BrandKnew November 2015

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Dear reader: It has been a whirlwind past 3 months for all of us at Brand Knew; the launch of our web blog brandknewmag.com has received incredible response from connoisseurs and students of branding & marketing. www.crowd-nine.com is our new platform where the global brands and the creative community around the world confluence. The re launch of the digital edition now follows with this issue.

As has always been the case, there is a whole lot to cherish in this edition: in the present content marketing obsessed era, we talk about how brands become publishers. For the true blue design fan, we touch upon the re design of the iconic Coke bottle. Analysis paralysis has always plagued the biggest of them and our feature on big data burying your brands walks that path. The most sought after audiences in the world by brands are the millennials and the story featured in this issue covers it extensively. It is quite possible that in your organisation marketing operates in silo and all other departments are completely in the dark about what they do. We also touch upon some fundamental issues of Landing page design and the most played out fonts on the web. It feels really good to be back with this action packed issue and hope you enjoy it as much as we did while putting it together.

Best always

Suresh Dinakaran @sureshdinakaran linkd.in/1dsjYaW

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bit.ly/1h95tgO 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 Country Head, India: Rohit Unni Digital/Social Media Marketing: Loknath Swain, Vishnu Nath Associate: Brand Success: Andre Van Helsdingen Web Specialist: Prasanta Kumar Sahu Online Support: Mahendra Kumar Behera

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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.

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CONTENTS

Why You Need to Hit the Marketing Reset Button Don’t Let Big Data Bury Your Brand Five Traits of Productive and Enduring Relationships Between Agencies & Clients Completely in the dark How brands became publishers 12 Hotshot Designers Reimagine The Iconic Coke Bottle Oh, to Be Young, Millennial, and So Wanted by Marketers Curating world-class content is collaborative What Are The Web’s Most Played Out Fonts?

Social Data Boosts Brands, Even If Marketers Ignore It Why Brands Should Mine Their Archives Why marketing degrees need a module on the Big Five Personality Model Let’s talk about (brand) love (and sustainability) Landing Page Design: Seven Tested Ways to Improve Conversion Book, Line & Sinker

Why You Need to Hit the Marketing Reset Button

By Will Margiloff

Before any commercial airline takes off, the pilot has a very specific flight plan to get to the correct destination on time. If elements take him off course by a few degrees, not only will he miss his goal but he’ll also wind up at a different place.

The same holds true for marketing. As a digital marketing leader, you are the pilot, your flight plan is the strategy, and your equipment are the tools to get you to your organizational and revenue goals. You also need co-pilots to help guide you as well as a means to barnstorm and break down silos within the Marketing Department itself.

Getting in that cockpit day after day, launching campaigns (both paid and owned) without precision or without a plan in hopes they’ll take you to a good destination is no way to run an operation. So, consider whether this is the time to reset your marketing.

Giving Yourself Time to Think With the acceleration of change in digital marketing, the undercurrent has been to “speed up or be left behind.” So, most organizations have quickly made decisions to stay ahead. Making quick decisions works in the short term, but sometimes, you need to slow things down, think strategically, and get a plan to move at the pace necessary to be successful.

Your “slow” moment (there never really is a slow moment) is a time to examine the important KPIs, efficiencies, processes, customer data, marketing mix, and other elements of your “flight plan” to make sure you’re getting to the right

destination. After all, you need to be more like a jet fighter instead of as a crop duster.

A Marketing Reset is an evaluation of your current approach, looking at things with new eyes to identify inefficiencies and areas for improvement.

Let’s start by looking at the four essential elements. (Processes can vary by organization.)

1. Marketing Mix Your marketing mix includes all the owned and paid activities your team works on (including paid media, owned channels, and content produced) to attract the right buyers to your brand.

Your Marketing Reset needs to consider the entire picture based on the customer journey to see ways to simplify reach while increasing speed and efficiency to each activity.

Some questions to consider are...

• Does your email team ever coordinate with your search team?

• Does your content team coordinate with display?

• Are there points of customer interaction that could be improved with better consistency and messaging?

Your reset provides you with an opportunity for holistic approach.

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2. Technology and Tools Because of the speed of change in the industry, many marketing organizations have hastily invested in tools that may (or may not) continue to serve them as well as trendy technologies in the marketplace.

Doing a reset means looking at your overall goals—your destination—and deciding whether your technology currently in place can get you there.

Ask yourself: • Do the activities and data from one point solution smoothly integrate with another?

4. Use of Customer Record and Third-Party Data For performance-based marketers, the push behind the need for a Marketing Reset is data. Because so much data is available—and because its proper use allows marketers to engage consumers better than ever—the legacy systems and ways of doing things are quickly becoming irrelevant and expensive.

Your Marketing Reset, above all, needs to explore how you’re using data for marketing engagement.

Ask yourself:

• Can you pull together your cross-channel results to see what’s happening in a complete view or do you have to log into multiple systems to get reports on the KPIs you need?

• Are you consolidating customer data within a datamanagement platform for a complete view of what’s going on, so you can create stronger messaging to key audiences?

• Is it easy to get new campaign ideas into market quickly... and if not, why not?

• Do you see the correlation between cross-channel campaign activity and revenue?

Speed, simplicity, price, ease of use, ability to integrate, and ability to scale are all considerations as you evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the technology during your marketing reset.

• Does your strategy wrap around the customer journey from the point of initial paid search click influencing their likelihood to buy after X number of emails and minutes on your website?

If there’s something better out there, get a plan in place to make the change.

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3. People and Process When you dig deep into a Marketing Reset, your goal is to simplify processes to get to your destination faster.

A large part of that simplification involves processes and the people who manage them. As touchpoints blur together and a customer-driven omnichannel approach is embraced, the structure of your internal teams also may need to shift.

Perhaps technologists become part of marketing to support data management. Perhaps CRM leaders are invited into strategy meetings to offer fresh ways to better target core audiences based on data you already own.

In the Marketing Reset process, look for ways to blow out the org chart and bring the right people into the room to better engage the customer and reach them with relevance at the right moment.

And even if you think you’re doing all this today, how can you do it better? What’s holding you back?

Technology has removed the complexity of advanced marketing and data science. Use your marketing reset to explore not only what you’re currently doing but what you should be doing to speed your success.

Why reset now? Adjustments are necessary. The pace change within digital marketing in the past few years has been impressive. The innovations in data and technology across channels have allowed marketers to do things only imagined just a few years ago.

Focus your approach on customers—how to best engage them based on consolidated data from each interaction they have with your brand or company with technology to simplify the complexity—and you’ll be on your way to that ROI destination well-ahead of schedule.

Will Margiloff serves as CEO of IgnitionOne, a provider of cloud-based digital marketing technology.

Don’t Let Big Data Bury Your Brand

By Peter Horst and Robert Duboff

Deep into the second quarter, the chief marketing officer of a restaurant chain arrives at work to find that the CEO has dropped by. In this business, as in many others, “CMO” means chief revenue officer to the CEO, who’s here to talk sales. “There’s only a month left,” he says, “and I need a boost to compensate for what we lost because of the weather. The data analysts over in IT tell me we get the highest response to burger and apps offers. So, time for some coupons?”

The CMO’s plan was to use the coming months to strengthen brand equity, through ads promoting the quality of the food and the heritage of the brand, while moving away from the emphasis on discounts forced by a tough first quarter. But when the boss asks for something, what can you do?

This all too realistic scenario illustrates the classic tension for CMOs and, we might say, the main reason their highlevel job should even exist: to achieve just the right balance between short-term revenue pursuit and long-term brand building. Advanced marketing analytics and big data make that job much harder today. If it was difficult before to defend branding investments with indefinite and distant payoffs, it is doubly so now that near-term sales can be so precisely engineered. Analytics allows a seeming omniscience about what promotional offers customers will find appealing.

Big data allows impressive amounts of information to be obtained about the buying patterns and transaction histories of identifiable customers. Given marketing dollars and the discretion to invest them in either direction, the temptation to keep cash registers ringing is nearly irresistible.

We can speak to the power of analytics directly, because one of us led marketing efforts for many years at Capital One, and the other is a longtime adviser to that company and others.

Capital One was “born analytical” in 1988 as a credit card company wholly invested in the data-crunching capabilities that were just then emerging. Recognizing how the credit card industry could be transformed by means of computer

analysis and continual scientific testing, its founders outlined an information-based strategy that would not only give it a competitive edge as it went to market, but ultimately define its entire culture. The ability to gain granular insights into the behavioral economics of very narrowly defined segments allowed Capital One to make credit card offers to far more consumers at far more attractive rates with far less financial risk. Back then the offers weren’t electronic—but direct mail provided more than enough closed-loop feedback for analysis, and Capital One was able to out-innovate its competition by learning from it.

That history makes the direction that Capital One’s marketing has recently taken rather surprising. After a decade of promotions that drew on ever-expanding digital data sources, which resulted in growth that catapulted the company into the Fortune 200, Capital One’s CEO, Rich Fairbank, decided that the company should invest more in brand building.

