BrandKnew December 2020

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

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12.20#98

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Dear Friends As we get ready to say ‘ que sera sera ‘ to what has been an incredibly tumultuous year for mankind, we look forward with hope, promise and belief that the coming times will be better and happier, for one and all, everywhere.

A sign off issue for the year had to be quality content packed. And that is what we have for you. Egging Start Ups to think like camels and not Unicorns. Coaxing Marketers to focus on the business not the technology.

A back to the old world calling of looking at insights for brands and marketers. You will find all of it adequately represented in this edition. We also bring in the flavour of the season(and probably beyond) ‘ subscription models ‘ used by car brands to engage younger drivers. Instead of just wearing the binary lens, in this issue we also encourage brands to really lean in and up the ante on the gender debate. There is also on offer a primer on what marketers and brands should look out for while creating innovative products for 2021 and beyond. How technology and data killed marketing as we knew it- Raja Rajamannar, CMO of Mastercard waxes eloquent on the issue. Rather than pay slip service, we also take a dive into understanding how CMOs should look at Artificial Intelligence in their quest to realise marcom, business goals. There is always a missing the wood for the trees when it comes to packaging design. In this issue we examine four key principles on how to get it right for brands and product development champions. Copywriting is an art and when done right, it becomes marketing science. Take a look at how to write killer copy(not filler copy) from none other than the man himself: Herschell Gordon Lewis. There is ample more actionable intelligence to welcome the New Year. Abundance, happiness, health and possibilities for you and yours!

Till the next, my very best! A Very Happy BrandKnew Year!!

With safe thoughts

@ISDGlobalDubai

@Brandknewmag

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Suresh Dinakaran

Brand Consultancy | Advertising | PR | Publishing Digital Media | Film Academy

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Chief Strategy Director: Rishi Mohan Brand Engagement and Outreach Specialist: Anuva Madan Chief Country Man, India: Rohit Unni Brand Trends and Research Architect: Meeta Pendse Revenue Growth Architect: Ritu Dey Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Performance Marketing Architect: Ryan Govindan Video Content Specialist: Vinayak Sivaprasad

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CONTENTS Marketers – Focus On Your Business, Not The Technology Return To Intimacy: Why It Took A Global Pandemic To Rekindle Our Love Of Insight Startups, It’s Time To Think Like Camels — Not Unicorns Brand Champions And Ltv Five Tips For Making Company-Culture Videos That Captivate Your Customers’ Hearts (Article 2 Of 3) Beyond Binary: How Brands Can Lean Into The Gender Debate How To Pull Off A Third Moment Of Truth 4 Booming Industries That Are Stealing Social Media’s Growth Playbook Recycling Content For A Greener Advertising Future Car Brands Use Subscription Model To Reach Younger Drivers Why Found Content Is Now A Permanent Part Of The Creative Mix How The World’s Biggest Advertisers Are Spending (Or Not) As Industries Adapt To The Coronavirus Pandemic In The Beginning Were The Words – How Consumers Read Packaging: Four Principles Gamification Is Changing How We Work — And Succeed Flytevu’s Jeremy Holley On Zeppelin, Cash, And The Value To Brands Of ‘Undiscovered’ Artists 3 Things To Keep In Mind When Creating Innovative Products In 2021 And Beyond How Cmos Must Evolve To Take Advantage Of Artificial Intelligence Ebook: Upgrade Your Copy From Filler To Killer With Herschell Gordon Lewis Raja Rajamannar: How Technology And Data Killed Marketing As We Knew It All The World’s A Virtual Stage 10 Techniques For Effective Packaging Book, Line & Sinker

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Marketers – focus on your business, not the technology

By Lars-Alexander Mayer

Too many companies are obsessed by technology and data, yet few have experienced significant improvements in return on investment (ROI) as a result of personalisation, writes Lars-Alexander Mayer.

Between the changes from Apple (IDFA) and Google (cookies), coupled with increasing government legislation following the GDPR and the CCPA, marketers are growing concerned about data usage and ownership.

To manage these concerns, marketers have been assembling their own technology stacks to manage their customer marketing data. However, as TD Reply learned in our recently published report ‘Rewriting the Marketing Playbook,’ while marketers are right to ‘own’ their customer data, their approach to data management must be businessfirst and not technology-first.

In trying to emulate the success of Google, Facebook and the big technology companies, too many marketers have put the cart before the horse by thinking technology-first.

This has resulted in organisations collecting lots of data, much of it duplicated across different company siloes. But what is the value of all this data? What key performance indicator does each data point enable the marketing team to understand?

From TD Reply’s work with leading global brands, I can tell you that the data management process must begin with business metrics. Organisations need to only collect the data sets which enable them to understand customer needs, improve performance, and provide better service.

Data lakes can quickly become data swamps Today, too many companies are obsessed by technology and data. They invest in technology infrastructure to capture data across the organisation, with any and every customer touchpoint inserted into a database. What started out as a data lake becomes a swamp full of data, much of it with little applicable marketing or business value.

Instead, businesses must start by asking themselves business questions. What do my customers want and how can my team deliver it in the best and easiest way? Then, businesses need to focus on defining, collecting, and analysing the data which will enable them to deliver the solutions their customers want.

For example, last year, Adidas published research showing that its attribution data was erroneously accrediting e-commerce as the main driver for sales. Only through a deeper dive using econometrics did Adidas discover that the company had undervalued the impact of video and other brand-centered marketing activities. By asking better questions, Adidas was able to more effectively manage its customer-centric business.

Personalisation has been a trend in data-driven marketing over the last few years, yet few marketers have experienced significant improvements in ROI due to personalisation.

Customers are not looking for a marketer who knows their name and what they bought last month. They are looking for someone who can make them an offer that will delight them today and in the future, and this can be accomplished by being a customer-centric marketing organization.

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Be agile with people and technology As we learned this year with COVID-19, business needs can change dramatically and quickly. That is why marketing organisations need to be agile. It means working with adaptive feedback loops which can be changed based on customer responses and market dynamics. It is also important to recruit people who can adapt to changing environments and market conditions, and implement tools and technologies that support agile operations.

Let me be clear: data ownership for marketers is critical.

However, marketers need to be ‘business-first’ and not ‘data- or technology-first’. Marketers need to determine which data they collect and analyse based on the business objectives that the data will empower.

Real potential of data is neglected Thinking business-first is also about seeing though the marketing hypes of today and keeping the big picture in focus. Contrary to what big tech will suggest, and as the Adidas case attests, personalised ads and user-level data do not actually make marketing more effective and have little to do with customer-centricity. In reality, the data they generate is virtually worthless for answering the big questions that truly matter: what marketing activities are really driving my sales and my brand? How is my brand perceived? What markets should I target next?

Today, unfortunately, marketers use data mostly for tactical purposes such as for the optimisation of campaigns, neglecting its much more interesting strategic, predictive and explorative potentials. As a result, user-level data

makes up a big part, if not the biggest part, of the data sold by different martech and adtech companies today. Real strategic value for businesses, however, is found in crosssection data such as ‘Share of Search’.

For example, a recent WARC article addressed how Share of Search is emerging as a proxy for Share of Market. We have enabled several global companies to prove Share of Search as a highly accurate Share of Market proxy in countries in Europe, North and South America and Asia (including China, using Baidu Data). We enable marketers to not only save time and resources, but also to be more precise in their marketing planning, as Share of Search can also be calculated on a regional or city-level.

It is likely that with the coming end of the cookie era, approaches based around using cross-section – rather than user-level – data will gain in importance. While many providers will likely not survive this change, for marketing as an industry this might be good news.

Forced to shift their focus from tactics to strategy, marketers may finally move from people-based marketing to outcomebased marketing and contextual targeting, as our report projects. In doing so, they might once again rediscover classic marketing theory and begin to ask themselves on a more regular basis whether what they are doing really adds to sales numbers and brand strength.

In the end, it all comes back to marketing successes and using data to generate insights that are relevant for business. To achieve this, a business needs to ask the right questions to drive for, and enable, measuring marketing success first.

Return to intimacy: Why it took a global pandemic to rekindle our love of insight

By Stuart Sullivan-Martin, Camilla Bruggen and Elif Pulcu, Wavemaker

COVID-19 offers advertising strategists an opportunity to revive and renew the methods by which they acquire real human insights.

Sometimes it’s only when something is taken away that you realise its value.

Over the past six months, that something is face-to-face research. Deprived of human contact by the pandemic, it’s made us see just how crucial it is to our work.

We can do great things with Big Data The last decade has seen a tidal wave of Big Data. It’s intoxicating! Behavioural data, customer data, survey data… multiple ways to understand people, brands and business.

The data analytics market is forecast to grow at +30% CAGR over the next three years.1 But have we (agencies, advertisers, media platforms, the industry) allowed ourselves to get over-excited? Data is critical for understanding what people do. It has huge value, for example sizing life event triggers for a new technology purchase or using social analytics to measure a brand’s share of positive mentions. Sometimes it can even surprise us: search analysis for the London Metropolitan Police helped identify an unsuspected underlying behaviour in the fight against knife crime – making a knife.

But this is rare. Big Data rarely gets to the ‘why’ behind the

‘what’ – why people do it.

And ‘why’ rather than ‘what’ people do is critical. The ‘informed point of view’ that is an insight. Something that is blindingly obvious and deeply true, but only in hindsight.

Only insight changes the strategy This is why we need insight – genuine insight, not observations or facts – and where qualitative research really makes the difference.

When the Sick Kids Hospital Foundation in Toronto identified that ill children weren’t victims, but champions, full of fight and battling their illnesses, it changed the strategy.2 When the Government of New South Wales’ HIV Testing campaign in Australia targeted men who have sex with other men, but identify as straight, they recognised these were men leading compartmentalised second lives who actively avoided health messaging aimed at the gay community. This was the critical insight that determined the strategy ‘Discreet Media’3.

When the British Royal Navy recognised that young people see themselves holistically, as world citizens living provincial lives, with no delineation between the professional and personal, it informed a new approach to communications – ‘Made in the Royal Navy’.4

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All these insights were uncovered by human-to-human research.

It’s time to return to intimacy The trouble is that as Big Data has accelerated over the past decade, qualitative research for marketing insight has slowly gone out of fashion. Look around your business – how many data analysts can you see, how many skilled moderators?

Perhaps it’s understandable. Face-to-face research isn’t easy; it requires specific skills, is difficult to scale and can be costly to do.

But if we want game-changing business strategy, we need real human insight. And the COVID-19 lockdown is not only our very own trigger to revive it, it’s also given us a new, virtual way to do it.

The video conference focus group is cheaper and easier to set up. A recent Wavemaker trial delivered impressive results.

While a little tricky to warm up (but isn’t that always the case in a focus group?), the participants were soon happy to share thoughts and feelings from the comfort of their homes.

Intimate issues related to pharmaceutical brands were discussed candidly and openly. We discovered the stress of the ‘personal lockdown’; when an allergy attack hits, sufferers cut their connection with the outside world, self-medicating on top of allergy pills – sleeping, taking cold showers, using wet towels.

These groups require some specific moderation skills, but the level of intimacy is high and the technology is a leveler. In some ways it beats in-person – no commute to the venue, no drab office walls, no rush to catch the train home.

According to WARC’s 2020 Future of Strategy report, agency responses to COVID-19 included commissioning new consumer research5 with 73% investing in qualitative research.

If you’re after genuine, intimate, eye-widening, heartthumping human insight that makes a difference, you can bet that face-to-face will deliver where Big Data falls short.

When we say insight, let’s mean it.

Top five tips for virtual focus groups 1. Small but perfectly formed (four or five people but no more) 2. Camera on please (promotes honesty and a commitment to be involved) 3. Everyone heard (call out each participant by name) 4. Real pictures and videos (It’s easy for participants to share their content; ask them to come prepared if they’re happy to do so) 5. Observers welcome (muted and with camera off)

Startups, It’s Time to Think Like Camels — Not Unicorns

By Alex Lazarow

The world has changed. In the wake of Covid-19, and the global recession it has caused, business leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors are all girding for a long period of extremely challenging conditions in the global market.

How can startups and innovators of all stripes survive in such conditions? Many are not prepared.

The current situation is particularly difficult for Silicon Valley, where the predominant model is to raise unicorns – the colloquial reference to startups worth over a billion dollars.

Traditionally, this is done through rapid growth. The problem now, however, is that this growth-at-all-costs methodology, which the Valley’s top players are exceptionally good at, only works in the strongest bull markets, in the most optimal conditions.

But consider what I call the “Frontier”: those business ecosystems outside the Bay Area bubble, where startups have

less access to capital or trained startup human capital, and where, especially in many emerging markets, they are more susceptible to severe and unpredictable macroeconomic shocks. Instead of the unicorn, the camel is the more fitting mascot. Camels are able to survive for long periods without sustenance, withstand the scorching desert heat, and adapt to extreme variations in climate. They survive and thrive in some of Earth’s harshest regions.

These startup camels offer businesses in all industries and sectors valuable lessons on how to survive through crisis, and to sustain and grow in adverse conditions, even if the metaphor isn’t as flashy. They do this with three strategies: they execute balanced growth, they take a long-term outlook, and they weave diversification into the business model.

Balance instead of burn.

Camels have no interest in “blitzscaling” — rapidly building-

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up the enterprise and prioritizing speed over efficiency in pursuit of massive scale. They are as ambitious to grow as any Silicon Valley enterprise, yet they take a more balanced growth path. This balanced approach has three key elements.

Right-pricing from the start. For one, entrepreneurs in developing markets don’t offer free or subsidized products to perpetuate customer growth, resulting in a high “burn rate.”

Instead, they charge their customers for the value of their product offerings from the get-go. Camels understand that price shouldn’t be considered a barrier to growth. Instead it is a feature of the product that reflects its market position and its quality.

Cost management through the life cycle. At the same time, camels manage costs through the life cycle of their companies to align with a longer-term growth curve. Matt Glotzbach, CEO of Quizlet, an online education and study aid company, understands this strategy in terms of his cost of acquisition and his key expense: people. “You want to have a business that can survive the ups and the downs,” he explains.

“Resiliency for me has two factors: one is the unit economics of the business for user acquisition, and the second is how far do you invest in headcount ahead of the revenue curve to drive that growth? This is where we make calculated decisions and have expectations for the investments where, if we’re right, we grow significantly, and if we’re wrong we won’t suffer significantly.”

