BrandKnew December 2022

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Dear friends

The end of the year is upon us and thankfully we are ending it on a much better note than we were at the beginning of the year when we were still feeling the pandemic and its econoclusterfuck.

The New Year should bring in new tidings and as we look ahead with hope, what you can look forward to in this issue is bagfuls of usable, soakable, shareable content. We take a leap to talk about how Space Advertising could be the next big thing in advertising. We also bring to the fore the often overlooked but vitally important relationship between status and marketing. The feature “Branding is Expecting; Marketing is Parenting”, clearly lays down the guard rails for the often overlapped verticals. The only way brands and marketers can drive impact and purpose is by getting out of the comfort zone- we talk about here in this edition. Yes, we are all aware of the 7 Wonders of the World, so we are not featuring it here but what we have done is to take up the Seven Wonders of Branding, it will be worth a read for brand guardians and brand owners alike. A.I is the thing, the next Big Thing and probably the Next Biggest Thing- we offer a guide to Survive the AI revolution that will hit the marketing and branding shores incessantly in the times to come. It was imperative for us to take a look at how TikTok remains a favorite for brands and marketers in spite of all the geo political dramas that it is going through. Understand some of that here in this issue.

There is ample more to dig into, soak in, savour and action and I leave you to do just that. For the next year and beyond my very best to you and yours. See you in the New Year.

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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: Suresh Babu Technology & Web Enabler: Vyanky Charakpalli

Social Media Outreach: Pooja Chhabda

SEO Advocate: Santhosh Rakonda

Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran

Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher

Chief Strategy Director: Rishi Mohan

Getting Out of the Comfort Zone: How Brands and Marketers Can Drive Impact

by Chris Celletti

It’s an oft-cited statistic, one that comes up often probably because of how staggering it is. Three quarters of brands could disappear overnight, and consumers wouldn’t care. This stark realization is one of the key drivers of why brands can no longer just focus on creating an image. In the past, when media scarcity intersected with attention abundance, a brand could focus its marketing on broad image making. But now that paradigm has flipped—we have abundant media outlets which results in a scarcity of attention. This means that brands have to do more. They have to make an impact.

This was the foundation for Ogilvy’s recent panel at Advertising Week New York, which featured two leaders who are pushing their brands to go beyond rote image making and towards driving impact. And both happen to be women who are doing so in male-dominated industries.

Ogilvy’s Global Chief Marketing & Growth Officer Philip Heimann moderated a discussion at Advertising Week NY with Ann Mukherjee, Chairman and CEO of Pernod Ricard and Jessica Thor, Director of Brand Strategy at Audi of America.

“Impact” is a term that can mean different things to different brands. For Audi, Thor believes that the brand’s values and purpose are aligned with the idea of impact.

“How do we take our platform, how do we take what we do and what’s authentic to our brand and the products we sell, and how do we move humanity forward?” Thor said, noting that doing so requires a company to step back and “open the aperture” to find blindspots.

For Mukherjee, impact lies in profitability, sustainability, and share growth. “Profitability, because consumers then think the brand is worth paying for,” Mukherjee said. Sustainable means, overtime, so you’re building a relationship. And share, because you’re better than the competition.”

And in order to achieve those goals, Mukherjee says you need to be a brand that people don’t just want to buy, but want to buy into. “If you want profitable, sustainable share growth, you better have a brand that speaks to the people you want,” she says.

A term that often comes up when people think about brand

impact is “purpose”. But the panel agreed with Heimann, who noted that purpose is “another overused term in our industry.” It’s not that purpose is meaningless or that a brand shouldn’t have a purpose, but that, as Mukherjee noted, “people confuse purpose with altruism.” A brand’s purpose shouldn’t be some high and mighty ideal, but rather crucially about the people who interact with and buy into the brand. “Connecting the consumer with the brand’s purpose, that’s the key,” she said, offering the example of Harley-Davidson, whose purpose should be something akin to letting rebels live life out loud.

Thor said that a company like Audi is one that’s driven by its purpose—moving humanity forward—and that results in authenticity. She also pointed out a core problem with the concept of brand purpose, being that it can be tough for brands to differentiate themselves through their purpose. In an industry like automotive, almost every brand has a similar purpose.

Given that, the most important thing for brands and marketers to remember is that impact relies on creativity. It is the lifeblood of brands and the only way they can truly

differentiate themselves and become something that people want to buy into and align themselves with.

Thor and Mukherjee both agreed that marketing today can only drive impact if it pushes brands and companies and brings them out of their comfort zones. Mukherjee ended the session with an impassioned plea to the agencies and marketers in attendance.

“I think everyone in the ad industry... when you hear your client say, ‘I want more for less or more for same,’ and they start squeezing you, and it’s all about productivity and make it happen—turn around and say ‘bulls---’. That’s not what it’s about, it’s about creativity. So when you hear all that stuff, put it to the side, that’s when you dial up your creativity button. Be brave and be bold and push us out of our comfort zone, because if you don’t do that. We’re done.”

Writer, editor, and communications professional with experience developing and driving thought leadership, editorial, and marketing content across multiple platforms to the right audiences.

HOW AGENCIES WILL BE RESHAPED BY MIDSIZE BRANDS

By Stanton Kawer

As creative businesses, agencies naturally fixate on Web3, the metaverse, retail media, interactive ads, even AI, while the top 200 advertisers command their attention because they fund the most experimentation and highest production values. Yet agency growth depends on meeting the intensifying needs of the middle market, the growing swath of companies with challenger mindsets and revenues of between $100 million and $1 billion. With 350,000 companies, 53 million employees and more than one-third of the gross domestic product, they’re bedrock for the economy and our industry.

Unlike big brands for which the conventional agency playbook was developed, middle marketers are often redefining their companies as they grow. They’re reorienting from manufacturing to marketing mindsets, inventing new ways to sell products, rapidly acquiring brands and perpetually repositioning to keep pace with their markets. And they’re doing it with fewer resources (data and people to do scenario planning) than established competitors. The upshot: Middle marketers can’t be wrong as often, afford any waste or justify an iterative strategy. They need to make fewer, bigger bets that pay off. To do it in the years ahead, they’ll need a new level of speed and orchestration to achieve systemic solutions. Often the real issue is designing an approach that will solve a complex business problem; what’s really needed is to organize around what will work on the many levels of B2B2C. For example, midsize brands that now dominate consumer products need agencies to supply more business sophistication than for CPG giants that have massive, leadingedge marketing teams and more established connections between distribution, retail, e-commerce and consumer research departments.

These marketers’ need for business solutions that transcend communications disciplines will usher in critical shifts in what agencies provide and how we organize:

Solve the orchestration problem

As middle marketers hire more specialists, they need to manage more agencies. Yet they lack the resources to make everyone work together to solve more than audience capture;

they’re already overstretched by the rising complexity of business, an avalanche of data and the intensifying demand of measurement. When they set up integrated agency teams, they exacerbate the overwhelm and invite competition. Agencies can solve the problem by orchestrating internally, either within one or several collaborating shops—so clients can hone business strategy rather than juggle resources.

Differentiate on business strategy

Rather than creative, the key service and differentiation will be business strategy—the understanding of clients’ businesses applied to interlocking components of marketing. Agencies need to solve for a multilayered business dynamic, not just an audience dynamic. It’s not enough to plan across the span of marketing communications. Agencies need to look through both customer and consumer lenses across the continuum of a client’s business, addressing product assortment, supply chain, distribution, packaging and promotion. Emphasize continuity—and make it count Continuity is best informed by multifaceted teams that stay consistent across a client’s business. Teamwork over time broadens specialists’ vision beyond their individual crafts. So, a creative director intuitively relates to a client’s priority retail channels and customers. A media director incorporates trade marketing needs and programs into the strategy. And agency leadership helps frame the brand’s five-year business plan.

The industry has called for agencies to play a bigger game for several years now. The unmet needs of most marketers amid economic headwinds sets the stage for a higher-order expertise that business leaders can appreciate. Systemic vision also gives an agency more power in the critical components of marketing because its teams can approach creative, media, ecommerce, and promotion from the perspective of how each effort drives the total business.

The next few years will be a crucial time for middle marketers. As they go, so goes our economy. Their need for a more complete, systemic approach to business building will create the new dividing line in the agency business.

& Stephanie

Spritzer and Stephanie Cartin were pioneers when they started their social media business in 2011. Not just because the medium was relatively new, but also because they were one of the few women-owned startups in the industry. That’s why, today, they use their social media savvy to build a support network that inspires female entrepreneurs of all ages. And with Mastercard’s Digital Doors program, these Citi Small Business clients can further amplify their digital presence. So businesses like Courtney & Stephanie’s can thrive in the digital world while they’re busy impacting the real world. Because their business is much more than the services they provide.

Branding is Expecting; Marketing is Parenting

by Deroy Peraza

In the nonprofit sector, the various functions of communication often get blurred, especially when it comes to branding and marketing. While related and interdependent, these are entirely different stages of communication that require different approaches.

Because I love a metaphor, I want to look at how these two stages relate to each other in a way many of you may be able to relate to. I’ll be drawing from two areas of personal experience— I am a father of three kids, and I lead a design studio that has guided dozens of nonprofits through the process of branding (or rebranding). After many years of playing both of these roles in parallel, I started noticing some striking similarities between expecting and nurturing children and expecting and nurturing brands.

Branding is Like Expecting

You and your partner have decided that you are ready to try to have a baby. It feels like the right moment in your life to take the leap, and you are determined.

When it comes to your nonprofit, you and the communications team are anxiously and eagerly embarking on the process of growing and nurturing an organizational brand. You’ve secured internal buy-in, you’ve identified your stakeholder team, and you’ve got a budget ready to go. You’re a ball of emotions. You feel scared, expectant, hopeful! You’re entering uncharted territory and you know it will change your future. Already, you feel the weight of enormous responsibility on your shoulders. The journey will be long. Nine months seems like forever— and also like an impossibly short time for all the things that need to line up to pull this off. You have so much to learn, and you immediately feel overwhelmed by the situation, so

you seek comfort and support.

First, you seek advice from your close ones. What will the process look like? What lies ahead? What should you look out for? Who should you talk to? Some of their responses are helpful, others just confuse you further and give you agita. But you want to be as prepared as possible for the endeavor that lies ahead of you.

Your research and the more knowledgeable advice givers help you realize that there are experts who have been through this a million times and know all the ins and outs.

For both expecting parents and brand managers, deciding on a team that provides the right mix of coaching, emotional care, and subject-matter expertise will be one of your first big decisions. These professionals are there to guide you through the process: to bring clarity to the surface, to help you and your team through the wondrous moments and the anxious ones, to be at your side when your brand is born, and to provide ongoing support beyond that. Trusting you’re in good hands will allow you to breathe a huge sigh of relief.

First Trimester: Brand Strategy

The first three months are full of new milestones. This is real! It’s happening. It’s all slowly taking shape. It’s really intense at times, but the progress is palpable, meaningful. It’s so exhilarating to imagine the future. This newborn will be the quintessential reflection of everything that you stand for in the world— so no pressure!

Throughout the brand strategy phase, you and your team will reflect deeply and have discussions together that you’ve never had the opportunity to have in earnest. You’ll reconcile different perspectives, and you’ll align on the values you’ll want to instill in your baby from day one. You’ll also realize

how much your work matters to your people— how deep, complex, and impressive it is. Ultimately, guided by your organization’s values and the expertise of your agency partner, everything will begin to crystalize.

Second Trimester: Verbal and Visual Identity

Everyone knows you’re expecting and has paid you a visit to share memories, to commemorate this landmark moment. These stakeholders in your life journey have witnessed so much. They provide a wealth of knowledge— some of it validating, some of it humbling, some of it eye-opening. Coupled with what you’ve learned so far, things are starting to come into focus, and you can identify some key learnings. You’re feeling better about how things are progressing. You’re starting to see fuzzy, abstract pictures that help you imagine what your child is going to look like, and you’ve downloaded a baby name app to start brainstorming. Your core brand idea and creative brief will anchor the work moving forward and help you imagine what your brand will ultimately look and sound like. They will serve as the foundation for the verbal and visual identity design phase of the journey.

Third Trimester: Building Out Your Brand and Preparing for Launch

You’re in the homestretch now. You’re now at a point when your new brand is almost fully developed— the strategy and idea are clearly reflected in a strong verbal and visual identity. You’re convinced your baby waved a peace sign at you with their tiny fingers in the latest sonogram. You’ve gotten to see some convincingly real 3D renderings that help you picture what they’ll look like someday. You can’t wait for the world to be able to see what you’ve gotten to see so far!

Delivery Day: Launching Your New Brand

But first, you must prepare for delivery day. You pack your bag with all the essentials: comfy pillow, changes of clothes, a good book, a tightly designed brand guide, and all the templates you need to breathe life into your new brand. You even put together a new website to share this special moment with everyone you know. You’ve done all your last minute quality assurance to make sure everything is ship-shape. You’re also ready to tell the world! You’ve queued up your social media launch posts and scheduled the newsletter blast you’re going to send to the thousands of people on your mailing list once your baby is born. Contractions start kicking in. Let the brand rollout begin. This kid is ready for the world!

Marketing is Like Parenting

Congratulations! You have a healthy new brand with curly toes, big cheeks, and real loud pipes. Everyone you’ve shared images with has swooned. Your team is so proud and so invested in what you’ve made together. You feel more synergy than you ever have before.

Then you realize you have to teach this baby how to do everything. Factory settings are limited to crying, sleeping, and waste removal. Walking, talking, drinking, eating,

thinking, strong values, empathy, making a living— that’s all up to you now. Buckle up: It took you nine months just to get to the starting line. Now that you have this baby, what are you going to teach them?

How are you going to guide them as they evolve and grow?

Your new brand will help focus your team’s culture and communication like never before. It will inspire your people to publish more content and share more ideas. It will help you attract new funders and talent. But accomplishing these things will require consistent, careful stewardship. Your new brand is the tool your organization has been waiting for. You and your team now have to make sure it’s always a living brand that never forgets what you stand for.

How will you leverage it to continue building on the ideals at the heart of your organization? How will it inform people about your work, and inspire them to support it? How will your new brand help you rally and strengthen your community? How will you use it to help you change the world?

You have a big responsibility ahead of you to shepherd this newborn through the world, but the potential is endless. Let the parenting fun begin.

You Can’t Have One Without the Other

My years as a parent have taught me the importance of having everything we communicate to our kids be rooted in a clear, consistent, shared understanding of what we value most. When we veer off and behave in unexpected ways, they spot and question it immediately.

Some nonprofits pay little attention to branding, thinking their dollars are better spent on marketing— or, they speed through a surface-level rebranding effort that ignores the absence of internal alignment and clarity about how you communicate your work. These organizations run all kinds of siloed campaigns and events without a strategic or visual foundation. Their communication ends up feeling inconsistent and dispersed. Their teams waste precious time and energy searching in the dark for a unifying idea and tone to guide their work.

Others invest resources and energy in a rebrand, but lack the discipline and long-term commitment to communicate it to the world and truly leverage their investment.

Branding— and I promise this is my last swing at the metaphor— takes a village. Your team, your board and funders, your community, and a group of experienced and compassionate professionals who can shepherd your organization safely and confidently through the process. We are those professionals, your designated care team. If you’re in the early stages of this life-changing experience for your organization, we should talk right away.