Most companies have gone in the opposite direction in recent years. Inspired by success stories like Capital One’s, organizations around the world concluded that they were overinvested in brandbuilding campaigns with When sales can be unclear returns and started precisely engineered, pushing toward a greater reliance on promotional it’s hard to defend analytics. But Fairbank saw a troubling future for a branding investments. company whose name held no relevance for customers and relied instead on the appeal of the Visa and MasterCard brands. Indeed, he commissioned a brand-equity study to understand how consumers saw Capital One, and it identified only one attribute the brand overwhelmingly owned: “They send me lots of mail.”

In the past few years we’ve learned a lot about how to strike the necessary balance—both through Capital One’s course

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10 correction and through insights gained from other marketers we respect. Here we offer some practices that amount to a playbook written by the smartest CMOs we know, whose companies target specific customers with short-term promotions but also depend on strong brands.

Marketing News Many students of marketing are familiar with the classic case of the weekly newsmagazine that promoted its way to irrelevance. Time enjoyed a circulation of 4.6 million at its peak, in 1988. Despite a 31% increase in the U.S. population since then, that number today is below 3.3 million—a 30% drop. In 2014 Time was finally spun off by Time Warner, the company that grew from its once strong foundation. The magazine was no longer earning its keep.

The first challenge came in the form of all-news cable channels, which by accelerating news cycles made it difficult for a print weekly to carry sufficiently current information.

Time’s marketers responded with a TV ad that made things much worse: “Hi, I’m Judy, one of the operators here at Time magazine. Remember, if you call now, you’ll get Time at almost half off the cover price. And this exclusive Time AM/ FM walkabout, free. This offer ends soon, so call right now.

Our operators are standing by.”

Desperate to replace the subscribers it was losing, Time ran blatantly promotional ads that were disconnected from the traditional image campaign it had under way—one that emphasized the heritage and quality of Time journalism and highlighted the brand’s personality. Thus the magazine unwittingly set up an experiment, and the results quickly flooded in. The promotional ads were so effective that Time soon killed off its brand campaign. A truly sad aspect of the case is that the editors had been working hard to create a better Time for a sped-up era. They knew they had one of the strongest brands for news in a world that had suddenly become news-obsessed. Their circulation-focused colleagues, by doubling down on the “call now” offers, not only failed to communicate that—they implicitly conveyed a lack of faith in the brand.

Time’s is hardly the only case that teaches a simple truth about maintaining balance. Michelob beer, for example, was for many years the premium brew that “weekends were made for”—until price promotions sent it spiraling down to the bottom of the barrel. Brand building is necessary to sustain the healthy margins that allow a business to keep fulfilling its brand promise in the long run. But because of the natural tension between brand equity and sales promotion, any pressure to spur revenue in the short term will threaten brand-building investments.

With that tension in mind, consider how great the pressure has become. Big data and analytics can put promotions on steroids. As a startling New York Times story revealed, they can enable a retailer to use a customer’s history of buying pregnancy-related goods to seize the opportune moment for promoting new-baby goods. As recent moves in the personal insurance market show, they allow the tailoring of price offers to individuals’ revealed habits to replace large-group risk pooling. In ways we encounter as consumers every day, they enable sellers to dangle offers with uncanny insight into what will make us bite.

Make Every Piece of Messaging Do Double Duty At Subway, whose franchisees operate more than 40,000 restaurants in some 100 countries, CMO Tony Pace managed to get the balance right during his tenure: The Subway name stands for a set of brand promises and simultaneously drives sales to the 40 million customers the company serves every week. Pace told us his secret: Rather than try to balance promotions and image-building campaigns at the portfolio level, his organization strikes that balance in every element.

For example, “Our five-dollar footlong promotion also features some of our ‘famous fans’ [such as the star athletes Robert Griffin III and Michael Phelps],” he says. “Their presence in the ads is for branding, not just sales.” In fact, what began in 2008 as a four-week sales-seeking promotion turned into a strategic $4 billion brand asset, complete with its own catchy jingle, logo, and hand gestures signifying “five dollars” and “footlong.”

Subway is a perfect example of a company whose marketing could easily be taken over by analytics-driven promotions.

With a strong loyalty program and many cardholders subscribing to receive electronic promotional messages, it has an enviable ability to track and influence its customers’ behavior. Pace points out, however, that if analytics-driven promotions are programmed to maximize sales in the short run, they will always push to a given customer whatever that customer has ordered most often. (Other offers have a lesser chance of prompting immediate action.) That is destructive in the long term, because, as the company knows, the bigger a customer’s “repertoire” (sandwich types ordered more than once), the more loyal that customer remains to Subway.

Even worse long-term effects, Pace notes, would come from overly automated media buying and ad placement.

“Programmatic marketing can lead to activities that are off brand strategy and brand-destructive,” he told us. “I’m not going to abdicate the messaging decisions.”

Yet if a marketing team stays focused on the right longterm goals, big data can often help pursue them. Subway’s new ability to uncover sales relationships among the 20 different sandwiches it offers, for example, means that it can see opportunities for growing a customer’s repertoire. The unprecedented quantity of data available to his marketers, Pace says, “does lead to enhanced precision of hypothesis making.”

Pull Branding-Level Insights from the Data As we looked for other companies that had effectively balanced branding and sales promotion, it was hard to ignore what Mark Addicks managed to achieve, both for General Mills and personally. By the time he retired, in 2015, he had been with the company 26 years, making him, as Advertising Age reported, “one of the longest-tenured CMOs in the food industry.”

Today Addicks describes General Mills’ use of big data as evenly balanced between the pursuit of short-term sales and the building of long-term brands. But it wasn’t always that way, he says. “Initially, data was used simply to drive sales: advertising on the right day of the week, adding precision on when to engage, knowing what offer to put in front of whom,

which pie to focus on for which part of the country.” Indeed, Addicks was more comfortable than many other CMOs with “letting the data tell us the consumer logic” for a promotion.

He offered one example of a pattern revealed by web data: Many shoppers who looked at a certain kind of yogurt went on to consult certain chicken recipes. “It may seem odd, but we are now starting to follow the logic without questioning it,” Addicks says.

Over time, such assumption-challenging patterns have yielded insights that have helped General Mills deepen its brand relationships and generate content that is more relevant and more meaningful. In addition to enabling targeted offers, granular, data-driven understanding of consumer behavior and segments can reveal the shared concerns and underserved needs of subsets of customers, such as those who have young children or those who are responding to cholesterol guidance from a physician. “This is hard for people to get their heads around,” Addicks says.

“People worry about taking their eye off the brand when you get that granular.” But when a marketer’s message can strengthen the connection between how consumers perceive a brand and the particular problem they need to solve, he says, it “drives sales, but also links to the broader brand positioning.”

For Addicks, perhaps, this was a natural direction for analytics to take. Somewhat atypically, when big data began to generate all the hype, he pushed hard to build the company’s capabilities with it. But when his team made its first pitch to the rest of the C-suite, its emphasis on the predictable sales payoff “really hurt our efforts to get the investment,” he says.

The company “so wants to focus on building a brand and serving customers that a focus on data seemed inconsistent with that.” Now that it’s clear that data can be just as useful in brand building, the investment is less controversial.

Use Data to Make the Case for Brand Building Mark Addicks was in a company that understood and loved brand building, and he had to advocate for data’s role in that. More often, as we’ve said, the brand builders are on the defensive, because others in their company want to see more sales emphasis. That’s why we were very interested by a company that makes a strong case for brand building with data.

Caesars Entertainment gained a reputation early on for data-driven decision making. Under the leadership of Gary Loveman, its culture became both sales-oriented and deeply analytical, with a general bias toward elements that are measurable and transactional. So when Tariq Shaukat became the CMO, he was prepared to drive even more accountability and granular analytics—but he was also determined to put them at the service of brand building.

“With the precision available now in zip+4 TV ad targeting, we’re taking a direct-marketing approach to advertising,” he explains. That means the company can rigorously test and compare the effects of brand-focused versus promotionfocused advertising. And once customers attracted by either type walk in the door, transactions inside the casino reveal “how they behave.”

Given the nature of Caesars’s business, says Shaukat, the real brand building is done on each property, as guests

experience what the company calls its “total service.” The big data Shaukat’s team uses includes not only transactions with guests, but also the answers to more than 500,000 feedback surveys every year. Together these offer deeply tactical insights as to how components of the experience drive brand perceptions and where investments will have the most impact.

Caesars can also discover how customers’ brand perceptions correlate with their lifetime value to the company—and therefore can predict how an investment that increases brand ratings will translate into incremental revenue gains. In other words, Shaukat says, “if we can move from a B to an A rating of our brand, that will have x impact on results.”

It’s gratifying to see that interrogating larger data sets with better questions can lead to very different marketing decisions.

Today Caesars’s TV ads are almost wholly branding-oriented, designed to heighten anticipation and emotional appeal.

(A five-second promotional offer at the end allows them to do the double duty that Tony Pace advises.) Although the corporation has run into trouble from its debt load, the brand and core business remain strong.

Don’t Do It If You Can’t Defend It We’ve mentioned Mark Addicks’s willingness to “follow the logic” of data analysis that makes surprising connections and suggests nonintuitive marketing moves. In, say, a grocery setting, the risk is small enough that it’s worth trying out a novel promotional idea. At Capital One, however, being part of customers’ financial lives means that computerized decision making could backfire if it produced outcomes that were inconsistent with the company’s values or brand.