Changing the trajectory. Managing burn throughout the life cycle of a company prepares startups to weather tough conditions over a sustained period. The typical Silicon Valley startup has a cash trajectory with a deep “valley of death” — the graph line reflecting steep losses before profitability is achieved. The line for Frontier startups looks different. Of course camels don’t avoid growth or venture capital funding, but their scaling trajectory and associated burn rates will be less extreme. In some cases, as with Grubhub, they’ll grow in controlled spurts, choosing only to put their foot on the gas and invest (often by raising venture capital) when required by the opportunity at hand. After such a spurt, sustainability (and often profitability) is within reach again if necessary. The difference here is that camels maintain the option to adapt their growth trajectory and return to a sustainable business.

Camels are built for the long haul.

Founders at the Frontier understand that building a company is not a short-term endeavor. For many, breakthroughs don’t come immediately, but rather occur later in the company timeline. Survival is often the primary strategy. This allows time to build the business model, find a product that resonates with the market, and develop an operation that can scale.

Competition will exist. But the race is about who will survive the longest, not about who goes to market first.

Quizlet just raised a $30 million Series C round, which valued the company at $1 billion in May of this year. The company did not take any funding until 2015, when it raised a Series A for just $12 million after 10 years in business. It took its time getting there, operating on a slow-but-steady philosophy toward growth. Glotzbach told me that Quizlet’s pace saved it from destruction. “I actually believe that had Quizlet raised a large amount of money earlier in its life cycle it may not

have made it,” he said. “The risk of getting overextended with high expectations and the infusion of capital earlier on might not have been able to accelerate the business fast enough to meet those expectations. Like so many startups we would have over-promised and under-delivered.” Taking the longterm outlook is critical to manage the risk-return trade-off.

Breadth and depth for resilience.

Entrepreneurs operating at the Frontier face unique constraints which can often become strengths during times of adversity.

Because entrepreneurs often are building startups in smaller markets by necessity — which markets are not sufficient on their own to grow and sustain the enterprise — they are forced to be born global, targeting many markets from the get-go. Frontier Car Group, a popular used-car platform, for example, launched originally in five markets, each serving as a regional hub. In some countries, the product caught on, but in others it did not, and the company learned valuable lessons along the way, shuttering those markets where it didn’t see a fit. But had the company put all of its resources into the wrong country to begin with, it might not be around today.

Similarly, because a rich tapestry of enabling infrastructure or ecosystem of adjacent products and services doesn’t exist in Frontier markets, entrepreneurs often need to go deep and build the full stack of supporting structures. This means that they have multiple business lines and products, and provide an ecosystem of services from day one. When one slows, the others pick up the slack. Take the case of Guiabolso, a “Personal Finance Manager” software platform that helps customers in Brazil understand their financial situation so they can manage it better (similar to Mint.com in the U.S.).

Unlike their peers in more developed ecosystems, Guiabolso had to build their own bank interconnection layer where none existed, give insight into credit worthiness without a robust national credit scoring infrastructure, and kick-start its product marketplace to allow its customers to make the most of their newfound financial insights.

Of course, entrepreneurs cannot and should not take this broad and deep portfolio strategy too far. Building a startup is exceedingly difficult, and overstretching across multiple fronts is a recipe for mediocrity on all. Instead, successful camels only expend resources on activities that are selfreinforcing (where lessons from successes or failures support the business as a whole) and self-balancing (when one piece of the business naturally hedges another).

By prioritizing balanced growth, building for the long-term, as well as deepening and diversifying for resilience, camels can not only survive market shocks, but can also grow and thrive in good times and bad. In short, they turn adversity into an advantage. As we prepare for the tough challenges ahead, the answers won’t be found within Silicon Valley’s insular bubble, but by learning from camels at the Frontier, who have had the solution all along.

Alex Lazarow is a global venture capitalist and the author of Out-Innovate: How Global Entrepreneurs— from Delhi to Detroit—Are Rewriting the Rules of Silicon Valley. He works with Cathay Innovation, is a Kauffman Fellow, and teaches entrepreneurship at the Middlebury Institute.

Brand Champions and LTV(Lifetime Value)

By Kate Stephani

In the age of online shopping and fickle customers, loyalty may feel like a thing of the past: where to cheapest option is available, the sale follows.

This isn’t necessarily true.

Every brand has their “Brand Champions,” or the people who are loud-and-proud loyal customers.

Marketing strategy tends to focus on lead acquisition, but overlooks retention. Brand champions are under-appreciated gems who deserve more from your brand. Arguably, they provide more for you in lifetime value than thousands of one-time customers can. Fostering this relationship will reap endless rewards as time goes on.

So how can you make brand champions feel appreciated?

1. Loyalty programs.

This may seem obvious, but it’s important to note. Enticing customers to come back consistently (and rewarding those who do) will create stronger relationships between your brand and the customer. This can also create future brand champions of people who may not have otherwise purchased from you again. Why should they shop with you when another brand is offering the same or better pricing? Faster shipping?

More options? Reward customers for staying loyal and make them feel like they “get something” out of shopping with you.

2. Social media engagement.

Customers are a great source of social media content. When someone is compelled by your brand enough to share it with their social media audience, they are a true believer! Reward this by re-posting on to your brand’s social media channels.

These few simple clicks make the customer feel valued (and gives them bragging rights with their friends!). They’ll forever

feel a special connection to your company because you acknowledged them.

3. Product reviews.

Product reviews are tricky because most of the time, only people who are really impressed or really unimpressed with a product will leave a review. However, if you’re able to target repeat customers to submit their reviews, the likelihood of them writing a positive one is higher. Offer a discount for a future purchase in exchange for their thoughts, and your brand champions will show up for you and be happy to tell everyone reading the reviews about how great your company is.

4. Aligning your charity work with causes important to your customers.

There is so much information available about our customers, you just need to know the right questions to ask. Find out what causes are important to them and see how you can incorporate this into your charity work. Just think: if someone was already planning on donating to a cause and they see you’re helping out with the same organization, they’ll be more apt to buy from you and receive a product in exchange, rather than donating directly and not receiving anything in return.

In the age of the fickle customer, the ones who are loyal to your brand are invaluable. Make sure you’re treating them right and they’ll continue to do right by you.

Kate serves as Senior Marketing Coordinator at the CMO Council where she drives the social media engagement strategy and content and creative development for the CMO Council’s biweekly newsletter, Required Reading and monthly e-journal, Marketing Magnified.

Five Tips for Making Company-Culture Videos That Captivate Your Customers’ Hearts

By Victor Blasco

In a fleeting digital world, empathy toward customers is an invaluable asset. In turn, companies that fail to let audiences peek into their own human side also fail to build trustful and lasting relationships with potential clients.

Doubly so in a B2B environment: customers like to associate friendly faces they can rely on with the company they’re doing business with.

As the finest video companies out there will tell you, companyculture videos are among the most effective types of content you can use to foster empathy and win your customer’s hearts.

But—there’s always a “but”—for your video to have that desired effect, you need to reach five key milestones. This article will lay those out and discuss tricks and tips that will help you get the most out of your company-culture video.

1. Define your company’s identity (It’s more than what you sell) Your brand is more than just the products and services you commercialize. Of course, your audience might have first heard about you from a product ad or a review from a colleague, but with a company-culture video they’ll get to know the values that build your identity.

Many brands can sell the same product, but no two brands have the same set of values. That’s also why no two companyculture videos can be the same; your piece should be a singular reflection of your brand’s unique personality.

So, the first thing you’ll want to do is to draft a list of the core values that encompass your company culture. You can start big, with “integrity” and “social responsibility,” for example, and then work toward more specific goals associated with your everyday tasks—such as “workplace diversity” and “promoting creativity and out-of-the-box ideas.”

2. Use the power of storytelling You’re probably wondering: How can your video communicate such abstract and universal values as integrity or social responsibility? The answer: through storytelling. Storytelling is the oldest art form; it has shaped the way we communicate since the beginning of time. There’s a reason we are drawn to characters, plot, and a three-act structure of beginning, middle, and end.

In your video, your brand’s values will be represented by the people who work in your company and their actions. Writing your script with that in mind will give a clear order to your ideas and let you figure out captivating ways to tell your brand’s story.

It’s also useful to think about your company-culture video as an explainer video: You’re using relatable characters in your story (in your case, real workers!) to create an emotional

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connection with your audience.

The following example has become a sort of a classic company video. It features BambooHR employees talking about what happens after they finish work at the office. Balancing work with life plays a huge part in the company’s culture, and in this piece they find the perfect way to illustrate tha 3. Interview your company’s workers A company-culture video isn’t complete without interviewing the people who do the work. They are the friendly faces your audience will associate with your company, and help to prevent customers from thinking about your brand as a faceless corporation.

Draft a list of the main questions you want to ask your workers, but also leave room for small talk and open-ended questions. The best interviews don’t feel like interrogations, so try to capture the natural flow of a conversation.

One more thing: using real people and not actors is an unbreakable rule of every company-culture video. Doing otherwise would defeat the entire purpose of your piece!

After all, your company is only as good as the people who work in it: a unique set of individuals united and working toward the same goal.

4. Get creative!

Maybe “fun” is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about corporate videos... but it should be! By balancing a heartful and entertaining tone, your video will stick in your audiences’ minds.

Some companies prefer an overtly dramatic and serious video about their company’s story and values, but most of those feel off-tone. The most interesting pieces are the ones that offer a real glimpse into what a normal day in the office looks like—including all of its inside jokes and quirkiness!

In the following example, Basecamp decided to play a game of blind coffee taste with employees. It’s an inventive way of getting to know its workers and shows how trust plays a key part in the company’s success.

5. Promote your finished piece Once you are done working on the final cut of your video, it’s time to get your audience to watch it!

Of course, the first thing you’ll want to do is to post it on social media, especially where your company has a big presence, and on business-oriented platforms such as LinkedIn. You can even make a shorter version of the video and upload it natively to boost engagement.

But your promotion shouldn’t stop there. Your companyculture video will look amazing and capture your audience’s attention on your company’s landing page, especially if you have an “About Us” section. Also consider including your piece as part of your email marketing strategy, and send it to your customers. We all like to know more about the companies we buy from!

Last but definitely not least, share your video with your coworkers! It will make them feel proud to be represented as part of your company’s values. t.

Beyond binary: how brands can lean into the gender debate

By Helen Rose

Gender expression has long been a metaphoric anchor for advertisers – but its clout can swing either way, writes Helen Rose, head of insight and analytics at independent media agency the7stars.

As the media controversy surrounding JK Rowling shows, gender fluidity is a contentious area. But progressive brands in search of impact are leaning in, not away, from the debate.

Global gaming sensation Pokemon Go introduced its first non-binary character ‘Blanche’ in the popular Nintendo series, Barbie producer Mattel recently unveiled a range of gender-neutral dolls, and the Star Trek franchise introduced its first transgender characters.

These developments meet the demands of a vocal counterculture – led by millennials and generation Z – that is tearing up the rulebook on narrow gender norms. Tone is everything at this pivotal moment of change, however, and campaigns can easily stray off-mark.

In an effort to better understand the changing gender agenda in advertising, the7stars, the UK’s largest independent media agency, along with neuromarketing agency NeuroInsight and cultural insight agency Sign Salad produced a whitepaper, Beyond Binary, that explores how exactly this shift is taking shape.

Here are three of our key findings on how brands can read the room and galvanise their reach with more incisive gender messaging.

1. Use humour to challenge existing gender norms With supposedly funny sexist ads falling flat on social

media, changing consumer sentiment – underwritten by recent regulatory changes – means that gender stereotyping no longer commands the comedic appeal it once did. But humour still has an important part to play; especially if it challenges gender clichés head-on.

Think of Heineken’s Men Drink Cocktails Too campaign this year, which cleverly plays with the awkwardness of couples being handed the wrong drinks – on the assumption that women drink cocktails and men go for beer. This familiar scenario was dealt a light touch in the ad. It used humour to appeal to its dominant audience (men) without alienating an emerging market (women), and all while giving a nod to gender inclusivity in a way that avoided being too obvious or self-congratulatory.

Old Spice’s The Man Your Man Could Look Like campaign is another great contender in this category. Brand owner Procter & Gamble could have simply relied on the time-honoured model of the archetypal alpha male in its ads; but instead it chose to poke fun at the concept of a strong and rugged hero. In doing so, it removed the “manly” pressure inherent in the male market while also appealing directly to women as influential buyers of Old Spice.

In a similar fashion, Lynx’s Less Effort More Style campaign mischievously disrupts a vintage movie scene of Hollywood romance, by showing the handsome male lead kissing another man.

The upshot? Humour is a potent asset for advertisers, but to hit the mark it needs to evolve in line with contemporary experiences of gender. It works best by undoing – rather than

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reinforcing – outdated norms.

2. Approach crossover topics with empathy and inclusivity In an age in which gender exists on a fluid scale (as opposed to a fixed, binary construct), inclusivity becomes an inherent truth: and one that stands in contrast to the sense of exclusivity that has, for so long, dominated mainstream advertising.

Rihanna’s new skincare line, Fenty Beauty, launched with male rappers A$AP Rocky and Lil Nas X. Dazed Beauty now has a section dedicated to rethinking masculinity. Adidas is among brands venturing into gender-neutral concept stores.

None of these efforts feel contrived or attention-seeking: they are merely moving away from binary definitions of gender as part of a natural marketing progression.

Underrepresented communities and voices are important here, as is empathetic treatment of the crossover of gender with other topics such as puberty, mental health and selfesteem.

Starbucks’ Every Name’s A Story campaign powerfully harnesses the moment at which a young person can be called their chosen name; regardless of gender. Always’ Like A Girl film spotlights the point at which girls’ confidence levels nosedive, and they become ashamed of running, throwing or fighting “like a girl”.

3. Create a safe space for dismantling body taboos A central part of this empathy comes with the ability of brands to speak freely about body issues once considered taboo.

Bodyform’s #wombstories film sensitively delves into a matrix

of talking points from periods to miscarriage, endometriosis and menopause. Similarly, Modibodi puts period visibility front and centre with its New Way To Period campaign that normalises cramping and staining.

By talking about periods as they are, minus the coded symbolism of “feminine hygiene” products, these brands win plaudits from an audience intent on dismantling an outdated culture of secrecy and shame.