Marketing is the expression of your organization’s DNA, as it is encoded in your brand. It has the potential to enhance and activate your organization’s behavior. And, like parenting, it doesn’t ever really stop, not even when your nonprofit has reached maturity and is succeeding in living up to its mission.

What’s the Secret to Successful Innovation?

By Elissaveta M. Brandon

Bhutan’s new slogan and logo blurs the line between tourism campaign and national identity.

It’s 2022, and everything is a brand: companies, people, and even countries. After Peru, Estonia, and Japan, the latest example in the latter category comes from a tiny mountain kingdom in the Himalayas. But what does it even mean to brand a country, and does every country need a brand?

After more than two years behind closed doors, Bhutan has reopened its borders for tourists. To mark the occasion, the country unveiled a new national identity designed to inspire citizens and foreign visitors alike—and justify a new Sustainable Development Fee that’s gone up from $65 a day to $200. Designed by London agency MMBP & Associates,

the brand centers around one word, “Believe,” and the visual identity reflects the country’s character and history through a kaleidoscope of traditional symbols rendered in bold and modern colors.

For the uninitiated, nation branding, or place branding, is all about using corporate branding techniques to promote countries. Tourism is the most obvious expression of that practice, but in this era of globalization, nation branding is also used to attract capital and talent, or to boost a country’s perceived prestige.

The practice dates back to the 1990s, when its inventorand former advertising executive Simon Anholt, defined it as the sum of people’s perceptions of a country across industries like tourism, immigration, culture, and people. In recent years, the practice has taken off to a point where nation brands now get ranked by a variety of institutions like the AnholtIpsos Nation Brands Index (Germany topped the charts in 2021, suggesting that respondents felt positive about buying German products, investing in German businesses, or about the German government’s work to fight poverty).

Today, a growing number of countries, cities, and even neighborhoods have embarked on branding and rebrand exercises, from Japan to New Zealand to the Republic of Tatarstan. In some cases, a rebrand can be reduced to a simple logo or slogan; in others, it can become a full-on tourism strategy. But at its core, branding is an attempt to shift perceptions for one particular purpose or another (but more on that later).Some branding strategies, like Scotland’s “Best Small Country in the World,” last a few years then die out. Others, like Amsterdam’s “I amsterdam” have become so popular that the city had to temporarily remove the iconic “I amsterdam” sign after it caused mass tourism in the city’s Museum Square.

The Bhutan Believe brand is actually a rebrand. Aside from its rich biodiversity and lush nature, Bhutan is known for its “Gross National Happiness”index as well as its “high value, low volume” approach to tourism. For years, Bhutan promoted its tourism as part of a “destination brand” that would set the tone for potential tourists (it was called “Happiness is a Place.”) In 2018, the country adopted a new strategy called “Made in Bhutan,” which ended up being less of an identity and more of an attempt by the Bhutan Department of Trade to position Bhutan as an export country.

Bhutan’s attempts to rebrand itself highlight the challenges of the process. Like many countries, Bhutan is more than a tourist destination, despite its dependency on tourism for its economic health. The very nature of a branding exercise will inevitably flatten a country’s complexity to fit one particular context (most often this is tourism). That’s why MMBP & Associates spent the past four months dreaming up a cohesive identity that reflects the country more holistically.

Julien Beaupré Ste-Marie, the founder of MMBP, says the driving force for Bhutan’s rebrand was two-fold and targeted both local and international audiences. Tourism was Bhutan’s second highest source of revenue before the pandemic brought it to a standstill. Now that the country has reopened, the rebrand is meant to convey the country’s renewed commitment to sustainable travel and justify the higher Sustainable Development Fee that comes with it.

Before the pandemic every tourist traveling to Bhutan paid a daily fee of $200 to 250 for an all-inclusive package that had to be booked through a tour operator. Only $65 of that went to the country’s sustainable development fund, while the rest went towards food, accommodation, transport, etc. Now, tourists can enter the country independently, but they have to pay a daily fee of $200 per person as part of their visa application, exclusive of food, accommodation, and other extras. This means that visitors are now paying more for less, so part of the rebrand was about communicating

why the fee that has essentially tripled. (Those reasons are laid out on a new website created by MMBP as part of the rebrand, where visitors are informed that the full $200 now goes to the sustainable development fund.)

Tourism aside, Beaupré SteMarie says the country has been experiencing a significant “brain drain” over the past few years as more young Bhutanese left in search of better opportunities abroad. (The trend appears to have peaked in 2018, but was still above average in 2021, when about 16,000 Bhutanese were living abroad, or 2% of the population.) In response, Bhutan has launched a series of education programs like the country’s first blockchain engineering program and a large scale upskilling program to train young people in fields like silversmithing, coding, or storytelling. As such, the new brand was designed to inspire young Bhutanese to move back, or never leave in the first place. “The brief for the brand was to be this self-fulfilling prophecy of engaging youth and renewed love and appreciation for the country,” says Beaupré Ste-Marie

The rebrand is aspirational at best, naive at worst, but it brings up an important question about the validity of branding in a world where every aspect of our life is a play to make money. Over the past two decades, many war-torn countries like Croatia, Columbia, or even Rwanda have used branding to shift public perceptions. In the process, they’ve become booming tourist destinations. But does every country need a brand?ADVERTISING

That depends on the motivations. “Almost every country in the world has a brand,” says Keith Dinnie, a professor of marketing at the University of Dundee School of Business in the U.K., who has written several books about place branding. “Unfortunately, you often get political leaders who see their neighboring countries have a branding campaign and they want one, but it’s not based on specific objectives.”

There are several triggers that often inspire countries to invest in a rebrand; it could be a failed campaign that didn’t resonate with locals (like Scotland’s “Best Small Country in the World” campaign, which Dinnie says ruffled a lot of feathers among locals and was later replaced with the comically bland “Welcome to Scotland”). Another reason might be a change in regime where “someone comes in and feels the need to do something new,” says Dinnie. Or, in the case of Bhutan, the government wants to rebuild the economies after the pandemic. But in the end, these reasons only make sense if they’re supported by clear objectives, like attracting tourists, foreign investment, or even international students for higher education.

Naturally, most rebrands come at a heavy cost (especially considering that money often comes from taxpayers pockets). Dinnie says it’s hard to prove whether any of them lead to more tourists, but the causal link between branding and investment is easier to track. He cites Great Britain’s socalled Great Campaign, which by some accounts has brought in over 4.5 billion pounds since it launched in 2011, by increasing exports and attracting foreign investment. Beaupré Ste-Marie declined to share the cost of the rebrand, and it’s too soon to say if the Believe campaign will have a tangible impact. I suppose for now, the only thing that people can do is “believe” that it will.

Digital Empathy: Can Virtual Interactions Create Meaningful Connections?

By DieuCam Nguyen and Emily Poon

How these brands have built advocacy into their businesses

By Kabir Ahuja

Leading brands are well-oiled marketing machines. You can’t become a household name without it. But a select subset of brands are taking that expertise and the size of their platforms, and using them to bring awareness to important issues or raise money for critical causes.

Of the 74 Brands That Matter 2022 honorees, 18 of them were notable for the extent to which they’ve married their brand ethos and cause marketing, backing initiatives and organizations that are tackling everything from racial equity and suicide prevention to anti-Asian violence and conservation. BLK used a classic song to encourage its users to get vaccinated against COVID-19, WeTransfer’s efforts to give underrepresented artists a platform earned one of its collaborators an Academy Award, and Omsom overcame decades of xenophobic sentiment to clear MSG’s name and get it Whole30 approved.

These are the brands that used their unique appeal to find a natural fit with the causes they championed.

AFLAC

Repped by one of the world’s most iconic mascots, Aflac used its duck to help highlight the vulnerability that affects families affected by sudden medical events with an animated short film. The Park Bench debuted in January alongside Aflac’s Close the Gap initiative, which seeks to educate consumers about medical debt and its work to cover costs associated with medical issues not covered by health insurance. These efforts coincide with an expansion of Aflac’s CareGrants program, specifically in 11 states that over-index in medical debt.

BLK—AFFINITY APP FOR MATCH GROUP

Who says public health can’t be sexy? Recognizing that it had the attention of one of the groups least likely to get vaccinated—Black adults under 40—dating app BLK used its platform to cut through the usual COVID-19 vaccination information, launching a campaign showing that dating and sex can be more fun for everyone when all parties are vaccinated. The Match Group-owned app reworked Juvenile’s legendary 1999 anthem “Back That Thang Up,” into “Vax That Thang Up.” The PSA version, with the lyrics, “when we

got the shot we gonna be romancing” and “feeling freaky all night you need to vax that thang up,” quickly became one of the most viral campaigns of 2021. The campaign was a win for BLK, which saw a 30% increase in new users, while its overall brand awareness nearly doubled to 64%.

BLK encourages vaccinated users to add a “vaxified” badge to their profiles, while unvaccinated users can use the app to find their nearest vaccine location. —Jess Bursztynsky

COLGATE

Looking to emphasize the relationship between good oral health and overall well-being, Colgate rolled out its “Know Your OQ” campaign in February, letting people visit a website to evaluate their oral health quotient, or OQ. The 10-question assessment garnered impressive metrics, including a 71% completion rate and an average visit length of 3 minutes and 9 seconds. The Colgate-Palmolive brand’s impact assessment also found that after visiting KnowYourOQ.com, there was a 33% increase in knowledge among participants that poor oral health can affect other areas of health.

COLOR OF CHANGE

Online racial justice organization Color of Change has been busy working to remove anti-Black racism from various industries with a dual-pronged approach of working with institutions while also helping everyday people take action. Its #ChangeIndustries effort grew in the past year with the rollout of #ChangeFashion, which included sharing the first inclusion rider for the fashion industry. The organization also commemorated the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor by hosting its Week of Action, which saw each day feature different programming on such topics as Black joy, public safety, and corporate accountability.

GOLD HOUSE

As an organization focused on helping the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities be more represented culturally and in business, Gold House was one of the first organizations to share GoFundMe pages around #StopAsianHate amid an uptick in reports of racism against AAPI people. It built on that in the past year, launching Gold House Futures, a fund that provides $500,00 in grants for nonprofits, short films, and recordings and live performances—all backed by such big names as Netflix and Spotify. Besides consulting throughout the year on 36 major films and TV shows, Gold House debuted its A100 list, honoring 100 impactful Asians and Pacific Islanders, generating 22.7 million video views.

HUBSPOT

When customer-relationship management platforms set out to build brand awareness, they often run up against the difficulty of making a marketing push of original content that might not transcend the B2B world. So HubSpot is leaving it to the professionals—and sponsoring them. HubSpot Creators is a program meant to help emerging podcasters grow their audience while providing them payment and content support. Podcasters who achieve a certain scale can join the HubSpot Podcast Network, where some podcasts have seen

listenership grow 76% on average since joining the network, launched in 2021.

MOSSY OAK

Camouflage apparel brand Mossy Oak has long had a relationship focused on nature, with various conservation brands that include Nativ Nurseries, which grows trees for wildlife forage, and Gamekeepers—publisher of the quarterly Journal for Wildlife Stewardship and its accompanying podcast and TV show. But the company went a step further earlier this year, launching its Wild Turkey Conservation Stamp, a $15 piece of collectible artwork whose proceeds fund wild turkey habitats and population research through Mossy Oak’s Gamekeeper Grants Program. In 24 hours, the stamp raised $25,000, whose allocation the brand will document with videos, photos, and editorial projects.

NATIONAL WOMEN’S LAW CENTER

Alongside its mission to fight for justice on behalf of women of color, LGBTQ people, and low-income women with families, the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) has undertaken several campaigns to highlight issues like child work and sexual violence. Its #WeAReTheBackbone activation, launched in concert with National Child Care Provider Appreciation Day, highlighting the importance of childcare providers in keeping kids healthy and helping parents return to work. NWLC also supported survivors of sexual violence with “We, As Ourselves,” a program that allows Black survivors to share their stories and resources with others.

NOWTHIS

With the proliferation of video platforms designed to engage younger viewers, one danger is that organizations will be light on substance and possibly even facts. But NowThis, Vox Media’s video news platform, has prioritized going deep on the news and pursuing stories that might otherwise go unreported. In the past year, NowThis spotlighted women leaders addressing issues of mental health and climate change with its Vital Voices of 2021 event. It also has pursued stories about race, including Uprooted, a podcast and docuseries that examines the unsolved hanging of a young Black man in Maryland in 1986, produced in partnership with Discovery+.

NYC PRIDE

The nation’s largest—and original—Pride event got a brand makeover—both cultural and cosmetic. With the 2021 event, NYC Pride barred police from the annual march until 2025, and created programming that focused on BIPOC members of the LGBTQ community. Following it up, with new executive director Sandra Pérez at the helm of parent organization Heritage of Pride, the NYC Pride March debuted a new logo in early 2022. The flag emblem starts with a rainbow gradient but is meant to be adaptive and able to feature the colors of various LGBTQ flags—including bisexual, transgender, and nonbinary—to better highlight the multitude of identities that the annual event seeks to celebrate.

Using its status as a cult-favorite purveyor of Asian condiments and starter packs for dishes, Omsom became a vocal advocate in 2021 for the oft-maligned MSG and against the anti-Asian sentiment that has long informed organizations, calling it an unhealthy product. Omsom’s advocacy bore fruit—at the end of the year, MSG became Whole30 approved, with the organization acknowledging Omsom as a key driver of the decision. That it was part of Omsom’s larger strategy, to provide products with cultural integrity while partnering with companies also led by LGBTQ women of color, underscores the brand’s overall ethos.

PANDA EXPRESS

Nearly 40 years after its founding, minority-owned American Chinese restaurant chain Panda Express continues to appeal to evolving tastes, having introduced a plant-based version of its signature dish, the original Orange Chicken entrée it began serving in 1987. Panda Express also continues to find ways to break new ground in its established tradition of philanthropy. Since its inception in 1999, the company’s Panda Cares unit has raised more than $305 million from customer donations and business partners to focus on children in need. Last year, inspired by increased conversations around race, chief brand officer Andrea Cherng had an idea to extend the charitable legacy of her parents: cofounders and co-CEOs, Andrew and Peggy Cherng. Since launching in May 2021 during Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage month, the Panda CommUnity Fund has contributed more than $2.3 million to support organizations that serve BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities. “We are a company founded by immigrants,” says Andrea. “We continue to look outward—how do we best serve our people and the broader community?” —Jay Woodruff

PAX

Long one of the most prestigious vaporizer brands in the cannabis space, Pax has taken the platform that comes with that position and used it to advocate for the people—largely people of color—who have been victims of the United States war on drugs. It has partnered with the Last Prisoner Project since the criminal justice reform organization started three years ago, and produced a short documentary series, The Human Toll: How the War on Cannabis Targeted Black America, which earned a CLIO award last year. 2021 also saw Pax undertake the Veterans Releaf Campaign, raising $85,000 for advocacy organization Weed for Warriors, and to support educational group Veterans Alliance for Holistic Alternatives.

QUEST FOR HEALTH EQUITY

As a brand most Americans only think about when they’re getting their blood drawn or urine tested, Quest Diagnostics moved to play a larger role in addressing health disparities in underserved communities when it established Quest for Health Equity at the end of 2020. Since then, the organization has partnered with religious leaders, health experts, and community organizations nationwide to push COVID-19 education, testing, and vaccination through Black religious organizations. Quest for Health Equity also worked to help Puerto Ricans with Long COVID, establishing the island’s first clinic focused specifically on Long COVID, helping more than 2,400 patients since opening in 2021.

