BrandKnew February 2022

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

Published by 02.22#111

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Dear Friends: It’s the month of Valentine and you will have several reasons to love this edition of BrandKnew.

There are forecasts and predictions galore just as content that is looking ahead into the future. Like for eg The 5 Star-Up Trends To Watch For in 2022. Continuing in the same fein, we take a look at the Consumer Trends That Will Shape How Brands Will Source, Produce Goods in 2022.We stick our neck out in saying that Interactivity is Advertising’s Biggest Enemy.

Metaverse is the flavor of the season and we offer Tips on How To Rule The Metaverse. Communication is a mega asset and we reason in this issue that Leaders Need To Be Good Writers Too. B2B comes with it’s set of legacy mindsets and systemic thinking and we offer advice on how to be Tackling The Creativity Crisis in B2B Using Neuroscience. They are the most desired audience for brands-Millennials- we pick up the conversation on How Brands Can Engage Millennials Via Social And The Metaverse. We unveil the mystery, ambiguity and deception behind Programmatic Advertising in the feature titled The Programmatic Poop Funnel. In an era of uncertainty, we talk about how Marketers Are Now In The Era Of Unintended Consequences.

There is ample more to devour in this issue and I leave you to do just that. Till the next, my very best!

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Suresh Dinakaran @ISDGlobalDubai

@Brandknewmag

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Chief Strategy Director: Rishi Mohan Business Performance Director: Sunil Vasudevan Brand Engagement and Outreach Specialist: Anuva Madan Chief Country Man, India: Rohit Unni Brand Trends and Research Architect: Meeta Pendse Revenue Growth Architect: Ritu Dey Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Performance Marketing Architect: Suresh Babu Technology & Web Enabler: Vyanky Charakpalli Social Media Outreach: Pooja Chhabda SEO Advocate: Santhosh Rakonda Content & PR: Nitin Kumar

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CONTENTS Why marketers are now in the Era of Unintended Consequences It’s A New Year, What Should We Be Asking Ourselves?

Tackling the creativity crisis in B2B with neuroscience 5 Consumer Trends That Will Shape How Brands Source, Produce Goods in 2022 Big Brands, Small Biz Where Big Tech Advertising Businesses Stand At The End Of A Crazy 2021 How brands can engage millennials via social, metaverse It’s Time For The Digital Ad Industry’s “Great Reset” Leaders need to be good writers, too 5 startup trends to watch in 2022 Stuck in quarantine? This quirky app can help you stay creative Interactivity: Advertising’s Hidden Enemy Want to rule the metaverse? Symbolism is key The Brand Babble Issue 4 Freaky Plane Designs That Reimagine The Golden Age Of Air Travel Falling Flat: Why Startups Need Hierarchical Structure The Programmatic Poop Funnel 5 Technology Trends Every B2B Marketer Should Be Aware of The Top 10 Google Algorithm Updates of 2021 [Infographic] Opportunity waits for publishers and marketers as cookie apocalypse looms: Digiday’s top trends for 2022 A New Year’s resolution for entrepreneurs: Revisit Jim Collins Book, Line & Sinker

Why marketers are now in the Era of Unintended Consequences

By Mark Schaefer

The people of the world have been whacked out by the fear, grief, and upheaval of a pandemic. Some of the consequences are obvious. We’ve learned new ways to work, shop, learn, connect, date, work out, and entertain ourselves, to name a few. But perhaps our marketing future will be determined by unintended consequences we can’t fathom at the moment.

It is going to take a long time to sort out what goes back to normal and what new norms transcend the pandemic.

I’d like to want to share a weird little story that illustrates a much more subtle, and perhaps profoundly more important, business consideration as we emerge from our suffering. It starts with a playful child.

A story of unintended consequences As pandemic restrictions thawed, my wife and I decided to attend a socially-distanced church event. We were happy to see old friends — behind their masks, of course!

We stood in the sunshine talking to a young couple with a two-year-old toddler. We were close to this family and

delighted in seeing how much this little girl had grown since we last saw her.

While the adults chatted, the little girl toodled over to a grassy patch, pulled up some leaves, walked over to me, and deposited them on my shoes. She repeated this process with flowers, old leaves, and little stones. She was decorating me!

Normally I would pick her up, compliment her on her artwork and make her giggle.

But I couldn’t. You just don’t touch each other in a pandemic.

I couldn’t interact in a normal way with this child. Nobody could. And it has been that way for more than a year.

Let’s dissect this seemingly insignificant interaction and think through the possible impact. What socialization lessons are being imprinted here? What is the child learning?

“It’s not safe for anybody to connect with me in a physical way except mom and dad.”

“I can’t really see how people react to me behind those

masks. I don’t see smiles. Do they like me?”

“I would like to play with these other children but every time I try, mommy carries me away. It must not be safe.”

I’m not a psychologist. I don’t know if these statements could be true or if they will matter in the long-term.

But I am an observant marketer. And what I’m learning is that people have been changed in millions of ways both large and small. Some of these changes are obvious. The consequences of other changes — like the story of the little girl — might not be apparent for years. That is a very big deal for our profession.

Sociologists and doctors are already beginning to call this demographic Generation C for COVID. They are predicting that the pandemic will be an experience that forms their ability to communicate and socialize, perhaps forever.

Your research is probably meaningless The other day a connection on LinkedIn posted a research paper about consumer content consumption that was authored in 2018. It was great work. And probably meaningless.

We simply don’t know what’s happening in the world right now and we certainly can’t trust a report from 2018. I’m not sure we can trust any consumer research that has not occurred in the last few months. The pandemic isn’t just changing children. It’s changing almost everyone in some way.

Here’s one chart from McKinsey that boggles the mind. On a global average, the pandemic has accelerated online commerce by SEVEN YEARS. This strikes at the heart of marketing discipline. We want to predict the future based on some trendline that started in the past. But the future has been re-written in the last 12 months, and our trendlines will be interrupted with unintended consequences. We might have to reimagine marketing strategy for the time being.

Martin Lindstrom suggests that an entire generation is being conditioned to have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

We have lived in fear and isolation for so long that we are literally being re-wired. Columnist David Brooks wrote that the accumulated isolation and lack of normal routines made him feel he lost his sense of purpose.

One year into the societal convulsions caused by the

coronavirus pandemic, about a fifth of U.S. adults are experiencing high levels of psychological distress, including 28% among those who say the outbreak has changed their lives in “a major way.”

How is this going to show up in the world?

We’ve been driven by unintended consequences To think about how unintended consequences might play out in the future, we can simply reflect on what happened at the start of the pandemic.

Let’s say we’re smart marketers trying to forecast what might happen to certain businesses if a pandemic hit. What would we think might happen when people are locked in their homes all over the world, gripped with fear, and using the web as their lifeline to work, learn, and play?

Would we have predicted a building boom in construction and home improvement? (Home Depot guessed wrong — they started laying off employees and reducing inventory just as demand exploded!)

Could we have guessed that Clearasil would be in short supply? Wearing masks all day caused acne.

Would we have had the idea to invest in companies making baby pools, RVs, or kayaks?

Who would have connected a deadly global plague to record sales of luxury boats, beach property, and toilet paper?

My point is, our economy has been driven by a tide of unintended consequences — some happy, some sad — and as the pandemic winds down, we’re in for a new tidal wave of unexpected consumer behaviors.

Unintended consequences and marketing How do we adjust to this quirky new reality?

I think the number one skill for a marketer right now is humility. We need to survey, sit and listen, and re-connect with our customers humbly. We need to test every assumption we ever had about our customers, and then re-test. We need to pay close attention to nuance. And we certainly cannot be basing our plans on 2018 data!

And in case you’re thinking, “Well I work in manufacturing, this won’t impact me,” A report from Adobe shows very weird consumer behavior in every segment:

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

It’s A New Year, What Should We Be Asking Ourselves?

By Dave Brock

It’s a New Year. Somehow, even if we don’t believe in New Year resolutions, we use the New Year as a moment to refocus and reset. For those organizations on a calendar fiscal year, it’s a restart—new goals, quotas, perhaps shifted priorities. Even for those organizations with a different fiscal year, subconsciously we tend to reflect and reset much of what we to.

As we ramp up into the New Year, what are some of the key things we should be thinking about? What are questions we might ask ourselves? Perhaps we should take a few moments before going into autopilot.

From a business strategy/execution point of view, we should be thinking about the transformations in our customers’ businesses. In the past year we’ve seen far accelerated digital business/digital buying transformations. Yet many of our engagement models are based on traditional engagement models; marketing creates visibility and awareness, drives initial demand, then sales takes over to manage the opportunity through closure. Finally, the customer is handed over to customer services/experience to manage the ongoing

relationship–at least until the customer starts the cycle again.

Customers don’t look at things this way, they don’t operate that way. People searching for solutions are the people who have the problem, who want to make a change. People buying the solutions are the same people–and more, depending on the impact of the problem to the organization. People using the solutions are the same–and more, again based on the problem to be solved.

Customers don’t shift their problem solving from person to person, group to group through the process. They may bring others in, but there is huge continuity in involvement through the life cycle of the problem.

Perhaps we would be more effective and impactful, if we mapped our engagement process to mirror the customers’ processes. We might rethink the people involved, the handoffs from function to function. We might try to create a more continuous engagement process.

At the same time, customers fail in the majority of their buying and problem solving journeys. It’s a huge loss for them and

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for us. Perhaps we should start to think about, “How do we reduce customer failure rate? What if we could reduce it by 5-10%? What would it mean to those that we helped? What would it mean to the relationship we have with them? What would it mean to both them and us from a business results point of view?

Of course to do this, we have to drill down and understand where, why, and how customers fail and what we could do to reduce those failures. But again, a small improvement could produce tremendous results.

We need to think of integrated engagement strategies over the life cycle of the customer’s engagement with us.

Importantly, we have to recognize, the customer, increasingly, is biased to a digital experience. Are we creating valuable digital experiences for our customers? Are we understanding what parts of the experience need to be digital and when/ how we might intercept those with human beings?

From our own organizational point of view, in addition to the strategy/engagement issues, we have to ask ourselves the question, “Are we creating workplaces where people want to work and feel valued?”

Over the past year, a new term has crept into our discussions– “The Great Resignation.” People are choosing, at scale, to move from organization to organization, even out of the traditional work force. None of this is really a surprise.

For years, we have seen precipitously declining employee engagement data. In sales we have seen continued declines in tenure and increases in attrition (both voluntary and

involuntary).

At the same time, leaders talk about the importance of “talent,” or publicize the importance of their people.

For years, in sales and marketing, we’ve seen the pendulum swing to increased mechanization of the processes, with people as widgets that can be replaced.

But we see increasing failures of this strategy! We are slowly recognizing that business is really all about people.

The fastest way to improve and sustain results, is to create work places where people feel valued. Workplaces that are diverse, inclusive. Where people are aligned with the purpose and values of the organization, and leaders value their involvement. As leaders, we have to start to ask, “How do we create workplaces that people want to be part of?”

Finally, as individuals, we are looking for meaning, we are looking to contribute–even if the goals may be self serving.

As individuals, we need to challenge ourselves with the question, “Does what I do matter?” If the answer is negative, we need to reframe or change what we do so it matters.

What other things should we be thinking about? What questions should be be posing to our customers, our people, and ourselves?

He worked in sales, marketing, and executive management capacities with IBM, Tektronix and Keithley Instruments. His consulting clients include companies in the semiconductor, aerospace, electronics, consumer products, computer, telecommunications, retailing, internet, software, professional and financial services industries.

Tackling the creativity crisis in B2B with neuroscience

By Simon Collister and Cristina de Balanzo

Neuroscience helps to confidently predict a campaign’s effectiveness, before it launches, says Simon Collister PhD, Director of Unlimited’s Human Understanding Lab and Cristina de Balanzo, Ph.D. Director at Walnut Unlimited.

We know there is a crisis of creativity in B2B. Just look at the research: 75% of ads analysed by LinkedIn’s B2B Institute were found to be rated 1 Star or less (where 5 Stars = likelihood of greater growth). The same source has found that using effective creative to build B2B brands becomes more effective over time, with a greater commitment to creativity delivering nearly 2x more very large business results in the long-term.

Then there’s the IPA’s database of B2B marketing campaigns, analysis of which has shown that emotional campaigns are 1.4x more likely to generate business results vs 0.2x for the rational campaigns which are the norm for this sector.

Despite all the data, however, we know that at the frontline of B2B marketing there is a reality that often makes it

difficult to follow the evidence and put more creativity into your campaigns.