It’s not just period products that are taking this approach, either. The candid tone of ads by hims, a manufacturer for hair loss and erectile dysfunction products, shows that breaking down bodily stigmas is important at all points of the gender continuum.

Communication surrounding this area should be open, honest and empathic but it also needs to avoid any sense of implicit pressure. Bodily improvement in this context does not demand the gaze of the opposite sex (everyone remembers Protein World’s disastrous Beach Body Ready ads) but instead represents a wider, more kind dialogue around self-care as a value in and of itself.

Since all brands represent identity in one way or another, the shifting dimensions of gender are an opportunity not to be missed. With an ear to all the nuances caught up in this issue, advertisers should join a new generation of voices in pushing the boundaries of what gender really means and ensure this is reflected in their communications strategies. Because, in a bold new age of non-binary, there will be many more stories to tell.

How to pull off a third moment of truth

By Warc Staff

More e-commerce and a greater focus on hygiene means people are dealing with more packaging to dispose of, sparking environmental concerns – an exclusive WARC Guide article shows how brands can help their customers to be greener and increase the chance of future purchase.

This is according to The importance of investing in sustainable packaging designs, by Ipsos’ Alex Baverstock and Ian Payne, part of the WARC Guide to effective packaging.

Packaging is an extremely important moment in the purchase journey, and as a result brands have invested heavily in the assets that make up the packaging, “to make them distinctive and instantly recognisable to potential customers so they are more likely to be selected in store”.

P&G famously refers to its importance as the ‘First Moment of Truth’: when the buyer chose your product over that of competitors. Basically, making any changes in this department carries significant risks.

But as attitudes shift, with awareness of individual environmental impact growing, people are discovering another moment of truth: after they have used the product,

they must dispose of the packaging.

“Ipsos’ research for Earth Day 2020 showed that globally, ‘dealing with the amount of waste we generate’ is a top environmental concern for around one-third of people (32%), just behind ‘global warming/climate change’ and on a par with ‘air pollution’.”

Further research from Ipsos shows that ‘avoiding products that have a lot of packaging’ is one of the key actions that the majority of people (57%) say they are likely to do to limit their own contribution to climate change.

“If the finished packaging has a large number of components and materials, if it has a high use of plastic, and/or it is not obviously able to be recycled, this might well impact on whether that product will be purchased again.

“While this presents significant challenges for manufacturers and retailers, it also presents opportunity: there is much greater ‘permission’ to more radically reinvent packaging solutions, and the very act of doing so can prompt greater interaction between consumers and brands.”

4 Booming Industries That Are Stealing Social Media’s Growth Playbook

By Mike Swigunski

Why alternative business models based on social media are taking off.

Why alternative business models based on social media are taking off.

Internet users spend approximately two hours a day on social media. That’s enough time for brands to show them dozens of marketing messages, including paid ads. The volume of these messages is so high that Facebook is essentially one of the largest advertising networks.

So what are some of these alternative business models that are booming right now? We’ll cover the traditional status quo, emerging trends in online business, and a few concrete examples of new ways to make money online.

But some organizations aren’t just marketing through social media. They’re using social media to create new, alternative business models. Some of these models, like the monetized Instagram page, are well known; others are unpublicized but highly profitable.

In the traditional digital business model, your website is the heart of your online operations. It’s where you display your products, market to prospects, and take orders.

Related: 3 Common Mistakes Companies Make With Their Social Ad Strategy

The traditional digital business model

This is the model used by digital service providers, online stores, and brick-and-mortar businesses. You create a website and drive traffic to it, generating leads and sales. That’s how things have worked for over 20 years.

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The biggest change to this traditional model is the emergence of mobile apps. Mobile devices now drive over 50% of all web traffic, and 78% of mobile users prefer apps to websites. As a result, more and more businesses are using branded apps.

Writers and entrepreneurs have been using this model to generate six and seven-figure incomes as early as 2015.

That said, apps are mostly an alternative way to present website content. They still fit within the traditional digital business model.

But right now, a newer version of this model is emerging.

Shaping it are two trends: booming audiobook sales and the rise of social media. The essence of the model is to selfpublish audiobooks in addition to ebooks and use social media to market both.

This is where social media comes in and it is helping entrepreneurs market, monetize, and scale businesses in profoundly new ways. Here’s how.

As a result of this trend, self-publishing experts and educators are doing two things. First, Kindle publishing veterans are pivoting to use and teach social media.

The rise of social business models

Second, a new class of audiobook self-publishers is emerging. One example is the Mikkelsen Twins, who make over $500,000 per month self-publishing on Audible. The two credit much of their success to social media, “The reason why we got so much attention is because we shared everything we knew for free in our YouTube videos.”

As recently as 2012, Google’s ad revenue was about 1,000% that of Facebook’s. Google was the platform for discovering new content, shopping for products, and just about everything else.

Things are different now. After buying Instagram and growing Facebook Video, Facebook boasts 1.79 billion daily users, compared to Google’s 3.5 billion daily searches. Social traffic is on par with search engine traffic - especially when you factor in other major platforms like Snapchat, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.

This kind of broad user base means businesses can choose to go without search engine traffic or a website. They can do everything they need to do online - drive traffic, market, close sales - entirely inside social media platforms.

This is the gist of the new, alternative business models we’re about to share with you below. They leverage social media for some or all of their online operations, carving out new niches in the process.

Alternative business models powered by social media 1. Influencer ecommerce In the past, we’ve seen brands sponsor Instagram and YouTube influencers. In this older business model, content creators get a fixed sum for mentioning or showing a product in their photos, write-ups, and videos.

Now, Rasmus and Christian Mikkelsen are launching PublishingLife.com to help others succeed with the same business model.

Some entrepreneurs take a separate route and choose to publish free, unmonetized content via their social channels.

They turn a profit using the following model.

3. Freemium social channels Traditionally, social media channels are monetized through merchandise, sponsorship deals, and eCommerce sales.

Monetizing content directly - i.e. getting people to pay for your videos, images, and write-ups - has always been desirable, but out of reach.

This is now changing. Platforms like Patreon let creators offer simple, convenient paid subscription options. Users who optin are usually rewarded with exclusive, early-access content, fun freebies, and a variety of other perks.

4. Decentralized businesses

More recently, this has been superseded by a different model, in which influencers are directly monetizing their own content.

Crypto tech has brought us many valuable applications, from Bitcoin to decentralized finance and logistics blockchains.

Together with social media, entrepreneurs can now create decentralized crypto businesses.

For example, on YouTube, many producers place affiliate links in the descriptions below their content. By doing this, they get to make their own money directly by driving sales to affiliate partners like Amazon.

One example is Fundabit: a decentralized crowdfunding platform that lets users invest crypto into exciting new projects.

Another example is the Market Peak project, where users can create a passive income by leveraging online communities.

Related: 4 Top Advantages of a Successful Kickstarter Campaign

Related: 5 Ways to Help Your Small Business Survive During the Pandemic

Others go a step further and make their own product listings on sites like Amazon. Those that do often hire optimization experts like Danny Carlson, whose Amazon listing optimization agency (Kenji ROI) makes over $70,000 per month.

Market Peak’s founder, Sergej Heck, initially discovered the power of social media by building and scaling large sales teams using social. Now, he uses those same strategies to serve his growing user base. He explains:

According to Danny, “[for online sales], the highest-ROI investment you can make is in your Amazon listing… [your] photos, copy, & videos.” Being able to control these elements directly is one of the major reasons social content producers forego affiliate marketing.

“There’s one thing your customers have in common: they’re all looking for a solution. [You can] host a group or forum where people can share their best tips… so they can network and help one another.”

Regardless of the monetization strategy, making social content and using it to generate sales is a booming alternative business model. Thousands of creators are applying it to their business right now - and many more are sure to follow.

2. Self-published books and audiobooks Self-publishing on websites like Amazon has been a littleknown, highly-profitable business niche for several years.

This is the youngest alternative business model on our list.

While it’s had less time to grow compared to the previous three, it appears to have a bright future.

Mike Swigunski is the founder of the remote job board GlobalCareer.io and author of the best-selling book, Global Career: How to Work Anywhere & Travel Forever.

Mike has worked and traveled in over 85+ countries over the past decade and loves writing about remote work and entrepreneurship.

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Recycling content for a greener advertising future

By Latane Conant

New is not always better. Consumers are creatures of habit and often buy into nostalgia, Shutterstock’s Jamie Elden writes.

This year we have experienced a significant rise in action against climate change; Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough are just some examples of those leading the charge and forcing many into action.

Consumers and businesses are starting to take this pressing issue far more seriously. And how could we not grasp the enormity of the situation? The average carbon footprint in the UK vastly exceeds the majority of other countries; the average Brit causes more environmental contamination in six days than someone living in an African nation will in a full year.

During a time where being eco-friendly and “going green” is a priority for many, how can marketers and the advertising industry specifically make sure they’re also doing their part?

Sustainability in the traditional sense is not enough – we need to look to other ways that we can do better.

The pandemic has forced us to innovate across almost every industry. For most businesses, this has been in response to the need to adapt to government lockdown guidelines, the changing behaviour of customers and an uncertain economic future. However, almost accidentally, we have seen a fundamental impact on our global carbon footprint. In fact, the decline in business aviation travel alone could cut 28 million tons of CO2 a year.

Advertising’s role Battling climate change is no single industry’s responsibility, and the advertising industry needs to address its role too.

If addressing the challenge in front of us for moral and ethical reasons isn’t enough, brands must understand there is a business impact to their stance. Over three quarters (77%) of consumers buy into the brands that share the same values as they do, and, as the passion for environmental issues grows amongst consumers, this becomes more important.

Many brands have recognised this. Last year, Starbucks announced trials for recyclable and compostable cups, whilst Coca-Cola used its ‘Round in Circles’ campaign to encourage people to recycle. However, there’s a dirty secret in advertising that no one is talking about: what is the environmental impact of producing advertising campaigns in general?

When the UK went into lockdown in March, production for advertising campaigns came to a sudden halt. How could production continue when everyone was being told to stay home? With restrictions in place, travelling and shooting on location became near impossible. Pre-existing content and green screens became invaluable resources that allowed the industry to keep moving.

London-based production company Cut+Run adapted its workflow by using readily-available content to complete client campaigns. It even created its own short-form video promo ads that marketed its own services using just stock footage.

This approach to content creation relied on smart thinking,

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technology and creativity. What it didn’t need was money and time spent on travel and resource that for a single use shoot.

In response to the industry’s need to be ‘more green’, the Advertising Association recently launched a new initiative, AdGreen. The goal of this is to eliminate the negative environmental impacts of production. As we continue to plan for a world post-pandemic in line with this initiative, recycling content should be seen as both a source for creativity and sustainability.

This concept isn’t new. You will have seen it before, maybe without realising. Last year, Hovis updated its iconic ad, ‘Boy on the Bike’, after nearly 50 years. Brands should think to this when recycling content of their own. New is not always better; consumers buy into nostalgia and people are creatures of habit.

With this, brands should also be looking to others to take content inspiration from. Seeking new ideas from other brands and industries who share similar values helps to widen the funnel of inspiration, leading to new creative concepts.

Brands should not allow the fear of being ‘unoriginal’ to steer them away from aligning their values alongside other content that has already been produced.

Last year, Dutch organic supermarket chain Ekoplaza was the latest marketer to repurpose Greenpeace’s animated film about palm oil and deforestation, after Iceland also (controversially) recycled the content for its Christmas ad in 2018. The word of warning here is that all content, whether new or recycled, does need to align to a company’s broader position.

Escaping the cycle In the content-hungry, fast paced world that we live in, it is easy to get trapped in the cycle of constantly creating something new because “that’s what we do”. The industry must continue to innovate and remain fresh. However, this now needs to be balanced carefully with consumer ideals.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the process of innovation as making “changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products”.

Therefore, by definition, innovation doesn’t need to translate to something brand new. Arguably, it is far more innovative and creative to produce something ‘new’ with the resources already available.

Next time you sit down to develop the storyboard for your upcoming campaign, ask yourself “Is it necessary to fly 10 people to Hawaii for four nights to record 30 seconds of footage?” Can you find that content elsewhere, recycling from somewhere or someone else? The result will provide a far more efficient production process, huge cost savings and a reduction on global carbon emissions.

How can brands promote recycling within their products if they aren’t following the same values in their advertising?

Marketers have a responsibility to recycle and reuse. Luckily, they have the resources at their fingertips to do it.

Overseeing Shutterstock’s Global Revenue, Production and Studio operations. Experience: Elden is one of today’s leading Media & Entertainment Executives having led 2 Public companies sales revenues across TV, Digital, Social, OTT & Original programming delivering over $2B in Revenues over his career to date.

Car brands use subscription model to reach younger drivers

By Warc Staff

These are tough times for vehicle manufacturers in the UK as they grapple with the impact of COVID-19, continued uncertainty about future trade relations with Europe, as well as a growing problem of an ageing demographic for new car sales.

It is estimated that the average age of a new car buyer in the UK is now 55, posing clear risks for auto brands that need to develop long-term relationships with their customers.

But one solution for long-term engagement rests potentially in a subscription model, which provides the flexibility that younger consumers increasingly demand in their purchase choices, whether that applies to livestreaming or big ticket items, reported Sifted.

Unlike traditional rental or leasing arrangements, some specialist car subscription companies don’t charge a hefty deposit or down payment – instead there is a one-time joining fee – and can offer a wide range of brands for a flat monthly fee.

Drover, a London-based startup, is one such firm whose

founder and chief executive, Felix Leuschner, says the average age of its clients is 38 and that the arrangement with manufacturers “doesn’t really cannibalise their customer base at all”.

The company offers users a flat monthly fee of £568, including breakdown cover and servicing, and cars can be booked for between one and 24 months, which is slightly longer than an average car rental but shorter than a leasing agreement.

Drover benefits from bulk buy discounts offered by the car manufacturers, who in turn see Drover as marketing opportunity, allowing consumers to try before they buy.

Turning to specialist subscription firms may be the way to go for the car industry, since its own efforts to set up car-leasing and car-sharing subsidiaries have largely failed.

General Motors, for example, closed its Maven car-sharing service earlier this year, while Ford last year sold off its Canvas car-leasing business, and Mercedes-Benz cancelled a pilot for a car-sharing initiative in the US after experiencing low demand.