SKULLCANDY

With a strong record on sustainability around electronics—it will recycle any headphone or earbud and give the sender a coupon for its products—Skullcandy also works closely with youth mental health and climate change organizations to support them. It partnered with To Write Love On Her Arms and Protect Our Winters on custom, limited-edition product collaborations and fundraising while also also supporting both with donations. On mental health, Skullcandy spotlighted various issues, including suicide prevention and World Mental Health Day, on its social channels, and it hosted headquarters events that brought legislators and brands together to discuss climate change.

THE TREVOR PROJECT

In the 24 years since its founding, The Trevor Project has become the world’s largest suicide prevention and mental health organization for LGBTQ youth. Its 24/7 free and confidential crisis call/text/chat service remains a cornerstone of its offering (fielding 200,000 contacts last year), but The Trevor Project still had a transformative 2021, which included implementing an AI-based tool to train 1,000 counselors, publishing 19 research briefs about LGBTQ youth and mental health, and rolling out a new brand identity for the first time in more than a decade. The organization also partnered with Lil Nas X during National Suicide Prevention and Awareness Month, naming him its first Suicide Prevention Advocate of the Year, earning The Trevor Project more than 570 million media impressions. That’s on top of the more than 4 million views of its “Football is for Everyone” PSA, produced in partnership with the NFL. These efforts are paying off, literally—the organization raised almost $22 million in 2021 from corporations while tripling the donations it received from individual donors. —Danica Lo

WEPRESENT BY WETRANSFER

WeTransfer’s digital art and editorial arm, WePresent, has reached new heights in the past year, most notably including by commissioning Riz Ahmed’s short film The Long Goodbye— which presents a post-Brexit dystopia in Britain and won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short, among 15 other awards. And though Ahmed was the most prominent creator featured on WePresent recently, he’s not the only one exploring ambitious projects for the platform, which works to showcase underrepresented voices via collaborations and brand partnerships—featuring more than 1,000 creatives in a year, including Marina Abramovic, FKA twigs, and Solange Knowles.

YVES SAINT LAURENT BEAUTY

Knowing that one in 3 women will experience intimate partner violence in their lifetime, Yves Saint Laurent Beauty spent much of 2021 and early 2022 taking its Abuse is Not Love program global, aiming to train 2 million people to recognize the signs of abusive relationships by 2030 (more than 130,000 have been trained so far). The brand is amplifying this message through academic publications, support for a growing roster of NGOs, and a campaign featuring Zoë Kravitz highlighting the warning signs of abuse. The campaign garnered 763 press articles and got more than half a million impressions on social media.

Why the metaverse?

By Fastcompany

As brands rush to stake their claim in the internet’s new frontier, many questions remain about what the metaverse is and isn’t. The most relevant question for business leaders, however, is why the metaverse is happening at all.

BY FASTCO WORKS

For quite some time, the metaverse has heralded computing’s fully immersive future, bringing our most valued experiences from real life into virtual spaces and bringing our most valued experiences from virtual into physical spaces. Long out of reach, the metaverse is at last under construction, as hardware, software, and assets converge to deliver immersive experiences that span art, education, entertainment, gaming, and beyond. As brands explore opportunities to expand with the metaverse, creators and businesses of every scale are eager to understand the kinds of content, messaging, storytelling, engagement, and commerce that will resonate with consumers in these new contexts. To advance this understanding, Meta and FastCo Works assembled four experts with decades of experience in building these worlds, augmenting human senses, and exploring the increasingly blurry lines between our time spent on and off the web. As we digest their unique insights on the current and future stakes of the metaverse, we’ll further anchor these insights in stories, examples and frameworks for business leaders to become pioneers in pursuit of this new frontier.

HOW WE GOT HERE ON THE CURRENT STATE OF THE METAVERSE

Sam Hamilton, head of community and events, the Decentraland Foundation:

In some ways, we are already living [in the metaverse]. We’re always on our smartphone, but it’s not a very human experience. I see a parallel digital universe that’s built on top of our physical universe, and that’s inside the metaverse, and in AR, and all combined together to make life…as far into science fiction as we’ve ever gone.

ON TAPPING CURRENT TECHNOLOGY TO CREATE NEW EXPERIENCES

Helen Papagiannis, founder of XR Goes Pop and author of Augmented Human: How Technology Is Shaping the New Reality:

The technology will always continue to improve, but it’s really about designing great experiences today with the existing technology and evolving those experiences in the future. This has consistently been my approach to AR since I first began building prototypes in 2005. It’s never really been about the technology; it’s always about the experiences.

WE ALREADY HAVE THE INTERNET — DO WE REALLY NEED THE METAVERSE?

Nada Stirratt, VP, Americas, Meta:

The metaverse is not a replacement for the internet but rather the next iteration of it, which will make the time we are already spending online more realistic, more personal, and more immersive. While we won’t occupy the metaverse every moment of every day, it is what we see as the next computing platform: a future that extends beyond just what fits in the palm of your hand or view on the screen, where we can interact freely in three dimensions.

proficient in these new technologies in order to operate in this future 3D space. That’s why we’re offering support for NFTs on Instagram and Facebook and are working to make it easier for brands to co-create experiences in AR and VR with technical creators.

BUILDING AT THE EDGE OF INNOVATION

NADA STIRRATT,

AMERICAS, META

WHAT EXACTLY WILL AN IMMERSIVE LIFE LOOK LIKE?

Nada Stirratt: Wendy’s Wendyverse, the first restaurant branded experience in Horizon Worlds, is a great example of what immersive life looks like right now, and it gives a glimpse into how these experiences will evolve. Originally launched as part of their 2022 NCAA March Madness campaign, the Wendyverse lets users meet up with friends, shoot hoops, play other interactive games, or find hidden Easter eggs… it has since expanded to become the hub for a whole new set of experiences such as Frosty Village, Sunrise City, and Spicy Nugg Island to keep the momentum going.

Sam Hamilton: We’ve got something planned for next year, [like]the ARGs of the early aughts that sent people on real-world quests to win prizes. Only we’re going to do it in the metaverse, in the physical world, in AR, and in Web 2.0. There’s tremendous potential for crossover between what’s happening in the metaverse, the physical world and the bridge in between.

Setting up shop

HOW DO YOU BRING YOUR BRAND INTO THE METAVERSE TODAY?

Sam Hamilton:

At the moment, we’ve got brands activating literally every week. Last week, we activated Netflix in Decentraland. Snapple and Jose Cuervo also did really good experiences. A lot of these things are quest based…the current trend is to take people on a narrative journey. Tell them a story that somehow enlightens them to something about your brand, and then give them something for completing the quest.

Nada Stirratt: While AR / VR and NFTs rightfully get a lot of buzz as the building blocks of the metaverse, they are also important technologies in furthering customer relationships. It’s smart for everyone—brands and consumers alike—to become

ON

THE TENSIONS DRIVING THE METAVERSE FORWARD Sam Hamilton:

For me, Decentraland is a philosophical project more than anything else. It’s a reaction to an internet—which I feel that many people, including some CEOs, agree—is broken at the moment. It’s gone down a path that we didn’t dream of 20 years ago. And it’s in a place where, for a small amount of time, we have a window of change. Decentraland is owned by its users; it’s really important that they get to direct the way it goes.

ON THE FUTURE OF CREATIVE STORYTELLING Helen Papagiannis:

Augmented Reality is a new communication medium that evolves the way stories are told and shared. It’s about amplifying creativity and the human imagination. When creating with AR, my intention is always to elevate wonder and curiosity. It’s a medium that enables me to make what is invisible now visible.

ON THE FADING BOUNDARIES BETWEEN REAL AND VIRTUAL

Jim Witte, professor of sociology and anthropology, George Mason University:

The metaverse could bring harmony and synergy between online and physical worlds. I like to use the metaphor of recorded music. The digital files might be compressed and a bit “loss-y,” but they’re also reliable and consistent. Analog records have pops and clicks, but also have a real depth to their bandwidth that’s alive and quirky. Both have their respective advantages, and both, in the end, reflect human behavior.

CAN THE METAVERSE BE MORE EQUITABLE THAN

Jim Witte:

Maybe. We know where power and economic exploitation is—it’s not going to go away. You can’t wish it away. But you can think about ways within that framework to say, “What can we do to use this for good? To think about educational

“IT’S SMART FOR EVERYONE— BRANDS AND CONSUMERS ALIKE— TO BECOME PROFICIENT IN THESE NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN ORDER TO OPERATE IN THIS FUTURE 3D SPACE.”

VP,

“DONE WELL, THE METAVERSE COULD BE A POSITIVE FORCE FOR EQUITY, BRIDGING SOME OF THE DIVIDES THAT EXIST IN TODAY’S PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL SPACES. “ —NADA STIRRATT

THE PHYSICAL WORLD?

opportunities

Nada Stirratt:

Done well, the metaverse could be a positive force for inclusion and equity, bridging some of the divides that exist in today’s physical and digital spaces. It is critical that the metaverse is designed inclusively from its very inception. This will require representation and leadership from experts across academia, policy, and many other fields to develop technologies to inform future best practices and governance principles. The result will rest on equity: inclusion and accessibility, privacy and safety, economic opportunity and interoperability.

Setting up shop ADVANCING BRAND INNOVATION IN THE METAVERSE

Helen Papagiannis:

Louis Vuitton commissioned me to reimagine the iconic trunk in Augmented Reality in celebration of the brand’s bicentennial. My trunk is a window into the creative process, a vessel for imagination and innovation. It’s a future garden blooming with possibilities and also a nod to the past.

Nada Stirratt:

As in real life, people in the metaverse will want to be entertained, informed, and connected with the brands they value and trust. A great example of what this value exchange looks like in the metaverse is BMW Group’s MINIverse, a virtual racetrack in Horizon Worlds. Here, people can dress their avatars in fun new racing suits, race their friends, and have a little bit of fun—all in keeping with the freshness and irreverence of the MINI brand.

THE INTERNET OF TOMORROW ON THE EMERGENCE OF STANDARDS

Sam Hamilton:

It’s super complicated, because in this moment of innovation, lots of people have different ideas, and different ways to go. At some point there will be convergence, everything will come together, and people will start using standards. In the NFT art scene, you can show art in any of the big platforms that support NFTs, so that already happened, and it happened really seamlessly.

ON THE EXPANSION OF SENSES

Helen Papagiannis:

For the most part, Augmented Reality has been primarily a visual-based medium, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s possible to experience virtual worlds with our whole human sensorium including hearing, touch, smell, and even taste. When we move away from copying reality, AR will be liberated from the burden of simulating the real, with the creative doors—and senses—wide open to new modes of expression and invention.

ON LIVING BETWEEN WORLDS

Jim Witte:

It’s about thinking open-endedly about where the

boundaries of the metaverse are going to lie… And it’s going to control much more than our living rooms. A lot of spaces we’re going to be in are going to have aspects of the metaverse. The job is to figure out which of the good aspects we keep from each environment, from the tangible physical experience and the metaverse experience.

ON DEEPENING CONNECTION

Nada Stirratt:

As the internet gained mainstream adoption, it became an additive force in our everyday lives, offering new ways to connect with our communities and enhance our experiences IRL. The same will hold true for the metaverse. As it unfolds, it will tap innovation to create ways for these connections and experiences to flourish in deeper, even more immersive, ways, allowing individuals to elevate their time spent online and off.

SAM HAMILTON, HEAD OF COMMUNITY AND EVENTS, THE DECENTRALAND FOUNDATION

Building a case for building the metaverse Sam Hamilton:

Decentraland is built like a city. You can walk down the road. You can go to a music venue, and when the gig is finished, say, “Hey, who wants to come to the casino?” For me, its a world that exists, that you can traverse. You can go from one place to the next while enjoying serendipitous moments, where you meet a stranger on the street and they become a friend forever. This is what, for me, makes the magic.

Helen Papagiannis:

For me, over the past 17 years, its always been about storytelling. Virtual and augmented realities are currently led by visual experiences, but this doesn’t have to be the limit. How can we explore these new environments with all of our senses, and then explore the applications of this multisensory space to expand the scope of our communication and storytelling?

Jim Witte: The thing that’s really changed, compared to my earliest work in Second Life, is the technology. AI is becoming more sophisticated; environments are becoming more realistic; wearables are becoming less intrusive. In Second Life it was your keyboard that allowed you to move around. Now it’s your own body. What you do with that can take many forms.

Nada Stirratt:

Businesses must experiment like never before across people, products, and messaging to facilitate new relationships, create new experiences, and deepen consumer connection both in the here and now, and in the metaverse of tomorrow.

for people who may not have chances to see the world?”

“TELL THEM A STORY THAT ENLIGHTENS THEM TO SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR BRAND, AND THEN GIVE THEM SOMETHING FOR COMPLETING THE QUEST.”

ADVANCE TOMORROW’S MISSION

As a key partner in government innovation, we blend unparalleled mission understanding with emerging technology to help our clients modernize their organizations and integrate, innovate, and dominate at speed.

See our ideas in action at BoozAllen.com.

Space advertising could be the next big thing

By Benay Ozdemir

The Jetsons set the standard of what the future could look like, billboards in space might be the next big thing.

The futuristic concept brings questions about cost that could deter advertisers but the turnaround profits could really change the game in marketing. A study conducted by Russians from the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) demonstrated that “As unrealistic as it may seem, we show that space advertising based on 50 or more small satellites flying in formation could be economically viable.”

What is the science behind space advertising?

The report suggested that the advertisement would appear as a constellation of bright artificial stars formed into an image that can be observed in clear night sky for several minutes. Similar to drone light shows that have been popular in events. The report also outlined that the development of these missions have actually become a point of interest for a few space start-ups as this approach provides a global Earth coverage allowing the advertisement to regions of high-demands multiple times. Imagine seeing an ad at the same time as everyone from a different country in the sky?

How can this work?

Costs for rocket launches have one down alongside low-cost CubeSats allowing space to be more accessible. CubeSats are mini satellites that are a cost effective platform that are used for technology demonstrations, advanced mission concepts like constellations. They are equipped with sunreflecting sails as pixels which can be viewed from earth. The report takes into account the demographic of the audience suggesting that “the characteristics of the population parameters allows constructing a more realistic model of economic viability for advertising missions. Residents older than 15 years are considered to be the solvent audience.”

How much can space advertising make?

In the report, an example of a mission demonstrating images with magnitude of individual pixels will have the payback period of 33.7 days which means the formation will operate for 91.5 days. This accounts for the science in playing back light in space. The image can be performed 24 times which estimated a potential 24 contractors for the mission. The estimated net income in the report suggests about 111.6 million US dollars. But the cost in the advertisement is up to USD$65 highlighting that the ad will pay for itself and make $2 million of revenue everyday.

Science is resilient.

It can overcome diseases, create cures, and, yes, even beat pandemics.

It has the methodology and the rigor to withstand even the most arduous scrutiny.

It keeps asking questions and, until there’s a breakthrough, it isn’t done.

That’s why, when the world needs answers, we turn to science. Because in the end, Science will win. Breakthroughs that change patients’ lives

Learn more at www.pfizer.com

The Seven Wonders of Branding

By Tomasacker staff

Have you recently become brand saturated and blogged out? I sure have. In my desire to keep up with the evolving “body of knowledge,” I’ve been increasingly subjected to a bunch of babble about brands and branding. Everything from what a brand actually is to the critical importance of brand names and brand positioning. And it has been coming from everywhere: from authors and the media to academics and agencies. Here are my seven wonders of branding (as in, I wonder why these dated concepts still flourish in these postmodern times):

1. Positioning

Here’s how Ries and Trout defined positioning in their seminal book of the same name:

“The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what’s already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.”