The hard reality of achieving creative cut-through in B2B Many B2B brands struggle to stand out for several reasons.

Firstly, brands are faced with low product differentiation, with competitors offering similar solutions. It can be challenging to find new and different ways to talk about the same themes and solutions to the same audience.

B2B brands continually produce underwhelming creative concepts.

Secondly, B2B brands are routinely communicating in heavily saturated marketplaces, with an emphasis on achieving short-term performance, meaning that longerterm brand-based investments are neglected.

And thirdly, brands can feel uncomfortable developing

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bold creative concepts over safer, tried and tested creative choices.

This all creates the perfect marketing storm where B2B brands continually produce underwhelming creative concepts and communicate with messaging often indistinguishable from competitors leading to poorly differentiated brand experiences.

Using neuroscience to unlock creative effectiveness But what if there was a way to break out of the conventional B2B mould? And to do that in a way that offered safety and confidence in choices?

This is where neuroscience comes in.

Science shows us that the majority of human decision-making and behaviour operates below the level of consciousness.

In particular: we know that brand-buying behaviour is explained by emotion, memorisation, and recognition which leads to decision making. But these are not concepts or metrics usually measured by performance marketing platforms or digital engagement scores.

And conventional research techniques, like focus groups and surveys, offer limited insight into creative effectiveness.

The effect that creativity has in influencing buying decisions plays out mostly below the level of conscious thought.

So, asking people what they ‘think’ doesn’t get the right insights, as it can’t capture consumers’ full emotional and motivational influences. It means we can’t get to the bottom of the key questions, including: •

What truly drives consumer behaviour?

•

What creative concepts communicate at a cognitive and emotional level?

•

What creative concepts really drive the right emotional reactions?

By measuring and analysing the real, subconscious forces which influence decision-making we can plan our creative and message strategy in ways that empower us to confidently predict what will help us to stand out and deliver more effective creative outcomes.

We all know that, regardless of the audience, human communication is about feelings, not just information; and it is not only what you say it, but how you say it. The power to unlock effectiveness relies on both.

To do this, we need to deploy more sophisticated research approaches. Neuroimaging techniques such as EEG, biometrics tools like galvanic-skin response, eye tracking, facial coding and implicit techniques are all tools that can be used to truly measure how unconscious emotional processes impact decision making. We, as humans, lack access to all these processes and emotions. But using these approaches removes reporting biased, false reporting and subjectivity.

Applying neuroscience to help drive attention in IT networking services

Creative evaluation is never easy, but using these neuroscience techniques we’re better able to understand the creative impact in our subconscious and describe more accurately what a creative makes us feel, beyond whether we simply like, dislike or recall specific messaging.

We know of an IT and professional services brand which had a big vision for relaunching its IT networking capability.

The team there understood the power of brand-building in a B2B context and set out some specific objectives. They wanted to gain cut-through against competitors and stand out in a saturated market while increasing awareness and understanding of their consultancy services and technology expertise, which not enough people knew about.

They used reaction time testing, a neuroscience technique, to assess the believability, clarity and relevance of three creative concepts that they had developed. This technique showed not only what people explicitly say about specific statements, but also the emotional conviction they express behind those statements.

Creative concepts scoring 40% or higher on reaction time speed will be in the top 25% of top-performing advertising.

The strength of these associations is linked to memory consolidation, so everything we have previously experienced with the brand or category will have a direct impact in the way we perceive, appraise and relate to the creative content shown.

This means that the faster the reaction times in responding to the survey questions, the more accessible the attitude is in the audience’s memory and therefore the stronger the association. It is these fast/stronger reactions that reveal our unconscious decision-making.

Not only that, we know from extensive benchmarking that creative concepts scoring 40% or higher on reaction time speed will be in the top 25% of top-performing advertising.

The ‘winning’ concept was selected because it scored over the key 40% threshold based on judging criteria, including ‘believability’ (62%), ‘relevance’ (58%) and ‘easy to understand’ (56%). Overall, 70% of respondents said the concept made them feel ‘better’ or ‘a lot better’ about the brand.

With this reassurance, you can create messaging, content, video and advertising assets. The key takeaway here, however, is that brand’s marketing teams can confidently say their campaign is not only going to stand out and create positive perceptions but also drive action. In short, neuroscience helps to confidently predict a campaign’s effectiveness, before it launches.

Simon Collister PhD, is Director of Unlimited’s Human Understanding Lab and Cristina de Balanzo, PhD, is Director at Walnut Unlimited.

5 Consumer Trends That Will Shape How Brands Source, Produce Goods in 2022

By Kate Stritzinger

Consumer insights demonstrate need for brands to make good on their sustainability and human rights claims, and make it even easier for shoppers to shop their values.

Research continues to reinforce that consumers are looking to make positive impacts in ways big and small at checkout.

More than half of respondents in the biennial Fairtrade Consumer Insights report (conducted by GlobeScan) confirmed that many have changed their purchasing choices within the past year to make a difference on economic, social, environmental or political issues — indicating people increasingly see their everyday shopping as an important way to make a difference.

As we look to the year ahead, we see five consumer trends that will shape how brands should back up claims, source products and make changes to make good on their claims: Continued demand for authentic corporate sustainability action.

With climate change worsening and driving major weather events, consumers are looking to brands to provide sustainably sourced and produced products that won’t contribute to the problem. In fact, more than a quarter of consumers say they always or usually base their purchases on sustainability, which is an increase of 4 points from 2019, according to the Hartman Group.

Climate studies predict that by 2050 coffee, tea, cocoa and cotton will be so severely affected that production in some areas will even disappear, resulting in a complete loss of income for the farmers who grow these goods. Now is the

time for both governments and business alike to take action in support of farmers to enable them to deal with what’s happening with the climate. At last year’s COP26 summit in Glasgow, more than 28 companies voiced their support of 1.8 million farmers calling for climate justice by signing a pledge as part of Fairtrade’s Be Fair With Your Climate Promise campaign — including Ben & Jerry’s, Tony’s Chocolonely and Nespresso.

Human rights and fair wages advocacy will go global in scale.

Many farmers and workers around the world live on less than $2 per day. In 2021, 73 percent of Fairtrade shoppers were willing to pay more for a product to ensure farmers and producers were paid a fair price; specifically, up to 35 percent more per pound for Fairtrade coffee and 30 percent more per bar for Fairtrade chocolate, according to the GlobeScan report.

To meet these consumer demands, small to large companies are re-examining their supply chains. For example, earlier this year, companies including Aldi and Unilever committed to ensuring that workers who directly supply their goods and services across 190 countries will receive a living wage by 2030.

Online shopping for groceries and everyday goods will remain the new norm.

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COVID has led more US consumers to make purchases online, and that trend will continue into 2022. In 2020, US ecommerce grew by 32.4 percent with a total spend of $791.7 billion, according to Digital Commerce 360.

This digitalization makes it easier for shoppers to compare products and learn whether a company’s sourcing and manufacturing practices align with their values.

Online retailers are also partnering with certifying organizations to help shoppers make comparisons even easier — such as in Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly program. Fairtrade International was one of the few certifications chosen by Amazon to launch the program, which continues to prove successful in nudging purchasing behaviors.

Shoppers will look for and support organizations and companies that promote gender equality.

Frequent Fairtrade shoppers care more than average shoppers about women’s causes, according to GlobeScan survey data — which is not surprising, given that female producers worldwide are still fighting for equal rights and opportunities. A large proportion of the world’s food is farmed by women, yet there remains a significant “gender gap” in agriculture — leaving female farmers with less access than their male counterparts to resources such as land, information, financing, training and supplies.

In addition to more women starting companies, shoppers can look for certifications to learn whether products are promoting gender equality. For example, Fairtrade works to rebalance gender equality and strengthen women’s and girls’ human, social, financial and physical capital in

their farming cooperatives and communities. Furthermore, Fairtrade Standards require all cooperative members to vote on how to use their Premium funds, often giving women a greater voice in their communities.

Purpose + brand transparency = consumer loyalty.

Consumers want to support brands that are not only taking care of their own teams and suppliers, but also contributing to making the world a better place. A study by Zeno Group found that consumers are up to six times more likely to buy from companies with a strong purpose. Additionally, 71 percent of consumers indicated that traceability is very important to them and that they are willing to pay a premium for brands that provide it, according to IBM Research Insights.

Companies have an opportunity to attract new customers and drive loyalty with existing shoppers by authentically developing a transparent supply chain and celebrating how they work to benefit people and the environment.

While many newly founded companies today are missionbased, even larger corporations see the need to meet this consumer demand by partnering with Fairtrade and other third-party organizations to add credibility and traceability to their sourcing; and consumer trust comes along with those commitments. More than 75 percent of consumers familiar with Fairtrade agree that the Fairtrade label makes it easy to decide if a product is ethically and responsibly produced, according to GlobeScan.

We predict these trends will continue to gain steam this year as the negative impacts of climate change — as well as awareness of the need for a fair deal for farmers across the globe — become more prevalent.

Big Brands, Small Biz

By Tom Kaneshige

For small businesses, the last few months must have felt like a rollercoaster ride whose wheels might come off the rails at any moment. This new year will be more of the same with the omicron variant spiraling out of control, at least in the first quarter.

Given such uncertainty, big brands would do well to lend a helping hand to their local channel. Truth is, brands need to address their relationship with small businesses, which has been severely strained due to the pandemic driving e-commerce direct sales and disintermediation.

Given that small businesses make up a considerable revenue channel for big brands, big-brand marketers will be scurrying to steady the ship. They’ll have to reach out to small businesses and offer their support, in the form of marketing expertise and digital-transformation resources.

What should brand marketers do? We can’t give you all the answers — at least not yet. The CMO Council has begun researching this critical topic. Check out our program overview, Revenue Gain from the Local Demand Chain.

We’ll be exploring go-to-market channel conditions, complexities and challenges across multiple industry sectors in North America.

Here’s what is happening in the small business world today: Many small businesses are coming off a great month.

According to Alignable’s December 2021 report, 43% of small business owners said their monthly revenues matched or exceeded pre-COVID-19 levels — a 16% increase from November and the largest monthly jump in all of 2021.

(The flip side is that more than half of small businesses still haven’t fully recovered.)

That’s great news, of course. Alignable says the top three vertical industries leading the overall recovery effort are insurance (65% fully recovered), finance (60%) and automotive (60%). Not surprisingly, retail had the biggest month-to-month jump given the holiday shopping season, with 41% saying they fully recovered in December compared to 24% in November.

But all is not well as the omicron variant spreads around the world and especially in the United States. Small businesses rang in the new year under a cloud of dread. Overall, 44% of small businesses worry the omicron variant will hurt their recovery, Alignable says. The top six industries most concerned are travel/lodging, restaurants, massage therapists, event planning, retailers and gyms. With the latter, this doesn’t bode well for the popular New Year’s resolution to sign up for a gym membership, work out and lose weight.

What we can say with a good degree of certainty is, too many small businesses lack marketing skills and digital transformation acumen. They’re caught up in the pandemic’s wave of shifting consumer behavior and not prepared for digital engagement. Small businesses often fall short of delivering on the new customer experience.

On the other hand, while digital commerce is thriving, many buyers and regular customers remain loyal to small businesses, local merchants and service providers that seek to engage with consumers and deal with supply chain disruptions and price increases. As stated earlier, this local demand chain drives significant revenue for big brands.

Our upcoming report will look at ways brand marketers can gain local-channel mindshare, maximize partner participation in cooperative marketing campaigns, as well as maintain brand governance and message consistency.

Stay tuned.

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

Where Big Tech Advertising Businesses Stand At The End Of A Crazy 2021

By James Hercher

The biggest US tech companies – Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft – are often lumped together.

But their ad platform businesses have distinct dynamics, and each was affected by the trials and tribulations of 2021 in very different ways.

Although Apple’s privacy changes took a knife to Facebook and a hammer to Google, for example, ad prices were on the rise. When iPhone owners became more difficult to reach, CPMs across Google, Android, YouTube, the Play Store, Facebook and Instagram jumped as the next-best options.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s programmatic business is taking off, because it sells primarily on its own sites and apps and has purchase data to insulate it from the privacy sting.

At the same time, Microsoft appears to be quietly assembling a media empire that might look strange now – Xbox, LinkedIn, Outlook Mail, the Edge browser and MSN? – but could turn out to be the duopoly-buster nobody saw coming.