The coronavirus pandemic has been a double whammy for the ad world: Health concerns and social distancing have shut down campaigns and shoots for months, and almost as damaging, the COVID recession wiped out budgets (and creative jobs), making those sprawling, multi-million-dollar shoots implausible for the foreseeable future.

But there is a powerful, new alternative. Increasingly, major advertisers are sourcing exceptional content from the internet to reimagine great creative. “Found content,” as the medium is becoming more widely known, can range from very high production value to viral videos to candid moments captured by someone on their iPhone. The internet is a potentially limitless creative library, but without the right curational tools to access it, finding the right content can be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

At Catch&Release, we have witnessed the acceleration of this shift firsthand, as many brand partners have confronted the challenges of the new normal by adding more colors to their creativity palette.

“Not being able to go out and shoot doesn’t mean the death of creation—far from it. Found content gives you a whole new range to explore within. We should view it as having a bunch of new ways to help uncover a story and then recontextualizing that story with creative editing, imaginative music choices, arresting typography, etc.,” says Jordan Atlas, chief creative officer at Edelman.

Over the past year, many brands and their agencies—including Droga5, Doner, McCann, Ogilvy and VaynerMedia—have adopted our curation and licensing tools to leverage this new medium to create very successful campaigns. In response to this accelerated demand, we have developed more features, which in turn have led to even more interest from potential customers. In our survey of 100 advertising professionals, we found that 87% of respondents expect the amount of found

content they use to increase over the next year.

Catch&Release’s proprietary technology not only reduces the inefficiency of the laborious, often opaque process of clearing and licensing content; it enables creative success: By centralizing these activities, and enabling transparency into the creative workflow from start to finish (curation to clearance to licensing), advertisers can optimize their budget and time, and maximize their creative output. At Catch&Release, we’ve built predictive AI into our platform to help discern whether original, never-before-licensed content can be licensed. This means creatives can curate through the lens of the specific needs of their brief, while having confidence they can actually use the content they find, the moment they find it.

Shifting attitudes toward UGC The more marketers experiment with found content in advertising, the more production value they discover in the medium. UGC is still widely perceived as amateurish home videos of pets and failed pranks. That’s where found footage comes in: By expanding the standard definition of UGC, we can tap into an endless supply of content that offers creative range across multiple sources (social media) or formats (4K, square or vertical video). For example, many advertisers are looking to use more cinematic or filmic content with strong aesthetic compositions required for high-exposure commercial campaigns. We’ve also seen a strong gravitation toward pivotal life moments, or content that features diversity in ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic backgrounds. Recreating this kind of authenticity and real-world relevance is so much harder to do in a studio.

Authenticity remains a brand’s superpower. In our advertiser survey, the No. 1 reason cited for deploying found content was to increase brand trust (39%), followed by brand engagement (29%) and sales (17%). And, perhaps counterintuitively, brands have more creative control at their

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WHY FOUND CONTENT IS NOW A PERMANENT PART OF THE CREATIVE MIX

By Analisa Goodin

fingertips when curating and licensing content from the internet. At Catch&Release, we see curation is an art form: It can be as deliberate, intentional and laser focused (similar to editing) or as vague as the creative director wants.

“Found content is a tool we need to learn to leverage better.

It’s no longer enough to just string together a couple pieces of UGC. There needs to be another element of thoughtfulness to take it to the next level,” says Matt McCain, chief creative officer and co-founder of Seattle-based creative shop Little Hands of Stone. When advertisers work with Catch&Release, they have the ability to define their own search parameters or terms, or curate based on the briefs they’ve already developed.

The flip side of the coronavirus shutdown is content demands are skyrocketing. The explosion of video sharing apps (e.g., TikTok, Triller), new gaming platforms (e.g., Twitch) and OTT and streaming services—especially for homebound users during the pandemic—all create a need for more diversified content across new channels and formats. The internet is the only dynamic, constantly refreshed source of content that can keep up with this accelerating demand—which makes technology solutions like Catch&Release all the more essential. “We’re going to see more agnostic approaches to creative,” notes Eric Levin, chief content officer at Spark Foundry. “You’ll have to look at the various technologies that enable the [agile] distribution [and creation] of content.”

Building the right playbook The internet is nuanced, spontaneous and rapidly evolves at the speed of culture. So how do brands tap into this treasure trove of creative content?

Brands still have to determine

which types of content are aligned with their message and will appeal to their audience. To succeed with this new creative medium, they must approach curation and licensing with a plan:

• Search with intent. This is more than just using keywords to find what you’re looking for. Tone, sentiment and composition all come into play, as well as specific brand guidelines or brief requirements (region, language, specs) that can help organically home in on the exact right piece of footage.

• Keep the creative brief as your North Star. Sometimes, brands can effectively work backward to curate content that fits a general concept and then use those images to inform the brief.

• Consider licensing at the forefront of creative development. This is about minimizing heartbreak. It’s a huge waste of time for everyone involved, if you fall in love with a shot that can’t actually get used in the final edit. With Catch&Release, you can save images and videos from anywhere on the open web, with the Catch Extension. Each shot curated with the browser extension comes with a unique Licensability Assessment, which determines the likelihood a shot can be licensed.

In unusual times, the usual ways may not scale. Working remotely calls for nimble alternatives. The need to collaborate better, test more, ideate and ship faster will only persist. The same pressures that existed before the pandemic—impossible deadlines, meager budgets, increased deliverables—have crystallized. They will continue to exist once we “get back to normal.” Remember: As the internet grows, so do our creative options. We’ll likely see advertisers flexing a new muscle to maximize their creative output with speed, without sacrificing quality, by tapping into the largest content library in the world: the internet.

Analisa Goodin is the Founder & CEO of Catch&Release.

After a decade working in the advertising agency world as an image researcher at firms like Goodby Silverstein&Partners, Goodin founded Catch&Release in 2015 to change the way advertisers leverage the internet to source and license content for commercial campaigns.

How the world’s biggest advertisers are spending (or not) as industries adapt to the coronavirus pandemic

By LARA O’REILLY

As 2020 wore on, it became apparent that the coronavirus pandemic was a crisis that wasn’t going to be limited to a couple of quarters of disruption.

After some initial pauses in spend, many marketers have now retooled and have moved out of response mode and adapted to an environment where consumers and businesses are getting used to living with Covid-19.

Digiday analyzed the most-recent earnings updates and calls from the top 10 ad spenders in the world, according to RECMA’s data for 2019 to see how they are adapting their marketing strategies to the ongoing crisis. RECMA’s data calculates “integrated spending,” which combines “monitored spend” — such as TV, radio, print and outdoor — and “nontraditional activity” —such as digital, data and content.

2% and 4%.

On a briefing call with journalists, which was reported by AdAge, P&G chief financial officer Jon Moeller said the consumer goods company increased its marketing outlay by more than $100 million in the quarter. While it managed to make savings of around $200 million on agency, production and other advertising-related overheads, Moeller said this money was reinvested back in marketing as media consumption remains high and the “heightened need to spend on hygiene and health.”

The ranking also includes new entrants versus 2018. Nestle, Expedia and General Motors now appear in the top 10, while GlaxoSmithKline (ranked #7 in 2018,) McDonald’s (#9) and Comcast (#10) no longer feature.

“We view this as a time to spend forward in terms of our advertising levels, not to spend back,” Moeller said. Still, the nature of that spending is changing: P&G’s chief brand officer Marc Pritchard used his speech at the annual Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference to call for the “antiquated network upfront system” of TV buying to get an update. This year the company negotiated many of its deals directly with broadcasters.

1. Procter & Gamble: ‘A time to spend forward’ on advertising (2019 integrated spend: $12.2 billion)

2. Amazon: Expecting another surge in holiday demand (2019 integrated spending: $6.7 billion)

Much like the previous two quarters, Procter & Gamble has continued to be a beneficiary of the pandemic as consumers stocked up on home cleaning and hygiene products. Net sales were up 9% versus a year ago to $19.3 billion on an organic basis and the company recorded a 19% lift in net profit.

Amazon posted another soaraway quarter in the three months to September 30 as consumers continued to rely on the e-commerce giant to top up on essentials, entertainment and just about everything else. Both its revenue ($96.1 billion; up 37%) and net income ($6.3 billion; up 200%) came in well above analysts’ expectations.

The maker of brands including Tide, Mr. Clean and Fairy revised upwards its full-year organic sales target to a lift of between 4% to 5%, up from its previous estimate of between

However, the company’s chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky warned that while holiday sales will easily break past the $100 billion mark, “we’ll all be stretched” to keep up with

the demand, which will likely eat into its fourth-quarter profit.

Amazon’s Prime Day two-day sales event took place October, which it said led to a 60% increase in sales made by thirdparty sellers, compared with last year.

Marketing costs increased 14% in the quarter to nearly $5.4 billion, having decreased slightly in the previous quarter, when there wasn’t as much of a need for marketing as consumer demand had surged anyway. Amazon released its 2020 Christmas ad this week, featuring a ballerina whose “show must go on” despite the coronavirus upending her prior performance plans.

As for its own advertising business, Amazon’s “other revenue” segment —which is primarily made up of advertising revenue — clocked in a 51% increase in revenue to $5.4 billion. Olsavsky said ad budgets had begun to increase from a contraction that had occurred in the earlier part of the second quarter. Plus, web traffic was up. “We do a good job of turning that traffic into valuable real estate for our advertisers and for our customers to find out more about selection and brand discovery,” Olsavsky said.

3. L’Oréal: A return to growth (2019 integrated spending: $6.7 billion) L’Oreal marked a sales rebound in its third quarter after a “crisis of supply” in the first half of the year as stores, airport concessions and salons were forced to close. Sales rose 1.6% on a like-for-like basis to just over €7 billion ($8.2 billion,) which it credited to “remarkable performances” in China and Brazil, the reopening of salons and the acceleration of its e-commerce business.

Unlike earlier in the year when some marketing launches were put on ice, “all of the launches initially planned went ahead, business drivers and media investments were strengthened” as it pressed ahead with its “back to beauty” plan in the third quarter, said L’Oreal CEO Jean-Paul Agon.

In a presentation during L’Oreal’s capital markets day in September, the company’s chief digital officer Lubomira Rochet said 50% of its business is digital and 50% of its “growth drivers” are now digital. The company now expects to record like-for-like sales growth for 2020, despite a tough few months related to the pandemic.

4. Unilever: Increased spending and tooling up “digital hubs” (2019 integrated spend: $6.3 billion) Unilever, the maker of Dove deodorant and Hellman’s mayonnaise, reported a 4.4% lift in underlying sales growth in its third-quarter, surpassing analysts’ expectations of 1.3% growth. Like P&G, Unilever benefited from consumers in western markets continuing to stock up on hygiene and cleaning products — but also saw a 5.3% bounce back in emerging markets where lockdown restrictions had begun to ease.

Speaking on the company’s third-quarter earnings call, Unilever CEO Alan Jope said the company increased marketing spend in the quarter and planned to increase marketing spend again in the fourth quarter.

That outlay won’t just be on traditional spending, but also investing in people and “future-facing skills,” particularly around digital marketing, he said. The company is ramping up hiring for new digital hubs, charged with managing “content-driven, highly-targeted, data-led campaigns,” Jope added.

That said, Unilever also plans to invest “heavily in marketing to support our brand campaigns” now that many markets have stabilized versus the beginning of the year.

5. Volkswagen: Strengthening ‘digital competence’ (2019 integrated spending: $4.5 billion) Volkswagen, the world’s biggest automaker by sales, marked a return to profit in its third quarter as sales began to recover in China — its largest market — and western Europe. The company sold 2.6 million vehicles in the quarter and while sales have fallen more than a fifth so far this year, it posted a pre-tax profit €3.6 billion ($4.2 billion) in the three months to September.

Still, its full-year global sales are expected to drop by as much as 20% this year and the outlook is still uncertain, given the potential for further countries to return to lockdown measures.

“In this challenging situation, we … succeeded in making significant progress in implementing our strategy, for example by further expanding e-mobility and strengthening our digital competence and in maintaining the financial leeway required for the substantial investments in the future,” said Frank Witter, Volkswagen CFO. The company still expects to post an operating profit in 2020.

However, that profit will be much lower than last year and its margins are lower than that of its competitors, such as Ford and Fiat Chrysler.

6. Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance: A focus on electrification and boosting Nissan’s image in the U.S. (2019 integrated spending: $4.4 billion) Renault reported an 8.2% drop in revenue for the September quarter, but that was a considerable improvement on the 35% dip in sales it recorded in the prior quarter. The company said its cost-cutting plan is paying off, plus it had helped increase its market share in Europe, largely thanks to a surge in sales for its Zoe electric hatchback, which almost doubled in the period. New CEO Luca de Meo plans to announce a full strategic plan for the company in January.

Meanwhile, while Japanese alliance member Nissan forecast its biggest ever operating loss ($4.48 billion for the year ended March 31) in July, the outlook is now looking less bleak. Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida said in an interview with Automotive News “if you look at the past three months, I think the number is much better,” referring to global demand for vehicles. A key focus for the coming months will be the U.S. market, where Uchida said “we really need to rectify ourselves in terms of operations and reestablish our brand image.” Leading that charge is Allyson Witherspoon who this month was promoted to the role of U.S. CMO.

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Mitsubishi is also expecting to report a loss for the 2020 fiscal year. Like other members of the alliance, it is streamlining its operations and placing a big focus on electric vehicles.

Mitsubishi wants electrified vehicles to count for half of its global sales in 2030, up from just 7% now. Its midterm plan, through to 2022, focuses largely on cost-cutting and ecofriendly models.

7. Coca-Cola: A refined “master brands” strategy (2019 integrated spending: $4.3 billion) Lockdown conditions continued to hit beverage sales in restaurants, bars and other out-of-home venues, but CocaCola’s third quarter was a marked improvement on the second. Revenue dropped 9% to $8.6 billion, compared to a 28% slump in the prior quarter.

Coca-Cola is dramatically streamlining its businesses and said it aims to cut its 430 “master brands” down to just 200.

Among the brands being discontinued are its Zico coconut water brand and Tab cola.

Marketing spend was down 30% in the most-recent quarter, compared with last year, though this was still a sequential increase on the first half of the year when the company dramatically cut its expenditure.

The company is still on a marketing efficiency drive, though CEO James Quincey emphasized on the earnings call that “this is not a top-down-driven exercise to reduce expenses” but rather a way to increase effectiveness and reinvest savings back into its reduced portfolio of brands. For example, the company was “marketing strongly” behind the Coke brand in the third quarter, which Quincey said helped it gain share.