And that may have worked well twenty-three years ago when product and service options were a fraction of what they are today and people were still influenced by propositions like: “We try harder.”

People today are better informed, well connected and extremely hard-nosed. We’ve been trained to be highly skeptical of any type of marketing claim. Which makes ours and era of action, not talk. We expect you to prove your pitch with new, exciting and relevant products, services and business models. We’re living in a marketplace driven by creativity and innovation. The concept of branding is a much more dynamic idea. Sticking to your knitting, and trying to persuade people with clever advertising and image-building campaigns, is a sure route to the retirement home.

2. A brand is a promise

This particular babble makes plain that a brand is an identifiable entity that makes specific promises of value. If this is true, then customers of the brand should be able to articulate those promises. Right? Because that’s how they differentiate between – and ultimately choose – brands. Isn’t that so? Uh huh. So what’s the unique brand promise of Nike? Nike what? Pick one: watch, golf ball, soccer shoes, sweatshirt. How about BMW? The Z4, 645 Ci Convertible, Mini Cooper? The brand promise of the NFL is different than the NBA, MLB, and NHL in what way precisely?

Forgetaboutit! A brand is NOT a promise (Please don’t tell me that people are buying the Mini because of the promise of German engineering. Most people think it’s a British car.). A brand is a performance. It’s about arousing people’s emotional drives through a unique expression of those emotional drives – with the cool design of a Mini, the enriching experience of a Starbucks, the cultural immersion of a Nike, etc.

3. Be consistent and repeat…repeat…repeat

The rationale behind this bit of jabber? The customer’s mind needs to be repeatedly exposed to a message (I’ve read everything from at least five times to nine plus) for it to cut through the marketing clutter. Plus the fact that repetition helps build familiarity, which in turn helps build credibility.

It is true that mere exposure to something results in a more positive attitude toward that thing. But running the same ad – or mailing the same piece – month after month is simply shallow and unimaginative. Like many of the impersonal, scripted remarks of service personnel. “How was your stay? We appreciate your business. We know you have a choice. Would you like fries with that?” Sure, an emotionally provocative message may touch a chord with a customer…

the first time. The tenth time, it touches a nerve. And that’s no way to build a relationship.

4. Top of mind awareness

This piece of brand wisdom is tied directly to the previous one and is closest to the dated, classical idea of branding. It goes like this: “If we can burn our name and proposition into our audiences’ minds, then when the desire arises they’ll automatically think of – and choose – us!” Brain autopilot. Click. Whirrr. I have news for you (perhaps). The age of branding as brainwashing is over. I can hear it now: “Come on, Tom. For habitual buying, which occurs when involvement is low and difference between brands is small, top of mind awareness is key.” You know, you may be right. Or maybe, low price is key. Either way, I wouldn’t want to take my customer relationships for granted and hope that my product or service category remains low involvement and undifferentiated.

Comic Jackie Mason once cracked about Starbucks’ business concept:

“If I said to you, I have a great idea for a whole new type of coffee shop. Instead of charging 60 cents for coffee, I’ll charge $2.50, $3.50, $4.50, and $5.50. Not only that, I’ll have no tables, no chairs, no water, no free refills, no waiters, no busboys, serve it in cardboard cups, and have the customer clean it up. Would you say to me, ‘That’s the greatest idea for a business I’ve ever heard! We can open these all over the world’? No, you’d put me right into a sanitarium.”

In fast-evolving markets, new kinds of competitors with different business models spring up all the time. So be aware (beware). Your product category could be the subject of Jackie’s next joke.

5. Personal branding

It was management guru Tom Peters who started the personal branding noise with an essay that appeared in Fast Company in 1997 under the title “The Brand Called You.” Peters wrote: “…think of yourself differently! You’re not an ‘employee’ of General Motors, you’re not a ‘staffer’ at General Mills, you’re not a ‘worker’ at General Electric or a ‘human resource’ at General Dynamics (ooops, it’s gone!) Forget the Generals! You don’t ‘belong to’ any company for life, and your chief affiliation isn’t to any particular ‘function’. You’re not defined by your job title and you’re not confined by your job description. Starting today you are a brand.”

With all due respect to Tom’s rant, he was right about one thing: In today’s rapidly changing world, jobs are NOT for life. But neither are companies, relationships or brands. In the article, Tom points to Arthur Anderson as a “model of the new rules of branding at the company and personal level.” Hey Tom! Ooops, they’re gone too!

Consultants and personal coaches have jumped all over this buzzword and have in essence rebranded Dale Carnegie–like success secrets as “Personal Branding.” With a little dedication (time and money), you too can become an Oprah, Madonna, Eminem or Donald Trump (although I’m not really sure why you’d want to be). Do yourself a favor. Dump

this self-involved concept and get back to being a caring, passionate, curious, human being. You’ll enjoy life a hell of a lot more, and—as a bonus—you’ll probably make more money in the process.

Take a look at Peter Jackson, the short, portly director of the “Lord of the Rings” megahit movies. Does he look like a recent graduate of a dress for success seminar to you? Cripes! He comes across more like one of Tolkien’s Middleearth characters. But he does have what success is all about: passion for the possible; sensitivity and caring for people; the willingness to try new things, to take risks, to learn and to grow; and a self-deprecating sense of humor…all of which I refer to as Sandbox Wisdom.

6. Brand inside

I understand this one, I simply don’t believe in it. The grounds for creating this brand adjective gibberish are that executives by and large ignore their internal audience (employees) when developing and executing branding campaigns (Hey CEO! It’s strategy, not a campaign). As a result, employees end up undermining the expectations set by the company.

So now we need a distinction to get executives to understand the importance of organizational alignment? Of getting everyone to live the brand? Or…do consultants need the distinction to position and sell their services? You know, I suppose one could also draw a distinction between the retail outlet outside and the retail outlet inside. That way, employees who work inside the store can be conditioned to rush past gum wrappers in the parking log on their way to their real jobs.

7. Brand logic (with a focus on USP, UVP or what ever you want to call it)

And last but not least on my notorious list, a return to rational, features and benefits marketing (Déjà vu all over again). A scientific sales mentality brimming with arguments, metrics, dollarization, etc. Irresistible logic. “How can you NOT be persuaded to choose my brand? I’ve proven it to you the way that one proves a theorem. Are you stupid, or what?” This is direct marketing gone mad. You can find it on websites, in brochures, sales letters and presentations, infomercials… you name it! You know when you come across it, because it always begins with a rhetorical question (we really shouldn’t call such questions rhetorical, because they don’t enhance the persuasive effect. Stupid or manipulative comes to mind); e.g. “Do YOU want to lose your shirt in real estate? If not… blah, blah, blah.”

Look. Branding today can only work through ideas that customers WANT to connect with. People can neither be hypnotized with media images nor cajoled with flowery prose. You must truly understand their language, and be felt like a part of their inner world of hopes and dreams. The old world of branding was similar to an adolescent’s view of love. It was about gazing into each other’s eyes and being dazzled by the reflection. Today, great branding is about a mature love. It’s about standing side by side in a trusting relationship with both sets of eyes focused on the horizon of life’s amazing possibilities.

Social media platforms look beyond advertising for growth

By Kimeko McCoy & Krystal Scanlon

From Twitter’s hostile takeover to Meta’s disgruntled investors, social media giants are faltering in the eyes of marketers, leaving brand executives unsure of their investments in them and scrambling to find the next social media superstar. Enter BeReal.

Over the past few months, the new French-founded, young-demo skewing, photo-sharing social media app has sparked interest from users (73.5 million of them monthly, to be exact) and brands alike. Chipotle, e.l.f. Cosmetics and Shake Shack have all flocked to the platform to stake their claims while BeReal is still hot.

It’ll be a challenge to keep this attention from marketers without robust advertising offerings. But for BeReal and other budding social media apps, the lack of ad opportunities may be by design and represent a new era of what it means to build and grow a new social media platform — without advertiser support.

“Historically, it seems like the mode of operations has been, get market share first and figure out monetization second,” said Brendan Gahan, partner and chief social officer at Mekanism. “We are at this time in social where the apps are trying to not be solely reliant upon ad revenue.”

Becoming less reliant on ad dollars

It’s a growing trend. Digital ad revenues on social media are shrinking thanks to rising ad prices and shoddy, inconsistent ad measurement. Which means the platforms are desperate to diversify revenue streams sooner rather than later, looking to leverage subscriptions or premium content to maintain momentum.

It’s a pivot from routes we’ve seen taken before — like Clubhouse, the audio-based app that peaked during the pandemic, but introduced advertising too late to continue as a competitor in the space.

Or, alternatively, TikTok — which could’ve plateaued when marketers found their ad offerings lacking but worked to bolster what they could offer, unveiling a slew of new performance marketing tools like shopping ads, automation and more at its TikTok World global product summit.

This new advertising life cycle for a social media platform is at least partly driven by trends elsewhere among social channels.

Social media marketers’ go-to platform, Meta, has been taking quarterly hits. Meanwhile, YouTube saw its first drop in ad revenue since 2019, per public reports. Snap, which has been pushing to “innovate its way out of trouble” for some time now is seeing the slowest rate of growth since the company went public five years ago. Then there’s Twitter, which has done itself in with Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform, shaking advertisers and scaring off ad dollars.

Now, these platforms are looking to reverse course by becoming less reliant on ads by boosting programs to work with creators and by developing subscription-based options (i.e. Twitter Blue, Snap+ and live shopping on TikTok and Instagram).

It’s in this environment that BeReal is trying to compete — one that is encouraging diversification beyond advertising to shield itself from the pressures of an ad-funded model.

Up until now, BeReal’s strategy has been similar to other

social media platforms just starting out: Raise significant investor dollars, scale up the user base, “and then a few years from now, flip the switch and hopefully make money,” as Gahan surmised.

In investment, at least, BeReal is following the growth model. Per reports, BeReal raised $30 million in its Series A funding last year, doubling that to $60 million in its Series B round earlier this year. That last round of funding is expected to quadruple BeReal’s valuation to over $600 million, per Business Insider, suggesting that the app is still a ways away from monetizing.

“What they’re doing is going for the market share, growth, exposure, and an ad-free space will always break faster than a place that’s showing you ads,” said Alex Payne, CEO and founder of influencer marketing agency Room Unlocked. “When they get to the mass reach user base they are looking for, is when they’ll start to seep it in.”

So, who’s using BeReal?

BeReal has been downloaded more than 40 million times since December 2019, according to mobile app analytics firm Apptopia. Much of that growth was from this year, with the U.S. accounting for nearly 40% of new users. In comparison, TikTok was downloaded 656 million times last year, per the analytics firm. And BeReal has grown so popular that both TikTok and Instagram have released copycat features.

Naturally, marketers’ interests were piqued, especially as the industry is desperately looking to get in early on the next generation of social media. However, this is easier said than done, considering BeReal’s anti-advertising policy listed within its terms of use.

Seemingly, BeReal’s interests lie elsewhere, given the platform is currently hiring for engineers and developers. Back in September, TechCrunch speculated that the app wanted to monetize influencer culture, and was considering paid features in lieu of ads. BeReal, however, has been tight-lipped about its monetization plans. When asked for a comment, a BeReal spokesperson said the company is “heads down, focused on the product and the mission.”

So while brands have experimented with what it looks like to be on BeReal, they’ve kept their ad dollars on established social channels. “TikTok, Instagram, Facebook is still part of the advertising mix and the content mix because it’s so invasive in our lives. Even though people are always constantly quitting it, they’re still on it,” said Tamara Littleton, CEO of social media agency The Social Element.

Diversifying early on BeReal’s strategy is notably a different approach than those of the more legacy social media platforms — which have favored ad-funded models to reach users who were encouraged to spend endless amounts of time scrolling to be fed ads.

But the fact is, BeReal’s very essence isn’t to keep users on its feed for long periods. So the question still remains: How viable is it to create any sort of monetization on the BeReal platform — whether ads, subscriptions or something else —

where the app model works by sending users notifications at random times each day for them to post a photo viewed by their friends?

Unless users can build a vast network of friends — and quickly — it doesn’t seem (at least right now) as if the model lends itself to typical advertising or even subscription models that rely heavily on reach and discovery.

As Ed East, group CEO and founder of creative agency Billion Dollar Boy suspects, the app’s intentional limitations encourage a spontaneous creativity that feels fresh and exciting. And it’s that element which has resonated with Gen Z.

A social platform’s advertising strategy then often comes down to the relationship it wants with its users.

Similar to BeReal, Snap is a social media platform that was originally based less on discovery and time spent, and more based on intimate connections. Snap, however, has had a rocky relationship with advertisers thanks to its limited audience, making it a nice-to-have instead of a necessity for advertisers. (More on that here.) To keep a steady flow of dollars, Snap pivoted, rolling out a premium subscription tier, Snapchat Plus.

It puts BeReal’s own innovation challenges with both monetizing and keeping user attention in the spotlight, especially as other platforms have moved to release similar, copycat features.

Starting a social media platform right now is a “precarious position to be in,” as Gahan puts it. Any marketers who aren’t holding their dollars close to the chest in the face of economic downturn are moving away from social media advertising in response to rising CPMs, shoddy targeting and measurement thanks to Apple iOS 14.

Marketers need reliability and are moving social dollars to other social channels and streaming channels, with audiences that have become more trackable with programmatic features.

“In the long run, we view BeReal as a feature and not a stand-alone product. Without an ad business, this is even more true,” said Jess Phillips, founder and CEO of influencer marketing agency The Social Standard. “If Netflix and Disney+ are launching ads, we can rest assured BeReal can’t avoid it forever either.”

However, as social media matures, ads should be just one part of any channel’s business plan instead of the whole plan, experts say. If not, platforms like BeReal could succumb to being nothing more than a flash in the pan. But brands should still test BeReal before it becomes “pay to play,” Evan Horowitz, CEO and co-founder of creative agency Movers and Shakers said in an email.

“When the platforms mature and become crowded, it becomes much harder for brands to reach consumers,” he said. He later added, “Were BeReal to break through and create more marketing opportunities, brand dollars would quickly follow.”

NEXT BIG THINGS IN TECH 2022

By Fast Company

It would be nearly impossible these days to find a sector in the economy that isn’t reinventing itself. As technology evolves at an ever-accelerating clip, companies big and small are turning to pioneering approaches in areas such as generative AI, Web3, and automation to create smarter, better, and (increasingly) more sustainable products and services. Yet, even in the crowded world of innovation, a number of brands stand out.

A panel of 22 Fast Company editors and writers selected this year’s 120 Next Big Things in Tech winners and honorable mentions. Including both corporate giants and under-theradar startups, they span 21 categories, such as Energy

and Sustainability, Security and Privacy, Social Good, and Transportation. Even those that are still making their way to the market have already shown tangible signs of success along the way. Ultimately, though, we were looking for efforts with the potential to grow even more significant over the next few years.

Whether it’s a new process for reducing food waste or a platform that automatically dubs movies in additional languages, each honoree reflects fresh thinking and cutting-edge technology in ways that impressed us. This might be the first time you’ve heard of many of them—but we’re betting it won’t be the last.

