaos to Clarity

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

By Judy Ungar Franks What happens when you apply old-school media thinking to a new media world? Absolutely nothing! Media: From Chaos to Clarity strips away the bias of a bygone media era to unveil the Five Global Truths that make sense of a messy media world. Author Judy Franks takes the reader on a journey that departs the old, Newtonian media universe and enters a new world of media chaos where media work in exciting ways. The Five Global Truths offer practical solutions that can guide more integrated outcomes in a fractured marketing world.

By Henry Jenkins Winner of the 2007 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award 2007 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Convergence Culture maps a new territory: where old and new media intersect, where grassroots and corporate media collide, where the power of the media producer and the power of the consumer interact in unpredictable ways.