Some CMOs apply the standard “Can I intuitively explain this before simply following the dictates of the data?” CMOs whose companies, like Capital One, are in regulated industries need also to ask, “Could I explain this to regulators, community leaders, and other stakeholders?” Taking a follow-the-data approach could lead to marketing initiatives that generate strong ROI but unwittingly expose the company to allegations of inappropriate targeting, or unfair exclusion, or using datadriven correlations that in hindsight appear discriminatory. In a human-driven, hypothesis-first model, this risk is minimized by training and awareness and oversight. In a data-driven, automated world, the risk of unintended missteps grows significantly in the absence of an appropriate judgment screen.

That is why Shaukat, even though he is thoroughly grounded in Caesars’s analytics-loving culture, insists that oversight by marketers who are comfortable using their intuition and judgment will always be needed. Surprising correlations are great for challenging a marketer’s preconceptions or the conventional wisdom; but in the end, the marketer must be able rationally to accept the logic. “If the data tells us to do something that doesn’t make intuitive sense, we don’t do it,” says Shaukat. “And if I can’t explain to a customer why we’re making a particular offer, we won’t do that one either.”

This sounds like a good brand-protecting philosophy for any company.

Get Branders and Analysts to Collaborate One last problem for CMOs who are attempting to strike the right balance between branding and promotion is that, increasingly, the two objectives are staffed by very different kinds of people. At the pizza chain Domino’s, for example,

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we heard from Russell Weiner, then the CMO (and now the president), that the complexities of the new data environment can’t be mastered by the jack-of-all-trades marketer of the past. “Big data requires such special skills,” he said, that it “attracts a different kind of person, who can’t rotate in and out of functions.” Just as the most creative marketers aren’t the best data people, analytic professionals usually lack the skills, the experience, and perhaps even the “internal wiring” to excel at brand, image, and creativity.

Even a coupon offer says something about the brand.

Like other CMOs we consulted, however, Weiner believes strongly that drawing on big data to create targeted offers can be instrumental to brand building. “Not showing a pepperoni pizza to a vegetarian is about both sales and branding,” he said. “A double good when you get it right, and a double bad when you get it wrong.” His company’s recent effort to encourage customers to order online rather than by telephone so that more and better data can be captured is part of helping his team deliver that double good.

But the bigger key, according to Weiner, is seamless working relationships between data-savvy creative marketers and consumer-centric big data analysts. “It’s like linking a quarterback with an offensive line, or Elton John with [Bernie Taupin] his lyricist,” he told us. The teamwork isn’t always harmonious, though. There can be “governance issues” about which side takes the lead and which plays backup. Weiner’s solution strikes us as one that other CMOs might borrow: He brought a top market researcher with him when he moved to Domino’s—someone whose skill set placed him right at the intersection of data crunching and customer understanding.

This professional’s insights into the whys of what the data showed allowed him to create collaborative space for the rest of the team.

Weiner said of one campaign that drew on both sides’ strengths, “It’s not about big data. It’s about big marketing.”

In the world of sports, he pointed out, many organizations have become more data-obsessed since Moneyball, the book (and movie) that celebrated the number-crunching sophistication of the Oakland A’s. But they don’t all play

better ball as a result. Why is that? “Maybe the numbers get you only so far,” Weiner mused, “and after that it’s about the people getting it right.”

Between the Extremes Another difference between marketing people correlates with age. Reliance on analytics and data-driven decisions may be second nature to the new hires in a large marketing organization, but very foreign to their veteran colleagues. In Mark Addicks’s words, big data “fundamentally challenges what they do and how they think.” Speaking from experience, he told us, “A junior person can look at the data and know more about the category than a senior executive. It can be very humbling when a junior associate in a meeting says, ‘I’m sorry, but that’s not how the category works.’”

It’s not easy to resist the pressure to go all-in on datadriven promotions. Even Rich Fairbank encountered (and encouraged) substantial pushback to his thinking about the importance of branding at Capital One. Extensive internal debates preceded the company’s strategic leap to make a significant multiyear investment in building the brand.

Yet much in the traditional marketer’s knowledge and skill set is not prone to obsolescence. Every marketing program has some degree of impact on both sides. Sales-oriented marketing influences short-term actions; branding prompts feelings and understanding of what a brand represents. But even a coupon offer says something about the brand, and even an ad with no call to action changes the consumer’s proclivity to buy. Good marketing might be defined as successfully navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of the extremes. In the past marketers have sometimes disastrously pushed toward branding while neglecting sales (the infamous Pets.com comes to mind). Today many are steering just as frighteningly toward sales promotions at the risk of causing their brands to founder. The best way forward will always require a middle course.

Peter Horst was the senior vice president of brand marketing at Capital One before becoming the chief marketing officer at Hershey.

Robert Duboff is a founder and the CEO of HawkPartners, a marketing consulting and research firm.

Five Traits of Productive and Enduring Relationships Between

Agencies & Clients

By Margaret Molloy

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Increasingly, companies are partnering with third-party specialists to help them better communicate with their constituents.

As a result, more often than ever, marketing departments are working with agencies. Moreover, a CMO’s relationship with his or her agencies is a critical factor in the overall success of any marketing plan.So, having a highly functional, intertwined relationship is vital.

However, as any CMO knows, it’s not always easy to achieve this level of synchronization. As a former client-side CMO, I’ve come to recognize the agency/client relationship can be contentious.

To shed light on the subject, I interviewed David Srere, coCEO and chief strategy officer of Siegel+Gale (where I work) and Troy Williams, vice-president of Global Brand Identity at American Express. In addition to being drivers of their own long-term relationship, David and Troy have experienced a multitude of client/agency relationships, both successful and unsuccessful.

In our talk, we found five main factors across all productive and enduring client/agency relationships.

1. Shared Values One guiding star in selecting the right agency partner is finding a firm where both parties have common values but distinct expertise.

Values must be consistent for an enduring relationship to take root. Whether a commitment to an excellent product or a philosophy of constant introspection and improvement, complementary values allow us to integrate deeply even if we both bring different proficiencies to the table. Trust and honesty pave the way for open and honest dialogue, which lays the foundation for a strong relationship.

While searching for a partner, there is one cardinal rule: play nice! Often in business proceedings, both parties adopt a hard-edge approach, but long-term relationships must be based on respect and trust. Troy and David both agree: People want to work with people they like. We believe that being nice and respectful from the introduction will set the tone for the relationship as one of partnership and not contention.

2. Clarity in Communication Excellent communication is the foundation of any good relationship. From the outset, we align on the cadence of communications, both in terms of style, frequency, and form factor. Each organization has distinct ways of working. We decide whether chat, email, or phone will be the quickest way to get a timely answer and gauge whether end-of-week recaps or step-by-step updates are the most efficient way to communicate progress.

Determining early on, the best modes of communication helps us ensure a seamless interface and remove unnecessary friction from the relationship.

3. Rituals Partaking in shared rituals is a powerful team-building mechanism. Consistent, casual meetings between the teams at both the management and team levels encourage this camaraderie.

For example, David and Troy enjoy biweekly breakfast chats to stay closely synced on their work. For the team, your weekly meeting or call can come with your favorite snacks, but rituals as simple as regular full-team happy hours or off-site events can be extremely constructive. We start early: When new members join the Siegel+Gale/American Express team, they are taken out for lunch and subject to “20 Questions” from the team that cover their personal and professional life.

4. Team Continuity There are two important aspects of team continuity: hiring and succession planning.

In the Siegel+Gale and American Express relationship, both firms have a direct say in the hiring practices of the other company. Senior management on both teams are involved in the interview process and even have veto power for hiring decisions. A hire on either side is a hire for the entire team, and both sides should take the process very seriously.

At some point, employees will inevitably leave. We consider it business-essential for both sides of relationship to have a thoughtful succession plan to ensure that the relationship remains consistent regardless of staff departures.

5. Regular Reviews Predictable reviews are a critical part of the process. Even the best relationships need regular resets.

We believe clients should (once or twice a year) formally evaluate their agencies based on the current state of the relationship and work completed. This evaluation is not just for the agency. Agencies need to be able to have a say in the future of the relationship with their clients.

“It’s not fun, but we have had to ‘fire’ clients when it wasn’t working out and we weren’t aligned on larger goals,” David says *** Optimizing agency/client relationships is now a critical business success factor, and these best practices, distilled from David and Troy’s deep experience, should be kept top of mind during all stages of the relationship to help ensure maximal success for all involved.

A thriving partnership can be a powerful tool to propel both of your businesses forward, and it will only grow stronger every year.

Margaret Molloy is the global CMO and head of business development at Siegel+Gale, based in New York.

Completely in the dark

By Justin Gray

WARNING: THE REST OF YOUR COMPANY HAS ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT MARKETING DOES We marketers are sure living in “interesting times,” as the old Chinese curse goes. Your marketing department can be successful and still be perceived by the rest of the organization as an absolute failure.

This critical disconnect is due to one simple deficiency: visibility. A unified view of how to measure marketing success is something widely disagreed upon but highly desired.

However, with the right mindset and processes, it doesn’t have to be that way.

What’s Marketing up to?

Keeping your counterparts and teammates in the loop of what Marketing is up to is of the utmost importance. That’s why calendar views are so important, why you see such emphasis on editorial and campaign calendars. (Everyone loves a good calendar.)