How to Survive the A.I. Revolution

By Hope Reese

In 1950, computing pioneer Alan Turing predicted that in a few decades, computers would convincingly mimic human intelligence — a feat known as passing the Turing Test. Fast-forward to earlier this year, when a Google software engineer announced that his conversations with the company’s AI-powered chatbot had convinced him that it had become “sentient.” “I know a person when I talk to it,” he told the Washington Post. (Google said that he was “anthropomorphizing” the bot and fired him.)

As AI technologies such as natural language processing, machine learning, and deep learning rapidly evolve, so does the idea that they will go from imitating humans to making us obsolete: Elon Musk has warned that a superintelligent machine could “take over the world.” The fantasy — or nightmare — that people and AI will become locked in competition is remarkably enduring. It is also distracting us from AI’s true potential.

So argues Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor of economics and of operations, information, and technology (both by courtesy) at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). In a recent paper, “The Turing Trap,” Brynjolfsson contends that too much attention has been paid to the idea that algorithms or robots will become substitutes for people. Instead, he believes that shifting our focus to envision ways that AI can work alongside people will spur innovation and productivity while unlocking economic benefits for everyone.

Using AI to automate human intelligence and labor is “an incredibly powerful and evocative vision, but it’s a very limiting one,” Brynjolfsson says. The alternative is augmentation: using AI to complement people by enabling them to do new

things. “Both automation and augmentation can create benefits and both can be profitable,” he says. “But right now a lot of technologists, managers, and entrepreneurs are putting too much emphasis on automation.”

Beyond the set of tasks that people can do and the limited set of tasks that can be automated is a much larger range of work that we could do with assistance from machines — the universe of augmentation. With advances in AI, we could simply mimic humans more closely than ever. Or, Brynjolfsson says, people could take a more expansive view of AI where “they’ll be able to do a lot more things.”

Looking Beyond Automation

Other researchers who are thinking critically about the future of this transformative technology are also convinced that it must go beyond automation.

“The idea that the entirety of AI is a field aimed toward automation is actually a bit of a misconception,” says FeiFei Li, the codirector of HAI and a professor of operations, information, and technology (by courtesy) at Stanford GSB. She says we need to “tease apart the hype” surrounding AI and look at its broader applications, such as deciphering

complex data and using it to make decisions as well as actuating vehicles and robots that interact with the world.

Li thinks automation can play an important role in protecting people from harm in jobs like disaster relief, firefighting, and manufacturing. It makes sense for machines to take on tasks where “the very biology of being human is a disadvantage.” But, she says, “there’s so much more opportunity for this technology to augment humans than the very narrow notion of replacing humans.”

Machines have been assisting people and replacing their labor for centuries, explains Michael Spence, an emeritus professor of economics and former dean at Stanford GSB. Yet the current digital wave is different from the wave of mechanization that defined the Industrial Revolution. Unlike their 19th- and 20th- century predecessors, which required constant human intervention to keep running, AI tools can function autonomously. And that, Spence warns, is taking us into “uncharted territory.”

“We have machines doing things that we thought only humans could do,” he says. These machines are increasingly supervised by other machines, and the idea of people being taken out of the loop “scares the wits out of people.” The scale of economic disruption that AI could cause is difficult to predict, though according to the McKinsey Global Institute, automation could displace more than 45 million U.S. workers by 2030.

Jennifer Aaker, PhD ’95, hopes that AI will transform the way we work — for the better. Aaker, a behavioral scientist and a professor of marketing at Stanford GSB, cites a recent survey by Gartner in which 85% of people reported higher levels of burnout since the pandemic began. Can AI help alleviate disconnection and dissatisfaction on the job? “The increasing amount of data from the last couple of years will make this question become more pressing,” she says.

For the past three years, Aaker and Li cotaught Designing AI to Cultivate Human Well-Beingopen in new window, an interdisciplinary course that explored ways to build AI that “augments human dignity and autonomy.” Aaker believes if augmentation can increase growth, education, and agency, it will be a critical way to improve people’s happiness and productivity. “We know that humans thrive when they learn, when they improve, when they accelerate their progress,” she says.

“So, to what degree can AI be harnessed to facilitate or accelerate that?”

Augmentation in Action

Many of the potential uses of artificial intelligence have yet to materialize. Yet augmentation is already here, most visibly in the explosion of AI assistants everywhere from dashboards and kitchen counters to law firms, medical offices, and research labs.

The benefits of augmentative AI can be seen in the healthcare industry. Li mentions one of her recent favorite student projects in the course she coteaches with Aaker, which used AI to prevent falls, a common cause of injuries in hospitals. “Patients fall or have rapidly deteriorating

conditions that go undetected,” she says. Yet it’s not feasible for a nurse or caregiver to constantly monitor people who are at risk of falling. As a result, “there are procedural errors, dark spaces. How do you know a patient is about to fall? These are things you can’t do labs on.” Smart-sensor technology can give healthcare providers an “extra pair of eyes to augment the attention of human caretakers and to add information and to alert when something needs to be alerted.”

AI can also make short work of necessary yet tedious tasks. Spence mentions how “pure augmentation” is helping doctors by using machine learning to sift through mountains of medical literature. “It can pick off, with reasonable accuracy, the articles that are particularly important for a specific doctor with a specific specialty patient.” Similarly, Aaker cites a project from her course with Li where nurses and doctors used an AI tool to process paperwork, allowing them to spend more time connecting with patients. “Imagine how that frees up medical professionals to do the work that inspired them to get involved in the field in the first place?”

That may be one of the most compelling selling points for augmentation: It liberates people to focus on things that really matter. Aaker cites AI tools that help around the house. “Parents can get burdened by household tasks,” she explains. “What the AI is doing is removing the boring or useless types of tasks so that parents can spend time in ways that are more meaningful.”

Machine learning tools that can quickly digest large amounts of data are widely available and are being employed to inform decision-making in medicine, insurance, and banking. In many of these cases, AI is not the ultimate authority; instead, it is a tool for quickly recognizing patterns or predicting outcomes, which are then reviewed by human experts. Keeping people in the loop can ensure that AI is working properly and fairly and also provides insights into human factors that machines don’t understand.

This type of assistive technology, Li says, “is a win-win. AI is not taking away from the human element, but it’s an enabler to make human jobs faster and more efficient.”

Defining AI’s Values

Building a future where AI boosts human potential requires leadership from the people who will be over- seeing its implementation. Before business leaders can embrace augmentation, Li sees it as imperative to educate them about “the unintended consequences” of the tech they’re adopting. One of HAI’s main purposes is to help business leaders think through the big questions surrounding AI: “How it should be guided, how it should be governed, and how it reflects society’s values.”

“Those things are a bigger part of the challenge than just getting the state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm,” says Susan Athey, PhD ’95, a professor of economics at Stanford GSB and an early adopter of machine learning for economic research. But these questions of governance and ethics can’t be left entirely to AI developers. “Universities are putting out thousands of engineers every year to go and build these systems that are affecting our society,” Athey says. “Most of their classes don’t get to these topics.”

That makes it all the more urgent that business leaders — and business students — develop a framework to guide real-world applications of AI. “That framing is not going to come from a typical master’s degree holder in engineering,” Athey says. “It’s going to have to come from businesspeople, from those with a background in social science, ethics, or policy — but they need to understand the technology deeply enough to do the framing.”

For now, many corporate leaders are figuring out how AI can quickly boost profits. “There’s a gold rush going on right now about ways to apply these incredibly powerful machine learning techniques,” Brynjolfsson says. While there have been incredible advancements in AI, “the big gap is in getting the economics and business side to catch up. I’m trying to get my fellow economists, my fellow business school colleagues, managers, and entrepreneurs to figure out new ways to implement new business models. How can we do this so it’s consistent with our values?”

Athey says that campus institutions such as HAI and Stanford GSB’s Golub Capital Social Impact Lab, which she directs, can provide essential guidance for these discussions. “Businesses are going to make investments that align with their bottom line,” she says. “But Stanford can play a role if we do the basic R&D that helps people use AI in an augmented way that can influence the trajectory of industry.”

Considering a “diversity of values” is critical to determining the direction AI will take, Li says. “It’s about including people who have been raised on something more than an engineering education and sci-fi culture,” she says. “Our field needs people who want to impact real people in meaningful ways — not merely solve problems in the abstract.”

Payoffs and Progress

Even if we look past the hyperbole about AI run amok and accept the argument that it shouldn’t be viewed simply as a substitute for human capabilities, what’s the incentive for companies to pursue augmentation if full automation is easier and cheaper?

Automation can be used “to replace human labor and drive down labor costs,” Brynjolfsson acknowledges. While that can help the bottom line, it is “not where the big payoff is.” Augmentation clearly offers greater economic benefits to employees who wouldn’t be swapped out like old parts. But it would also provide expanded opportunities and options for employers and consumers.

“Both automation and augmentation can create benefits and both can be profitable. But right now a lot of technologists, managers, and entrepreneurs are putting too much emphasis on automation.”

He notes that technology has already boosted living standards enormously, mainly by creating new capabilities and products rather than making existing goods and

services more cheaply. Instead of rushing to automate jobs and tasks, Brynjolfsson hopes business leaders will think harder about innovation and ask themselves, “What new things can we do now that we could never have done before because we have this technology?” Answering that question, he says, will “ultimately create more value for the shareholders and for all of society.”

Spence also believes that augmentation would lead to more inclusive growth, while automation would worsen current economic trends. Although the past era of mechanization had an initial “pain period” as workers scrambled to adopt new skills, it “contributed to the productivity and the earnings of what has come to be called the middle class.” While the people who owned the machines got rich, income was more widely distributed than it is now. “There’s a fair amount of evidence that the digital era has contributed to the polarization of jobs and income,” Spence says. Automation would further shrink the proportion of GDP going to the middle class and working class, leading to even more concentration of wealth. In that scenario, Spence says, “inequality worsens.”

He agrees that a more creative approach to AI is needed. “Consciously biasing the evolution and development of AI in the direction of augmentation is the right way to think about it,” he says. This will mean “using AI and digital tech to bring key services to people who now have limited access to them,” such as the 5.5 billion people living in developing countries. “There are values and policies that affect these incentives and so you want to try to operate on them in such a way that the benefits are broadly available to people. Not concentrated, say, on the owners of capital, or even more narrowly on the owners of some sort of digital capital.”

Those incentives aren’t in place yet. Current tax policies favor companies that install machines instead of hiring workers, Spence explains. “If you shifted the tax system so it was less favorable to capital and more favorable to employing people, you’d probably get more focus on people and maybe more focus on augmentation as well,” he says.

Brynjolfsson agrees. “The market does not automatically get the balance right in many ways. Our policymakers have put their thumb on the scale to steer too much investment toward mimicking and automating more jobs and using capital merely for labor substitution,” he says. That could lead to a situation where AI brings prosperity to a few and disempowers the rest — the Turing Trap.

We’re not there yet. Artificial intelligence is just beginning to have an impact, Brynjolfsson says. The challenge is to chart a path to a future where people remain indispensable. “Most progress over the past thousands of years has come from doing new things that we never did before — not from simply automating the things that we were already doing.” That will require us to tap into a superpower that can’t be programmed into a robot: imagination.

Hope is a journalist whose writing appears in dozens of publications including The New York Times, Shondaland, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, the Harvard Review, the Nieman Journalism Lab, the Paris Review, Vox, JSTOR Daily, Medium’s OneZero, GEN, and Forge, MIT’s Undark Magazine, and more.

TikTok continues to be a brand marketer darling despite its geopolitical dramas

By Krystal Scanlon

TikTok has its fair share of problems including geopolitical tensions, privacy issues, internal strains and worrisome content. Yet none of it seems to matter to marketers who can’t get enough of TikTok — or its users. Time and again this happens in advertising: ad dollars flow where the audience goes.

And the ad dollars continue to shift to TikTok from other channels, from Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, even TV. This is happening despite recent warnings in the U.S. from political leaders whose national security concerns could spark regulatory action against TikTok, which is owned by China-based ByteDance.

“The TikTok ban in certain countries due to its connection with China or the backlashes connected to China’s extremist policies may affect advertisers’ short-term spending,” said Brian David Crane, founder of digital marketing agency Spread Great Idea. “But ad spending has always rebounded, which shows this platform has aced the science of leveraging eyeball visibility.”

A spokesperson for TikTok didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

To have maintained marketers’ ad spend right now is critical. Demand like this is a boon for any media business at the best of times; even better during a downturn when advertising can contract.

That’s not to say marketers are oblivious to all that ails TikTok. They’re wary — but only to a point.

“We’ve seen a couple of brands that won’t put the TikTok

pixel on their site because it didn’t pass their security teams protocols and expectations,” said Adam Telian, vp of media services at New Engen, without naming specific clients. “So they’re advertising on the platform, but they’re not giving access to their first-party data.”

But the reality is that TikTok continues to be one of the best platforms for reaching new buyers for many marketers, and stopping before they have to is just wasting time and money. “Typically we see this money come from either other social media budgets, or incremental brand spending that has been allocated due to a shifting economic climate,” said Alex James, head of paid social at Alpha Digital. “In Australia, while the majority of e-commerce ad products on TikTok remain out of reach, it really is about tapping into that younger audience in a more engaging environment than the standard scrollable feed.”

Moreover, reaching this audience is cost effective at a time when it isn’t elsewhere. Apple’s privacy changes have also made it increasingly difficult and expensive to reach audiences on social platforms. While TikTok has been hit by those changes, its ad prices continue to remain cheaper than those on Facebook and Instagram.

“On average we are seeing TikTok’s CPCs and CPMs 25 to 50% less than Facebook or Instagram,” said Rob Jewell, chief growth officer at Power Digital Marketing, without giving specific figures. “More brands are looking to TikTok to drive lower traffic costs to their site during a time when traffic costs soar across all marketing platforms.”

That’s clear from how much budgets have grown over the

last year. Since 2019, TikTok’s next stage of growth had been earmarked for further down the marketing funnel. Back then, TikTok’s decision makers were concerned about becoming another cheap reach option for advertisers, but believed commerce could demonstrate how the platform could be a destination for performance as well as branding dollars. That said, the idea has only started to catch on with marketers in the last six months or so. Not least because TikTok drummed it into them.

TikTok has boosted its ads business with new tools for advertisers as it claims to now have 1 billion users. “The size of the user base has grown so much, and TikTok has proven its ability to drive full funnel results for clients,” Telian explained. “By improving their pixel and data capture capabilities, the app is seeing better results in the lower funnel. TikTok has really shown its capabilities in driving conversion.”

“We’ve seen ad budgets for TikTok balloon in the past year to the point where ad spending has increased several fold in comparison to the fourth quarter of 2021,” said Annalise Curvelo, senior director of business development and partnerships at Sightly. “We’re seeing money being pulled from platforms like Meta and into TikTok campaigns.”

Indeed, Facebook’s losses seem to be TikTok’s gain — well, sort of.

“It’s [Facebook is] a natural place to pull from,” said Telian. With demand only increasing for presence on the platform, its likely ad spend will be pulled from every direction. “It’ll come from linear TV dollars that start to filter into TikTok as that becomes their consumers’ choice of video

consumption,” explained Telian. “It’ll come from Facebook, from YouTube — the dollars flow to where brands’ audiences are and where their performance is being seen.”

To be clear, TikTok isn’t really rivaling Facebook and Instagram for ad dollars. Those platforms continue to take up some of the largest parts of a media budget. It’s just that advertising has either plateaued or isn’t as effective (thanks to Apple) so marketers aren’t spending as much of their dollars there. It’s really the smaller platforms like Snapchat and Pinterest, where marketers are faced with an either/or predicament, that TikTok is increasingly winning out.