The company plans to increase marketing investment behind Coke in the fourth quarter and into 2021, he added.

8. Nestle: A focus on healthy and “trusted brands” (2019 integrated spending: $4.2 billion) Throughout the coronavirus crisis, Nestle has credited a consumer desire for “trusted brands” — such as Maggi noodles and DiGiorno frozen pizza —for providing a boost to its sales.

The Swiss food giant revised upwards its like-for-like full-year sales forecast last month, saying the number would come in at 3%, up from its previous estimate of between 2% and 3%.

The company posted third-quarter sales growth of 4.9%, in which it credited gains in its health-science business as consumers stocked up on vitamins, supplements and nutritious drinks.

Last month, Nestle upped its stake in healthy meal delivery startup Freshly, to take full ownership of the company — a move designed to diversify its portfolio and cater to the increased consumer demand for e-commerce.

Elsewhere, Nestle has embarked on a big sustainability push, having committed to making 100% of its packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025.

9. Expedia: Sharp pullbacks spending: $4.2 billion)

(2019

integrated

Back in April, Expedia Group chairman Barry Diller said while Expedia usually spends around $5 billion a year on advertising, “we won’t spend probably $1 billion this year” as the travel sector felt the brunt of lockdown measures and consumers’ leeriness of airplanes. A great deal of the company’s ad spend goes on digital performance channels, particularly Google.

“The second quarter of 2020 represented likely the worst quarter the travel industry has seen in modern history,” said CEO Peter Kern in July, though he added that April was the “bottom of the trough” and that bookings began to improve through May and June. But as lockdown measures once again get enforced around the world, the outlook looks bumpy.

The company laid off around 12% of its global workforce in February and, as Skift reported last month, is preparing to lay off more employees within its travel partners group as it continues the streamlining of its business and looks to make more than $500 million in cost savings.

Selling and marketing costs were drastically reduced in the second quarter, down 83% to $283 million. The company merged its brand groups as well the performance marketing groups that sit within them. “There’s big opportunities ahead, we believe, in doing the work as a portfolio of brands and optimizing for that portfolio as opposed to optimizing each brand by itself,” said Kern on the company’s second-quarter earnings call. Expedia reports its third-quarter earnings on November 4.

10. General Motors: Catering to “pandemic-induced auto demand” (2019 integrated spending: $3.9 billion) General Motors reports its third-quarter earnings on November 5. Like other automakers, analysts also predict its profit will return to pre-coronavirus levels, the WSJ reported.

The company revealed in October that its third-quarter vehicle sales dropped by around 10% compared to the yearago quarter, but that sales improved sequentially each month within that quarter.

The company’s chief economist Elaine Buckberg said the pandemic had led to a build-up in demand for automobiles.

Research from McKinsey & Company and Ipsos showed that many consumers see private vehicles as a “safe space” and that more city residents have sought to buy vehicles as they move out to the suburbs. Very low automotive loan interest rates plus savings from a cutdown on vacation, restaurant and other entertainment costs had also driven up demand.

In an interview with Digiday, Melissa Grady, CMO of GMowned Cadillac explained how the luxury auto brand had changed its advertising “around every two weeks” through the pandemic. In September, Cadillac launched a new brand campaign for the Escalade starring actress Regina King dubbed “Never Stop Arriving.”

In the beginning were the words – how consumers read packaging: Four principles

By Martin Lee, Acacia Avenue

Martin Lee, co-founder and managing director, Acacia Avenue says brands must remember that reading is also a behaviour governed by cognitive biases and mental short cuts (heuristics). Consumers subconsciously judge brand

copy according to four principles and this reading influences their purchase decisions.

One early morning about two years ago, I was sitting at the

dining room table with my then eight-year old stepson Arthur, both of us surrounded by the usual forest of cereal packets, when he asked me a question about one of them.

“Why is there so much writing on a box of Shreddies?”

I can’t remember what stumbling reply I gave at the time, but it was a great question. Why indeed? The insight it gave me was that people, from being young children, are making sense of brand output, and that by the time they are adults, they are highly experienced interpreters of brand output, including copy, design, colour, claims and miscellaneous chatter (or tone of voice as marketers might prefer to call it).

And of course, most of this interpretation starts with reading.

There are four intuitive principles that people bring to this reading, which I’ll headline here and expand on more below.

1. The composition must look good 2. Claims must be specific 3. It must be concise 4. If it’s entertaining, make sure you know what reward you want readers to get We’ve got to the point in our collective understanding of behavioural science to know that consumer decision making is governed by all manner of cognitive biases and mental short cuts (heuristics). But it’s way too easy to overlook the reality that reading is also a behaviour. And what’s more, in the overwhelming number of purchase decisions we make, some amount of reading precedes the decision.

Consumers could spend all day reading the words on packaging from brands and get nowhere near the end. So they don’t. They’ve learnt to value efficiency more. In the split second of seeing copy, they instinctively calculate the likely benefit of paying full attention to that copy set against the time and effort involved. We call it the effort equation, and it looks like this.

Time + effort < reward If the time and effort is low, the reward can be low too, because at least it wasn’t demanding. If the effort is high, the anticipated return would have to be correspondingly high too. It’s why no one reads Ts and Cs; it takes ages and you learn nothing useful.

With the effort equation as the guiding principle, in terms of fulfilling the craving for efficiency, we consistently see in our packaging research the following supporting principles in play. Consumers subconsciously judge pack copy according to these principles: 1. It must look good. Pleasing visual design enhances the likelihood of a reward. It communicates the idea that the brand cares about itself and has bothered to put its best face forward. In addition, consumers are surprisingly good at intuitively sensing when a brand in a competitive market has updated its packaging – it just somehow looks sharper, crisper, more of the moment in a way

that is hard to put into words. All markets are like this – we recently saw a compelling example in the nicotine replacement market, where NiQuitin is the most recent brand to have updated its look, and all customers in our sample correctly identified that fact.

2. Claims must be specific. If they are, then they are credible.

The heuristic at work here is that when a brand can say something definitive, they do. If it’s vague, then it’s not trustworthy. Consumers have decades of experience of smoking out words like ‘can’, ‘could’, ‘up to’ and other qualifiers.

3. It must be concise. If it is, then I know they aren’t wasting my time with unnecessary waffle. Brevity is respectful, and gives your copy much more chance of passing the effort equation. The headline to this article makes a Biblical allusion, and the shortest verse in the Bible is ‘Jesus wept.’ That’s your action standard.

4. It can be entertaining, as long as you know what reward you want readers to have. Here’s the tricky one. The other principles mostly cover the area of being informative and /or useful. But communications from brands can succeed the effort equation by being uplifting or fun. We’re entering into those shark infested waters where brands try to demonstrate their distinctiveness by how they come across in language. The question to bear in mind is ‘Am I clear what reward a customer is going to get from this?’

It matters more when you’re not giving them something useful. For years, Malmaison hotels put onto the side of their shampoo – ‘the best shampoo you’ll ever steal.’

Which is funny the first time you read it, amusing the second time, but tired by the fifth or sixth time. And going back to where we started, i.e. the breakfast table, another interesting case study is from Dorset Cereals, who, like many niche brands, use tone of voice to create a distinct personality. Here are two bits of writing from the same pack: “A simple blend of crunchy roasted hazelnuts, brazils and moreish flakes with juicy raisins and dates.” This is enthusiastic tone, it’s informative but with a degree of persuasion, by deploying good adjectives that customers will always give you permission to do. This isn’t wasting their time to read.

But look at this: “Life’s not a dress rehearsal. So, go on, write a silly story; invent a new dance; buy a banjo; go skinny dipping. Because when you savour the present, life suddenly becomes far more delicious.”

Hmm. In summary, it’s easy to see why Arthur, and perhaps many thousands of people like him, wonder about the amount of writing that appears on cereal boxes. Making sure that you know what reward you want to give people from reading your packs is central to scoring hits rather than misses.

Martin Lee is a branding specialist.Having previously worked in retail marketing, at WHSmith as a buyer and marketing manager, and then at Waterstones as marketing director, he is well able to assist clients in taking insight and turning it into strategic and commercial recommendations.

Gamification Is Changing How We Work — and Succeed

By Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter

The story of gamification isn’t fun and games. It’s serious.

Authors Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter have been at the forefront of the development of gamification tools in business.

In a revised and updated edition of their book, For the Win: The Power of Gamification and Game Thinking in Business, Education, Government, and Social Impact, they explain that when used carefully and thoughtfully, gamification produces great outcomes for users, in ways that are hard to replicate through other methods. Other times, companies misuse the “guided missile” of gamification to have people work and do things in ways that are against their self-interest.

The authors recently sat down with Brett LoGiurato, senior editor at Wharton School Press, to discuss their revised and updated book.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Brett LoGiurato: I wanted to talk first about your initial interest in gamification and what drew you together. I understand it started as a shared interest in World of Warcraft, so how did you develop it from there?

Kevin Werbach: It was a shared interest in games and the power of games. We were originally both faculty at Wharton, and we were both studying what was then called “cyberspace”—virtual worlds. Dan actually did this work before I did, but he and others started looking at virtual worlds of games and comparing that to the virtual world that was getting built with the internet in cyberspace. I found that incredibly fascinating, and I found Dan to be a really brilliant guy, as well. So we became friends, and one of the things that we did was with a group of researchers, journalists and others who studied games in virtual worlds — we got together and started playing a game, World of Warcraft, back when it originally launched, now 15-plus years ago.

That experience of seeing what it was actually like in this incredibly sophisticated virtual world really further kindled our

interest. Then when this phenomenon of gamification started to develop a couple of years later, people were saying, “We can learn from games and take insights from developing effective games and apply that to business and apply that to the things in the real world that we are studying.” I think that’s really the point where both of us jumped and said, “Yes, we really think this is something significant, and we can contribute to the understanding.”

Dan Hunter: Kevin is exactly right. That was the process, but for me there was this crystalline moment where we were both playing World of Warcraft, and we’d heard all about gamification. It was starting to become a movement, and I remember having to do these things in World of Warcraft that took forever. I mean, there was just this grinding kind of hole that you had to do in order to do something that was a little bit later on in the game. It’s often called “grinding rep” or “farming,” and we were doing this, sort of happily doing this.

And the actual cost of doing it, if we went out and actually bought the gold on the open market, would have been a few cents. And so here were these two people with advanced degrees who otherwise were seemingly pretty smart, doing something that was absolutely ridiculous.

“It really struck me … that games are this incredible motivator, that if you can wrap up a process inside some kind of game elements, then people will do the most amazing things.” – Dan Hunter It really struck me at that point that games are this incredible motivator, that if you can wrap up a process inside some kind of game elements, then people will do the most amazing things— sometimes really dumb things. But really, they will

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enjoy it. That was the moment when we were sitting down, thinking about gamification, and I said, “You know, there’s really a book in this, and this is going to be a big thing.”

LoGiurato: When you two published the first edition of For the Win back in 2012, The Economist called gamification a “management craze” when it reviewed your book. What do you think has changed most in the gamification sphere since that time?

Hunter: For me, I sort of think about this in terms of the Gartner Hype Cycle, right? There’s that big, initial wave. It’s cresting, and everybody wants to get on it. Gamification is going to be in everything. Burger King is going to be using gamification to sell more burgers, and indeed, I think they did. Then there were providers jumping in saying, “We can do this for you. We’ll provide you with a platform.”

Then, of course, you end up on the downside of that particular wave, and everyone goes, “Oh, gamification, it was just a management craze.” It turns out now that we’re in that sort of happy point that you see in the hype cycle wave of a gradual kind of acceptance that’s going upwards, [where gamification is]being used in areas where people don’t even think about it as being gamification. They’re just thinking about how you get people to do things.

So one of the really interesting things about this has been how we’ve ended up with people just doing this — implementing these kinds of systems — without going, “Oh, we’ve got to put out a press release that is all about gamification.” You know, “We are the first with the latest.” Because it’s not the latest anymore, but it’s still really powerful.

Werbach: Yes, and if anything, it’s bigger. When we started, the hype was really ahead of the reality. Now, frankly, the reality, if you ask how much implementation there is of gamification, often as Dan says, without thinking of it as that, it’s really much more than the hype of people talking about it. The example that struck me was there’s a meditation app that I use, and they had a feature of streaks, which is if you use the app two days, three days, four days in a row, it

says, “Your streak is this many days.” And they took it out.

The developer of the app did a little audio thing, where he talked about taking it out, and he said, “You know what? I don’t even know why we put this in the app. We basically did it because every other meditation app does this. And we realized for us, it actually wasn’t what we wanted. We don’t want people thinking about their streak and focusing on their streak. It works. People are really motivated. People write to me all the time saying, ‘Isn’t it great? I’m using this every day because of the streaks.’ But this is a meditation app. What we care about is how engaged you are in the moment, and that’s what you focus on. So we took it out.”

What was striking to me about that was he didn’t know it was gamification. He didn’t know why he did it. It had just become something that you do, and something that is actually effective. And it’s an example where it was right for that app to take it out, because they hadn’t thought about consciously how and why they were doing gamification, which is what we emphasize in the book. And it didn’t make sense for them, which is fine. But that, to me, really brought home the point that people are talking about gamification as a phenomenon a lot less, but people are doing it a whole lot more.

Hunter: The other thing that’s kind of funny about that example — it’s a great example — [is that]I bet that the developer got a lot of pushback from the users who said, “Please put the streak function back in. We really love that. It really is important to us.”

LoGiurato: In the new edition of your book, there are a lot of new examples. What is the most encouraging and positive use of gamification you’ve seen in the last few years?

Werbach: I wouldn’t pick just one. I think the expansion of gamification in particular into education and health care — there are many terrible examples in both of those fields, or examples like we’ve been alluding to where gamification is done thoughtlessly. But some of the examples where it really is valuable in terms of educational experiences — the one that we talk about in the book is Duolingo, which is a language

learning app, which is really thoughtfully designed around gamification, and that’s a big reason it has been so successful.

But we’ve seen the same thing in health care, where it’s really changing people’s lives on things like getting people to take their medicine. We talk about a stroke rehabilitation company in the book that’s based on gamification. So it’s a really great thing, I say as a business school professor, to talk about this as a technique to motivate people at work and a technique to help drive business metrics. But changing people’s lives — that’s a pretty important thing.