Get used to people wanting to know what is going on with Marketing. It’s always one of the first budgets to be cut. Sure, you’re doing more than ever, but the impact is often less

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What most organizations want is Sales reaching out to people directly, but that process has changed quite a bit with the growth of digital channels.

Marketing is finally starting to get that legitimized view, considering all the technology and money people are spending on it. But, organizations still aren’t clearly defining success and are trapped in a one-dimensional view of what successful marketing looks like. They are trying to reinforce opportunity creation. Which I think is a logical area where Marketing comes into play.

The problem is that there is still a disconnect between Marketing and Sales. Marketing wants people to know that it generates the lead, but Sales wants the credit because it spent six months talking to the lead to get him to the close.

Marketing, like Sales, is increasingly becoming an equation of influence, meaning that you can get a very hot lead and send it over to Sales... but Marketing doesn’t stop there. The yin and yang work together to move the buyer closer to the goal. When you’re measuring marketing success, having metrics that will provide those insights are key. So is getting buy-in for those metrics.

Lead generation should be part of any good marketing process, of course, but it shouldn’t be the sole focus. Influence is just as important, albeit less sexy, a concept, but with today’s modern buyer, nurture is how results are cultivated.

Metrics for measuring success In the past, success was measured by the month and how many net new leads were generated. Today, that view is archaic.

The modern marketer considers not only net new lead creation but also leads and even former prospects that have re-engaged through ongoing conversations. What’s more, the window of this influence is widening, up to a year.

Sometimes, it’s even more, depending on the details of the solution being offered and the associated sales cycle.

At LeadMD, our sales cycle is 23-days long, but the average length in nurture is over a year. We know there is a large consideration period, a catalyst for pain identification, and an incredibly swift buying process that occurs for our services.

Things like the differentiation between Automation Qualified Lead (AQL) and Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) are starting to better define those influences. Based on the newest Sirius Decisions findings, AQL seeks to better define buyers who have met scoring thresholds facilitated by automation, but have not yet “raised their hands.”

This designation alone speaks to the emergence of marketing attribution at a different level. Previously, buyers were forced to fill out forms or attend an event to express interest, not the accumulation of light interactions that today can qualify them for a tailored follow-up.

Marketing deserves credit for those interactions, and the first step in that process is exposing the visibility of the touches themselves. Without that, it’s just another name in a database.

You can start to see that this all leads up to an often difficult way to measure framework. The easy thing is to fall back on number of leads. And that really goes against a lot of the things being preached in marketing today about awareness, thought leadership, and brand building that don’t have a “right now” influence over a net new lead or opportunity.

We have to be able to measure those conversations that now take place over a huge amount of time. Just the way you’d research for a while before getting a new car, the process with B2B software is much the same way.

With as much lip service as these new methodologies get inside the marketing community, we often do a terrible job at educating the other departments in our company.

Be a champion for marketing The organizations that we see succeed with good alignment and technology have someone who is a marketing champion that cannot be muted. It’s up to you to be that champion, especially if you use such methods like marketing automation and content marketing.

Marketers need to make it clear that engaging a buyer is impossible if you’re focused on net new lead creation because to do that, you’re going to default to things like PPC and content syndication.

Paid methods can give you a download but not much more, and that’s the opposite of engagement. If you call me after I download your whitepaper, I’m never going to download another one again because I know there is a phone call looming.

Though the role of the champion is absolutely key, there is one downside: When a champion gets a new job, the organization slides back to where it was. *** Bottom line: there is no better way to align process than to provide visibility into it and create other champions by indoctrinating them. Bring in stakeholders from all areas to get buy-in. Be transparent; document your process and share it with your peers.

Never be afraid to over-educate and over-communicate. It’s never just what you are doing in a campaign, it’s always the why. People want to know why it’s a good investment, and it’s up to you to show them why.

As marketers, we have to have to be open and honest. Many marketers paint a vivid picture of all the things they are going to do, but when the stakeholders are gathered, the canvas is blank.

Never be afraid of bringing the bad with the good, and work tirelessly to create understanding about what you’re aiming for and how long it’s going to take.

Justin Gray is the CEO of LeadMD. He founded the company with a vision to transform marketing via the use of marketing automation and CRM solutions.

How brands became publishers

By Fabio Torlini

In the not-so -distant past all brands were broadcasters of information. The most aspirational brands sold us dreams and visions through advertising of how our life could be.

The more functional or mundane companies conveyed the practical benefits or time and cost savings of their product.

Fast forward to the present day and times have changed.

Brands now have multiple routes to reach the consumer. The rise of social media, mobile and content publishing have opened a wealth of new opportunities, but at the same time the consumer has become savvier, more selective and much harder to please.

In the new age of omni-channel commerce and hyperconnectivity, brands must engage with their current and prospective customers in ever-changing, ever-more sophisticated ways. Across the C-Suite – including chief executives, chief marketing officers and chief information officers – enterprise brands must embrace a world where they are ‘publishers’ of content and where technology decisions are vital to customer engagement; and it starts with the website. Get this wrong and it can be an expensive and time consuming mistake to rectify.

Impressions matter A customer’s first interaction with a brand might be a retweet, or an infographic hosted on that brand’s publishing page, or an eBook being passed around an office, or a teaser on Facebook that leads to a long-form article, or a viral video. The diversity of content formats and ability to target persona groups is crucial in the shift to ‘publisher’. So too is the technology which underpins it.

The website is where the customer journey is centred.

Whether it’s the main corporate web domain, an internal intranet, campaign site, or microsite, a ‘call to action’ will nearly always drive the user to a dedicated web page where they can learn more, conduct research, be entertained, or hopefully buy. So the choice of web platform is crucial.

Is your CMS super-charged for fast growth?

For companies where agility and speed to market are key, WordPress is a solution that matches these ideals. So it stands to reason then, that fast growth and start-up companies build their websites, and other web assets, on the WordPress platform.

Research by WP Engine analysing the content management systems of 290 UK and European companies found that in total 26% (75) of companies use WordPress as the primary website CMS. No other third party CMS comes close.

This number is certainly encouraging and is a clear sign that WordPress is successfully making the shift from famous blog platform, to trusted web platform and third-party CMS of choice for many of Europe’s most exciting companies. There is definitely a lesson for enterprise organisations to learn here about to embrace the ‘nimbleness’ and agility that characterises start-up and fast growth companies.

Future-proofed In this new world of “brand is publishing,” enterprise brands need to plan for an uncertain future in a shifting world.

Next year will be different from this year, and three years from now it will be different again. Just as the purpose and implementation details of ‘brand is website’ changed over the subsequent decade, so will ‘brand is publishing.’ You can’t learn the playbook and then execute it blindly. But you can deploy flexible, future-proof technology and processes that allow you to adapt and quickly pivot when the market dictates.

There are lessons we can all learn from how fast growth and start-up companies are planning for future growth.

Fabio Torlini, managing director of WP Engine

12 Hotshot Designers Reimagine The Iconic Coke Bottle

By Diana Budds

BUY THE WORLD A COKE. This year marks a significant milestone for Coca-Cola as its signature hourglass-shaped bottle celebrates 100 years.

While the pioneering pop brand has experimented with packaging throughout the decades, there’s no denying the universal recognition that shapely silhouette carries.

industry celebrities like architect David Rockwell and up-andcomers like Felicia Ferrone and Jonathan Nesci. “There was no aesthetic thread we were trying to adhere to,” Bailey says.

“Our goal was rather to showcase how diverse American designers are in their thinking and output.”

To mark the centenary, Surface magazine invited 12 designers to reimagine the bottle for its June/July issue. “Coca-Cola, though global in scale and influence, is so American,” Surface editor-in-chief Spencer Bailey says. “I thought, ‘Why not ask some of today’s top U.S.-based designers to rethink its iconic design in a fresh way?”

The brief was simple: “create an object inspired from the original Coca-Cola bottle design that somehow dispenses the beverage,” Bailey says. “Not all of the designers followed this.” (How American to rebel.)

The origins of the coke bottle are by now legendary. In 1915, Coca-Cola invited 10 glass companies to develop a “bottle so distinct that you would recognize if by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground.” The Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Indiana, won the competition.

The roster of participants spans coast to coast and includes

See the complete series in the slideshow above and visit Surface’s Facebook page to read the designers’ full statements about their creations.

Diana Budds is a New York–based writer covering design and the built environment. She’s a staunch defender of Brutalism.

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AMINA HOROZIC For Surface magazine’s brief to recast Coca-Cola’s 1915 contour bottle, Amina Horozic, a lead industrial designer at fuseproject, wanted to preserve the silhouette.

“There is no avoiding the fact that Coca-Cola bottle is one of the most recognizable product forms in history,” she writes in her artist’s statement. “The resulting vessel embraces the icon in a subtle way, respecting its heritage and transforming the ubiquitous into something precious.”

DANA DAMICO “As my work explores the juxtaposition of texture and form, I designed a fine etched pattern broken up by the contours of the bottle,” says Dana D’Amico, a designer based in New York. “My goal was to enhance the quiet beauty of the bottle while adding a tactile experience for the user and paying homage to this design icon.”