“While multi-platform campaigns are keeping core budget and strategy on Meta, we’re seeing a lot more spend going to TikTok than other platforms (like Snap or Pinterest),” said Meara McNitt, social media director at Online Optimism. “As the platform has shifted to be a place of search, users are open to ads centered around brand discovery.”

With this in mind, Christina Miller, head of social at digital agency VMLY&R, explained TikTok has already been ramping up its efforts for the holiday period since the summer. “TikTok announced shopping ads in August just ahead of holiday campaign planning, which aim to help advertisers meet shoppers wherever they are in the purchase journey,” she said.

The new ads span across video shopping, catalog listing and live shopping. “This increased commerce products offering signals TikTok will continue to invest and likely put more emphasis on advertisers to take part in video and live shopping in the near future once again,” Miller added.

A lot of people think that brands are logos, products, or websites. These are common identifiers because they’re the artifacts we see.

Visual assets are important, because they have the power to make a great first impression. But a nonprofit brand is so much more than that. In fact, these elements are just the tip of the iceberg. When done right, they are the result of a ton of work that happens under the surface— work the average person will never get to see. So what is the brand if not these easily recognizable touch points?

Below the Surface

Think of your organization as a person. Your logo and visual design would be the person’s appearance: their physical attributes, their choice of dress. Sure, wardrobe and hairstyle are a reflection of their personality, but those superficial attributes don’t fully represent who they are, what they think, what they feel, and how they act?

Appearance is a facsimile of reality, never a complete picture. Reality is much more nuanced and surprising than what you can perceive in a few seconds.

To really get to know a person, you need to talk to them, listen, understand how they think, and observe how they behave in the world. You need to get to know what is below the surface.

Now let’s get back to your organization. In 20+ years of doing this work, we’ve yet to encounter a nonprofit without a compelling mission, values, work, or people. Nonprofits are usually blessed with the depth and substance many commercial entities need to manufacture, so it is in your best interest to open the door so people can discover the richness that lies within. Branding, which is about communicating

your organization’s essence, is the invitation.

Once people are attracted by your brand’s great first impression, they’ll start looking for the hallmarks of all great interpersonal relationships. Is there substance behind your initial impression? Do you communicate clearly and honestly? Are you consistent? Do you do what you say you’ll do? Do you live your values? Do you care? Do you make others feel welcome?

In other words, can people trust you— with their friendship, time, dollars, attention?

Trust can only be earned, and it is best earned through authenticity and consistency.

Becoming More You

Superficial branding — new colors, a flashy website or hearttugging social media campaign — will only get you so far. For newer organizations, without a lot of history and limited funding, it can help spark much needed momentum to get started. For more established organizations, this approach is a wasted opportunity and might cause more harm than good.

If your organization is going through the effort of rebranding, the character of your organization— the mission and values, the people you employ and the people you serve— have to be the basis for your brand strategy. That strategy has to come before the visual execution, and it has to inform and be informed by how you show up in the world. It has to be authentically and unmistakably you.

Once you’ve identified the “real” you, it’s time to communicate consistently. Whether through your branding or through the marketing material that will evolve from it, the more disciplined you are with your visual and verbal branding the clearer your promise and progress will be. In a world full of

Why You Need a Branded Podcast (And How to Create and Brand Yours)

by Deroy Peraza

distractions, there is great power in simplicity and repetition.

Now here’s the cool part: The practice of looking deep and reflecting on who you are, and then projecting that to the outside world through your brand, will actually reinforce and sharpen the character traits you discovered about your organization. It will help your people commit to making you more you.

When a nonprofit brand behaves in a way that doesn’t sync with the first impression it makes through its branding, it’s probably because the brand strategy process was short circuited. These mixed signals sow confusion— what we call brand dissonance. If someone behaves in one way one day and the next day they act in a completely different way then, you don’t know what to expect from that person and interactions become anxiety-producing. The same is true for organizations.

In a world that’s risk-averse, reputation-based, and focused on generating good faith and financial investment, trust and reliability are essential. Donors have to trust that your organization will apply dollars they give to the work you say you will do. Volunteers need to trust that you’ll make productive use of their time. The people you serve deserve to trust that you’ll do what you promise them and always have their best interest in mind. Consistency is the cure.

Living Into Your Brand

When we talk about a nonprofit brand’s behavior, we’re really talking about your people. So it’s essential to have your team’s contributions to a new brand strategy because they’re the ones that will live it.

In their day-to-day work, your people don’t sit around talking about the mission of the organization; that big-picture view is typically communicated in a memo or presentation from

leadership. Few people in your organization are privileged to have these conversations. But it doesn’t have to be this way if you’re intentional about it.

Involve people from across your organization in big-picture, existential questions like: What’s happening in the world and how does our work fit into that? How do our values play into that? Who else is doing what we’re doing and how do we relate to them? What has been left on the table that we can pick up on? What new pathways are opening before us?

Being part of those conversations will build stronger affinity and empower your team to use visionary language to describe your work. It will also begin to create a clearer picture of what it means for them to be a part of the brand. Tension, belonging, confusion, alignment, doubt, affirmation, empathy— your team will feel a rollercoaster of emotions throughout the branding process. But the shear depth of their reflection is exactly what will build the muscle to more consistently embody the character of your organization.

Codifying Behavior

One of our clients recently told us, “we don’t even call it ‘brand,’ we call it ‘reputation.’”

Let’s be honest: A new brand won’t automatically change your organization’s behavior. Instead, it’s a mutually reinforcing process. It sharpens and focuses behavior that’s naturally occurring within the team. Branding is a pathway for conversation about behavior, then clarifies and codifies that behavior in strategy, language, and visual identity.

If a brand were simply a typeface and color scheme, there wouldn’t really be a need to do the hard work of building a strategy. And it is hard work. Is it all worth it? In the words of one of our clients: “Yes and yes, and again yes.” Let’s talk about how we can get you to yes.

B2B marketing and the rule of three in a recession

By Richard Parsons

The rule of three is a hypothesis about the evolution of industry leadership and structure, first set out by Boston Consulting Group founder Bruce Henderson back in 1976. In essence, it suggests a stable, competitive market never has more than three significant competitors, the largest of which has no more than four times the market share of the smallest.

It is a theory that has been re-examined and re-affirmed a number of times over the decades since. And its enduring relevance comes down to the essential point it makes about how in the maturity of fast-changing ‘hot’ markets, businesses face two outcomes: either purchase or be purchased. Why? Because whatever the business sector, the rule of three (or, rather, ‘the rule of three and four,’ to give it Henderson’s official title) will always prevail.

To understand the impact of this on individual B2B business purchase decisions – and the extent to which all business purchases are subject to the same pressures – we studied B2B case studies from 23 sectors across 26 leading economies of the world to unpack the effectiveness of marketing and its component facets.

Our aim was to debunk the myths surrounding B2B marketing and to shine a light on how business products and services are purchased – to prove the link between creativity and effectiveness. Here’s what we found...

The B2C and B2B sales funnels are different

The B2B sales model differs from the B2C sales model because the B2B and B2C sales funnels are different. In B2C, the standard sales funnel has many long-term prospects yet to purchase a brand at the top, filtering down to fewer existing customers with higher brand awareness. And its associated selling model focusing on audiences higher up the funnel tends to deliver the broadest brand impact and greatest financial paybacks.

In B2B, however, our research found that the buyer starts with just three brands, then expands the number of considered vendors to 10 (including the original three), before finally reducing the number down to one – the vendor they buy from. Less of a sales funnel, then; more of a sales diamond.

B2B brand awareness is critical

Because of the different nature of the B2B and B2C sales funnels, brand awareness is critical for those that are not one of the three most significant competitors in their market.

We found that while size and market share dictate the three brands they start with, brand awareness dictates which seven are then added for consideration – in fact, brands in the initial consideration set are three times as likely to end up being purchased than those that aren’t. Creative campaigns are 12 times more efficient at delivering business success.

The most effective B2B brand awareness campaigns are balanced

Most marketers consciously choose to focus on either end of the marketing funnel – building awareness or generating sales among current prospects and customers. But our findings suggest a need for a more specific set of objectives aligned to each touchpoint used to influence consumers as they move through initial consideration, to active evaluation, to closure.

As a result, B2B brand awareness campaigns should be balanced. This means a balance of emotional and rational elements, as emotional messages are more memorable and likely to contribute to brand and sales success. It also means a balance of big ideas for long-term brand building and elements designed to convert to an immediate sale.

Face the future with confidence

The invisible forces at work for the rule of three within mature markets are also present during an individual’s micropurchase decision, our work shows. In fact, the macroobservation for mature markets is simply the accumulation of the many micro-decisions over time.

70%-90% of all B2B purchasers end up buying from those brands that were known to them at the start of the buying process, our research shows. The more famous the brand is among a broader audience, the more likely it is that the brand will become one of the three leaders within that market.

By understanding this and then acting on it, B2B marketers can face whatever the future holds with confidence.

Top brands come to SCAD seeking new ideas, inventions, and business strategies for a changing world. SCADpro delivers.

Tap into our talent bank. scad.edu/scadpro

Why bad strategy is a ‘social contagion’

By Yuval Atsmon

Business leaders often misunderstand the actual meaning of strategy, Richard Rumelt argues in his new book, The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists (Public Affairs, May 2022). In this episode of the Inside the Strategy Room podcast, the long-time professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and former president of the Strategic Management Society talks with McKinsey senior partner Yuval Atsmon about the parallels between mountain climbing and strategy, the difficulty in committing to choices, and strategy sessions as “success theater.” This is an edited transcript of the discussion. For more conversations on the strategy issues that matter, follow the series on your preferred podcast platform.

Yuval Atsmon: What are the differences between what you call good strategy and bad strategy, and why is the latter on the rise?

Richard Rumelt: Certainly, the trend over the past 30 to 40 years has been in the direction of bad strategy. It’s a social contagion of sorts. In fact, my provisional title for the book was Breaking the Bad Strategy Habit. Many companies treat strategy as a way of presenting to the board and to the investing public their ambitions for performance, and they confuse that with having a strategy. Some of it is the victory of finance as the language of business because we talk about shareholder return as the ultimate measure of success. Executives end up saying, “Our strategy is to achieve these results,” but that is not strategy.

Strategy is problem-solving. It is how you overcome the

obstacles that stand between where you are and what you want to achieve. There are, of course, companies and individuals with brilliant insights into what’s happening in the world and how to adapt to or take advantage of it, but I am often asked to participate in strategy sessions, and a lot of them are awfully banal. In a typical session, the CEO will announce certain performance goals: “We want to grow this fast, and we want to have this rate of profitability.” Maybe they will throw out some things about safety and the environment, and that’s their strategy. But that’s not a strategy—that’s a set of ambitions.

Strategy is how you overcome the obstacles that stand between where you are and what you want to achieve. Nowadays, I first ask, “What are your ambitions?” If you have six or seven senior leaders in the room, you get a big spread. It’s not just about shareholder returns; it’s about success, and respect, and responsibility. That’s fine. We all have ambitions. In The Crux, I write that when I was 25, I wanted to climb the big mountains of the world. I wanted to be a professor of business and an inspiring teacher. I wanted to marry a beautiful woman and have successful children. I wanted to drive a Morgan Plus 4 Drophead. Those were desires. Could I accomplish them all at once? Of course not. The beginning of strategy is, which of these ambitions can we make progress on today or in the near future? Then you formulate an action plan. This gap between action and

ambition is where most bad strategies come from. Bad strategy is almost a literary form that uses PowerPoint slides to say, “Here is how we will look as a company in a year or in three years.” That’s interesting, but it’s not a strategy.

Bad strategy is almost a literary form that uses PowerPoint slides to say, ‘Here is how we will look as a company in three years.’ That’s interesting, but it’s not a strategy.

Yuval Atsmon: I find it’s difficult for people, both in business and in their personal lives, to commit to choices. At McKinsey, we define strategy as making choices ahead of time in the face of uncertainty. If you can keep changing the decision, it’s probably not a strategic decision. Many executives try to keep options open to delay those choices.

Richard Rumelt: Yes. When you commit to the left road in the woods instead of the right road, you are killing off things that might have been. That’s painful. In 1993, I was climbing the Dômes de Miage, a very narrow ridge in France. I was up there with [Canadian business professor] Henry Mintzberg, and if one of us were to fall to one side, the other was supposed to jump to the other side to balance us. At one point I caught my crampon point in my pant leg, and I stood there for a moment before pulling that foot up and putting it down. And I had this epiphany: “I’m in my late 50s. What am I doing up here? My wife is in Massachusetts. My daughter is graduating college. I have doctoral students who need advice, I have a book I want to write.” I began to realize that climbing is not a good choice for me. So, I stopped doing technical climbs and became more of a hiker. It was a painful choice. When I see pictures of that mountain, I still feel a pang. When you decide to commit your energy to A rather than B, it is not comfortable, so executives instead generate lists of priorities. I had a client with 12 priorities on their list, which violates the definition of the word priority, which means “first.” You don’t want to be on a plane and hear an air traffic controller say, “I’m giving priority on Runway 3 to the following list of airplanes.”

Having a list of priorities is a way of finessing the fact that we don’t want to make a choice. It also reflects the tendency to try to include everyone, all the roles and activities, in the strategy. I call that “the public face of strategy.”

There are two origins of the word strategy, one going back to the Greeks and the other to Napoleon’s activities, but whatever its source, it has to do with a focus of strength against weakness. In business, it’s a focus of strength against opportunities or problems. That focus of strength is essential. If you focus resources on a weak point, even if it’s a great opportunity, you are not acting strategically.

Yuval Atsmon: How should companies approach long-term strategies in a world that’s increasingly dynamic?

Richard Rumelt: I tend not to emphasize long-term strategy. If it’s appropriate in a given situation, I call it a “grand strategy” or talk about mission. I’m not sure you can have a long-term strategy in today’s world. Going back to mountain climbing, I see strategy as a journey. You look at a mountain and say, “I think this ridge is the way to

go.” You go up and you find the ridge blocked, so you say, “I will traverse on this ledge.” Then you look up and say, “Now I’m going up this crack. I think it will lead to another ledge.” You find your way. The long-term there is getting to the top, but that’s turning strategy into ambition again. The strategy is how you get to the top, and you do that—as a company, as an individual, or as a nation— by solving problems. Companies typically evolve through their responses to challenges, just as, according to Arnold Toynbee, civilizations evolve through successive challenges and responses.

Yuval Atsmon: I would add that higher volatility makes strategy even more of a problem-solving practice because you need to make decisions at a quicker pace and more often than in the past. And what matters is not so much understanding the trends but spotting the discontinuity in trends, because it’s the change that presents opportunities and challenges. That requires both relating the change to its potential impact on your business and galvanizing action to address the challenge.

Richard Rumelt: Yes, but we find game changes difficult. For 30 years, the basic trends were increasing globalization and increasing specialization, with pieces of value chains dividing into smaller pieces: you go to one place to evaluate products and another place to buy the product and a third place to ship the product. That’s expected in an open system, but are we entering an era when we have to rethink how we source and distribute? Many trends right now suggest that we are at an inflection point and things will be different in the future.

Yuval Atsmon: Your book does not suggest that in a more complex world, strategy becomes more difficult. Instead, you tell readers to go back to the essence—the crux—of what matters most or the point of leverage that companies can use to differentiate themselves.