But as Google was raking in the revenue despite pandemicrelated headwinds, Google’s data and privacy policy changes continued to keep the entire industry hopping on hot coals.

For starters, Google said that its ad tech will not build its own alternative tracking methods after killing third-party cookies in Chrome. And although Google didn’t cite a specific example, it made clear it doesn’t expect industry IDs (cough … Unified ID … cough) to pass muster with new privacy rules.

But Google’s own ambition to test and launch third-party cookies alternatives in its Privacy Sandbox fizzled this year.

Origin trials of Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, for instance, Google’s proposal to replace cookie-based targeting, couldn’t run in Europe over privacy concerns. And Google tossed another wrench in the Privacy Sandbox gears in June with its announcement that Chrome would delay the deprecation of third-party cookies by almost two years, from Q2 2022 to the end of 2023.

Google

But Google isn’t just struggling to balance government regulations with its own privacy policies. It’s also been working to adapt to Apple’s anti-tracking solutions, AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) and Intelligent Tracking Protocol, which cover apps and the web, respectively.

2021 was a year of tumult for Google advertising – but not because it wasn’t a record year for revenue. It was.

One major change came in September when Google abandoned last-click attribution as its default measurement

AdExchanger examined how each of these major players evolved their ad businesses this year to meet new data privacy standards – and how they might fare moving into 2022.

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standard. The new conversion default, called “data-driven attribution,” uses modeled data rather than attributing direct clicks to purchases. Last-click attribution favored search advertising – i.e., when someone searches “blue buttondown shirt” and clicks to a product page – but Google now no longer has the scale of conversion data to do this on iOS and Safari.

But the most important Google news wasn’t new at all, although the world just found out about it this year.

A New York judge unsealed information from an antitrust lawsuit exposing a secret deal between Google and Facebook, whereby Facebook got unique identity data and ad volume guarantees from Google in exchange for shifting its ad network spend to Google rather than header bidding vendors.

That arrangement, called “Jedi Blue” internally, will no doubt resurface in other antitrust suits as a clear-cut example of market collusion and unfair dealing.

Facebook No company was hit more directly by privacy changes this year than Facebook.

Facebook’s edge as an ad optimization engine has always been that every website and app either carries its tracking pixel or integrates its SDK. Any clicks, page views or purchases

are then connected to its user graph.

But Apple disconnected those data streams by requiring explicit tracking opt-ins from every iOS app and by disabling link tracking for Safari users between apps and the web.

Facebook Analytics, the free tool used by advertiser and business accounts on the platform, shut down in June.

Scrapping the product was perhaps easier than overhauling it to meet new data privacy standards.

However, Facebook did overhaul its attribution system out of necessity.

Facebook’s new go-to measurement methodology is geotesting. Although Facebook no longer has reliable user-level data, it can collect enough data in a market or region to model conversions.

But Apple’s ATT change means Facebook’s 28-day attribution window for ad clicks has shrunk to only one day.

Facebook is scaling down its ad product capabilities as a way to consolidate data. For example, instead of running dozens or even hundreds of creative permutations for a campaign, Facebook now recommends collapsing many-branched campaigns into one.

Last week, Facebook announced it will consolidate outcomebased campaigns from 11 to six metrics. Awareness, traffic,

engagement, leads, app promotion and sales made the cut, while reach, video views and messages were among the discards.

If ad spend is channeled into fewer products, Facebook maintains statistically significant data for optimization and attribution.

At the same time, Facebook is also trying to collect its own conversion data.

Facebook Shops, an on-platform service integrated with Shopify, now offers discounts to advertisers that traffic customers back to Facebook rather than to Amazon or their own sites. But the discount hasn’t caught on yet because those merchants generally prefer sales to ad credits.

Amazon Amazon had a relatively quiet year – at least compared to the other major walled gardens.

But quiet doesn’t mean slow or insignificant.

Amazon’s ad platform wasn’t caught up in data privacy drama because Amazon is a first-party data machine.

Google and Facebook draw immense value from tracking and profiling users around the web, and tying that data to conversions on other sites or apps.

But Amazon already owns its own conversion data (i.e., sales on Amazon) and only needs to track users on its properties – across an increasing number of surfaces.

Amazon expanded its inventory pool this year.

New sponsored video units sometimes now appear in search feeds alongside high-performing or brand-name products.

Big brands pay well to distinguish their items from lowerquality lookalike.

Amazon also tested Twitch ads bundled into its DSP for general programmatic video in 2021 and closed the door to third parties. This year was the first when no outside DSPs (aka, The Trade Desk) could use ad IDs to buy Fire TV ads.

Now, only the Amazon DSP has that capability.

Apple Apple is generally thought of as more of a referee than a player in the ad industry. It creates and enforces its own rules and occasionally tosses a player out of the game but doesn’t score goals for itself.

But that’s not actually the case.

Apple is a massive advertising player, even putting aside the $15 billion or so Google paid Apple in 2021 to be the default search engine on Safari and iOS – and Apple made several important changes to its own platform tech this year.

In May, Apple created a new App Store unit: Search Tab campaigns. Developers can now sponsor suggested apps that show up below the search bar while someone is entering a search term. The new product gives major advertisers a way to reach every iOS user without winning impressions one by one – similar to buying the YouTube homepage banner.

A month later, Apple expanded App Store search ads to

China.

Apple has a limited scope, since its own ad platform only serves to the App Store and a few other Apple apps, such as News and Stocks. But Apple has the potential to turn its O&O into a huge ads business.

Apple earned $3 billion in ad revenue in 2021, up from $300 million in 2017, according to investment management firm AllianceBernstein. That puts Apple’s ad revenue on a similar growth track as Amazon – supporting the thesis that Apple, too, could have a $25 billion ad business in a few years’ time.

Microsoft Microsoft’s biggest ad news of the year came in just under the wire. The tech giant acquired Xandr from AT&T four days before Christmas.

Microsoft knows the former AppNexus business well, since it was an early investor in the startup and a longtime client.

So, perhaps it was just picking up some ad tech engineering talent and useful tech at a fire sale discount. (Terms of the deal were not disclosed.)

But Microsoft has a vast array of products and properties where it can tie ad tech into valuable media and data.

Xbox gaming users, for instance, are part of Microsoft’s Audience Network. LinkedIn is another massive ad business, surpassing a $10 billion run rate in July of this year.

To be fair, some of Microsoft’s assets may seem trivial or outdated. MSN? Not a thing. Microsoft Edge? Never heard of it. Outlook.com? Yuck. Bing? Lol. But these are each, in fact, huge ad businesses. Microsoft earned $8.5 billion in search ad revenue between June 2020 and June 2021.

In October, Microsoft Edge’s share of the web browser market ticked above 6% in North America for the first time, according to StatCounter data. That doesn’t seem like much, but it’s up from near zero percent share two years ago – and every slice of the browser business is a huge win for Bing search ad revenue.

In other words, the Microsoft ad business is at an inflection point. Will the Xandr acquisition give Microsoft a boost and will advertising data begin to cross-pollinate products like LinkedIn, Xbox and Edge? We’ll see.

“Given the rapidly changing digital media ecosystem, our collective assets will be a powerful offset against the exposures of cookie deprecation and make this the ideal time to bring together our platforms to empower the open web,” Rik van der Kooi, head of Microsoft’s ad business for more than 10 years, wrote in a blog post last week.

But the company is also in a moment of major leadership change.

Van der Kooi recently announced that he will step down at the end of the year and hand the reins to Rob Wilk, former global head of sales for Microsoft Advertising.

Steve Sirich, the longtime GM and CMO of Microsoft’s global ad business, departed in October.

How brands can engage millennials via social, metaverse

By Susan Rush

If you like this article, sign up for SmartBrief’s free email newsletter on Social Business.

Millennials, also known as Generation Y, are a generation of doers, multitaskers that have high expectations for the brands with which they choose to interact. The metaverse opens up new opportunities for brands, but authenticity is of the utmost importance to millennials. SmartBrief connected with AJ Rowe, a creative producer based in Brooklyn, N.Y., and head of content and culture at Hogarth Worldwide, to gain insight into millennials, not only how they interact with brands, but to discuss how Facebook’s parent Meta can work to bring authentic experiences so craved by this generation.

What values do millennial consumers prioritize when choosing a brand?

As a millennial consumer, the biggest values my peers and I seek in brands are convenience, reliability and authenticity.

We are a generation filled with multitaskers. The ability to consume with smartphones and online marketplaces makes life easier, and shopping experiences more efficient.

With all that accessibility, reliability is also at the top of our list. While we’re constantly on the move, we find comfort in knowing there is little to no risk with our investments. Whether it’s the stock market, or simply buying home essentials, millennials want to know our hard-earned money is not being wasted.

Most importantly, millennials seek authenticity in the brands we support. In today’s time, it’s a lot easier to identify hyperbolic and inauthentic storytelling in marketing. Additionally with the rise of technology, the “magic” of production has faded, and consumers now understand what happens behind the camera. If advertisers want to connect with this generation, transparency must be at the core of what they do.

How can brands create responsible content that still resonates with millennial consumers? How will Facebook and Instagram shape content creation?

The best way for brands to create responsible content for millennials is to create within the audiences they seek. As an industry, we can no longer assume a one-size-fits-all model for production. We have to be more intentional with our creative resourcing and tap into communities to find who and what connects to the people.

Social media will continue to play a huge role in this transition.

Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok (and whatever’s next) are content playgrounds for creators around the world. As tech intelligence continues to rise, brands must be up to date with all trends, and be innovative with both their ideas and their connections.

Which content formats most appeal to millennial consumers? Short-form video, reviews, influencers, etc.?

Appealing to millennial consumers can be tricky. The amount of content we have access to continues to rise at an alarmingly fast rate, making it more difficult for branded content to resonate. Millennials thrive in short-form media. Anything longer than the average bite-size piece of content is typically overlooked for something that’s quick and easy to consume.

In addition to easy viewing, we also want to feel a connection to the work. Whether using real people to tell stories, or partnering with influencers or cultural ambassadors within communities, we seek brands who work with people who look like us. So, it’s more than simply casting for millennial talent. It’s about actively searching for ways to connect with consumers so they can see themselves in the work a brand produces.

What effect will Meta have on the industry and millennials in particular, as we move into 2022?

Facebook’s corporate transition to Meta may completely change how we view our universe; let alone the media we engage with. The concept of reality will be flipped upside down as we will now be able to create our own “metaverse” catered to our every desire. Each of us will be even more connected than we are today, and experiences that were once determined by screen swipes will now be an air swipe, or at the glance of an eye.

Millennials as a liberal and open-minded generation, will welcome this new world with open arms. Being able to experience life digitally will increase the desire for authentic expression and bring more control to audiences. Brands will no longer be able to hide behind what they think consumers want to see. It will be their responsibility to connect directly with the source to find what truly moves and impacts culture.

It’s Time For The Digital Ad Industry’s “Great Reset”

By AdExchanger Guest Columnist

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Peri Shamsai, media and entertainment industry lead, NE at Accenture, based on a sales leadership workshop co-run with the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

The digital ad ecosystem is undergoing seismic shifts in an environment that is unlike any we have experienced before.

The looming death of the cookie, the blurring of media lines and COVID-19 marketing disruptions have challenged the core capabilities for all players in the ad ecosystem. Ad sellers, in particular, are facing intense pressure to change not only the kinds of skills they employ in their ad sales workforce, but also how sales teams are structured and operate.

The leaders who are succeeding in this emerging marketplace are the ones transforming their end-to-end businesses to adapt to the new landscape.

video impressions need to find ways to establish trust in their measurement and reporting metrics.

But this capability can be difficult to develop in-house, which means they should consider looking for opportunities to partner, invest in and/or buy established capabilities.

Doing so can help give advertisers comfort and confidence in the accuracy of the data, thereby creating legitimacy and a faster time to market.

Longer-term, ad sellers must build trust into their products if they want to create a more robust first-party data set.

Think about how to offer users multiple opportunities to receive value through personalized offers and discounts or exclusive content.

Address salesforce work challenges The ad sales workforce needs to change through reskilling and training.

These challenges were top of mind among ad sales executives during the most recent IAB Annual Leadership Meeting earlier this year.

Ad sellers must make their sales resources more versatile so that sales teams can share their knowledge, sell across all inventories, educate clients and create ties with product and operations teams. They must learn the art of storytelling, especially on social platforms, as it will make it easier to bring consumers through the sales funnel.

As a follow-up to that event, Accenture, the IAB and IAB members further explored these issues and came up with three key strategies that ad leaders can adopt to not only survive these changes but go on to thrive in the future.