DAVID ROCKWELL “We based our design for a new Coke bottle on the classic 1915 contour bottle,” says David Rockwell. “We love it because it’s a beautiful object, but the real virtue was that it was refilled over and over again at local Coca-Cola bottling plants. A double-walled stainless steel container can be refilled at vending machines at home and around the world. Stickers dispensed from different vending machines would customize the bottle and track its journey, like travel stickers on vintage luggage.”

FELICIA FERRONE Felicia Ferrone, a Chicago-based designer, paid homage to materials. “The bottle is made of the signature Georgia Green glass and integrates the iconic logo onto the bottle itself, just as the original bottles were branded,” she says.

FORT STANDARD “We appreciate the mass-manufacturing process of the original mold-blown glass bottle, as well as its material qualities, so we decided to utilize that process as a design constraint to work within,” says Fort Standard. “The result is a modern take on the iconic form that references the original bubbly vertical ribs in the form of 10 vertical faces that are then divided horizontally by pushing and pulling points to mimic the original form, resulting in a total of 100 celebratory facets.”

FREDERICK MCSWAIN “The classic Coca-Cola bottle always has a way of sparking my sense of nostalgia,” says Frederick McSwain, who didn’t redesign the bottle, but created an accessory for it. “I aimed to create a playful companion, designed to offer personalization to both experience and taste.”

JOE DOUCET “I grew up in working-class environment, and pocket money was challenging to come by as a child. One of my most coveted indulgences was an ice-cold bottle of Coke,” says New York designer Joe Doucet. “I chose a block of glass with an idealized version of the form that only becomes truly visible when filled with Coke.”

JONATHAN NESCI “The specifics of this project started where most of my works start: geometry,” says Jonathan Nesci, a designer based in Columbus, Indiana. “I found the hyphen in the Coca-Cola logo was in fact a rhombus, which inspired the hex shape. By changing the footprint of the bottle to a hexagon, I was able to add efficiency and update the look in a subtle way, allowing the forms to interconnect without wasting space during shipment.”

LEON RANSMEIER New York–based designer Leon Ransmeier departed from the bottle entirely. “In response to the ever-increasing concern about packaging waste and resourceintensive logistics, we chose to eliminate the bottle altogether,” he says. “Rather than create another plastic or glass container for what is predominantly water, we’ve designed a super-concentrated carbonated lozenge. Simply drop the Coca-Cola Tablet into 16 ounces of cold water and it effervesces to create a refreshing glass of Coca-Cola in less than a minute.”

LIZ DAILY “My bottle is a bit of a shape-shifting, origami-inspired design,” says Liz Daily, a Chicago-based designer who specializes in soft goods. “The bottle is rigid plastic and silicone, so the shapes can change and squish to form the iconic bottle shape, but also deform and move for different curves and varieties. The interaction and playful form are my translation of the fun of the Coca-Cola brand and bottle.”

MARC THORPE “The carafe’s inspired details include the exaggerated curvature of the 1915 glass body, frosted pale green glass, vertical top to bottom fluting, and a polished steel cap,” says Marc Thorpe.

NOLEN NIU “I have a love/hate relationship with the two-liter bottle of Coke,” says L.A. designer Nolen Niu. He created a siphon to extract soda without losing the carbonation.

“I love that it’s two liters of thirst-quenching Coca-Cola Classic, but I hate that it becomes flat and fizzle-free practically the moment you open the bottle.”

Oh,

to Be Young, Millennial, and So Wanted by Marketers

By Hilary Stout

The makers of Tic Tacs had a problem on their hands.

After 18 months of internal study, they had concluded that the all-important millennial generation might not be content with a mere mint.

No, the millennials wanted entertainment, release from boredom, “emotional rescue.”

So this month a new and more amusing Tic Tac is coming to store shelves — the Tic Tac Mixer, which changes flavors as it melts on the tongue. From cherry to cola, for example, or from peach to lemonade.

It’s yet another play in the millennial mania that is overtaking all manner of businesses, and seems to be getting more obsessive by the day. Not since the baby boomers came of age has a generation been the target of such fixation.

But this has a 21st-century style of urgency — with 24/7 micropandering, psychographic analysis, a high-priced shadow industry of consultants and study after study. (A

few from recent days: how luxury brands can connect with millennials; what millennials think about restaurant loyalty programs; and which emotions most influence the purchasing decisions of millennials. Answer: anxiety and empowerment.)

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All cater to a generation, generally viewed as people born from about 1980 to 2000, whose youngest members aren’t even out of their teenage years.

Goldman Sachs has gone as far as to research what (older) millennials are naming their babies. GameStop, a leading purveyor of video games, promotes its “insider knowledge” of the generation. Even coffee — an industry that would seem to have the generation in the bag — is frothing.

“The reality is that Gen M-ers drink more specialty coffee than any other generation,” wrote Heather Ward, a research analyst. “As specialty coffee professionals, how do we make sure we are giving them the attention they need?” she continued in a paper prepared for the Specialty Coffee Association of America.

But some analysts and consumers have begun to ask, what about the rest of us? After all, the millennial generation has less wealth and more debt than other generations did at the same age, thanks to student loans and the lingering effects of the deep recession. Though millennials are hailed as the first generation of “digital natives,” the over-40 (and 50 and 60) sets have become pretty adept when it comes to smartphones and other devices.

Still, this most coveted generation is huge — about 80 million strong in the United States, larger than any other demographic group. And it recently crossed a milestone: As of March there are more millennials in the American work force than Generation Xers or baby boomers, according to the Pew Research Center. The consulting firm Accenture estimates that millennials will spend $1.4 trillion annually by 2020, and they are expected to inherit about $30 billion in the coming years.

“Why you’re seeing the fervor now is just where millennials are headed — out from the younger part of their life stage to where they’re in their first profession, they’re getting married, having children and influencing more spending,” said Christine Barton, a senior partner and managing director at the Boston Consulting Group.

As a result, businesses are terrified that if they don’t snare them now, they’ll miss the chance.

Last month, Whole Foods revealed that it would open a line of grocery stores “geared to millennial shoppers,” with a “curated selection,” “streamlined design” and “innovative technology.”

Not to mention lower prices.

The news media reported the development earnestly. But some people noted that better deals on quality produce might have a cross-generational appeal.

Robyn Bolton, a partner at Innosight, a consulting firm, responded in a post on the Harvard Business Review website questioning the generational theme.

Whole Foods, she wrote, appeared to be saying that “Gen X and baby boomer shoppers are fine with or even prefer old, cluttered stores that sell a confusing array of stuff at high prices.”

Ravi Dhar, the director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management, said the attributes that businesses were ascribing to millennials — including a dependence on technology — applied to the population as a whole.

“How people shop and consume information, that’s really changing beyond the millennials,” he said.

This month, the market research firm Forrester issued a report titled: “The Kids Are Overrated: Don’t Worry About the Millennials.”

It noted that consumers in their 20s were overwhelmed with educational debt and that those baby boomers were more affluent and bigger spenders, unhip though they may be.

“While some businesses must target millennials because of the nature of their products, most do not need to,” the report said. “When such companies do pine for twenty-somethings, they resemble the desperation of a nerdy teenager who, smitten with a prom queen, forlornly asks, ‘Why doesn’t she love me back?’ ” Last month, Brittany Nicole Miller celebrated her 29th birthday. Her age makes her the target of much of the corporate affection, a fact that she says she has experienced “ad nauseam.”

Ms. Miller, who is also known as Piper, is divorced and works as a massage therapist and a model. She lives with two male roommates (who are not a couple) in a rented townhome in Danville, Calif., in the East Bay. She used Twitter to complain to Sprint when she had a problem with her phone (it worked), and she likes to buy vintage clothes and accessories.

In some ways, she is a stereotypical millennial; in others, she is not.

“It can be a little overboard, the generalizing,” she said.

The Republican National Committee took the generalizing to a mockable extreme in last year’s elections with an ad featuring a bearded hipster wearing glasses, bemoaning government regulation, a spot that was roundly parodied by the British comedian John Oliver with his own bearded, glasses-wearing hipster.

Jason Dorsey, who at 36 considers himself among the older millennials, founded the Center for Generational Kinetics in Austin, Tex., five years ago and is often invited to speak about his generation at conferences and events. The center, which advises corporate clients in many industries, focuses its research efforts on “generational context,” he said, “not generational silos.”

Really, he and others say, millennials, especially their dependence on technology, are probably just a leading indicator of where life is headed for everyone.

“Being able to text message with a company we found is something every generation wanted to do even though we assumed it was just millennials,” he said.

“Definitely we want to be inclusive of millennials, “ he added, “but we don’t want to forget the people who brought us to the dance.”

Curating world-class content is collaborative

By Shaun Gregory

The out-of-home (OOH) industry couldn’t have thought to play in the content space five years ago; now the opportunities are huge. The need to provide engaging, inspirational moments to monetise certain formats is driving the appetite for compelling content.

There are increasing opportunities for advertisers to create and broadcast bespoke content, to promote their brands in a creative way.

User-generated content (UGC), in particular, is a significant trend that has neatly coincided with the rise of digital outof-home (DOOH). Web content is increasingly dominated

by UGC, according to Mary Meeker’s 2015 Internet Trends Report.

Pinterest pin creation is up 75%, Twitch video broadcasts have risen by 83%, Wattpad stories have experienced a 140% increase and Airbnb reviews are up 140% year-onyear. Brands in Europe are trailing behind those in the US when it comes to leveraging UGC; the first ones to really start experimenting will take the lead.