Richard Rumelt: Right. One reason many companies’ strategies are banal is that they try to do too many things at once. One principle I expound is that if you are to expend energy and talent on solving a problem, it had better be, A) a very important problem, and B) a problem you can actually solve. There are problems we can’t solve, so let’s defer those to next year and instead work on what we can deal with. I have yet to find a company that will abide by my advice and focus on one problem. They always want two or three.

The crux of a mountain climb is the hardest move or segment, and you practice getting over that crux in order to accomplish the climb. The advice that comes from that is, “Don’t attempt a climb if you can’t handle the crux.” In business or national-security terms, that means, “Don’t tackle a problem if you can’t handle the hard nut at its center.” The successful strategists ask, “What’s the crux of these problems? Can I get through them? And if so, which of these problems is worth putting our resources toward?”

The successful strategists ask, ‘What’s the crux of these problems? Can I get through them? And if so, which of these problems is worth putting our

resources toward?’

Yuval Atsmon: Many organizations emphasize resilience these days. What are your thoughts on integrating resilience into a strategy?

Richard Rumelt: In traditional strategy, we studied products, we studied markets, and we studied customers, then we tried to see where we had an advantage and committed resources there. What that leaves out is organizational functioning. Some people say, “Strategy is important, but it’s really about execution.” That’s silly. That’s like saying, “We have a military strategy, but our soldiers are too fat to walk.” Execution is part of strategy, of course. Strategy is about what is important and the challenges you face. If one of these challenges is that the organization is dysfunctional, then that’s strategic. If your managers are not managing properly, if the organization lacks the resilience it needs for the business it’s in, that is a strategic issue.

Now, do all organizations have to be resilient? No. Some companies are in businesses where things change almost every week, and they need to be resilient and adaptive. If you have been making brand-name candy bars for 100 years, I’m not sure how resilient you have to be—you are in a stable market niche with a very stable business. The hard part comes when you see a new opportunity you can’t resist—and that opportunity is in a differently paced world. Then you need more resilience to deal with attacks and responses and change while also developing a different operating pattern from the past. That’s a tough situation.

Yuval Atsmon: These days, companies are planning for different scenarios. It’s very hard to make predictions right now, but times of volatility are opportunities, to your point, to apply strength against weakness. So for some companies this is an opportunity to make bolder strategic bets.

Richard Rumelt: I like your expression “strategic bets” because business is about making bets to some extent. There is an Arab saying, “He who predicts the future lies even if he tells the truth.” What will be the top five agenda items in 2027? Will sustainability be one? Will equity and inclusion? Deglobalization? Yes, probably. Now go forward another five years, to 2032. History shows that the top five will not be the same. There are long-term things you can bet on. Age distribution of the population is pretty fixed, and for much of the world, this means a coming imbalance of too many old people and not enough young people. We can predict that because it’s already here. Birth rates in Germany are far below replacement birth rates. You know there will be a shortage of young workers. The social and technical stuff, that is much harder—nobody forecast the addictive quality of social media. But strategy is not about forecasting; it’s about dealing with problems you can recognize.

Yuval Atsmon: In your book, you talk about people preferring to hear good news—what you call “success theater.” To countermand that, you suggest they ask simple questions like, “What about that plan is difficult?” As strategists, we should quickly get to the core of the challenge that must be overcome, right?

Richard Rumelt: The first step people struggle with is accepting the idea that strategy is about overcoming challenges. I worked with a government group that spanned 12 different agencies and they had a strategy that had 22 “priorities.” They insisted they could achieve them, and I kept saying, “But you have to deal with why that’s hard. If it was easy, it would already have been done.” They worried that if they said, “We have a problem,” Congress might not give them money, so they had, in this case, an ambition theater focused on “We can do it!”

Likewise, many businesspeople believe it’s bad to talk about problems. Peter Drucker said that you shouldn’t focus on problems but opportunities. It’s sort of this macho tradition, and I love that, but if we are dealing with strategic stuff, we have to deal with the reality that it’s difficult. For example, how do we deal with our technology not being up to par? You can’t transition to better technology without exploring why that is difficult, organizationally and intellectually and in terms of skills.

Yuval Atsmon: What’s your advice for getting the entire organization involved in strategy development and then execution?

Richard Rumelt: I’m not a big proponent of strategy as a giant democratic action where everybody contributes. If you have a dysfunctional organization, then the wisdom of the various organizational levels is not being digested by the leadership.

There are two types of errors. One is where you don’t involve the front lines, and the other is where the front lines don’t understand the strategy. If the strategy is focused energy on a critical thing, then it can’t be what everybody wants and everybody gets a little piece of what they do included. The hang-up is when you’re disconnected from what is happening in your business and don’t understand the nature of the problem partly because of the success theater, where business managers only talk about their successes and opportunities.

Yuval Atsmon: What are the best ways to engage the board in strategy development?

Richard Rumelt: It’s interesting that boards do not typically have strategy committees. “Strategy, that’s the CEO’s job.” Boards may not need strategy committees, but they do need a sense of best practice, just as we have well-established best practice in accounting: here is the way results should be reported and analyzed. We lack that maybe because there are too many conflicting voices on what good strategy is.

The big dysfunction that happens on boards is we say, “Let’s bring in outsiders, people with different backgrounds and representing different social, political, and economic interests.” That’s great, except now you have a roomful of people who don’t understand the business. The language these people have in common is financial accounting, so that’s what they concentrate on. As long as things are going great that’s fine, but when you begin to get into trouble, the problem-solving is absent at the board level. All the board can do is replace the CEO. The role of the board vis-à-vis strategy is one we have not yet sorted out as a society.

Why everyone in the $127 billion sneaker business wants to work with Salehe Bembury

BY MARK WILSON

The

The key challenges affecting industry today are similar all over the world. Capturing value from automation is at the top, particularly for companies that rely on manufacturing, factories, or supply chains. Machines can allude to value, but true value capture cannot be done by machines. When the connection between machines, software, and people gets lost, the results are disastrous. Machines sit idle. Software stalls productivity. Workers are frustrated.

Machine input needs to be converted into contextual information by human workers. Only by constantly adapting to circumstances, markets, and business models, can knowledge be activated so that value is captured.

Yet, automation and digital transformation are viewed

as different things. Automation often refers to machine efficiency while digital points to productivity and, occasionally, operational software. The workforce gets lost in the middle, even though augmenting the workforce is the reason machines and digital became relevant in the first place.

Digital is only one of several key enablers, and perhaps not even the most important one. Instead, we need to ask the more fundamental question: What constitutes success for industrial firms?

Bringing in new talent poses another challenge: that of teaching them the ropes. The machines on the shop floors today are not ready for it. Despite costing millions

of dollars, they are often complicated to run and require separate training. Overcoming the impact of experienced workers resigning in droves adds to the fire.

Yet, the two challenges—automation and talent management—are not viewed as two sides of the same coin. Instead, we have separate efforts to invest in automation and initiatives to invest in skills without making the connection. Nobody seems to be willing to create machines that are easier to operate. Why is that?

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 40% of manufacturing workers separated from their job in 2021 alone. Retiring workers is obviously an urgent challenge. But is it the crucial one?

A recent Deloitte study found manufacturers may see 2.1 million jobs go unfilled by 2030. The manufacturing skills gap seems compounded by the fact that the majority of workers prefer jobs in other sectors, such as retail, services, and technology.

So, is the future of manufacturing tied to wooing younger talent from millennials and Gen Z? If so, the success would, at first glance, seem to depend on digital. These are generations who grew up with smartphones, robots, and AI, and also with a high awareness of sustainability. But the future of manufacturing is not so much a digital challenge as a human challenge.

The first obstacles on the shop floor today are pen, paper, and clipboards. Annotating information that way means processes are error prone, inefficient, and lack opportunities for direct feedback across visibility lines in the factory.

But digitizing a process is not always the panacea it might seem to be. The decisions on what process to digitize needs to be based on what true bottlenecks are, and can only happen in collaboration with frontline workers. Not all can be digitized right away. Moving too fast without the proper worker buy-in might lead to higher error rates and more downtime. Make the case for putting down pen and paper, and provide an alternative—don’t just prohibit their use.

At the other extreme, the technologies that seem to matter the most to manufacturing at the moment are complex and expensive machines. There, the challenge is to rewire these machines so that they don’t take ages to get up to speed on, and operate. The digital interfaces that are starting to matter here often sit on top of these machines, as they feed into the machines and extract data that is sent off to operator monitors and dashboards across the shop floor, factory floor, or even across the supply chain.

Achieving productivity from machines is not so much a “digital” challenge as it is one of standardization, interoperability, and the excessive reliance on thirdparty contractors. The right digital tools exist to extract information, but many times the interfaces are cumbersome and the role of digital solutions is mostly to simplify things.

Unutilized talent on the shop floor is a big opportunity. Operators could mean so much more to their organization if they were allowed to see the bigger picture. With digital tools that explicitly allow the sharing of contextual information such as real-time feedback, adjacent processes, or supply

chain developments, manufacturing workers could become knowledge workers. Imagine how much innovation could be accomplished if the entire workforce was innovating, not just our scientists, engineers, or managers.

What digital tools should do is remain in the background so the workers can continue unabated. The best interface is invisible, seamless. The metaphor is “fluid,” literally like liquids relate to a solid.

Even after factories have long been modernized, cleaned up, and are less noisy, the sector has thought it needs to fight off a bad reputation. Perhaps manufacturers should be more patient. Perception change will most likely happen by itself. Manufacturing is hands-on work. You make things that matter to the economy. At best, you work in unison with advanced machines and robots, augmented by machine learning algorithms and sensors. Engineers who build operational applications with worker input ensure technology moves into the background, where it belongs.

At forward-looking industrial firms such as Stanley Black & Decker, J&J, and DMG MORI, engineers get to engage with exciting, lightweight software applications that don’t require coding skills. As a result, they can enable lasting quality improvements through building operational apps that feed from, and communicate results from, both human and machine-generated production processes. But it’s not just the tools they use, but the management frameworks they deploy that creates the magic. These organizations are willing to give up some of their control, only to reserve the right to tighten the ship, if needed.

The best industrial organizations balance bottomup initiative and top down control, or hacking and governance. The result, as we demonstrate in the upcoming book, Augmented Lean: A Human-Centric Framework for Managing Frontline Operations, is building an augmented workforce. There are many ways to do this, and no stepwise approach will get you there.

In order to move from automation to augmentation, you need to let change emerge. That’s what happens when you truly empower your employees, up and down the organizational ladder.

Instead of going digital first, manufacturers need to first take workplace walkthroughs (e.g., Gemba-walks) among their workers. The aim is to discover true bottlenecks instead of fixing theoretical ones.

The industry also needs a way to engage and communicate to new scores of talent. It is detrimental if the message is based on PR and hype. Improving your workforce depends on having an attractive workplace to offer with opportunities to grow, to lead, and to innovate.

Digitally enabled or not, implementing someone else’s vision for organizational improvement (including ours) is a recipe for disaster. The future of industry is not digital, it is human. Instead of buying into the technological hype, today’s industrial leaders need to build a human-centric workplace that rearranges machines and software around their own workforce. An augmented workforce is not cookiecutter, but it is more innovative, and it yields lasting results.

Stop Fetishizing the Strong Point of View

By Tomasacker staff

We have created an industry obsessed with strong points of view, sustained by a power structure that rewards the most confident, most assertive, and loudest voices. Those who don’t constantly and readily supply a stream of strong points of view are viewed as weaker employees.

Of course, it’s essential to have a strong, confident point of view. Show up to a pitch, a job interview, or a conference stage without one and you won’t get very far. Junior employees are encouraged to speak up and represent their point of view. If they fail to do that in the moment, the moment is gone. If you have too many missed moments, people will think you’re not engaged, you’re not smart enough, or not making your presence felt.

Being voiceless is not an option if you want to get ahead. Ours is an industry of confident assertions, that rewards the confidently assertive.

And yet, creativity requires uncertainty. Creativity is about making connections between things that others don’t readily see. It’s thinking something that’s never been thought of before. How can certainty deliver that? Uncertainty is the sign that you’re creating something never seen before. The more you live in uncertainty, the more extraordinary the idea can be. Uncertainty is where the magic happens.

If you want to talk about your creative output with confident assertion, great, but don’t pretend there wasn’t a whole lot of uncertainty to get you there. Having a strong point of view at the end is essential, but to have one all the way through the process is to close yourself off to potential. How can you be empathetic to the views of others if you’re already so convinced your view is the right one? How can you be open minded when you’ve already made up your mind? And yet our industry worships those who talk like they invented the world.

Right now our culture values bold opinions over nuance, complexity and doubt. At the start of the pandemic, politicians and the public craved instant certainty from science. The world fell in love with the 95 percent Covid vaccine effectiveness data point. We became uncomfortable with scientific voices that ran counter to the mainstream public health messaging. Yet, embracing uncertainty is what makes for good science. Creating hypotheses and encouraging peers to debate and poke holes in early thinking is one of the strengths of science and how it ultimately keeps moving forward.

We need to balance the pressure for certainty with the benefits of embracing uncertainty. There’s a time and a place for a strong, assertive point of view, but we can’t allow that mindset to dominate everything we do. We have to allow room for not having a point of view, for doubt and for diverse voices.

Here are five things we can do to help that happen: Don’t let those with a strong point of view suck up all the air. Those employees and candidates with strong points of views are often favored by traditional leaders, because that’s how they were rewarded growing up in this industry. Seek out those who are comfortable with uncertainty—those who always end up in a good place, but take their time to get there. Be wary of the presentation of tight, simple narratives masquerading as a process. That’s rarely how the best ideas are generated.

Once you have a point of view, park it. Develop others.

Create moments in the process where early strong points of views can be aired and parked. You can always come back to them later. Force yourself to develop multiple points of view that have nothing to do with each other. There are many creative ways to solve the same problem. There are many ways to define the problem. Don’t let a strong point of view get in the way of a stronger point of view.

Explore the opposite.

Sit with the opposite point of view for a while and don’t judge it. Believe that the opposite could be valid, then make a case for it. Question your most firmly held assumptions. Remember that the point is to think about something that’s never been thought of before. You won’t get there with the same thoughts you’ve always had.

Discomfort is the place where the greatest growth happens.

A state of discomfort is where we and our ideas grow. Letting ideas emerge out of chaos over time might feel uncomfortable in a world where we all like to feel in control, but it’s how some of the best ideas happen. We should cultivate a comfort with that.

Let go of the strength of the point of view.

We think our point of view is real and important. We become attached to it. It becomes part of our identity. But it’s nothing more than an ephemeral thought. A point of view is just a point of view. Question why you’re hanging onto it with such strength. Soften your attachment to it and see what happens.

The overlooked relationship between status and marketing

By Sabrina Ortiz

I’ve been working on a new book that examines community through the lens of marketing strategy. One of the things I’ve learned about is the underlying power of status and marketing.

Of course status is the heart of marketing when it comes to luxury goods and rewards programs. But there is also a more subtle connection when it comes to community and culture.

In a normal professional or social setting, it’s taboo, or at least narcissistic, to talk about status. But when it comes to a brand community, status is everything. Status is the fuel for the engine.

Understanding the connection between status and marketing starts with the foundational idea that we all need recognition to thrive as human beings.

Status games

Will Storr, author of The Status Game, said in a podcast interview that community status is an integral part of our

personal identity. “We join groups when we align with their rules of behavior,” he said. “We follow the rules, and the better we follow the rules, the higher we climb in status. We begin to dress like the people in the group, talk like people in the group, read the same kind of books, etc. We can be one person pursuing status in one group and another version when pursuing status in another community. You can’t separate the status game from our personal identity.”