“People are talking about gamification as a phenomenon a lot less, but people are doing it a whole lot more.”–Kevin Werbach Hunter: Yes, the one that stands out for me is Neofect, which we talk about in the book, which is a South Korean company that is doing rehabilitation of stroke patients by getting them to visualize moving their hands and doing things using games. And that’s a really sophisticated use of gamification.

So it’s not just, to your point, badges and leaderboards, which are great. They motivate people, and you see them in lots of different areas. But that’s an example of, as Kevin says, really changing people’s lives.

Within health and fitness, it’s almost impossible to find an app that doesn’t have gamified elements, whether you’re talking about Strava or Fitbit or any of these sorts of ones. And the rise of that and the movement of that throughout the entire industry, I think has made a huge change in people’s fitness in aggregate, right? Any individual person might decide not to do it, but a little bit of motivation that gets someone across the line to actually exercise, in health care terms for society, is a really huge thing. So I definitely agree with Kevin around health care and education. That’s where we see it the most.

LoGiurato: On other side of the token, you talk about a lot of potentially negative effects from gamified thinking, and you mention some in the book: China’s social credit system, an incident in which a Robinhood trader is said to have died by suicide after seeing his losses on the app. Do you believe that concerning trends like these will continue in the future, and how can companies looking to gamify their systems avoid these types of consequences?

Hunter: Well, they should read the book to start with and be aware of the issues. You know, I see this as the inevitable downside that you get with any of the types of technologies, digital technologies, that we see these days. You know, the “techlash” that we see in relation to Facebook and Google, and the current hullabaloo about TikTok, and so on. There is always going to be some kind of negative that gets generated by the widespread adoption of these sorts of technologies, just because they change people’s lives really dramatically.

So the one main principle, the lesson that I think the developers or people who are doing this should be thinking about, is to say, “This is a big change in people’s lives. This can motivate people in really, really significant ways.” And that’s great for business. That’s great for the outcomes that you’re looking for. But it can have some really serious implications in their lives. And so just as we have to bring ethical precepts to the way in which we design technology like social media,

then we have to bring those same sorts of ethical principles to gamification, because the downside can be really pretty significant. And so just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should do it. And just because people will use these gamified approaches and do the things that you want them to do — that doesn’t mean that you should be doing that.

And that’s the sort of care and responsibility that we all need to take in relation to any of these sorts of approaches.

Werbach: Yes, there was something striking when we went back to do the update of the book and looked at what we had written, something like eight or nine years ago, when we originally put it together. We were talking about these issues back then. We were talking about, very explicitly, the need to be concerned about ethical and other problems with gamification. We’ve put a lot more in the book because it’s an even bigger concern now. But it was there at the beginning, and it’s also really embedded in all of the structures in the book for how to do effective gamification. We talk a lot about thinking about players. If you think about what the goals of your gamified system are, if you just sort of assume, “Well, our goal is to just get people to trade more because we make more money on our exchange if people trade more,” and you don’t talk about the users … then there is always a danger that you’re going to manipulate them. [You could] create something like that tragic Robinhood trading example, where someone loved the game so much that it drove them to suicide.

“It’s about putting people first and saying, ‘Okay, if people really matter, then let me make this experience a really good one for them.’”–Dan Hunter If you focus in on what’s in the interest of the players, and you can truly say to yourself, “I am building this as something that helps them get to where they wanted to go, anyway,” then you are much less at risk of those kinds of ethical failings.

And so the kinds of structures that we provide in the book — and again, a lot of the book is very practical how-to guidance that we’ve updated in the new edition — then I think that’s really going to be a way to avoid sliding into some of these manipulative activities.

LoGiurato: Can you provide a quick overview of the six steps you give in the book to implement gamification?

Werbach: There are six steps, and they all start with the letter D, so it’s sometimes called the “D6 Framework.” The basic notion here is don’t just jump in and build something. Start with defining what your objectives are. What are you trying to do with the gamification? Then delineate target behaviors.

What is it specifically that you want the players of the system to do? Then describe your players. Think about and structure the categories that people are using. Just what exactly is going to motivate different categories of your users? Then the fourth one is to devise what we call “activity cycles.” What are the feedback loops that drive the actual progress of that gamified system?

The next one is don’t forget the fun, because one thing we found is that people can get so focused on the structure and the process that they build something that people don’t

actually want to play. So step back and ask, “Is this fun? Is this something that’s really engaging?” And then only after you do the first five, the sixth one is deploy. Pick the appropriate tools and actually go and build it. If you put things in that order and have that kind of structured process, you really will hit all of the key elements for an effective system.

LoGiurato: So Kevin, you launched a massive, open online course right before publication of the first edition, and Dan, you founded a startup based on using gamification and Edtech. What has the response been through the years for both of you, and how have gamification and game thinking affected your teaching and your own experience in the real world, as well?

Werbach: So I created one of the first MOOCs, and it’s still running. Over 500,000 people around the world have signed up for it. And there was a recent spike when everyone went into lockdown around the world with COVID-19, there were tens of thousands of people who signed up for my MOOC, as well as other MOOCs, because they were stuck at home.

I had to stop reading the emails and the success stories that people posted because it was just overwhelming. You have so many people finding ways to change their life, to change their business, to structure what they’re doing based on these techniques. And so that’s tremendously gratifying. I wasn’t thinking about gamifying it when I built the MOOC, but when I look back at what I did almost by accident — well, I realized that it actually matched up quite accurately with what we talk about in the book.

And the point is that gamification doesn’t have to be about what we call “PBLs,” the points, badges, and leaderboards.

There are no little rewards you get for getting a certain number of points in the MOOC. And that’s not how I teach, either.

But if you look at the structure, how content is introduced, the feedback loops and a lot of the principles that underlie the flow of the course and little bits that jump in that make the course interesting and surprising and so forth — it’s all game-based. It’s all gamification. So again, I realize I wasn’t even doing it necessarily explicitly, the way I should have, but for me it reinforced that you can think about gamification in lots of different ways, once you understand what the basic game design principles are.

Hunter: Yes, for me the big change was really focusing on people. When I started out on this particular journey, it was about, “Okay, gamification. This is a really cool tech. We can use this.” And so the first startup I did out of education was explicitly a gamified learning app. It pushed videos out.

People would then answer questions of students who would engage with it. Then they would get a series of rewards, based upon all of the explicit gamification kinds of principles that we outline in the book.

“If you focus in on what’s in the interest of the players … then you are much less at risk of those kinds of ethical failings.”–Kevin Werbach In the subsequent startups that I’ve done and also in my teaching, it’s not so much about gamification as the be-all and end-all. It’s about saying, “Hey, what do people really want to do? How can I make this experience of teaching or of an online community, for example, in one of these

other startups — how can I make that really a pleasurable experience for people so that they don’t feel like it’s work, they don’t feel like it’s really hard? You know, I’m not going to class and being bored out of my mind. I’m going to class and really enjoying it. Or I am engaging with this community in a way that actually makes me feel good. So I don’t explicitly gamify my classes. The startups I’m doing now are not explicitly about gamification, but they use those principles. And it’s about people. It’s about putting people first and saying, “Okay, if people really matter, then let me make this experience a really good one for them.” And that’s what we try to do in the book, where we give you the kinds of knowledge and content that allows you to start making those sorts of steps so that you can create really just wonderful, appealing experiences in a range of different areas.

LoGiurato: We’ve talked about a lot of different examples of gamification so far. What is sort of the one, outside-thebox, most creative use of gamification that you’ve happened upon?

Werbach: It’s hard to pick just one. The one that I’ve always been really impressed by is something called Quest to Learn, which is a school in New York, partly because it’s not the kind of simple gamification of points and leaderboards. It’s really thinking deeply about what if we organize the entire curriculum and structure of a middle school and high school along the kinds of principles that we learn from games?

And they’ve been able to show really wonderful results from doing that. So that one for me was striking, just because of the comprehensiveness of implementing it as basically the foundational principle for the entire school.

Hunter: That’s a great example. The one that I keep coming back to and just think, “Good God, that is just a beautiful system,” is Duolingo. And the reason that Duolingo is so good is it has been created by geniuses of this sort of stuff.

And we talk about that a little bit in the book.

But what it actually is, is a series of gamification mechanics put together in a way that just works beautifully for a range of different sorts of users. So those people who really engage with narrative are handled there. The people really will love it because of that. People who just love points and want to amass points because it’s significant to them—that’s the sort of the thing that drives them—they’ve got that, as well. When you take the entire system together and build all of these things in this particular way, you look at it and go, “Okay, that actually is just gorgeously designed. It allows for lots of different user types. All of them are different. Everyone is going out there and learning languages. It has changed the lives of a huge number of people, particularly those who are seeking to learn English and take the test of English as a foreign language in order to be able to study in the States or wherever it might be. That has been something which is, I would say, probably the most impressive use of gamification that’s out there at the moment.

LoGiurato: Final question: What’s one lesson that you hope readers take away from the new edition?

Hunter: People matter, right? Focus on the people. Never lose sight that you are making people do things that otherwise they wouldn’t do. So make sure that you do that responsibly, and at the same time, you make sure that they have fun.

Werbach: I can’t add anything to that.

FlyteVu’s Jeremy Holley on Zeppelin, Cash, and the Value to Brands of ‘Undiscovered’ Artists

By Nanette Kirsch

Plus, mission-based companies teaming up with forward-thinking talent Jeremy Holley is a co-founder of FlyteVu, a Nashville-based full-service entertainment marketing agency founded in 2015 that connects brands to consumers through storytelling, experiences and the power of pop culture.

The company’s roster of former and current clients includes the American Red Cross, Barefoot Wine, Bumble, Carter’s, Cracker Barrel, Jack Daniel’s, Enterprise, Journeys, Norwegian Cruise Line, Spotify, Tennessee Tourism, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Victoria’s Secret PINK and others.

Holley was previously svp of consumer and interactive marketing at Warner Music Nashville and played a key role in building Warner Music’s multiple rights business overseeing all aspects of creative, digital and strategic marketing.

We caught up with Jeremy for our Liner Notes series to learn more about his musical tastes and journey through the years, as well as recent work he’s proud of and admired.

Jeremy, tell us...

Your earliest musical memory.

Listening to vinyl records every Sunday with my dad.

Your first concert.

I grew up in a very religious small town, so my exposure to live shows was limited until after I graduated high school.

Oddly, my first concert was White Zombie with Pantera. I guess there is no better way to dive in than that.

Your favorite band.

Led Zeppelin, in my opinion, is the greatest “rock” band of all time. For a band whose body of work spanned only

12 years, they sure made an impact. As a marketer, I also think it’s interesting that they accomplished mass stardom while limiting commercial access to their music. Following a performance on a French program in 1969, they never played a promotional TV gig again. They had no trust in their sound being manipulated for audiences by outside audio engineers. They’ve also been very selective about how their music gets distributed and licensed.

How you get your music these days.

I usually find new music through Apple, Amazon or Spotify (recommendation playlist), but word of mouth and the recommendation of friends is still my favorite.

Your favorite place to see a concert.

Pre-Covid, Ryman Auditorium. Today, I would settle for anywhere that is not online, as there are NO substitutes for live music. Digital opportunities have made it easier than ever to connect “to” people, but there is no doubt that music streaming and virtual performances fail to deliver the same emotional connection that in-person events provide to connect “with” people. Live music fulfills the desire of genuine human connection, and we could certainly use more of that right now.

Your favorite music video.

Johnny Cash’s version of “Hurt.” Rick Rubin somehow managed to make the Man in Black even cooler and recorded one of the most groundbreaking songs from Cash’s career.

The original song spoke of depression, but Cash’s voice, lyrics and prior reputation masterfully transformed it into a

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gloomy yet hopeful statement about faith and mortality. It gives me chill bumps every time I see it, and it’s a good reminder to focus on the things that matter most in life.

A recent project you’re proud of.

There are so many. In the midst of the pandemic, FlyteVu has continued to live out its core values of service. I’m most proud of the campaigns that give back. Here are a few.

Someone else’s project that you admired recently.

I have tremendous respect for the countless men and women who own music venues and produce live shows but are impacted by Covid. I love the work YouTube and Marc Geiger are doing to save live venues.

How musicians brands.

should

approach

working

with

Understand the value proposition that comes not only from the dollars but from the exposure and cachet of the partnership. For example, a brand like Bumble has a highvalue proposition for artists because its brand ethos (female empowerment) aligns with their core values. A brand that is mission-based will have an easier time working with forwardthinking talent. Knowing the value proposition is key to putting together a program that’s going to deliver a win for you.

How brands should approach working with musicians.

Use data, but find the experts in the space. Marketers can alleviate a lot of pitfalls by leaning on experts with the right relationships to identify talent that will move the needle for their brand. Sometimes the right answer is a household name,

but many times it’s not. We all tend to think if an artist isn’t on our radar, it’s easy to dismiss them as “undiscovered” when the reality might be they’re getting millions of streams with our target audience already. Connection is about storytelling, and the most authentic voice can and will activate your consumers. Dismissing someone simply because they don’t have a hit on the radio is short-sighted. You wouldn’t limit sales of your product to only the top 1 percent of consumers, so why should you only consider the top 1 percent of artists when looking for a partner? Go where your customers are, and you will be rewarded.

What music can do that nothing else can.

Music is the common language that connects people and breaks down all barriers. No matter your age, ethnicity, nationality or political opinion, music creates a common ground for people to relate and be inspired. It’s important to remember that music also drives emotion, and emotion drives sales.

What you’d be doing if you weren’t in the music world.

I wanted to be a fighter pilot, play Major League Baseball, or work in music. I was too tall and not good enough for the first two, so I guess I’ll have to settle for music. It has served me well.

Tim Nudd is a writer covering creativity in business. Since 2018 he has been editor in chief of the Clio Awards, leading all content initiatives for the venerable awards company. Prior to Clio, he was creative editor at Adweek for eight years. He lives outside Portland, Maine.

3 Things To Keep In Mind When Creating Innovative Products In 2021 And Beyond

By Winston Ibrahim and Bill Nottingham

If you want to innovate, you don’t necessarily need to be in Silicon Valley. And if you are already in Silicon Valley, try to consider looking for partners or solutions from outside the Bay Area.