In a world of connected devices, we expect the rise of sociallydriven content to be a significant development in the OOH space. Coca-Cola, for example, is running an OOH digital push for its #ChooseHappiness campaign using Twitter to display mentions of the hashtag. The campaign is running across 300 digital sites in London, including on the London

Underground for the rest of the year.

In light of this growing trend, we recently partnered with social media aggregator TINT to help brands to create sociallydriven branded content experiences and publish them across the Exterion network in moments. With an agnostic approach, the new partnership will provide consumers with a new way to access all the social media channels they use on a daily basis whilst they’re out and about.

The consumer will curate content going forward. What you see on social media will be up on screens because that’s the content consumers care about; it’s what’s trending in realtime that’s important.

We are committed to digital innovation and are bringing new technologies from around the world into our media network.

We don’t believe all the expertise has to lie within our building – we’re growing our partner network to be able to execute today’s ideas tomorrow.

Looking ahead, we’ll partner with businesses that enable us to add experiences to our assets. We’ll look at sound and image recognition, as well as iBeacon, Google Eddystone and payment providers, and what each of these can do to enhance our OOH offering.

Shaun Gregory, chief executive of Exterion Media

What Are The Web’s Most Played Out Fonts?

By John Brownlee

FONTREACH IS A NEW TOOL THAT CAN TELL YOU WHAT FONTS ARE HOT, AND WHAT FONTS ARE NOT. There was a time not too long ago when all the fonts on the web were pretty much the same: Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman, Comic Sans, Impact, Georgia, Trebuchet, Webdings, maybe some Verdana. But with advances in web technologies over the years, websites can throw pretty much any typeface they want at their visitors. So which fonts are the most overexposed, and which ones are still relatively obscure? Fontreach is a new tool that tells you, by crawling the top million websites and looking at what fonts they call for.

Here’s how it works. Go to Fontreach and start typing in the

All Font Illustration Made By: Jesse Chase and Jason Chen

name of a font, say, Impact. Fontreach will then pull up stats about that font’s usage on the web. In the case of Impact, it’s used by 11,133 of the top million sites on the web, making it the 47th most used digital typeface. Clicking on the font gives you a breakdown of which of the biggest sites are using it. You can also view a numeric ranking of the top fonts on the web, which isn’t very surprising at the head of the list (Arial, Verdana, Helvetica Neue are the top three), but gets a lot more interesting the further down you scroll. Ever heard of Cufon, Oswald Stencil, or Love Ya Like Sister? Some sites depend on them. You can even search by domain name.

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Fontreach was created by Jason Chen and Jesse Chase of Digital Ocean after they started looking for a new typeface for their website. They thought the current typeface they were using, Proxima Nova, was too overexposed. But how to prove it, and find something equally versatile, but much less played out? So they built Fontreach, a tool spinning off Libscore, a previous project that scans the top million sites on the web and examines what JavaScript libraries they are calling up.

Fontreach is more than just a cool web toy, though. It’s a useful tool for designers to quantify their understanding of the web, and justify their decisions with hard data. As Chase writes on Medium, web designers are now getting access to

hard statistics to back up their gut instincts. “Having certain information at our fingertips can better prepare us in making decisions that shape the web of the future, he writes. “Be it a library, a font, or other usage information, we should have the tools necessary to identify trends in how we build the modern web.”

John Brownlee is a writer who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with two irate parakeets and his wife, who has more exquisite plumage. His work has appeared at Wired, Playboy, PopMech, CNN, Boing Boing, Gizmodo, and more.

Social Data Boosts Brands, Even If Marketers Ignore It

By Emily Alford

While 39 percent of of marketing executives say that social media data isn’t useful, some industry insiders believe that social media is the best way to measure campaign success.

A recent study has found that 39 percent of senior marketing executives believe that social media data is not yet useful to their business, but some insiders say that the value social data provides can be a huge indicator of how campaigns should be adjusted.

The Marketing Executives Networking Group has shown in a recent survey that while companies are awash in social data, few know what to do with it. Fifty-five percent of senior marketing executives surveyed found social media “intrusive,” while another 39 percent revealed that the social media analytics just aren’t actionable. Those executives are missing important opportunities for allocating ad spend on local as well as national levels by using social media’s regional analytics, says with Opher Kahane, chief executive (CEO) of Origami Logic, a marketing intelligence platform.

“We use social data to measure sentiment surrounding the campaign,” Kahane says. “For example, when we work with large global brands, like Visa, the measurement they care about across paid and earned has to do with whether or not their spend in a particular area is efficient. And if they see a piece performing well in a particular area, they can take the creative aspect and repackage it, put more spend behind that piece of content and use it more broadly.”

Allen Adamson, chairman of North America for Landor, says the agency is constantly monitoring social media for changes in brand sentiment, especially negative and positive responses to new campaigns.

“The most powerful use of social media data is to be listening and hearing what’s going on as a critical way to stay in touch with the mind of your target,” says Adamson. “On social media, their defenses are down. They’re telling you what they’re thinking in real time. Its like a magnifying glass into the collective thoughts of your target audience.”

Individually, that data might not mean much, but collectively, the data can mean the difference between having a small success on one platform or a viral hit on multiple platforms.

“If we see a YouTube video doing well, we make a shorter form and do a Facebook video ad,” Kahane says. “We use that data to add more fuel to the fire. Or let’s just say someone has a successful Instagram post of a product purchased with Visa Checkout, we may use social data to inform the direction of our display ads.”

However, not all social media platforms are created for all brands. If posts aren’t getting any response on one platform, it might be best to just leave it with an eye toward returning if customers do.

“Different demographics emerge and disappear on social all the time,” Kahane says. “Look at Snapchat. People migrate every time there’s something else new and trending.

Marketers need to look at data across channels to stitch together a narrative of what their customers want, but all channels are not equally relevant for all brands.”

Perhaps the main reason that senior-level marketers just can’t seem to find the use in social data is that it has to be monitored constantly, and ad spend has to move from channel to channel with a frequency that some marketers might find overwhelming. Kahane recommends that brands keep spending fluid, ebbing and flowing on different social platforms as target demographics and brand sentiment on each ebbs and flows.

“To spend heavily on all channels doesn’t make sense,” Kahane says. “Use demographic data and social listening to find which channels are appropriate for what action. For us, it changes from month to month. Only experiment affords folks the information to make decisions, and you just can’t predict a month down the road.”

Emily Alford is a reporter at ClickZ. In addition to ClickZ, her work has appeared in The Huffington Post, Yahoo, and The Daily Meal. She has a PhD in English from Florida State University.

Why Brands Should Mine Their Archives

By Nick Rappolt

IN THE DIGITAL AGE, ATTENTION SPANS ARE SHORT BUT COLLECTIVE MEMORIES ARE LONG. HERE’S THE STORYTELLING OPPORTUNITY BRANDS ARE MISSING. In London’s Notting Hill, one man’s love of brands has grown into something of an obsession. Over 30 years, curator Robert Opie has collected the chocolate bars, cereal packets, and washing powders of yesteryear, using them to build a public collection: the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising. The artifacts may not be valuable, but they form a crucial part of the nation’s culture—a shared heritage that goes beyond individual memory.

Yet the objects in Opie’s collection require some explanation in order to hold meaning. On their own, they fail to capture what makes a brand, because, if you really boil it down, brands only exist in our minds. They are, in David Ogilvy’s words, “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes”—a mix of objective fact, emotion, and association, constructed in the memory.

IF YOU REALLY BOIL IT DOWN, BRANDS ONLY EXIST IN OUR MINDS.

You can split brand memory two ways: we have individual associations, implicit to us alone, and then collective ones that form part of our shared culture. Collective brand memory allows us to have an experience as a group in ways we can’t as individuals, and that makes it more powerful.

Indeed, collective associations can have such a big impact that they change us as a society. Think of the connective force

of Facebook, Google, Uber.

The Power of Memory But if brands are built of memories, why aren’t companies spending more time and money curating their history online?

MANY COMPANIES ARE FAILING TO MANAGE THEIR OWN DIGITAL HERITAGE.

In a digital age, the Internet is obvious place to do this, yet many companies are failing to manage their own digital heritage. The money spent establishing their brands over the years is being wasted, as the curation of their history is just being left to Facebook, Wikipedia, and Google’s search algorithm. It’s a massive oversight and lost opportunity.

Company and market disruption is now everywhere and causing concern in boardrooms as companies strive to evolve.

As already established brands, long-standing companies have a big competitive advantage: their heritage and the brand memory they’ve cultivated over time.

The history we have with a brand shapes our views of it for the long-term. If a brand is associated with positive memories, it is more able to diversify into new sectors. A customer will trust

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it to offer the service they have come to expect, just in a new category.

So what can brands do?

Companies need to curate their history in an engaging, interconnected way that allows people to access visual stories and memories, told through the individuals that shaped and built them. This would have three effects: building a digital presence that educates people internally about the company and shows externally its relevance in today’s world; preserving the company history and curate it for the future; allowing for mass education about a brand through ubiquitous access, invoking a collective memory.

Whereas just 20 or 30 years ago, these stories might stay confined to a book or on-site exhibition, or worse, buried in file boxes, the digital age in the form of the Internet offers the perfect way to both tap into collective brand memories and also preserve history. Here are three practical steps for sharing memory.