Finally, they need to master the art of building relationships internally and externally with ecosystem partners, since it’s likely that remote working and less face-to-face contact is here to stay.

Reimagine trust

Rethink sales tools

Trust and transparency are critical for users and advertisers.

Both groups need to know the companies they deal with are honest and deliver what they say they will.

Underpinning all of this transformation is technology. Now more than ever, it’s critical that ad sales teams invest in the right tools, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to improve processes, ensure data is used correctly and, importantly, free up time for employees so they can add more value into the sales process.

When it comes to digital, users want a company to “know them,” but also feel confident their data is being handled securely and properly – and that the trust is there on a daily basis.

However, a lack of standardization across third parties in data and consent collection remains a big challenge, as is the lack of transparency in how media content proliferates through various platforms.

Moving forward, ad sellers have an opportunity to earn trust. In the short term, while cookies still exist, they should test and learn new approaches to identify consumers and their preferences. In addition, organizations that sell linear

When one door closes, another opens While today’s environment is filled with uncertainty and new challenges never faced before, it’s also filled with opportunity.

The change we’re all experiencing could serve as the “Great Reset” for the digital ad industry. Don’t squander it.

Ad sales leaders have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rebuild trust with their users, transform their workforce and build new tools and capabilities.

Leaders need to be good writers, too

By Adam Bryant

Being an effective manager requires strong communication skills, including writing. A few tips can help you avoid common traps and raise your game.

You’ve probably already drawn up your list of resolutions and goals for 2022. Allow me to make a pitch for adding one more: improving your writing skills. Yes, that may sound like one of those evergreen goals. But it’s particularly relevant for leadership right now. After all, most communications from leaders, whether they are company-wide emails, memos, or tweets, start out in written form. Getting them right helps build a strong culture—a bigger challenge now that some form of hybrid work is going to be with us for a long time.

So leaders have to communicate more, and better, to create a sense that everyone is part of a team. It reminds me of what Kip Tindell, cofounder and former CEO of The Container Store, a Texas-based retail chain, told me in an interview years ago: “One of our foundation principles is that leadership and communication are the same thing. Communication is leadership.”

And though there tends to be a lot of focus these days on the sort of presentation and spoken communication skills that are used in video calls, sometimes the more old-school form of communication, writing, gets overlooked. For everything from the “about us” page of your website to the emails you send to employees and your communications with customers and clients, writing plays a large part in setting the tone of

your culture and your brand.

I have two overarching tips to share about how to be a better writer, but before I do, I should provide a couple of sentences about my qualifications to weigh in on this subject. Although I work in leadership consulting now, I was a reporter and then an editor for 30 years, with 18 of those years at the New York Times. I’ve seen time and again the traps that writers fall into.

And those traps are hardly unique to journalism. Here are two of the biggest ones. If you can recognize and avoid them, you’ll be a better writer, communicator, and leader.

The WSL problem WSL stands for writing as a second language. I use it as a shorthand to describe how people will often treat writing as if it were a completely different form of communication from the way they speak. They use sentence structures that feel less natural, and they start reaching for more formal or fancier words or phrases—like contrapuntal or eschew—that rarely come up in everyday conversation.

Maybe the goal is to sound smart or to impress. Or maybe some of it goes back to our college days, when professors wanted us to learn academic writing, which often strikes me as a concerted effort to find more abstruse ways to convey

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straightforward ideas. (And yes, I threw abstruse into that sentence intentionally, as another example of one of those words that people rarely use in conversation.)

Whatever the intention, WSL leads to an overall tone that adds distance between the writer and the reader. And that is precisely the opposite of what is needed now from leaders. If there are fewer opportunities to hear leaders speak in person because so many of us are working from home, then we need to “hear” them speak in their emails. A more conversational writing tone shortens the distance between author and audience. It feels more real, which is what everyone craves at a time when we are living more of our lives online.

To guard against WSL, just apply this simple test when reviewing what you’ve written: Does this sound like me?

Would I talk like this if I were speaking face-to-face with a colleague? Reading aloud is a good way to check for the WSL problem (especially if, as a leader, someone else is writing the words for you).

The expert-itis problem “Expert-itis” happens when people get too close to their subject. They assume everyone else knows as much as they do, so they focus on the nuances of a particular topic or insight without explaining the context.

Does all your writing, as a leader and in your organization, pass the ‘cows, chickens, and taters’ test?

It’s a completely predictable and understandable problem.

I’ve worked with many reporters who have suffered at times from expert-itis. They may have just spent a month or more doing a deep dive on a subject, and they became so immersed in the topic that it was hard for them to pull themselves back and get in the heads of readers who might be hitting the

material cold.

Expert-itis crops up everywhere. It’s why air travel can sometimes seem so stressful. Take the checklist culture of airlines’ safety rules. Operational complexity often bleeds into communications, confusing customers with byzantine explanations for simple procedures like how to put on a seatbelt. It’s one reason that JetBlue Airways chose a chatty tone for its branding, including check-in kiosks with screens that simply read “Hello.”

Or try making sense of the “about us” pages on some corporate websites, particularly those of tech firms. Here’s just one example: “Your database instances are deployed in a unique virtual private cloud (VPC) to ensure network isolation.

Other security features include IP whitelisting or VPC peering, always-on authentication, encryption at rest and encryption in transit, sophisticated role-based access management, and more.” Translation: we keep your data safe in our cloud by having unique, sophisticated authentication and encryption procedures.

Combatting expert-itis requires empathy. You need to get into the head of someone who is brand new to the subject at hand and be sure you’re providing them with full context and rationales so that they don’t feel like they are being left behind.

To help guard against WSL and expert-itis, it’s useful to keep in mind this lesson that Susan Salka, the CEO of Californiabased AMN Healthcare, said she learned from her father: “If somebody was talking over his head, using big words, being too complex, or trying to act too sophisticated, he would say, ‘Would you break that down to cows, chickens, and taters?’”

Adam Bryant is a managing director of The ExCo Group, a senior-leadership development firm. He is the author, with Kevin Sharer, of The CEO Test: Master the Challenges That Make or Break All Leaders.

5 startup trends to watch in 2022

By Nicholas Hawkins

As the Great Resignation continues in full swing, some people are skipping the job hunt altogether and pursuing entrepreneurship. A record 1.4 million Americans filed applications to start new businesses in September 2021 alone, according to an analysis of Census data by the Economic Innovation Group (EIG). In October, more than $54 billion was invested in over 2,000 companies around the world. Some of the hottest sectors? Wellness, finance, and property technology (aka proptech).

As Helaine Knapp, founder and CEO of fitness startup CityRow, tells Fast Company, “I think we need to be prepared for anything in 2022.” As such, we tapped Knapp and other experts to find out what trends this year holds.

HYBRID IS HERE TO STAY Events, in particular, may never be the same. That is a good thing for Alon Alroy, cofounder and CMO of events platform

Bizzabo, who is betting the future will be hybrid.

“The future is going to be about flexibility and choice,” says Alroy. “There will be large in-person events, there will be small in-person events, but each of those new ways of gathering will now have a virtual component as well. And that creates a lot of room for innovation.”

He isn’t the only one who sees the advantages of a hybrid business. CityRow’s Knapp thinks entrepreneurs are better off than before when it comes to raising capital. “[There] likely will be a lot more remote fundraising, a lot more remote deal-making, which has a lot of advantages to it. If you choose to see them, and just be able to make the best with every single card that you are dealt, even if it’s something that you were not prepared for. I think that’s what’s going to separate the good from the exceptional entrepreneurs in 2022,” says Knapp.

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CRYPTO, BLOCKCHAIN, AND NO-CODE TECH WILL CONTINUE TO DISRUPT TRADITIONAL BUSINESS MODELS The digital space isn’t all about fundraising or hosting events, however. Neil Sequeira, cofounder and a partner at defy. vc, believes disruptions are ahead for legacy businesses.

“You’ll see the crypto DeFi [decentralized finance] blockchain businesses opening up more business models in traditional markets that are already being disrupted,” says Sequeira.

He believes the real estate industry is bifurcated between organizations that embrace change and technology, and those that don’t. “I think that means that the larger, more tech-forward, frankly, more sustainability forward, real estate organizations are going to grow and scale,” says Wallace.

These will likely reap the advantages of size, cost of capital, and efficiency, he says.

MORE FLEXIBILITY AND PERSONALIZATION FOR EVERYONE

This means room for innovation. As financial and no-code technology becomes more accessible, finance, insurance, and other legacy businesses will see more competition. Small business owners and startups alike will be able to use these tools to overcome inefficiencies, and challenge more wellestablished businesses.

Whether it’s fundraising techniques, events, exercise methods, education, or jobs, 2022 will bring an abundance of options for people and businesses. Finding what works best for you will be the goal. To do so, Knapp says leaders must have their finger on the pulse of their industry, and be prepared to help shape their future.

“The foundation has been built for people to do this, but what are the windows and doors and kind of the applications that run on top of that foundation going to look like? That is where there are plenty of places still to invest,” says Sequeira.

AND

“That’s what we’re doing at CityRow with our true omnichannel,” says Knapp, “to really connect with consumers in the two fastest-growing verticals of fitness.” For Knapp, that means offering brick-and-mortar studio space and expanding digital workout options from home.

2022 will bring a renewed focus on the environmental, social, and governance impacts of businesses. For Sequeira, this means a “focus around climate sustainability, where ingredients come from . . . where the products are created, and the impact they have on the world,” he says. But it doesn’t stop with consumers and the products they purchase.

This trend is taking root for employees as well, with younger generations wanting their employer’s values to match their own.

In a recent report, Fast Company senior writer Liz Segran spoke to tech entrepreneur Melissa Bridgeford about Wizard Commerce, a new platform she cofounded. Set to launch in 2022, it will allow consumers to text a brand, discuss products, and ultimately buy items through a secure website that also saves payment information. “The fact that conversational, text-based commerce is so popular in Asia suggests that it could also take off here,” Bridgeford said. “And we believe that the time is right for American consumers to try this new approach to shopping.”

FOCUS ON ENVIRONMENTAL, GOVERNANCE (ESG)

SOCIAL,

“It’s critically important to them that they are working somewhere where the impact of what they do on the world is accounted for. And that is a change from many generations in the past,” says Sequeira.

Darren Bechtel, founder and managing director of Brick and Mortar Ventures, knows the importance of ESG but has worries about the reality of the investment landscape. “I fear that it’s being used as a little bit more of a buzzword, and there’s a lot of money being thrown around just to check boxes,” he contends. “I think there are companies that lack really scalable, sustainable business models that have successfully raised money,” Bechtel adds, but cautions that there might be a “little bit of a day of reckoning.” He explains it may be similar to what we witnessed in the early days of drones for construction. “Those generalist investors all thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And there were just massive valuations and massive rounds, and then just a field of dead bodies and recaps,” says Bechtel. “I’ve worried that we might see that happen.”

SINK OR SWIM FOR REAL ESTATE As tech becomes a permanent fixture in everyday life, it’s time for real estate to catch up. Brendan Wallace, cofounder and managing partner at investment firm Fifth Wall, sees 2022 as a year of enormous secular growth in real estate and proptech. Despite being roughly 13% of the U.S. GDP— and one of the largest asset classes and lending categories— real estate has been one of the slowest industries to adopt new tech, says Wallace.

Sequeira of defy.vc observes, “We’ve had this foundation of a change of distributed, both, from a crypto and blockchain side, but also a workplace and people side of things.”

For example, defy.vc is working with GajiGesa, a fintech company designed for unbanked Indonesian workers.

Instead of allowing them to fall victim to predatory lenders with high interest rates, GajiGesa allows workers to withdraw their earned wages immediately. They now work with over 120 companies in various sectors and boast that over 80% of their clients no longer use informal lenders.

“Think about the past two years,” continues Sequeira.

“Every board meeting has Zoom, but what is going to make that experience better?” He likens an application like videoconferencing to the floor of a new house. “But then if you look at the house, well, there’s so much more to it, there are paintings on the walls.” That is where he sees a lot of room for compelling innovation and potential improvements.

The pandemic has changed the way we live, work, and socialize. Everyone from grandparents to students became proficient in navigating digital spaces and the new normal.

As businesses begin to reopen, this won’t change, but instead, continue to evolve. And the world of entrepreneurship will follow suit. Sequeira muses, “And how do you take that and make it a really beautiful place to live?”

Experienced restaurant worker and recent Columbia graduate seeking to apply communication, time management, organization, and problem solving skills to a new career.