When it comes to creating anything new, the hardest part is always the beginning. In order to start, you often need a handful of resources: talented people, compelling ideas, and, most importantly, enough working capital to do proper consumer research and feasibility prototypes, and then enough left to take you to commercialization. You also need partners who believe in you, support your dream, and will stick with you when you reach hurdles and failures along the way. In Silicon Valley, there is an abundance of all three—which is why conventional wisdom often encourages founders, investors, and growing startups to move to the Bay Area.

But in 2020, talent, ideas, and capital are everywhere. And many of the Valley’s most accomplished companies—Twitter and Square, for example—have opted to “work from home” forever. Before we know it, physical proximity might become a thing of the past. It really shouldn’t matter, as long as you have a company culture of trust, empathy and collaboration.

If you have team members that feel they need to have the greatest idea in the room, you may want to rethink their involvement in your mission.

We see this “new normal” as a good thing. But we do want to flag potential long-term challenges with permanent remote

work. Teams or Zoom calls still cannot satisfy those “Ah-Ha” moments at the water cooler or from the random run-ins in the hallway.

Innovation is all about breaking down preconceived notions about how the world works. And while Silicon Valley has birthed some truly remarkable tech companies, it has had a much harder time thinking about people in America, the real America, when it comes to other types of innovative products like consumer goods. And so finding partners who can complement your mindset with deep domain experience without over-validating a one-sided point of view of the world is crucial to creating hyper-scalable, highly relevant products for a wide range of people.

If you’re thinking about how you, your partners, and your ventures can innovate in 2021 and beyond, here are a few principles we have found worth keeping at the forefront of your mind: 1. It’s better to create something quickly (and iterate based on feedback) than something perfect.

V2 can be better. And any ideas left on the “cutting room floor” can always be applied to the product’s next generation.

What’s important is getting V1 up and running. Sometimes, “good” is better than “perfect.”

Company leaders often forget that the biggest impediment to innovation is making the executive decision to get started.

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51 We like to say, “Pause is Death.” What paralyzes teams is feeling the idea itself has to be perfect, and validated, and completely “risk-free” before it’s worth putting any resources into making it real. In reality, these days you can create a minimum viable product (MVP) very easily—or at least find creative ways to test the market with soft launches, preorders, etc. But we should first define what a true MVP is. It is first a 2D concept and consumer feedback on that concept.

The next several MVPs need to be prototypes. They don’t have to be pretty. They just need to prove feasibility. You will most likely do several prototypes until you can see them as the “real thing.”

A great example of how a soft launch can dramatically impact the trajectory of a product is the story of how Nottingham Spirk helped create the first mass-market, battery-powered electric toothbrush, called the Dr. Johns SpinBrush. When the SpinBrush was launched as a new and innovative product, we first had a “soft launch” in a small market area. We quickly identified quality issues with some of the plastic components.

We stayed close to consumer feedback and we were lucky to gain this insight early on. When we gain these “emergency insights,” we make a running-change, making material and sometimes engineering changes to fix the problem. Then, after we change modular components, the updated version of the product will have this issue resolved. We focused on incorporating learnings from the soft launch to make key improvements before hard-launching to the general public.

The strategy is to have the ability (if needed) to fail small, then scale big.

A year later, the company sold 50 million toothbrushes.

The year after? 100 million toothbrushes. And then the rest was history.

Until eventually, the SpinBrush became so widely accepted that P&G bought the product for around $475 million.

Remember: If you’re so concerned about a perfect launch that you never actually launch, your innovation will simply be a concept.

2. “Running changes” can help you move faster and maintain momentum in the market.

To elaborate further on the strategy of “running changes,” it’s like an “app update” but in the physical sense, with molds providing the ability to be switchable down the road as needed. You’re anticipating something might need to be modified, and so instead of needing to build another hundredthousand-dollar tool from scratch, you build individual pieces that can be switched and iterated on as time goes on.

When it comes to quickly creating and iterating on CPG products, “running changes” are a great way of maintaining momentum in the market and conserving company resources.

As much as possible, you want to avoid big launches, big feedback loops, and big stretches of time between the product that had some issues and the next version of the product you plan to put in people’s hands.

The more you can reduce the amount of time within these

feedback and improvement loops, the better.

3. Innovation is not an individual sport.

There is always someone else smarter than you—and that’s a good thing.

When it comes to creating anything truly different, you are far better off engineering situations in which you are not the smartest person in the room. A friend of mine, Ranndy Kellogg, President and CEO of Omron Healthcare, says it best: “If you are the smartest person in the room, you may be in the wrong room.” You benefit exponentially by being around people who have done what you’re trying to do, or people who have solved similar types of problems, or people who just have different backgrounds and see the world differently from you.

For example, America is much broader than just Silicon Valley.

Give the “North Coast” of Cleveland a try, where Nottingham Spirk is headquartered. With best-in-class healthcare institutions like Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals, you find that innovations backed by “real science” are a great place to start. Gone are the days of the “theoretical medical device tech.” It needs to be proven and for medical, clinically proven.

The trap a lot of startups have fallen into on the West Coast is trying to create a lot of unscalable products. Not every business needs to be the next Facebook or Google. In fact, America is built on small businesses, and small towns, and regions of the world where the next trendiest tech startup in San Francisco most likely makes very little sense in more rural areas and less densely populated cities. The best part of the pandemic is that the playing field of “location” is even. It really doesn’t matter where you live. Find the right team and get started!

Arguably the biggest benefit to living in SF, LA, NY, etc., has been talent density. But if you are open-minded, there are lots of regions in the US, from the auto design expertise of Detroit, to the technology found in Boston, to some of the up and coming tech from Austin, Texas. With distributed workforces and Zoom meetings becoming more and more popular, density can now be found over the internet. You can connect with design and innovation firms outside of your local area. You can connect with other entrepreneurs, designers, and thinkers from anywhere in the world. And, most importantly, you can connect with customers from all walks of life, gathering information about how a wide range of people perceive your new product. If you are starting a company, remember that you are not the customer. You may be one customer but your opinions are just one of many needed for your product to be a success.

At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is what the customer thinks. And then once you find success, you will realize that you will need to do it all over again, because there will always be someone else developing something new that may change your market.

Innovation is a marathon and not a sprint. And the race never really ends.

How CMOs Must Evolve to Take Advantage of Artificial Intelligence

By Mike Kaput

Marketers are drowning in data from dozens of sources: social monitoring, media monitoring, web analytics, emails, call tracking, sales, advertising, remarketing, ecommerce platforms, mobile apps, and more.

The question is: what do you do with all of it?

That is where artificial intelligence comes in. Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines smart, which in turn augments human knowledge and capabilities. AI takes very specific and complex data-driven problems, and then devises and executes solutions.

Marketers have a finite ability to process information, build strategies, create content at scale, and achieve performance potential. AI algorithms, in contrast, have an almost infinite ability to process data, and deliver predictions, recommendations and content better, faster and cheaper.

That means AI is a tool that can help marketers do their jobs better. All that data, rather than creating noise, becomes a priceless asset, used by AI systems to accelerate marketing performance and gain insight into which investments work.

So, what can CMOs do to evolve and start leveraging artificial intelligence now?

1. Cut Through the Hype About AI Artificial intelligence may seem like a futuristic concept, but its use is widespread among companies we interact with daily, including Netflix, Amazon, UPS, Facebook, Google and Apple. But it comes with plenty of hype. It’s difficult to tell what AI is truly capable of—and this leads marketers to underestimate how AI might change their businesses.

In reality, massive amounts of data; exponential advancements in computing power; and the availability of AI technology from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, IBM and others have combined with a flood of venture capital money pouring into everything AI to prime the marketing industry for disruption.

CMOs must take AI and related technologies seriously before they can reap its benefits. (A good place to start is diving into these 11 expert resources for marketers interested in AI.)

learning and cognitive computing.

Consider how much time your team spends drafting social media updates, optimizing content, building email workflows, predicting conversions, writing performance reports and dozens of other marketing management activities. Now imagine if machines performed many of these activities. This would not make marketers obsolete. It would free them up to enhance rather than solely create.

This means more time spent on activation, promotion and improvement, driving better performance and using top talent on higher value tasks. CMOs must grasp that AI is a tool to give their marketing teams, not a technology to replace them.

3. Experiment with AI Now CMOs need to start experimenting with AI now. That means signing up for demos, talking with providers and researching the solutions on the market. When we interviewed 9 AI experts about their advice for marketers, some variation of “experiment often” came up again and again.

Consider the AI capabilities of your existing marketing technology. While marketing automation is still largely manual, we anticipate major solutions to add AI functionality rapidly. CRMs like Salesforce are already baking AI into their products. Chances are, your marketing tech providers are a good resource to start learning what’s coming.

Begin to evaluate the repetitive manual marketing tasks that might be intelligently automated. Solving for pain points, such as “I need to automate social media posting,” is a good way to focus your AI experimentation efforts.

4. Focus on Continued Learning C-suite marketers have historically lacked access to AI-focused education that helps them develop internal capabilities. That’s why we launched AI Academy for Marketers, a platform that brings the power of artificial intelligence to you.

2. Understand That AI Enhances More Than It Automates

AI Academy for Marketers is designed for marketing professionals and students at all levels, and largely caters to non-technical audiences, meaning registrants do not need backgrounds in analytics, data science or programming to understand and apply what they learn.

Marketing is being disrupted by AI, but that does not mean marketing as a profession is being destroyed or automated out of existence. Many tasks commonly performed by marketers are being augmented by machine learning, deep

The Academy is available now and features deep-dive Certification Courses (3 - 5 hours each), along with dozens of Short Courses (30 - 60 minutes each) taught by leading AI and marketing experts.

eBook: Upgrade your copy from filler to killer with Herschell Gordon Lewis

By Matt Edgar

Delve into the works of the late great Herschell Gordon Lewis, AKA ‘The King of Killer Copy’ and discover how to create copy that sells even during the most challenging times.

marketing experts, Drayton Bird.

David Ogilvy said of him “Drayton Bird knows more about direct marketing than anyone in the world”.

He was known around the world as the “Godfather of Gore.”

When asked if he’d like to contribute, Drayton kindly agreed

But the international direct marketing community knew him better as the King of Killer Copy.Killer Copy in a Crisis

of bores’

Herschell Gordon Lewis was a professor of English who made words his weapon of choice and taught marketers how to use them skilfully by ‘poking ’em directly so they wouldn’t forget ’em.’

Herschell published over thirty copywriting books including Hot Appeals or Burnt Offerings, Sales Letters That Sizzle, and Open Me Now. For many years he wrote a monthly column called Copy Class for Direct Marketing International magazine (now the Global Marketing Alliance).

Killer Copy in a Crisis is an exclusive collection of Herschell’s articles published from 2008 – 2010.

Twelve years ago, Herschell was writing about the importance of innovative marketing in a financial crisis. Not this one, the last one.

The Foreword is written by one of the UK’s most well-known

by saying: ‘Herschell was a one-man oasis of wit in a desert

Killer Copy in a Crisis is must-read for anyone with the word marketing in their job title.

Killer Copy in a Crisis Words of wisdom from Herschell Gordon Lewis • On messaging: “Don’t get diarrhoea of the fingertips’ with overzealous sales copy.”

• On offerings: “Few are willing to commit suicide because a mortician is offering a ‘special’ this week.”

• On headlines: “Illustration should agree with what we are selling, not with headline copy” • On technology: “We’re wallowing in a populist sea and losing control of our own instruments” • On advertising: “Barnum was right. There’s a sucker born every minute and the Web is a fertile territory for 21st century Barnum’s.”

Raja Rajamannar: How technology and data killed marketing as we knew it

By Geoffrey Precourt

Marketers must be ready for a future that is shaped by everything from smart speakers and autonomous cars to artificial intelligence, according to Raja Rajamannar, Mastercard’s chief marketing and communications officer.

Geoffrey Precourt, WARC’s US Editor, outlines how this might be achieved.

On the digital stage of Advertising Week 2020, Raja Rajamannar, Mastercard’s chief marketing and communications officer, all but announced the death of marketing as we have known it.

The culprits? Technology and data. These dual forces, he announced, “are the two engines on which marketing is going to take off into the future”.

And Rajamannar drilled down into a recitation of how tomorrow’s powers are pushing yesterday’s models into oblivion.

Voice tech, automated cars and the need for new marketing skillsets The most powerful technological disruptor, Rajamannar averred, is the turbulence that smart speakers have brought to marketing. “Research has shown that more than 25% of all US households already have a smart speaker,” he said.

“And more than 70% of these people have said that they have made at least one purchase using these smart speakers in the last 12 months.

“That’s huge.”

And it’s an oversized change not just because of the platform itself, but also because of the way it has hijacked consumers and pulled them off the traditional path to purchase.

According to Rajamannar, when a consumer asks for a generic product, both Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home respond with a specific brand.

And, the Mastercard marketer explained, when a consumer hears that specific name, 70% of the time they buy without further consideration.

“What’s happening is we now have a new influencer – a new decision-maker – who is driving the purchase funnel. If Alexa says, ‘You should buy Pampers,’ the consumer says, ‘Okay, let’s go ahead.’”

That voice-activated dynamic, Rajamannar proposed, “is going to change how a brand will relevantly cater to the purchase funnel”. The new devices, and their new algorithms, are taking “search-engine optimization of the past to a completely different level.

“This is a new ecosystem altogether.”

Moreover, he added, it’s introducing households all over the world to the practicality and convenience promised by the Internet of Things.

Mastercard has thus been “working with Samsung” on a smart refrigerator with a simple premise: a camera keeps track of what’s on the shelves, and when the supply drops below a certain level, the smart system orders replenishments from a third-party food supplier and arranges delivery to the home.

“That’s a fascinating way to simplify a consumer’s life and make it very seamless and frictionless,” Rajamannar said.

“But it completely changes the purchase funnel.”

And, in doing so, the technology all but eliminates the traditional role of the marketer, for whom the funnel was an integral part of the everyday (and long-term) toolkit.

The same kind of tech magic drives the disintermediated path to purchase for products central to connected dishwashers, connected washing machines, connected coffee machines, or connected ovens.

The question for marketers, according to Rajamannar: How does a brand get into that stream of consciousness and influence the consumer’s decision in favor of their brand in a cost-effective way – particularly when the shopper is delegating their thinking and decisions to an algorithm?

“The Internet of Things is going to change consumers’ purchase funnels; it’s going to change how they are interacting; how they are making their purchase; how they’re making the discoveries; how they become brand aware; and how they get influenced in terms of their perceptions about brands,” he said.