1. Digitize an accessible archive Every company with heritage has an archive of content that needs to be digitized and made accessible. The content— pages may number into the hundreds of thousands— must be structured and made easy for anyone to navigate.

Brands can learn from the example of publishers, who have led the charge in designing effective digital archives. The New York Times is a great example. Instead of leaving back issues to grow dust, the paper unlocked the value of its old content with the Times Machine, which resurfaces historic interviews and features to give context to current news stories, boost reader dwell time and cultivate a strong brand story as a long-established “newspaper of record.”

2. Design an interface that enables users to discover content The design of the interface should allow users to discover content easily and intuitively, and provide an emotional hook that encourages people to delve deeper. The most crucial aspect in the creation of a digital archive is its visual and interactive design; it should look amazing and work beautifully on all devices. Analyze the user data to understand behavior and then shape and evolve the user experience accordingly.

This requires good programming, so archive material can

be resurfaced in response to a user’s habits. Virgin.com is an example of a site that does this. Using a piece of technology called “The Kinetic Engine,” the site determines the type of content users are consuming and recommends relevant content in response. This delivers a more immersive, meaningful, and engaging brand experience.

3. Create a searchable visualization of the company In essence, brands will be creating a digital record encompassing their entire history and culture. The simplest way to do this is to create “exhibits” that allow users the opportunity to explore specific time-periods or events that might be relevant to them.

The British supermarket Sainsbury’s is a great example of a brand that has done this. Its “living archive” is like a digital museum, using historic collections to showcase the company’s long-standing values and cultural heritage.

Material is displayed through interactive stories, grouped around themes such as World War I and Christmas Past and Present.

The advancement in digital technology and location-based services over the past decade has given us the ability to preserve culture and history in an unprecedented way, so that it can be accessed by anyone at any time. It could be rudimentary browsing on a homepage, moving to more complex thematic discovery. Tying into maps, it could also be contextual discovery on-site at a particular location, creating delightfully surprising moments. It’s through journeys like these that new memories are forged and, possibly, shared.

Nick Rappolt is CEO of Beyond, an experience design agency with offices in London, San Francisco and New York City.

Why marketing degrees need a module on the Big Five Personality Model

By Javier Burón

Human behaviour poses a host of questions to marketers.

Why do people behave the way they do? How do advertising and marketing professionals decide which group of people are more receptive to their communication?

These questions are at the top of many lists. And they should be. The solution would not only optimise marketing communications but will also make for better campaigns.

This is why, it’s imperative that universities look towards having a module on personality insights in their marketing degrees.

Young marketing professionals have to be go-getters in today’s competitive job market. Learning about how personality influences behaviour and purchasing decisions in universities will provide them with the knowledge and tools they need to get ahead from the moment they step into their first job till after the point they start working on marketing campaign strategies.

So how do we do this? And why are we talking about The Big Five Personality Model instead of the other consumer behaviour models already taught at university?

The current principles are based on age-old concepts of classic cognitive psychology and sociological models of consumer behaviour. And while these are still relevant, there’s a big piece of the puzzle that’s missing which will be filled with the Big Five Personality Model.

Developed by researchers Costa and Norman, it is now the most widely used model to generally describe how a person engages with the world.

What is the Big Five Personality Model?

Contemporary psychologies believe that all of human behaviour can be explained to these five fundamental personality traits: 1. Agreeableness is a person’s tendency to be compassionate and cooperative toward others.

2. Conscientiousness is a person’s tendency to act in an organised or thoughtful way.

3. Extraversion is a person’s tendency to seek stimulation in

the company of others.

4. Emotional range, also referred to as neuroticism or natural reactions, is the extent to which a person’s emotions are sensitive to the person’s environment.

5. Openness is the extent to which a person is open to experiencing a variety of activities.

Each of these top-level dimensions has six facets that further characterise an individual according to the dimension.

Why is it more important than ever in digital marketing?

According to Gartner’s 2014 CMO Spend Survey, social marketing is 11% of the 2014 digital marketing budget and is expected to grow to 13% in 2015. With such an increase in budgets, the emphasis on campaign ROIs will become greater.

Every marketing channel is cluttered with noise and consumers are currently facing information overload more than ever.

Understanding about and actively applying personality insights will help gain a competitive edge, and cut right through that noise. It’ll not only make targeting more precise but will also make understanding competitor audience easier and more efficient.

Personality insights can play a two-pronged role: campaign optimisation and strategic planning. For example, when planning a Twitter marketing campaign, personality insights will tell marketers who within their audience is most likely to redeem coupons or retweet content.

While segmenting using variables such as location, age or gender give a top level idea of the target audience, it’s important to narrow down audience personas as much as possible. Personality insights is a huge breakthrough in our industry and the time to take advantage of it is now.

The sooner this is spoken about at university, discussions will spark, ideas will form and we’ll be at the forefront of greater marketing.

Javier Burón, co-founder and chief executive of SocialBro

Let’s talk about (brand) love (and sustainability)

By Suzanne Shelton

One of the ah-has from the soon-to-be-released 2015 Eco Pulse study is that, indeed, a company’s sustainability or social responsibility commitment is a reason to love the brand.

So, if there’s still any question at your organization as to whether sustainability is important — and whether you should put money behind telling the story — feel free to share these data points.

In fact, when we asked Americans, “Can you name a brand you love?” and then asked, “Why?” environmental and CSR reasons were almost as prevalent as core functionality or performance features.

I’d go so far as to say social and environmental features are beginning to rival traditional, core features (such as quality and performance) in brand preference and product selection.

By the way, the brands listed as loved brands weren’t niche-y green brands; they were mainstream.

When we asked, “Can you name a brand you hate?” we also got a list of mainstream brands (including some from the “love” list), and again, environmental, social responsibility and product content reasons were just as prevalent as product performance/customer service issues.

The phrases “unethical/dishonest/immoral” and “corporate philosophy/political leanings” popped up just as frequently in the open-ended responses as traditional reasons for being mad at a brand/product, such as “bad experience.”

Perhaps most interesting of all: we saw an enormous jump in the percentage of Americans who say they’re putting their money where their hearts are on this issue.

When we asked, “Have you ever chosen one product over another or stopped purchasing a product based on the environmental record of its manufacturer?” 33 percent said yes — and 75 percent actually could name a specific brand.

Just look at the graph below to see what a huge shift this is on both fronts:

From a consumer perspective, we are quickly evolving to a place of “good guys vs. bad guys,” and more and more of us want to buy from the good guys. That concept fundamentally makes sense — and in a consumer reality where shelves are lined with seemingly endless extensions of brands (Tostitos Artisan Recipes Roasted Garlic & Black Bean Flavored Tortilla Chips, anyone?), trying to choose the “best” one has become confusing and mind-numbing.

Knowing something real and good (in a higher-purpose/ helpful-to-all kind of way) about the brand becomes a clearer way to make a choice.

One last comment before I wrap this up: I was at a conference last week of folks who hold communications positions at our nation’s largest utilities. I asked if it was possible for people to love their utility, and this crowd all looked at me as if I were from Mars.

As they are set up, branded and marketed today, those “are you out of your mind” looks are justified. But in a future where utilities become easier to do business with, offer personalized options that customers actually want and, yes, embrace a commitment to the environment, I don’t actually think it’s outside the realm of possibility that a utility one day could make the “brands we love” list.

Any brand managers reading this post could see their brands on the list — provided your company makes a heartfelt, authentic commitment to something that creates value for our world, not just value for the stock market. And provided you tell that story in a heartfelt, pure way.

Suzanne C. Shelton is founder, president and CEO of Shelton Group, an advertising agency focused exclusively on motivating mainstream consumers to make sustainable choices.

Landing Page Design Seven Tested Ways to Improve Conversion

By Alp Mimaroglu

Using a landing page (see image, below), Wikipedia thanked its readers and the online community at large for taking part in the Wikipedia Blackout protests against two proposed laws in the United States Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).

At the bottom of the landing page, Wikipedia urged readers to enter their ZIP code in order find their US representative and contact them to vote against the bills. It was an effective call to action: More than 8 million people filled in their ZIP code, and 3 million ended up emailing Congress to oppose the bills.

SOPA and PIPA were effectively stopped in their tracks as lawmakers scrambled to appease the public and join in denouncing the proposed legislation.

But the interesting thing about the landing page is that it wasn’t optimized. Wikipedia’s quick “thank you” note could have been improved in various tested ways that might have gotten even more readers to find their representatives and investigate further.

Although there are hundreds of tried-and-true conversion optimization methods for improving landing pages, let’s discuss seven of the most basic—and powerful—ones.

1. Keep it short Wikipedia was going for a personalized, heartfelt letter, which makes sense in relation to the nature of the call to action and the audience. Still, it’s 208 words long (including “Make your voice heard!” at the very end).

I’m sure Wikipedia hired a professional writer to pen that note, but did the writer take into consideration the optimal length for a landing page? The letter might have looked great on a single page, but did the writer know that the Wikipedia logo would take up half the page?

Length is inversely proportional to click-through rates, and a landing page is the one place you want shorter, tighter copy.

Here’s how Wikipedia could have shortened the letter and increased engagement (in 147 words): Thank you.