Stuck in quarantine? This quirky app can help you stay creative

By Elissaveta M. Brandon

Time seems to stop when you are stuck in quarantine, like I am right now. Everything at home is still, and if you live in a quiet residential area with little foot traffic, even the landscape seems to have frozen. Against all odds, I found some relief to my restlessness in a fairly new app that uses art as a tool for self-exploration. This morning, for example, I went around the apartment looking for movement that would make for a good time-lapse video. My search led me to the window, where I spent a minute admiring—and filming—the slight tremor of the curtain under the breeze.

Like millions of Americans over the holidays, I got Covid (most likely omicron) and found myself stuck in Bulgaria, which has a mandatory quarantine period of 14 days. (I’m on day seven, though really, I’m on day twelve because my husband tested first and his quarantine rolled into mine.)

First came the movies, then the boredom, then a deep sense of resignation that led me to hours of doomscrolling on my phone.

That’s when I fell for an Instagram story advertising a new app called w1d1 (it stands for week 1 day 1). Created by Russian designers Alexey Ivanovsky and Andrei Keske, the app made its timely debut at the start of the pandemic. The slew of lockdowns exacerbated our obsession with screens— the average time we spent on our phones went up by 25% to almost 7 hours in 2020. There’s an app for everything; the irony of this one is that it reminds you to look up from your phone.

“It’s a weird creature to come up with,” Ivanovsky tells me on a Zoom call (the founders parted ways before the app launched and Ivanovsky now runs the company with three other people). The app costs $50 for a year, which is more than I’ve ever spent on an app (thank you, quarantine desperation). In return, you can opt for a daily challenge or choose from a series of so-called “blocks,” or themes that align with your interests: I picked photography, collage, personal history, and reflection.

The overarching goal is to make room for creativity every

day, and to do so in an accessible way. “We are all afraid of the white canvas,” he says, but these everyday prompts turn the creative practice into a ritual, like 10 minutes of meditation a day.

The creative brain behind the daily challenges is w1d1’s head of content, Nina Zakharova. My first prompt was inspired by American photographer Edward Weston, who, as I learned, was known for turning subjects like cabbage leaves and cone snails into abstract shapes and patterns. My husband and I even made it into a game, challenging each other to find the mysterious object based solely on the picture. I shot a stack of DVDs from above and at such an angle they were unrecognizable. He zoomed in on the holes of a saltshaker until his camera lost focus and they looked like two yellow orbs. (He won.)

The app is inspired by the work of 20th-century literary critic Victor Shklovsky, for whom the purpose of art was to help us see things like we see them for the first time—”to make things strange again,” as Ivanovsky says. Every task culminates in something that you share on the app’s platform, like on Instagram, except answers remain anonymous. Ivanovsky says about 30,000 people use the app, many of them in Russia but also the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada. (The app is available in Russian and English, with a version in Japanese coming soon.)

The idea here is to build a diverse community with people around the world who can see how others are reacting to the same challenge. But only a fraction of users actually do the challenges. That’s the thing with apps, they have to contend with human procrastination and very short attention spans, because ultimately the app can only work if you’re willing to extract yourself from the couch and play along.

The irony that this is app exists to remind us of the outside world isn’t lost on Ivanovsky, who describes himself as “an offline type of person.” But to him, technology can be a means to a more “conscious and observant life.” Fundamentally, he says, it’s all about how “ridiculously interesting everything is.”

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.

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Interactivity: Advertising’s Hidden Enemy

By Bob Hoffman

The advertising and marketing industries had a dream.

The dream was that interactive media would revolutionize advertising and make it far more engaging, relevant, and effective. There’s been one problem. Nobody’s interested in interacting with advertising. In fact, one of the great benefits that interactivity has to consumers is that it helps them avoid advertising.

Historically, interactivity has been the enemy of advertising.

Radio advertising became less effective with the invention of the car push-button radio. As soon as an ad came on people interacted. TV advertising became less effective with the invention of the remote. It was a lot more effective when people had to drag their ass off the sofa to change the channel. Today the ability to click away, or scroll past a display ad, or the ability to click “skip ad” on YouTube are a pleasure for consumers, and a toothache for advertisers.

Interactivity helps people avoid advertising.

Click through rates on display ads continue to drop. By most reports they are below one in a thousand. Every attempt at “interactive” TV has been a dismal failure. YouTube has billions of ostensibly “viral” videos. The overwhelmingly majority of which have never been viewed by anyone but the creator’s mom.

Of course, we never hear or read about any of this. The narratives we are exposed to about marketing activities and the beliefs we have in the success of these activities are profoundly skewed by the bias toward trumpeting success, not failure. Who wants to reveal themselves for the bewildered bumblers they are? Not me. It’s wise to be forthcoming about your successes and circumspect about your failures.

This leads to a form of “selection bias” -- an error of logic in which people draw conclusions based on exposure to horribly skewed information. As someone who has a moderately successful newsletter, I can tell you I’ve been pitched about a million success stories and not a single failure.

For every success story we are exposed to in the trade press,

at conferences, or in the business section of the newspaper, there are a thousand untold non-successes we don’t read or hear about. These are the non-spectacular stories, created in non-spectacular fashion, by non-spectacular brands. In other words, they are about 99% of everything that happens in marketing.

What marketers seem unable to comprehend is that, at best, advertising is a minor annoyance. It is pretty clear that most people are willing to go to substantial lengths to avoid it.

Streaming video now constitutes almost 1/3 of all TV viewing.

Much of it costs people up to $100 a year, but part of the value proposition is that it’s largely ad free.

Easy interaction with a medium is not an advertiser’s friend.

But there is apparently no end to marketers’ ability to delude themselves. And also no end to ad hustlers’ willingness to feed these delusions.

There are a few exceptions. Happily there are some very talented people in advertising who can create ads that are so interesting, beautiful, or funny that people will not try to avoid them. Unhappily, there ain’t many of them.

For the most part, the only way to get most people to pay attention to your advertising message is to force them to do it.

This is why social media marketing - which started life with a utopian vision of free “sharing” and “conversations” - quickly evolved into traditional paid advertising. Mr. Zuckerberg thanks you.

The lovely fantasy of online advertising -- in which the same person who was frantically clicking her remote to escape from TV advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with online advertising -- is going to go down as one of the great marketing delusions of all time. It has been undermined by an unfortunate fact of nature -- no one in his right mind volunteers for advertising.

By a factor of about a thousand to one, people who can interact with media do so to avoid advertising -- not engage with it.

Want to rule the metaverse?

Symbolism is key

By Molly Rowan-Hamilton

Earlier this year, Traci and Dave Gagnon got married on virtual platform Virbela. It was a hybrid event where part of the wedding happened in “real life” too. It’s a sign of the times.

The boundaries between “real” and “digital” are blending into what is increasingly referred to as the ‘metaverse’: a space not limited to virtual matrimony, but one where brands can weave themselves into our digital DNA. It’s no longer a question of to what extent the metaverse will be a new marketing frontier. It’s a question of how quickly

and how creatively brands will use it to connect with their target audiences. And it’s not just a simple copy and paste job or a straightforward transfer from 2D to 3D. Brands need new strategies, new ideas, and new iterations if they want to stay connected to audiences within this evolving virtual space. Crucially, the ones who will thrive will be those who create new ways of expressing their meaning symbolically within the metaverse.

Symbolism has always been at the heart of branding: shapes,

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colors, objects. The way we interpret these influences our behaviors – even if we don’t realize it. Symbols speak louder than words, because our brains decode meaning thousands of times faster from images than from text – 60,000 times faster, to be precise. They’re easier to remember and shortcut meaning effortlessly and irresistibly. Successful brands do this all the time. Primed like Pavlov’s dogs, we may start to be hungry when we see red and yellow because we associate it with McDonald’s. The more we get to know a brand, the more value we derive from their symbols. It triggers an emotional reaction. Like buying a Chanel handbag and joining an elite-group with high social status or wearing Nike clothing and associating with an active lifestyle. Symbols represent a brand’s personality.

But symbolism in the metaverse is different than symbolism in the physical realm.

It’s crucial to acknowledge that consumers entering the metaverse already think and understand things through a lens of symbolism. We’ve grown up with symbols influencing our decisions, and the connections we have to the digital world only accelerates the connections we have with brands.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the metaverse as an “embodied internet.” In creating one’s own avatar, we are all forced to think about how we want to be represented in our most distilled, yet concise format, with the potential to grow and be creative as we see fit. Brands need to apply a similar way of thinking.

Nike was one of the first brands to jump behind this new digital lens with the creation of Nikeland, its personalized digital space in Roblox, an online platform that allows users to program and play games created by other users. Building its own unique selection of games, with features where players can shake their cellphone to unlock lightning speed, Nike is expanding its accessibility to even more consumers. And transitioning this game play to have higher symbolic meaning comes from the ‘swoosh’ emblem adorning players’ clothes.

It’s more than just wearing the brands’ trademarked digital goods; Nike is digitally associating itself with playfulness and inclusivity (two facets that make up the brand’s IRL meaning).

Not limited to apparel brands, Wendy’s entrance into Fortnite’s ‘Food Fight’ wasn’t just a way of showing up where its consumers are for the sake of it. It was a way of creating something that symbolically showed what they stood for.

Wendy’s is famous for its fresh meat, and as a challenge to competitors that use frozen food, the aim of the ‘Food Fight’ game is to eliminate all the freezers. By taking part, consumers are actively responding to symbols that express key elements of the Wendy’s brand meaning. And in one final act of symbolism, the coders at Twitch removed the burger freezers from the game permanently at the end of the campaign, therefore removing the (virtual) world of frozen beef forever. Genius.

Yet it’s crucial to understand this isn’t a one-way transformation. There is still very much a physical world that we all exist in. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put it, this

movement will “embed computing into the real world and embed the real world into computing.” In Burberry’s Honor of Kings appearance, players could purchase a ‘skin’ of Burberry clothing with looks taken from its SS/21 ‘In Bloom’ collection and signature House check. Seamlessly blending the digital with the reality, the clothing is available to purchase both online and in the physical stores. The symbolism here comes from the brands’ belief that beauty comes from the intersection between humanity and nature, where the Honor of Kings character Yao embodies the spirit of nature as she can take the form of a deer.

Merging the two realms is key. To do so, brands will need to create immersive, multi-sensory experiences that truly transport consumers. I recently spoke with Jordan Harper White, a NYC-based creative director and project manager who’s been working at the intersection between physical and digital spaces for the last decade. He argues that brands need to think of themselves symbolically, beyond purely the visual, if they are to succeed in the metaverse: “Creatives in the space need to foresee hybrid collaborations between audio, visual, experiential designers and emerging technologies that incorporate all of our senses to truly merge the digital realm with our physical world.”

Harper White led the team that brought IBM’s Watson Artificial Intelligence to the 2019 US Open. Usually, the AI tennis highlights are just for a TV audience and player coaches, but IBM created a physical experience that mirrored the technology’s capability to deliver instant highlights of every match based on their fan curiosities, preferences, and choices. Moreover, through Azure Kinect, IBM shared an experience with fans to mimic what it felt like to be a player via gestures, movements, and facial expressions and allowed them to encounter familiar brand experiences in a whole new way. That physical experience subsequently reinforced the value of AI throughout their lives in different industries showcasing IBM’s ability to not just change the game, but to help them interact with the world in different ways. While we don’t know what the future of the metaverse will look like, we can learn from digital integration of the past. When social media first arrived, brands had to similarly adapt to cut through the noise. British fitness brand Gymshark was one of the first to leverage influencers, and in doing so became globally synonymous with the online health and fitness space.

Glossier, a social-first beauty brand, curated pop-up shops around the world, which were geared toward community building and brand awareness. The decorative backdrop and Instagrammable aesthetic of the pop-up blended the physical realm with the digital, creating engaging content that empowered its customers to share content that gave them their own voice, aligning with their mission to “give a voice through beauty.”

What’s clear is that in this new ‘phygital’ space of the metaverse, the power of symbolism for brands knows no bounds. Those that can harness it to elevate what they stand for will be the ones who cut through and ultimately succeed in connecting with their target in new and exciting ways.

THE BRAND BABBLE ISSUE

By Bob Hoffman

he focus of today’s sermon will be brand babble and the widespread and usually silly attribution of human characteristics to brands by marketers.

As I’m sure you’re well-aware, we all want to have “relationships” with brands, and be part of a brand’s “tribe” or “community” and “co-create” with brands, and understand “brand meaning,” and of course, respect and trust their “brand purpose.”