A case in point: “Look at connected cars,” Rajamannar suggested to the Advertising Week online assembly. When this technology reaches maturity, “The attention of the consumer onto the road is just no longer required. As a marketer, both the visual attention and the audio attention of the consumer [is in play]. You actually can interact and engage with the consumer in very different ways.

“It almost becomes like the autonomous car is a moving office or a moving living room. We used to think about gaining the attention of the consumer in the family room, in a traditional media situation. Now, we need to think through those kinds of scenarios in the context of autonomous vehicles.

“Do we have the ecosystem for that environment” to serve consumers “in the most appropriate way? It’s all going to be

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a new dimension that we have not seen the beginning of yet.

“And, it’s a dimension that demands a different kind of marketer with a different set of skills.”

Artificial intelligence is integral to the future The old marketer is dead? Long live the new marketer – and their new lifeline, artificial intelligence (AI).

As Rajamannar told the Advertising Week 2020 digital delegates, “AI is now the single biggest enabler of how we function, and how we become more effective, and more efficient.

“The power it can bring to the table is amazing.”

So, he proposed, is the “fascinating” list of data sources and sensors that rarely have been perceived as tools of analysis – aside from a wired-appliance network of refrigerators, washing machines, coffee makers, and ovens – “starting from your shoes, to your clothes, to your wearables, to everything that has and gives readings about you.

“With the consumers’ obsession with their quantified selves, they are putting out data that you can read and make sense of it,” even as all that analysis still protects and respects the privacy of the consumer.

“In that kind of a scenario,” the Mastercard marketer said, “the availability of data is going to be exponentially more than what we have today.”

Artificial intelligence, Rajamannar continued, will enable marketers “to look at the data, identify patterns and develop insights” that were never possible – or even imagined – before the new data driver.

“I have seen it in action in multiple areas, including in marketing, and we have been very successfully experimenting with it at Mastercard for a few months,” he revealed.

But, he cautioned, “When you talk about AI, everyone and their brother who comes up with a new solution will preach to you, ‘My solution is AI-powered’.”

As such, “artificial intelligence” may have become buzzwords for the marketing community, “but it’s very important for us to understand concepts like AI, at least to the extent where we can ask the right questions.”

The consequences of failure? “If you don’t educate yourself, if you don’t come up the curve, you will stand the risk of becoming obsolete very soon.

“Areas like artificial intelligence are critical for us to understand.”

All The World’s a Virtual Stage

By Tom Kaneshige

All the world’s a virtual stage, as the Bard would say in these strange times. He, too, lived during a pandemic — the bubonic plague — with outbreaks shuttering theaters amid political chaos. “Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind,” Shakespeare wrote in “King Lear.”

But this isn’t about reviewing the virtues of plays or the vitriol of politicians, rather reviewing your virtual events.

Is the audience rapt with your performance? Will they eagerly come back for more online sessions? Are they writing glowing reviews? Or maybe they’re still in their pajamas, checking email and dozing off during your PowerPoint soliloquies.

Let’s start by setting the scene.

The pandemic wiped out physical events practically overnight, and so many brands turned to virtual events as a viable replacement. The number of organizations planning a virtual event doubled this year, according to Wild Apricot.

Other brands opted out. Chief among their reasons: People are sick of online calls and events, supporters aren’t technologically savvy, too hard to get people to participate, not enough revenue, people lack stable Internet, etc.

It’s true that brands had a tough time figuring out how much to charge attendees for a virtual event. Bizzabo says the average price was more than $500 earlier this year and fell to around $250 in the summer, as marketers sought to attract more attendees. (Bizzabo, though, predicts the average price will go up over time.)

Once people come to your virtual event, you’ve got to get them to engage with the content and each other. Marketers cite audience engagement as the biggest challenge in an event where attendees can leave with the click of a button.

However, signs point to some early success. Bizzabo says the average attendee watches 68% of a 20-minute or longer session, with an average of 12 sessions per virtual event.

Nearly half of registrants attend live, while 10% check out the on-demand recording, according to Intrado. These stats

should excite virtual event planners everywhere.

With audience engagement, a key lesson is to keep it small.

Markletic found that the ideal audience size for a virtual round table discussion is between eight and 10 people. They want to meet peers and grow their networks, and small gatherings afford them the opportunity.

Brands will need to build in networking opportunities, too.

According to Freeman, 81% of virtual event organizers agree that digital events need to include networking and engagement, in addition to learning. Even in online settings, brands can conduct workshops, round tables, fireside chats and happy hours.

“Attendees want to replicate the experience of bumping into someone in a hallway and starting a conversation or turning to someone sitting next to you to share an experience,” wrote Ray Wang, founder of Constellation Research, in a destinationCRM article. “Tools such as Wonder.me, Remo. com, and Gatherly.io re-create this.”

In order to gauge whether your virtual event was a hit or a flop, event organizers should measure attendee satisfaction.

This is done through surveys and polls, as well as feedback received from the sales team. Polls are especially good for learning ways to improve interaction.

The underlying theme is that people are quickly adapting to digital work and life and want to attend virtual events for both learning and networking. In Shakespeare’s time, theatre closures meant the show couldn’t go on, but today we have a virtual capability and a willing audience.

Now it’s up to brands to give a performance worthy of the digital play.

Tom Kaneshige is the Chief Content Officer at the CMO Council. He creates all forms of digital thought leadership content that helps growth and revenue officers, line of business leaders, and chief marketers succeed in their rapidly evolving roles. You can reach him at tkaneshige@cmocouncil.org.

10 techniques for effective packaging

By Roger Horberry

FMCG packaging represents prime marketing real estate, one of the most effective weapons in the marketing arsenal. It can literally make the difference between a consumer adding a particular item to their shopping basket or moving on to choose a competitor’s product. No other point in the real world purchase journey has such a stark stop/go aspect to it.

In this article we’ll be looking specifically at packaging copy, and share techniques that will enable you create copy that reduces stop and increases go. Pack copy and brand success Let’s begin by agreeing what a brand actually is and how brands relate to pack copy. That’s important because if we can’t define it, we’ll struggle to deliver it. For the purposes of this article we suggest a brand is ultimately a tool for differentiation, and that differentiation is the basis of consumer choice. Obviously price matters, but only one brand can be the cheapest – every other player in a particular space must find another way to stand out.

That’s where the differentiation delivered by pack copy comes in. It’s the brand’s last chance to project personality and highlight relevant difference in order to secure a sale.

And unless a brand is deliberately trying to cultivate mystique (think Muji and its wilfully obscure kanji pack labelling) then pack copy is at the heart of this process. Good pack copy is about turning a necessity into a benefit

Pack copy and brand messages Pack copy doesn’t exist in a vacuum – instead it’s part of a continuity of brand messaging. Pack copy should form the tip of this messaging pyramid – the most distilled expression of ideas explored more fully elsewhere in the brand’s world.

An important aspect of this is finding a way to combine functional cues with emotional resonance, so that the pack copy appeals equally to the consumers’ head and heart. Tone of voice, sentence format, design and typography all play a part. For example, front of pack copy might include a few short, punchy bullet-type phrases summarising features and benefits, while back of pack might include a few sentences or even paragraphs that extol the product’s virtues in narrative form.

Recent examples and results Flawsome! fruit juice Changing its name from Get Wonky to Flawsome! (inspired by the idea of ‘flawed… but awesome’) and introducing pack copy lines like “Save the rejected”, “From wonky to wonderful” and “From denied to delicious” helped this brand significantly increase its relevance and distinctiveness in the market, doubling the brand’s followers on Twitter and

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massively increasing PR exposure. With no other changes to the brand’s activities or marketing other than the redesign, sales leapt 540% in the year following relaunch, against a targeted increase of 100%.

By reimagining Well & Truly as a tasty lifestyle brand rather than a straightforward healthy snack led to a 104% uplift in gross sales – double the target – with no advertising support.

At the heart of this is a flexible pack copy headline that builds on the brand name: “Well & Truly Moreish”, Well & Truly Tasty”, Well & Truly Crunchy”, and so on. Adopting a copyled pack design also made Well & Truly less female-focused, helping its owners win new male consumers and steal share from Walkers.

most concise form possible. These don’t need to be full sentences and might be an opportunity for some creative brevity.

• Highlight any signature features – even if those features are something as straightforward as “Made with all natural ingredients”.

• Make it meme-y. For consumer items, three writing techniques really aid recall: pun, rhyme and alliteration.

• Consider humour. This won’t be appropriate for every category but where relevant, humour can be a potent persuader.

10 key techniques

• Cross-sell to your other products. That way your pack copy keeps selling even when the sale is over.

What golden rules should guide the creation of great pack copy? No toolbox of techniques can cover everything, but the following should give you a solid start.

• Establish origins. By this we mean some version of the classic “founder’s tale”. Creation myths of this sort go a long way to grounding a product provided they’re true.

• Less is more. Pack copy is micro content, so create lead messages that work for micro attention spans. And at the risk of stating the obvious, make certain your pack copy describes what the product actually is or does.

• Keep it clear. Lead with a single strong key message and present supporting copy – assuming any is needed – in a way that doesn’t compromise this.

• Lists, not paragraphs. Keep important information in the

• End with a call to action, even something as simple as “See our website for more great stuff.”

• Confound expectations. In the past, many beauty brands lent their products a technical veneer with pseudoscientific language (the so-called “science part”). Recently some beauty brands – for example The Ordinary – have adopted a minimalistic approach to pack copy that projects appealing confidence.

Book,

&

Line

Wally Olins. Brand New.: The Shape of Brands to Come Paperback – 1 March 2014

By Wally Olins Wally Olins’s fascinating book looks at every aspect of the world of branding. With his customary flair and no-nonsense prose, he analyzes the problems facing today’s organizations, praises those companies who seem to be building and sustaining brands successfully in our brave new world, and predicts the future of branding.

Sinker Rise of the Youpreneur: The Definitive Guide to Becoming the Go-To Leader in Your Industry and Building a Future-Proof Business Paperback – 20 February 2018

By Ray Edwards In late 2014, internationally acclaimed blogger and podcaster Chris Ducker coined the term “Youpreneur” to describe the rise of the personal brand entrepreneur, a new business model that very few people saw coming.

By Karen Kang

Pop!: Create the Perfect Pitch, Title, and Tagline for Anything Paperback – 3 February 2009

Globalization and social media have made the world smaller, more connected and infinitely more competitive. The world has changed. Have you? If you dont have the package that will take you to the next level of your career, you need to reinvent your personal brand.

Why do some ideas break out and others fade away? What causes people to become so excited about a product that they can’t wait to tell their friends? How can an idea be communicated so that it catches fire in people’s imaginations?

Brandingpays Hardcover – 15 January 2013

by Sam Horn

Hello, My Name Is Awesome: How to Create Brand Names That Stick Paperback – September 15, 2014

Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands 1st Edition

by Alexandra Watkins Every year, 6 million companies and more than 100,000 products are launched. They all need an awesome name, but many (such as Xobni, Svbtle, and Doostang) look like the results of a drunken Scrabble game.

“When everybody zigs, zag,” says Marty Neumeier in this fresh view of brand strategy. ZAG follows the ultra-clear “whiteboard overview” style of the author’s first book, THE BRAND GAP, but drills deeper into the question of how brands can harness the power of differentiation.

Creative Strategy and the Business of Design Paperback – June 14, 2016

Logo Modernism (English, French and German Edition) (German) Hardcover – September 3, 2019

By Douglas Davis

By Jens Müller, R. Roger Remington

Remaining relevant as a creative professional takes more than creativity--you need to understand the language of business. The problem is that design school doesn’t teach the strategic language that is now essential to getting your job done.

Modernist aesthetics in architecture, art, and product design are familiar to many. we recognize a time of vast technological advance which affirmed the power of human beings to reshape their environment and to break, radically, from the conventions or constraints of the past. Less wellknown, but no less fascinating, is the distillation of modernism in graphic design.

By Marty Neumeier

groupisd.com

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Thinking with Type, 2nd revised and expanded edition: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students

Careerkred: 4 Simple Steps to Build Your Digital Brand and Boost Credibility in Your Career Paperback – 4 April 2017

By Charles Doyle

By Ryan Holiday Are you looking to change your career but have been told: “You don’t have the experience?” If so, CareerKred provides you with the step-by-step guide you need to build a brand online that will help you demonstrate your expertise online and boost credibility in your career.

Our all time best selling book is now available in a revised and expanded second edition.

Thinking with Type is the definitive guide to using typography in visual communication, from the printed page to the computer screen

Branding: In Five and a Half Steps

By Michael Johnson Michael Johnson is one of the world’s leading graphic designers and brand consultants. His studio, johnson banks, is responsible for the rebranding of many notable clients, including Virgin Atlantic, Think London, BFI, Christian Aid, and MORE TH>N, and he has garnered a plethora of awards in the process.

Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s

By Ray Kroc, Robert Anderson Few entrepreneurs can claim to have radically changed the way we live, and Ray Kroc is one of them. His revolutions in food-service automation, franchising, shared national training, and advertising have earned him a place beside the men and women who have founded not only businesses, but entire empires.

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions…and Created Plenty of Controversy

By Leigh Gallagher This is the remarkable behind-the-scenes story of the creation and growth of Airbnb, the online lodging platform that has become, in under a decade, the largest provider of accommodations in the world.

Identity Designed: The Definitive Guide to Visual Branding Hardcover – January 22, 2019

By David Airey Ideal for students of design, independent designers, and entrepreneurs who want to expand their understanding of effective design in business, Identity Designed is the definitive guide to visual branding.

Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma By Duncan Clark Built

An engrossing insider’s account of how a teacher built one of the world’s most valuable companies - rivaling Walmart and Amazon - and forever reshaped the global economy.

In just a decade and a half, Jack Ma, a man from modest beginnings who started out as an English teacher, founded Alibaba and built it into one of the world’s largest companies, an e-commerce empire on which hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers depend. Alibaba’s $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the largest global IPO ever.

Start your own f*cking brand Book English

By Maria Erixon Maria Erixon founded the denim brand Nudie Jeans with Joakim Levin, her husband at the time, in 2001. Today the company has annual sales of over SEK 400 million; it is one of Sweden’s bestknown international brands and a global lodestar in sustainable fashion. The book offers a unique insight into the company’s journey, successes and setbacks.