The Wikipedia blackout is over—and you have spoken.

We asked if you could imagine a world without free knowledge. You said no. You shut down Congress’s switchboards and melted their servers. Your messages dominated social media and the news. Millions of people around the world spoke up in defense of a free and open Internet.

But make no mistake—SOPA and PIPA are not dead. They are waiting in the shadows. We must remain vigilant.

This has never been about money for us. It’s about knowledge. As a community of authors, editors, photographers, and programmers, we invite everyone to share and build upon our work. We care passionately about the rights of authors because we are authors.

We’re turning the lights back on. Please help us keep them shining brightly.

Read more Contact your US representatives.

Your zip code: Make your voice heard!

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2. Use bullets Another thing Wikipedia did not do is use bullets to spruce up the copy. Bullets increase white space and make blocks of text less intimidating and more inviting.

studies. Kissmetrics even includes them prominently as one of 10 key landing page features that draw in users:

Let’s see that letter again (in 152 words): Thank you.

The Wikipedia blackout is over—and you have spoken.

We asked if you could imagine a world without free knowledge. You said no.

• You shut down Congress’s switchboards and melted their servers.

• Your messages dominated social media and the news.

• You, and millions of people around the world, spoke up in defense of a free and open Internet.

But make no mistake—SOPA and PIPA are not dead. They are waiting in the shadows. We must remain vigilant.

This has never been about money for us. It’s about knowledge. As a community of authors, editors, photographers, and programmers, we invite everyone to share and build upon our work. We care passionately about the rights of authors because we are authors.

We’re turning the lights back on. Please help us keep them shining brightly. Here’s what you can do: • Contact your US representatives. Your zip code: • Make your voice heard!

Now be honest: Isn’t that easier to read?

3. Include testimonials and case studies Another reason to use bullet points to highlight what readers did in response to Wikipedia’s message is that Wikipedia did not use a testimonial or quote on the landing page.

It does exist indireclty—in the form of reader responses (i.e., “You shut down Congress’s switchboards and melted their servers”), but it isn’t immediately obvious as being a testimonial.

Effective landing pages make use of testimonials and case

4. Place a prominent call to action above the fold Wikipedia got this one half right. It included the call to action above the fold (the point at which a reader would have to scroll down the screen to keep reading). But, strangely, all the CTAs are understated. I don’t really want to click on that “Read more” or to bother aiming my mouse at that tiny ZIP code box. What gives?

There may have been a legal reason for that decision, but, in general, it’s not a best-practice. CTA boxes should be loud, proud, and urgent (like the one in the Kissmetrics example).

Landing page copy is so crucial that a single word can increase CTR 90% or more, and the right contrasting color (which I’ll go over next) can also make or break the sell.

5. Use contrasting colors Despite what many marketers may think, color psychology is not static. Depending on the context of a page, red can be be a great color for a call-to-action button. In the following example, the red button increased conversions 34%

compared with the control green button over 600 visits.

HubSpot ran a similar test with green and red buttons over 2,000 visits and found a 21% increase in favor of red as well.

But that’s not to say that green buttons are a bad idea. In the following example, the green button increased conversions nearly 36%: In the end, though, it’s not the color itself that necessarily matters; what matters most is whether it contrasts with—and stands out from—the colors around it on the page.

That holds true for landing page design as a whole: Wikipedia’s classic black text on a white background works because it follows that principle.

6. Prominently display your logo Wikipedia gets points for making its logo absolutely huge. The whole “social action casts a long shadow” theme is perfectly suited for the large W and adds gravitas to the page.

All 35 of the landing pages in Unbounce’s post on landing page design examples prominently display logos. Here’s a good example:

7. Include a video Most landing pages could benefit from video.

I know, I know: video doesn’t grow on trees. It costs a lot, and it may not be worth the effort, especially when you’re already paying for A/B testing and have tight turnaround deadlines. But let me reiterate that short-form videos don’t cost nearly as much as you probably think (especially whiteboard videos), and they can be made quickly.

Video marketing is also proven to convert: Video can increase landing page conversions 80%, according to a study by eyeviewdigital.com.

Unbounce covers five brilliant landing page videos in this post. Here’s one of them

Alp Mimaroglu is a Marketing Luminary at Symantec.

He specializes in marketing automation, demand generation, and marketing technology. Alp has extensive experience in both business and consumer marketing.

Book,

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Line

Sinker

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success

By Daniel H. Pink

Named one of the best books of 2013 by Amazon, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal- as well as one of Oprah’s riveting reads, Fortune’s must-read business books, and the Washington Post’s books every leader should read.

To Sell Is Human offers a fresh look at the art and science of selling. Daniel H. Pink draws on a rich trove of social science for his counterintuitive insights. He reveals the new ABCs of moving others (it’s no longer “Always Be Closing”), explains why extraverts don’t make the best salespeople, and shows how giving people an “off-ramp” for their actions can matter more than actually changing their minds.

By Grant Adam

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well

By Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace

By Douglas Stone, Sheila Heen

Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the firstever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation—into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made...

Douglas and Sheila have spent the past 15 years working with corporations, nonprofits, governments, and families to determine what helps us learn and what gets in our way. In this book, they explain why receiving feedback is so crucial yet so challenging, offering a simple framework and powerful tools to help us take on life’s blizzard of offhand comments, annual evaluations, and unsolicited input with curiosity and grace.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR

Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans and Followers

By David Meerman Scott

By Jeffrey K. Rohrs

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.

Proprietary audience development is now a core marketing responsibility. Every company needs audiences to survive. They are where you find new customers and develop more profitable relationships. And yet, most companies today treat their email, mobile, and social media audiences like afterthoughts instead of the corporate assets they are. With AUDIENCE, Jeff Rohrs seeks to change this dynamic through adoption of The Audience Imperative.

Captivology: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention

Brand Famous

By Ben Parr

Another of our favourite books from the 2014/2015 book season — “Brand Famous”.

We loved this book because the author is sassy and a little brash and offers a lot of smart branding advice and exercises that will help you get straight to the heart of your brand and help you to communicate in your very own brand voice. Boyd works with a lot of big brands, but her advice in this book is all about the scrappy small business owner.

The entire purpose of branding is to create this “wormhole” effect that connects your ideal customer to you in seconds instead of years. To accomplish this, you’re going to need to grab their attention. And if you want to learn to do that like a “Boss” as they say, you’ll want to grab a copy of “Captivology”. This is a tasty bit of writing by Ben Parr (a journalist) who will astound and amaze you with how wondrous our brains are at managing what gets our attention. You’ll get fantastic ideas on how to make small tweaks that grab big attention.

By Linzi Boyd

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Think and Grow Rich: Your Key to Financial Wealth and Power

By Napoleon Hill

What’s the Future of Business: Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences

Napoleon Hill’s classic mental-exercise book teaches you everything you need to know to empower yourself for success. Drawing on the experiences of not only the author, but famous U.S. businessmen, Hill makes real-world lessons which anyone can follow. One of the great selfhelp books of all time.

By Brian Solis

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

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

By Chip Heath, Dan Heath Made to Stick is a book that will transform the way you communicate ideas. It’s a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures)–the Nobel Prizewinning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of “the Mother Teresa Effect”; the elementary-school teacher whose simulation actually prevented racial prejudice. Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny...

“In today s rapidly changing digital environment, Darwinism is alive and well. What s the Future of Business doesn’t just explore trends and theories; it introduces a dynamic, actionable path to transformation.” Evan Greene, CMO, The Recording Academy, Producers of the GRAMMY Awards Rethink your business model to incorporate the power of “user” experiences What s the Future of Business?

By Joe Pulizzi “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...

The Big Data-Driven Business: How to Use Big Data to Win Customers, Beat Competitors, and Boost Profits

Heavyweight Marketing: Knockout Strategies for Building Champion Brands

By Russell Glass, Sean Callahan

This is one of our favourite branding books for 2015 for main street business owners. If you’re a startup and have limited to no marketing or branding done, or if you’re a marketing mess, you’ll want to check this one out. Nikolas Allen is truly the marketing guy next door who has taken is “in-the-ring” daily branding work with small business owners just like you and slapped it into this practical book.

The Big Data-Driven Business: How to Use Big Data to Win Customers, Beat Competitors, and Boost Profits makes the case that big data is for real, and more than just big hype. The book uses real-life examples-from Nate Silver to Copernicus, and Apple to Blackberry-to demonstrate how the winners of the future will use big data to seek the truth.

The Passion Conversation: Understanding, Sparking, and Sustaining Word of Mouth Marketing

By Robbin Phillips, Greg Cordell, Geno Church, John Moore No passion, no conversation. No conversation, no word of mouth. No word of mouth, no successful business. If you think you are in the marketing business, think again. You re in the people business, and The Passion Conversation teaches you how to get people to fall passionately and madly in love with your organization or cause.

By Nikolas Allen

Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity

By Hugh MacLeod When Hugh MacLeod was a struggling young copywriter living in a YMCA, he started to doodle on the backs of business cards while sitting at a bar.

Those cartoons eventually led to a popular bloggapingvoid.com-and a reputation for pithy insight and humor, in both words and pictures.MacLeod has opinions on everything from marketing to the meaning of life, but one of his main subjects is creativity. How do new ideas emerge in a cynical, risk-averse world?