What? You don’t?

Our first stop on this tour de farce, is this piece written by Mark Ritson. Facebook is probably the least trusted brand in the universe (the “metaverse” notwithstanding.)

Ritson says, “Facebook repeatedly ranks low in consumer trust surveys, yet user growth continues, revealing the idea of trust in brands as anthropomorphic nonsense.”

A piece published this week in MediaPost had this to say...

“Consumers love to hate Facebook, but they don’t stop using it. The company just keeps growing. Daily active users, to cite one metric, were 1.91 billion on average for June 2021, an increase of 7% year-over-year. Headcount at the company was 63,404 as of June 30, 2021, an increase of 21% yearover-year.”

The idea that the brands we use are intensely important to us and we spend time and energy sussing out their meaning and trustworthiness is a deeply embedded marketing fantasy.

For most people, their “relationship” with most of the brands they buy is shallow, transactional, and contingent. Brands are not nearly as important or meaningful to consumers as most marketers would like them to be.

Marketers have the naive but apparently fact-resistant belief that customers care deeply about what they use, and buy according to a logical or emotional comparison of what they want and what the brand says it is “about.” Sometimes they do. But mostly they don’t.

Any scientific, non-ideological interpretation of consumer behavior can lead to only one conclusion: All other things being equal, most people buy most brands in most categories because they are the most familiar. Not because they are the most deeply understood or the most personally meaningful.

The leading brands in virtually every category tend to be the most familiar, regardless of what the brand babblers say about their meaning.

Let’s make this even simpler. People are mostly too busy, too lazy, or too indifferent to give 2/5ths of a flying shit about the “meaning” of all the stuff they buy. Mostly, they buy on auto-

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pilot from familiar brands they feel comfortable with.

first question you have to ask is, superior to what?

“Naive and Unjustified”

Here is a chart that neatly summarizes the findings of the research in question. In a minute we’ll see how the ‘superior to what? ‘ question becomes very germane.

Next we move on to one of my favorite topics, brand purpose.

As regular readers know, here at The Ad Contrarian Worldwide Global Headquarters, we are fully in favor of brands doing good things, but very skeptical of “brand purpose” as a marketing tactic. We want corporations to do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. Not because they can make marketing hay by rubbing our noses in their virtue. Consequently, we have been very vocal and critical of the hypocrisy that pervades the whole “brand purpose” advertising craze.

An article in MarketingWeek this week caught our attention.

It was headlined: Criticism of Brand Purpose Is ‘Naïve and Unjustified’, Claims Peter Field.

Peter Field is a very highly-regarded British researcher (who along with the great Les Binet) has done some breakthrough work on advertising effectiveness. While we have high regard for Peter, we have not always been comfortable with his methodology.

We believe this research proves exactly the opposite of the impression left by the tone of the article. Before we make our case, let’s issue this disclaimer. We are basing our opinion on the reporting of the research by the writer of the article.

Peter has access to the primary responses and we don’t.

Nevertheless…

We believe the key finding of the research, as quoted from the article, is this: “Initially, the findings look bad for brand purpose advocates. The average number of ‘very large business effects’ for all non-purpose campaigns stands at 1.6, while for brand purpose campaigns this figure drops to a markedly lower 1.1.”

In other words, comparing apples to apples, brand purpose campaigns perform “markedly lower” than non-purpose campaigns. This is no surprise to us “vitriolic” critics of brand purpose advertising.

The article in question says that Field calls for an end to “vitriolic criticism piled on brand purpose by some industry commentators and practitioners (that’s me!) having found through new research that well-executed purpose campaigns deliver superior effectiveness on a number of key business measures.”

But then Peter does a little research sleight-of-hand that would be laughed out of any legitimate research facility. He cherry picks only the strong (i.e., most successful) purpose campaigns and compares them to all non-purpose campaigns. This is what happens when researchers are looking for an outcome, rather than the truth.

When you see vague terms like “superior effectiveness” the

If you want to know the comparative effectiveness of all

purpose campaigns, you compare them to all non-purpose campaigns. If you want to know the comparative effectiveness of strong purpose campaigns you compare them to strong non-purpose campaigns. But if you want to find an outcome you’re looking for, you compare strong purpose campaigns to all non-purpose campaigns.

Baseball fans, here’s an analogy. Let’s say you want to find out who hits better, left-handed hitters or right-handed hitters. So you do some research and you find that overall lefties bat .270 and righties bat .250 (btw, I’m making these numbers up.) But, dammit, you wanted righties to bat better.

So you do a little trick and you cherry pick the top 50 righties and find that on average they bat .290. Now you can say “well-performing righties deliver superior effectiveness on a number of key batting measures.”

Belief that the research in question demonstrates that brand purpose advertising is anything but less effective than nonpurpose advertising is “naive and unjustified.”

(BTW, I like and admire Peter, but in baseball terms, I call ‘em as I see ‘em.)

Falling Behind: Ad People No Longer Least Trusted A study of the world’s least trusted professions came up with some unsettling news for us this week. We are no longer the least trusted profession in the world!

While previous studies have placed us in the #1 least trusted position, according to consumer research firm Ipsos this year the least trusted professions are government officials and politicians (which, as far as I can tell, are pretty much the same thing.) So we can no longer brag about being #1.

We’re going to have to qualify our world-leading status in the following way -- we’re the least trusted non-politicians in the world. Not perfect, but still impressive.

Fake It ‘Til You.... Well, Forever Among the start-up tech set, one of the philosophies that has dominated for the past two decades is the extremely annoying “fake it til you make it.”

This is just a very cute way of saying, lie, cheat, and commit fraud until you either get healthy or get caught. By then, if you get caught, you’ll either be out of business or be big enough to hire a suite of lawyers who’ll con the government into a cozy settlement. But the chances of being prosecuted for your fraud? Zilch on a stick.

We’re all familiar with how deeply this philosophy cuts in techland from the one case that actually is being prosecuted -- the Theranos case.

Steve Goldstein does a good job this week in explaining how “fake it til you make it” is also alive and well in online media.

Steve takes us through the alarming case of adland darling Oxy Media and explains that in the super-hyped world of podcasting, as in all online media, audience metrics are both critically important and highly unreliable.

Can This Be True?

And speaking of fraud.... an article appeared in Ars Technica

(an online magazine owned by Condé Nast) this week that has me scratching my head. It’s one of those conspiracy theory stories that makes a conspiracy theory hater think that maybe there was a conspiracy.

It concerns a hacker named Robert Willis (once known as Hacker X) who claims he created a huge network of interlocking websites that produced false and inflammatory misinformation during the 2016 presidential election and reached millions of people daily. His activities were so successful, he claims, that his own father still believes the bullshit he made up, even after he told him he made it up.

Ars Technica claims it vetted this guy’s story every possible way, and it checks out. The problem is, they won’t name the apparently well-known media company that hired Willis to do his dirty work. That’s a major black hole in an otherwise fascinating story. You might want to read it and draw your own conclusions. If it’s true, it’s a whopper. h/t Bob Sproul Tweet of the Week Last week, in a piece about the deafening silence of the ad industry during the ongoing Facebook scandal, I wrote, “(The) reason I believe our industry has been silent is that Facebook has bought and ‘owns’ the industry. No one in a position of authority has the balls to call them out.”

This week, John McCarthy, Media Editor at ad industry pub, The Drum, tweeted this out. I rest my case.

Today’s Lessons For Agencies I’m finally getting around to reading “Thinking Fast And Slow”

by Nobelist Daniel Kahneman. It’s totally brilliant and has a lot of ideas that are important to advertising practitioners.

One of the things I love about the book is that it seems to be confirming so many of my beliefs about advertising.

Kahneman would call this “confirmation bias.”

Here are two tidbits from the book that can be helpful to agencies.

1. When you’re showing your reel or presenting new concepts, do you lead with your best stuff or save the best for last? I’ll give you 5 seconds to decide...5...4...3...2...1...

When I was in the agency business and we were making presentations I always insisted on leading off with the best we had. It turns out that for once in my life I was right. Kahneman clearly illustrates how “the halo effect” works and why you should always lead with the best you’ve got.

2. When you’re pitching, clients sometimes find it too difficult to make a decision based on which agency is best. So they unconsciously step down the decision and make it about something else - like which agency they like better. The moral here: Keep the unpleasant people out of the pitch meetings.

Bob is a writer and speaker. He has written five books about advertising, each of which has been an Amazon #1 seller.Bob is one of the most sought-after international speakers on advertising and marketing.Bob’s blog, The Ad Contrarian, was named one of the world’s most influential marketing and advertising blogs by Business Insider.

4 Freaky Plane Designs That Reimagine The Golden Age Of Air Travel

By John Brownlee

For all their convenience, airplanes are one of the dirtiest modes of transportation out there. A fully loaded A380’s CO2 output is equivalent to each passenger driving six cars an equivalent distance. But what if airplane designers in the 1940s and 1950s had worked to embrace energy sources besides petroleum? How might the history of aviation have played out?

That’s the question posed by Royal College of Art graduate Tim Clark, who imagines an alt-history of aviation in which planes were designed to be powered by sonic booms and nuclear engines. Clark’s project, High-Speed Horizons, hopes to jumpstart what he considers “stagnated” Earthbased aerospace innovation by proposing four Golden Age plane designs that could have been: The Boomjet “SBT” — The Boomjet is probably Clark’s most arresting design: an aircraft with the body of a Boeing 767 and a billowing skirt of a tail that contains 47 separate propellers. Inspired by the shape of a sonic boom, the Boomjet’s propellers allow the Boomjet to take off vertically like a helicopter from a launchpad-like structure. And thanks to the Boomjet’s shape and propellor, the power of

its sonic boom can actually propel it forward. Unless there’s a body of water nearby, though, emergency landings are going to be a rocky affair. In the same way that SST was the preferred aviation acronym for talking about supersonic transport planes such as the Concorde, SBT stands for “sonic boom transport.”

The X-1SB — Designed in 1947, the Bell X-1 was the first plane to break the sound barrier. An insanely simple design, the X-1 was designed after the specs of a .50 caliber bullet, essentially because the engineers knew that a bullet was stable above Mach 1. In Clark’s alternate history of Cold War aviation, the X-1 was followed by a sister plane, the X1-SB, which combines a .50 caliber bullet with the shock wave that results from breaking the sound barrier. The “humorously tiny wheels,” Clark says, were inspired by a real-life plane: the V-173 Flying Pancake (not to be confused with the Navy’s X-150 Submersible Waffle).

The B-29 Duo “Double Mama” — The original Bell X-1 couldn’t take off by itself: it was designed to go really fast once airborne, but to actually get in the sky, it had to be airdropped by a Boeing B-29 Superfortress. With its even

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more unwieldy shape, Clark figures the X1-SB will have a similar problem, so he designed a dual-fuselage B-29, the “Double Mama,” to haul it up into the stratosphere. And while a double-bodied plane might look weird, it’s actually not that unconventional. This is the same family of aircraft that tows Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip Two to release altitude The Air Laissez-Faire — In the wake of disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, it seems pretty obvious why we don’t put nuclear reactors inside machines that semi-regularly come crashing out of the sky. During the Cold War, though, both the United States and Soviet Union extensively researched nuclear-powered aircraft. Air Laissez-Faire imagines what would have happened if this technology had hit the open market. Powered by a nuclear reactor, Air Laissez-Faire is a 518-foot plane that always stays airborne, mashing

up design elements from the Rockwell B-1 Lancer and the Concorde. Clark imagines it as a potential meeting place for globe-trotting businessmen: instead of flying all the way to Tokyo to meet your Japanese business partners, why not meet on Air Laissez-Faire, hopping aboard as it passes by?

Although his alt-history airplane designs look weird and whimsical, Clark insists that all of them would fly, save the Boomjet. “The drag caused by the back of the Boomjet makes it hard to believe it would work,” Clark says. Even so, he argues, implausible designs are all part of the history of aviation. “Every airplane design, aerodynamic or not, is an attempt to solve a problem and spark innovation,” Clark says. And in a warming world, what better problem could be worth solving than the aerospace industry’s addiction to fossil fuels?

Falling Flat: Why Startups Need Hierarchical Structure

By Wharton Staff

Wharton management professor Saerom (Ronnie) Lee has a word of warning for aspiring entrepreneurs who envision an egalitarian workplace where there are no bosses and every employee ranks the same.