“The research shows we’re happier and more stable emotionally, the more groups we belong to,” Will said. “The Whitehall Study, conducted by Dr. Michael Marmot, revealed this remarkable fact that the lower you go down the hierarchy of government, the worse people’s health outcomes became, and the greater their mortality risk. The immediate thought is, well, that’s because rich people are so privileged, they’ve got personal trainers and macrobiotic diets and all this stuff. But it wasn’t that, because even one step down from the very top, a person is still extremely wealthy, extremely privileged and yet there were different health outcomes.

“This status syndrome has been found across genders, across countries, and even in animals,” he said. “A study showed that monkeys at the top of the community hierarchy are less likely to fall ill due to their status. When a monkey’s status in the hierarchy changed, their health status changed, too.

“Status in a community isn’t just about our psychological health. It also affects our physical health.”

Every form of community has a status system either intentionally or unintentionally built in. We join communities where we see an opportunity to improve our status among a group that we care about. A person doesn’t have to be at the top of the hierarchy to feel good about being there. As the leader of my own community, I try to acknowledge and encourage people as soon as they join.

Bestowing status is much more than a practical measure to manage a growing community. Status creates emotional

connection to the community (and the brand), enhances loyalty, and nurtures brand advocacy.

Status and marketing

If you think this commentary is interesting, the fun is just beginning!

Keith Jennings and I tear into this subject in a new Marketing Companion episode and discuss how status:

How status drives nearly all consumer behavior

Why culture, style, fashion, and art are driven by status

Why lack of status is

How status makes social media behavior predictable

The connection between status and personal branding

How status impacts nonprofits

This is a discussion that could change your worldview and will certainly make you think about marketing in a new way.

A Letter to the Industry: Why Advertising Matters

By Mike Barrett

Recent headlines haven’t been kind to Meta and the metaverse, but Ed East, Founder of Billion Dollar Boy, sees consumer interest in a virtual world growing and a lot of potential for brands even after a difficult quarter, based on

new research from the agency.

The word ‘meta’ originates from the Greek word meaning ‘beyond’. It goes some way to explaining why Facebook chose its new name when it rebranded a year ago. Understandably,

with an ever-increasing portfolio of brands – including Instagram and WhatsApp – Facebook said the new name would better ‘encompass’ the broad range of services and platforms it provides.

While some critics would argue the renaming was motivated by a need to protect Meta’s other brands from recent negative stories affecting Facebook’s reputation. But from Meta’s perspective, the rebrand also signals the business’s new focus beyond social media: the launch of the metaverse – immersive worlds powered by virtual reality (VR) where people can game, work and communicate.

Speaking at a virtual conference to unveil the rebrand, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “Over time, I hope that we are seen as a metaverse company and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we’re building towards. We’re now looking at and reporting on our business as two different segments, one for our family of apps, and one for our work on future platforms.”

One year on, to what extent has the business achieved that vision and what lies in store for Meta and the metaverse in the future?

A year on

Since its inception, Meta is reported to have spent a total outlay of $10bn on the metaverse, a clear sign of the business’ commitment to focusing on the immersive VR world. But long-term shareholder Altimeter Capital Management recently called on the company to rein in its spending amid accusations, in an open letter from Brad Gerstner, CEO of the investment firm, that Meta has lost its ‘focus’.

A leaked Meta report has also revealed that Meta has yet to reach its goal of 500,000 monthly active users for Horizon Worlds.

It’s important to remember though that the metaverse remains in its infancy – Zuckerberg only announced the launch of legs last month! Indeed, the survey results from our metaverse whitepaper demonstrate that Meta remains early on in its consumer education journey. The survey canvassed over 4,500 consumers, marketers and creators across the UK and US in June, with almost one in five (19%) UK consumers feeling confused toward the metaverse.

However, our whitepaper research also found that 40% of UK Gen Z consumers and a third (32%) of UK millennials are already ‘active’ within the metaverse, with half of both age groups keen to learn more. The results show that consumer interest has been piqued since its launch and brands have been encouraged to explore the virtual reality world as a result.

For example, both Nike and Gucci created branded, virtual interactive spaces – ‘Nikeland’ and ‘Gucci Town’ – for consumers to engage with the brand and other users, while Adidas partnered with NFT companies such as Bored Ape Yacht Club and fast-food chain Wendy’s released its own branded game mode, called ‘Food Fight,’ in which players are challenged to rid the world of frozen beef.

As well as brands jumping on the metaverse bandwagon, video-sharing social networking service Triller also launched its own copycat platform ‘Metaverz’ this month to engage consumers with events such as live music and sporting events – a further vote of confidence in the potential of VR.

Although the full extent of the metaverse’s early promise still remains to be fulfilled, it means there is a huge amount of potential room for growth yet. A Meta spokesperson emphasised this to the Wall Street Journal, describing the metaverse as a multi-year project and sharing their belief that it’s the future of computing.

The future of Meta and the metaverse

So, what does the future look like for Meta and what is the potential for the metaverse?

The warning from Altimeter Capital Management is a reminder that Meta must not lose focus on its legacy products and services. With Meta platforms accounting for 73% of user time spent on social media in the UK, these platforms are a key driver of the business’s success and should remain a priority.

So, as well as growing new platforms, Meta will also need to mark its second anniversary with a continued focus on developing Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp – especially in the wake of growing competition from the likes of BeReal and TikTok.

Recent news that it is testing new formats such as ‘multiadvertiser ads’ – displays of products at the bottom of videos – and ‘post-loop ads’ – short video partner ads in between creator Reels – is a positive development. Meta will need to continue to push the boundaries of its platforms’ capabilities without losing their individual identities in the ongoing tussle with competitors.

As for the metaverse, refining the platform and attracting and retaining users remains crucial to its progress. Securing buyin from creators will be key to this process. Almost a third (29%) surveyed in our whitepaper are planning on operating within the metaverse over the next year. If Meta is successful in delivering on this objective, the revenue opportunities could be substantial, in particular among a consumer base which is increasingly growing accustomed to online shopping - spurred on by the pandemic.

It’s within this context that UK marketers have invested in the metaverse, with over half (55%) reassigning budget from other marketing channels and almost half (46%) already executing marketing strategies in the virtual reality world, according to our whitepaper.

Meta’s second year will be about building on some of the initial learnings from its first year and delivering on the enormous potential for brands and consumers.

Following November’s news of 11,000 job losses at Meta, Billion Dollar Boy CEO Thomas Walters adds that “the redundancies look increasingly like the unfortunate sideeffect of the enormous $10bn+ investment in a vision of the metaverse that people don’t yet understand.”

THE BLINDNESS OF VISIONARIES

By Bob Hoffman

This week we witnessed the further destruction of the reputations of tech “visionaries.” You’d think that after years of watching the likes of Kalanick, Holmes, and Neumann self-destruct we’d have learned something. But, of course, we never learn anything.

Let’s start with dickwad extraordinaire, Mark Zuckerbag. Zucky is knee-deep in trouble. His company has lost over 70% of its value this year; he’s blowing over $10 billion annually on his bewildering metaverse obsession; and his shareholders are screaming for blood. So this week he fired 11,000 people. But couldn’t even do that right.

The great Beth Collier noticed that Zbag’s memo to his employees notifying them that they were dead meat was strikingly similar to a memo sent by Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, to his employees a week earlier. I have excerpted some of the language from both memos. See if you don’t agree

Just a coincidence, right?

I don’t think you could paint a more perfect picture of this jerk -- a man who couldn’t be bothered to use his own language to speak from his heart to 11,000 people who worked to help make him one of the richest people in the world. Instead, he chose to cut and paste language from someone else. What a dick.

Musk Still Batting .000

While Zbag was busy copying his friend’s homework, the Muskrat was busy destroying Twitter.

Right after we went to press last week, Twitter announced that they had mistakenly laid-off dozens of employees and begged them to please come back.

Then Musk brilliantly threatened advertisers who had run screaming from him with a “thermonuclear name-andshame” campaign. Here’s his big idea: He’s going to name all the companies who have stopped advertising on Twitter and they will be so ashamed and so despised by their customers that they will come running back. This guy is really, truly fucking bonkers.

Meanwhile this week, new defections from Twitter among major advertising brands came to light -- including Chipotle and United Airlines.

Next came his idiotic answer to his brand safety nightmare. He instituted his $8-a-month “blue-check” program that certifies that you are officially you. And that you are a real, no-shit, card-carrying, true-blue Twitter dreckmeister. It turned out to have the exact opposite of the intended effect. Twitter was swamped with all kinds of new fake users who fraudulently bought the “blue-check” medallion. Including our Blessed Savior...

Unlike Musk, at least this guy has a sense of humor.

According to the NY Times, “Twitter, the so-called global town square, with about 240 million users, has descended in recent days into a messy swirl of accounts pretending to be high-profile brands and sending disruptive tweets.”

It didn’t take long for Twitter to change its idiotic “true blue” scheme. Maybe this tweet was the “brand safe/verified” tweet that did it...

Next, in a brilliant PR move, Musk told employees that declaring bankruptcy was not out of the question. That must have gone down really well with his bankers and his Saudi business partners.

Finally, having seen and heard enough, at the end of the week some of his highest ranking executives walked. This did not sit well with Federal authorities who are now investigating his actions since taking over Twitter.

I wish I was good enough to make all this shit up.

My favorite Musk quote about buying Twitter, “I did it to try and help humanity, whom I love.” Yeah, he loves humanity.

He just doesn’t like people.

Finally We Come to This Dipshit...

Honestly, if I ran a restaurant and this billionaire slob came tumbling in dressed like this, I’d throw his ugly ass out.

So this guy, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been the poster child for the worldwide cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme. This week his company, FTX, collapsed and filed for bankruptcy.

According to press reports, “At least $1 billion of customer funds — and possibly as much as $2 billion — have gone missing.” Ooh, that’s not good. Apparently, another half a billion in cryptocurrency disappeared in “unauthorized transactions” according to the company.

FTX, which is a cryptocurrency trading company with a whole lot of other side hustles I can’t possibly explain or understand, was apparently a fun little multi-billion dollar house of cards run out of an apartment in the Bahamas by Bankman-Fried and a bunch of his pals.

Lots of people have lost millions. The whole crypto thing will now finally get the once-over from the incompetent regulatory bodies who are supposed to protect our most vulnerable populations -- nitwits and Millennials -- from shit like this. What, you may ask, has any of this got to do with advertising? Well, perhaps you remember the FTX spot from the Super Bowl a while back in which Luddite dinosaur Larry David could not be convinced to invest in crypto. As a card-carrying Luddite dinosaur myself, I have to thank Bankman-Fried for green-lighting a funny spot, that, ironically, turned out to be right on the money.

Bob is a writer and speaker. He has written six books about advertising, each of which has been an Amazon seller. Bob is one of the most sought-after international speakers on advertising and marketing. He has been invited to speak in 24 countries. In 2021 he was invited to speak to members of the British Parliament as well as the European Parliament.

& Book, Line Sinker

Creativity Begins With You: 31 Practical Workshops to Explore Your Creative Potential

by Andy Neal

Can creativity be ‘taught’? Or is it simply innate? This book will help you find your creativity through your own unique identity and experience, challenging you to fight those negative voices, get out of your habitual comfort zones and - most importantly - play.

Do the F*cking Work: Lowbrow Advice for High-Level Creativity by Brian Buirge (Author)

Over the last eight years, Jason Bacher and Brian Buirge of Good F*cking Design Advice (GFDA) have made a name for themselves in the international design community, inspiring creatives, artists, and entrepreneurs with their products, weekly e-mails, and most important, their unorthodox advice about work ethic and the creative process.

Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

by Austin Kleon

When asked to talk to students at Broome Community College in upstate New York in the spring of 2011, Austin Kleon wrote a simple list often things he wished he’d heard when he was their age: ‘Steal like an artist; Don’t wait until you know who you are to start making things; Write the book you want to read;

What Your Customer Wants and Can’t Tell You: Unlocking Consumer Decisions with the Science of Behavioral Economics (Marketing Research)

by Melina Palmer

“The most important business book to come out in years.” –Michael F. Schein, author and columnist for Forbes, Inc, and Psychology Today

Now Try Something Weirder: How to keep having great ideas and survive in the creative business by Michael Johnson

‘Michael Johnson offers the most generous kind of professional advice: insightful but full of enthusiasm. Designers need cunning as well as inspiration.’

Do Purpose: Why Brands with a Purpose Do Better and Matter More. (Mindfulness Books, Empowering Books, Self Help Books)

by David Hieatt (Author)

All Marketers are Liars: The Underground Classic That Explains How Marketing Really Works--and Why Authenticity Is the Best Marketing of All by Seth Godin

All marketers tell stories. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche is vastly superior to a $36,000 Volkswagen that’s virtually the same car.

The Secret Marketing Plan: Target New Customers, Stand Out From The Crowd And Make More Money by Bill Klaff

losing is an art. Mastering the secrets to close sales is a lifetime skill that helps boost your brand or business. There are marketing strategies that separate you from the general market. Creating a profitable marketing plan is the first step to achieving this feat so you can easily sell fast to anyone.

Conviction Marketing by Kelly Roach

In a world of trending fads, unqualified “influencers” and surface-level tactics that leave business owners exhausted, overwhelmed, and far from profitable.... Conviction Marketing helps entrepreneurs uncover the secret ingredient to achieving authority and industry leadership in their field.

The Direct to Consumer Playbook: The Stories and Strategies of the Brands that Wrote the DTC Rules by Mike Stevens

Overcome the challenges of the ever-increasing cost of marketing, the demands of customer service, complicated logistical requirements and the perils of selecting the right technology by learning from the DTC pioneers who have got it right

Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy (Fast Forward Your Product Career: The Two Books Required to Land Any PM Job)

by Neel Mehta

Authored by 3 Product Managers at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, Swipe to Unlock is a comprehensive guide on the must-know concepts of technology and business strategy. It is a mustread for anyone pursuing product management, design, marketing, consulting.

Brand Identity Breakthrough: How to Craft Your Company’s Unique Story to Make Your Products Irresistible

by Gregory V. Diehl

Does your business have a story to tell? It should!

From the moment you first opened your doors, you began crafting it. With every new product you release, you carve out an even more unique niche in your industry. This all builds up to one thing—brand identity. Does yours stand out from the crowd?

Marketing to the Entitled Consumer: How to Turn Unreasonable Expectations into Lasting Relationships by Nick

Worth

Marketers face a paradox. Consumers expect your brand to know everything about themwho they are, what they want, and why-and to deliver it at the exact moment they need it. But ad saturation and inbox clutter make them resent everything marketers do. In this environment, traditional approaches just won’t cut it.

The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands by Jean-Noël Kapferer

Discover the secrets to successful luxury brand management with this bestselling guide written by two of the world’s leading experts on luxury branding, Jean-Noël Kapferer and Vincent Bastien, providing a unique blueprint for luxury brands and companies.

Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group) by Marty Cagan

How do today’s most successful tech companies― Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla― design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than most tech companies.

Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less by

Jim VandeHei

This is the guiding principle of Smart Brevity, a communication formula built by Axios journalists to prioritize essential news and information, explain its impact and deliver it in a concise and visual format. Now, the co-founders of Axios have created an essential guide for communicating effectively and efficiently using Smart Brevity— think Strunk and White’s Elements of Style for the digital age.