According to his latest research, organizational structures often fail.

startups

with

flat

“Although many entrepreneurs dislike the notion of hierarchical structure and managers, they ultimately do need managers, and do need to plan ahead and design the appropriate hierarchical structure way earlier than they think,” he told the Wharton Business Daily show on SiriusXM. (Listen to the podcast above.)

In his study titled “The Myth of the Flat Startup: Reconsidering the Organizational Structure of Startups,” Lee pushes back against the popular view that firms, especially new ventures, work best without managers stifling creativity and getting in the way of progress. He said it’s only natural for founders at the beginning of their journey to get caught up in the excitement of generating ideas and finding the right productmarket fit. But focusing solely on the near-term will cost them down the line when having a clear delineation of duties helps firms to scale.

“What many of them realize over time is that no matter how good the business idea is or how brilliant the team is,

mismanagement can ultimately kill their business,” Lee said.

“Unfortunately, there are many cases where startups fail simply due to the lack of management structure.”

Lee found the most successful businesses that begin with a flat structure usually start creating levels of management when they reach about 20 or 30 employees. At that size, good managers step in to keep order and prevent the company from descending into chaos. Without supervision, employees may lose direction, drift into endless exploration, create projects they aren’t capable of accomplishing, and fight with each other.

“With no managers to keep them in line, they can start competing for projects, and these competitions start to get out of control and result in conflicts,” Lee said, pointing out that male employees, who are typically the majority, tend to accumulate influence in a power vacuum. Consequently, they secure the most promising projects for themselves, leaving female and minority employees with lesser contributions.

“While a flat hierarchy can foster experimentation and creativity at the early stage, it can lead to dysfunctional conflicts and coordination failure among employees, result in employee turnover, and ultimately lead to commercial failure,” Lee said.

Striking the Right Balance

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Lee acknowledged that it’s hard for entrepreneurs to balance the twin pursuits of creative innovation and commercial success. They often realize one at the expense of the other because it’s difficult to achieve both at the same time. Movies are a great example of that: Artistic films rarely make the kind of box-office profits raked in by blockbusters, which are usually devoid of artistic value.

harder to retain their original employees who were attracted

In the study, Lee found that the trade-off between the two desired outcomes can be mitigated by adopting the right organizational structure. That’s why it is important for founders to consider what kind of hierarchy will work best, and when to implement it.

heady early days of the business.

“Unfortunately, there are many cases where startups fail simply due to the lack of management structure.” – Saerom (Ronnie) Lee

to the job in the first place because the organization was flat.

In such cases, Lee said, it’s helpful for founders to temper employee expectations by making it clear that managers will be added as the firm grows.

The key message for entrepreneurs is to think just as much about their people as the product, especially during those

“Because it’s very difficult to make the transition from a flat to a hierarchical structure while busily working on ideas, entrepreneurs need to plan ahead and have a structure in mind,” Lee said.

In related, forthcoming research, Lee and his co-authors conducted a field experiment with 8,000 job candidates to examine whether startups that advertise a flat structure in job postings attract more female applicants. Contrary to the common belief that women prefer a flat organization,

“To commercially succeed, startups need to some extent limit their employees’ creative freedom and prevent endless exploration of ideas. They also need to cull ideas diplomatically without demotivating or creating conflict among employees, who tend to get emotionally attached to their ideas,” Lee said. “This is easier said than done.”

as this structure would be more egalitarian than traditional

As they build hierarchical layers, founders may also find it

long run,” he said.

hierarchies and provide a healthier work-life balance, they found that advertising a flat structure decreases the female representation in the applicant pool by 25%.

“Featuring a flat hierarchy can inadvertently decrease diversity at a startup and ultimately hurt performance in the

The Programmatic Poop Funnel

By Bob Hoffman

Who doesn’t love a good funnel?

Today, we’re going to make a nice colorful funnel using the latest data from some of the ad industry’s most reliable sources to trace a dollar spent for programmatically-bought display advertising on its exciting journey from your pocket to the bank accounts of middlemen, con men, crooks, and the Bermuda Triangle.

- The first four items come from the ISBA and PwC’s, Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study - Item 5 comes from Integral Ad Science - Item 6 comes from AdAge and Spider Lab’s report, Combating Ad Fraud in the Age of COVID-19 - Item 7 comes from Lumen Research

Adtech was created to make the buying and selling of online advertising so much more efficient. Today, about $350 billion dollars is spent on online advertising. 70%+ of it is bought programmatically. It turns out it has been wonderfully efficient for the lads and lassies in the adtech industry. Not so efficient for losers like you and me. Let’s see how it’s working...

Covering Your Ass

1. You start with a dollar to spend

Some Notes on the Funnel

2. Your agency gets a 7¢ fee

- It’s important to note that the ISBA study alluded to in points 1 through 4 above only reported on the highest quality tip of the iceberg -- the most premium end of the programmatic marketplace.

3. Technology and targeting fees take another 27¢ (DSPs, SSPs,and WTFs) 4. 15¢ mysteriously disappears into the “unknown delta.” No one knows where the “unknown delta” is. My guess? Jupiter or North Korea.

5. 30% of the ads you buy won’t be viewable 6. About 20% of the stuff you buy will be fraudulent 7. Only 9% of your display ads will be viewed by a real person for even a second. Bastards.

8. Blogweasel math notwithstanding, looks like your dollar bought you 3¢ of real display ads viewed by real human people.

Covering My Ass As I’m sure you know, no one in the comical online “metrics” business can agree on anything. Consequently, to minimize the torrent of abuse I’m going to get from agency and adtech apologists, I have taken the numbers in the above illustration from the most reliable sources I could find:

Oh, and be sure to ask your agency about these numbers.

And when they say, “We have systems in place...” ask to see the systems, have them explained to you, and get their version of how much value you’re getting from a programmatic ad dollar. Should be good for a few laughs.

Even at the premium end, only 12% of the ad dollars were completely transparent and traceable. An astounding 88% of dollars could not be traced from end to end. Imagine what the numbers must be like in the non-premium end.

- The “unknown delta” represents about 1/3 of the fees that programmatic buyers pay. This money just evaporates.

No one can figure out where it goes. Not even a famous blogweasel.

- I have used 30% as the factor for non-viewable ads. Some research reports it as high as 50%.

- I have used 20% as the fraud number at the publisher end of the funnel. Even if fraud at this end is only 10%, the math still comes out at about 3% viewable ads by real people.

- How many people actually view a display ad? The IAB defines a “view” as 50% of an ad’s pixels seen for one second. Huh? Even by this ridiculous standard only 9% of online ads are “viewed.”

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.

5 Technology Trends Every B2B Marketer Should Be Aware of

By Hazel Raoult

Enter 2022 and we will have B2B marketers witnessing a range of technology trends. The overarching principle driving these changes is that the customer demands a lot more. The growing competition and race for profitability amidst the pandemic have put the customer in the driving seat. The old paradigm of leading the customer is gradually being phased out, favoring a new one — follow the customers and cater to their requirements.

As technology changes the B2B marketing strategies, marketers’ teams must remain on top of industry developments. As a B2B marketer, you may have difficulty deciding where to invest your time and resources with a constant stream of new technology and execution techniques.

This is why we are covering five technology trends that you should be aware of in 2022. Getting hold of any or all of these would mean staying relevant and on top of the growing competition.

Trend #1. Account-Based Marketing Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a modern approach pivoting B2B marketing where marketers and sales personnel collaborate to identify and convert best-fit clients.

The Account-Based Marketing (ABM) goals were highly

impacted due to the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, as told by 42% of marketers. Also, 49% of the respondents said they had shifted their priority from acquiring new clients to retaining current ones.

Unlocking success with this approach will need sales and marketing teams to collaborate closely to aid marketers in finding the most qualified prospects for an ABM strategy within the target population.

Small businesses may profit from this strategy with a powerful blend of their sales and marketing teams using ABM to target their marketing resources and efforts most effectively.

Compared to other marketing activities, ABM provides a 97% higher return on investment. Among the 100 B2B marketers surveyed by Demand Gen Report and ABM In Action, only six admitted to not using ABM. Ultimately, AMB helps align sales and marketing activities for B2B businesses by ensuring efficient use of marketing resources.

Trend #2. Email Personalization Email marketing is the most successful channel for reaching out to a wider audience. As per Content Marketing Institute’s report, 68% of B2B marketers consider email newsletters

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53 one of the best ways to nurture leads. This is why it gets critical to personalize emails that render quality leads with improved conversions over an email.

businesses to make purchase decisions virtually. Adopting video marketing for B2B would mean entertainingly communicating key business information.

Another report suggests that 70% of marketers who adopted email customization achieved an exceptional return on investment (ROI. Thanks to the variety of templates and technologies that enable personalization, outreach, and audience segmentation simpler than ever before.

Branded films may assist B2B buyers in learning about new trends and honing existing abilities. By 2024, spending on video advertising will reach $12.66 billion, up from $10.18 billion in 2019.

Also, during the pandemic, the world switched to digital signatures to save time and effort, and minimize unnecessary physical contact and paper waste. Digital signatures can be readily leveraged in your emails for enhanced security and credibility.

B2B email personalization is a big step forward from mass emails that don’t get any results. Marketers can now run email campaigns, analyze those, and use AI to forecast (discussed in the next point) more easily.

Trend #3. AI-Powered Buyer Experience Another technology that is helping B2B marketers develop ever more tailored B2B buyer experiences is Artificial intelligence (AI). It helps create a unique customer journey across numerous channels. You can opt for an automated scheduler, spam score checker, automating A/B tests for email marketing, and much more.

Using AI in your B2B marketing will help plummet your costs and errors while boosting your ROI. B2B Marketers can link and analyze customer data to produce consumer insights that integrate marketing, sales, and customer service.

As per Salesforce, 21% of sales leaders hugely rely on AI applications, with most collaborating with marketing teams to share these applications. Like how email personalization helps drive more conversion, tailoring other aspects of marketing can also help unlock different growth metrics.

Personalization boosts lead generation, retains customers, and drives upselling. Moreover, it also enhances the remainder of the customer experience. For instance, 82% of marketing executives attribute personalization to a significant or moderate increase in consumer advocacy, while 92% attribute it to brand growth Trend #4. Video Marketing There are some technology trends that B2B marketers cannot afford to overlook, and this is one of those.

Especially as a modern-day digital marketer, you need the power of technologies such as video content to make it more accessible and appealing.

Video marketing is highly beneficial to B2B companies as it provides a visual reference to the buyer’s journey.

Moreover, you can also create case study videos that bolster your marketing efforts. This one is becoming quite a trend as more and more B2B businesses are adopting videos to reach out to their customers. Recent data suggests that 70% of B2B buyers watch videos when they research a product before they buy it and case studies videos are quite popular.

Spending on video advertising is predicted to grow in years to come, especially when the pandemic pushes many

Trend #5. Multi-Channel Marketing The chances are that you are already blasting enough emails as a part of your B2B marketing campaign, rampaging through email lists week after week. But, without a multichannel marketing plan in place, your business might be losing out on the possibility to grow further.

Most successful marketers know the importance of multichannel marketing as they keep accessing various channels to reach out to different businesses. This includes digital and offline marketing operations. B2B marketers can adopt a range of techniques to achieve success with this kind of campaign, most notably by tapping into the desires and preferences of their consumers via different media platforms.

Below are some of the many ways to simplify multi-channel marketing and accelerate creating a cohesive experience: Conduct research before deciding on or investing in a new platform. For instance, if you are thinking of running adverts in a mobile app, identify its target audience and check the app CTR. Create a definite plan for the business objectives that your content will drive.

Keep track of your marketing efforts using lead tracking software like Salesforce Sales Cloud, Zoho CRM, etc.

Invest time in fine-tuning all marketing channels, including regular updates.

Wrapping up Every year with technological advancements, B2B marketers need to stay updated with ongoing market trends. Adopting such fast changes requires a keen eye, a quick mind, a dynamic approach, and awareness to adopt the best in B2B marketing.

Everything boils down to accepting the change and repositioning your B2B brand with anything from personalization to artificial intelligence that helps you stay on top of the game. Becoming a successful B2B marketer would need you to keep tap with the latest technologies and be prepared to adopt one or all these trends.

The newer trends keep emerging and are a testament to the marketing industry which is ever-evolving and dynamic.

Brace yourselves for the new year by identifying the trend that can boost your business and swiftly adopting it.

Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.

The Top 10 Google Algorithm Updates of 2021 [Infographic]

By Cent Muruganandam

Google is constantly evolving its algorithms to display the users the most accurate, relevant, and secure pages. And every year, it seems to introduce more and more updates every year. Knowing what kind of updates have been made will help you keep up with SEO best practices, improve your rankings, and understand any reasons behind performance shifts.

Page experience

Here we cover the ten most influential Google algorithm updates for 2021 in chronological order.

We have also provided tips for optimizing your content

These include:

corner. This is a good time to check for updates released last

Passage ranking

year. 2021 was a year-round for Google and SEO: multi-

Mobile-first indexing Product reviews

Page titles Core update Local Search Update About this result

according to these updates. The new year is just around the

core updates, page experience updates, spam updates and more. To give you an overview, here’s an infographic of Google’s 2021 updates. We hope this infographic will help

MUM

you understand the latest Google guidelines and updates to

Link spam

launch your new 2022 strategy.

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Most Important Google Algorithm Updates of 2021

performance data.

Passage Ranking Update (February 2021)

Product Reviews are Being Updated (April 2021)

Google may now utilize artificial intelligence to index not only web pages, but also individual passages (paragraphs, phrases) from those pages, thanks to the passage ranking update. As a result, certain passages may appear as the featured snippet. Instead of making the user trawl through the relevant web page to locate the answer, the goal is to immediately respond to specific queries.

The purpose of Google’s April 2021 product reviews update was to encourage product reviews that included in-depth research, intelligent analysis, and original material rather than just summarizing a list of products.

“About this result” Update (February 2021) Google’s “About this result” feature, introduced in February 2021, adds context to individual search results, allowing users to select which results will be most useful to them. The “About this result” box shares the following:

Google discovered that a lot of review content doesn’t provide information that genuinely helps individuals make purchasing selections after a testing, experimenting, and review process.

In its statement, Google stated the following.

“As a result of this, we know that people prefer in-depth product reviews to shallow content that merely summarises a bunch of things.

•

When Google first indexed the page’s webpage.

•

Whether or not connection to the site is secure.

•

Which of your search terms appear on the page.

That’s why we’re announcing a change to our ranking methods called the product reviews update, which is designed to better reward this type of material.

•

If there are any links to the page from other websites that use those search terms.

For the time being, this update only includes English language evaluations.

The page’s language •

It will also retrieve a brief description from Wikipedia if you have a Wikipedia reference (not meta tags this time).

100% Mobile-First Indexing Update (March 2021) As mobile traffic grew in popularity in the 2010s, Google began to emphasize mobile friendliness as a ranking criteria in 2015.

A year later, Google implemented mobile-first indexing, which refers to when Google scans and ranks your website pages based on the mobile version of that material.

Mobile-first indexing became the default for all new websites in July 2019.

It became the default for all websites, old and new, in June 2021.

In its must-read guide on the matter, Google goes on to say “Previously, when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user’s query, the index predominantly used the desktop version of the website’s content.” Because the majority of Google Search customers currently access the service via a mobile device, Googlebot will predominantly crawl and index pages using the smartphone agent in the future.”

To make your site more mobile-friendly, do the following:

We feel this will benefit people who create valuable information in the product review area even more.”

MUM Update (May 2021) Google has made progress with AI in its algorithms, the most recent of which was the MUM upgrade in May 2021.

The Multitask Unified Model (MUM) is a natural language model that is substantially more powerful than BERT, which was released in October of this year (bidirectional encoder representations from transformers).

“Helping you when there isn’t an easy answer,” MUM says.

MUM’s purpose is to offer comprehensive answers to complex problems by combining contextual information from several sources.

Instead of needing to look for something like: •

“How to prepare for a hike on Mount Adams,”

•

“How to prepare for a hike on Mount Fuji,”

•

“Mount adams versus Mount Fuji hiking,”

•

“Mount adams vs Mount Fuji hiking,”

a person can inquire •

“I’ve hiked Mt. Adams and now plan to hike Mt. Fuji next fall; how should I prepare differently?”

•

Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.

and find out everything you need to know in one search.

•

Use image compression and slow loading.

•

On your mobile phone, manually test popups and form functionality.

MUM is being trained in 75 languages, allowing it to find suitable replies in languages other than the one in which the query was typed.

Mobile-friendliness works on a page-by-page basis, but the mobile usability report in Search Console and Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool can provide site-wide mobile

This isn’t to say you should start answering complicated queries in your postings.

Simply conduct keyword research and continue to generate

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long-form content that focuses on long-tail and query keywords.

Link Spam Update (June 2021) It was divided into two sections, each of which Google claimed would begin and end on the same day—but it took two weeks longer than intended.

There weren’t many specifics in this update, but it’s always a good idea to double-check that your website is spam-free.

between two pages of equivalent quality.

It turns out that Google may have done a better job of downplaying the upgrade than it planned, with Danny Sullivan later insisting that it might have a significant longterm impact, even if the immediate impacts were minor.

Here are some things you can do to improve your core web vitals: Remove annoyinginterstitials and banners that are blocking

If your website allows users to interact with it through comments, forums, or other means, you should be extremely wary of these malevolent actors.

Reduce Javascript execution

Here are some suggestions for keeping your website safe from spammers:

Optimize and compress images

The SSL certificate for your website should be updated.

Check for security concerns and manual action reports using Google Search Console.

Clean up suspected spamming acts on a regular basis, such as numerous requests from the same IP address.

Use noindex to keep low-trust pages out of Google’s index, especially those that contain user-generated material.

You can also use the nofollow attribute to make the links nofollow Page Experience Update (June 2021) In addition to the mobile website index, Google has introduced a specific set of indicators through a Page Experience update called Core Web Vitals. The new Core Web Vitals signals, which monitor loading speeds, the responsiveness of interactive components, and the visual stability of pages, were merged with numerous existing user experience signals.

These are not new indicators, but re-prioritized elements used to quantify an individual’s experience on a website.

These include: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The speed at which the main content of the page loads.

First Input Delay (FID): The speed at which a web page responds to the user’s first action on the page.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Layout stability (that is, elements do not jump unexpectedly).

The actual data for these metrics can be accessed from Page Speed Insights or the full Core Web Vitals report in the search console. Each of these reports contains recommendations to improve the responsiveness of your site.

Google initially stated that the page experience upgrade will have a minor impact, claiming that quality is the most important component in ranking. The page experience signal, according to the report, could help distinguish

Implement lazy loading

Provide correct sizefor images and embeds Improve server response time Page Title Update (August 2021) For over a decade, Google has been following queries to optimize SERP page titles. But by August 16th, people started to notice that Google had changed the page title significantly. A week later, Google confirmed that it introduced a new system that stopped adjusting titles based on queries but was supposed to better represent the entire page. This update is not well accepted as the title is generated from H1, image tags, and even anchor text from other sites.

In mid-August, SEO reported a significant increase in Google rewriting page titles in SERP. Google often adjusts page titles to make them more relevant to user inquiries, but the frequency and scope of changes reported in late August was extreme.

On August 24th, Google confirmed an update to an algorithm that coordinates the search engine process for generating website titles in SERP results. “Last week we introduced a new system for generating website titles.

Previously, titles could change based on the queries issued.

In principle, this does not happen on the new system. This is because, in our opinion, the new system creates a title that is totally suitable for explaining what the document is, regardless of the particular query.” Danny Sullivan, Google search liaison, suggests.

As a result, the frequency and level of page title changes have subsided since its peak in August, but Google has more power over page titles than it did before the update.

Google argues that “focusing on good HTML title tags” is still important, and has posted new guidelines for website owners on its Search Central website.

This post was originally published on PageTraffic blog.

Author on SocialMediaToday.com and Business2Community.com; loves the laptop lifestyle and escaping the 9 to 5. Loves family, entrepreneurship, smartphones and fast cars in that order.

Opportunity waits for publishers and marketers as cookie apocalypse looms: Digiday’s top trends for 2022

By Kayleigh Barber

This year was not a quiet one for the industries that Digiday covers and the reporters who have had their ears close to the ground joined the Digiday Podcast to talk about the challenges and trends that they’ve been covering on their beats as well as what we’ll continue to closely watch in 2022, including cookie apocalypse preparedness, mitigating platforms’ influence on media buying, and how the return to office is an ever looming presence.

There’s a lot of push and pull between employees and management on that topic and I think that’s just going to continue to be, you know, a big area of focus for the industry, as companies try to figure out how to bring people back into the office — [or] if it’s even necessary to bring people back into the office and how to do it smoothly without having a lot of backlash, really, from unions, about health and safety measures and things like that.

Use these time stamps to jump ahead to the specific industry conversations:

Apple’s position as a power broker is changing mobile advertising strategies

Media Year in Review – 3:32

Seb Joseph, senior news editor:

Advertising Year in Review – 43:02

Snapchat is making a big focus on AR enabled commerce, right? And the thing behind that is, and this came through from an interview we had with the GM of Europe recently, they believe that the more sales that happen in their app via AR enabled commerce, the easier it’s going to be for them to show advertisers how effective their ad dollars are, without the need for the use of an identifier, whether that’s from Apple or Google.

Publishers’ post-cookie playbooks become a little clearer Max Willens, senior editor of research and features: One of the things that we’ve been tracking really closely with the research panel this year has been cookie preparedness and kind of mindset among publishers. The main issue that lots of publishers are struggling with is figuring out how they’re going to try to make this situation work for them the [best] it possibly can. Publishers hated the cookie world, because it basically dis-intermediated them from the process in a major way and forced them to sort of take what they could get. But all of a sudden — and this doesn’t apply to all the publishers but to a certain select group — they can stand up and say with a straight face, ‘We have a large audience that we have some fairly interesting information and insights about. We have a good deal of insight into how they behave, not just on our properties, but elsewhere. If you want us to help you reach them, not only with messages, but maybe with the ability to buy your products directly or meet them in real life, we can help you do that.’

That’s a big change and a big opportunity for some of them, but I think there’s still not much certainty that this is going to be a big win for publishers, overall. Maybe a slight inch, but not a huge one. Most of the money is still going to go to Google and Facebook.

The challenges facing a modern newsroom Sara Guaglione, media reporter: I’m going to be looking a lot more into the modern newsroom [and] employee activism, I think you could call it. We’ve seen so much activity with unions at media companies. Oftentimes, they’re being very outspoken about what they want from a workplace to feel safe, and happy in their work life balance.

The long and short of it is, you’re starting to see how influential Apple now is in advertising. Since 2017, [Apple] has been steadily throttling the access advertisers have to its ecosystem, all in the name of privacy. So first, there was ITP, which reduced third-party cookie tracking in browsers.

Now AT&T does the same on its devices, and in the future it’s looking like it’s going to do the same thing for IP addresses and email addresses. I think Apple’s role as a power broker in the industry nowadays is a big talking point.

Agencies remain heavily impacted by methods of the past I think agencies already are accounting for [the coalescence of digital media and walled gardens] because they’ve felt the impact of this for a few years now. And I also think it’s why they’re getting into more consultative work that very intentionally gets away from the investment way of doing business that they’ve traditionally turned to.

And clients are now taking more in-house, but one factor in all of this that I observe, just from speaking to sources at all the holding company-owned media agency networks, is that most of the chief investment officers still come from a traditional media background. That colors and influences the way [in which they buy media] and what they buy on behalf of clients. I think that has more of an impact and an effect on where marketer dollars get spent than a lot of people realize.

A New Year’s resolution for entrepreneurs: Revisit Jim Collins

By Stephanie Mehta

Before Jim Collins wrote Built to Last and Good to Great he published Beyond Entrepreneurship. Originally published in 1992, Beyond Entrepreneurship grew out of a course Collins and Bill Lazier taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and it has become a quiet favorite of entrepreneurs such as Netflix founder Reed Hastings. Last month Collins published Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0, which he calls an “upgrade” of the original book, with new chapters and essays. It also includes what he describes as “the map,” or a framework that distills 30 years of research into a guide that entrepreneurs and companies can follow if they aspire to build enduring companies. In an interview with Fast Company editor-in-chief Stephanie Mehta, Collins notes that he and co-author Lazier highlighted many of the themes business leaders are touting today, such as purpose and stakeholder capitalism, while cautioning against a “built to flip” mentality. He also describes B.E. 2.0 as an “act of love” and a way to honor Lazier, who died in 2004.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity: Fast Company: Why update Beyond Entrepreneurship, and why now?

Jim Collins: Beyond Entrepreneurship grew out of the course that Bill Lazier and I taught at Stanford’s business school. It was a course called “B352, Entrepreneurship and Small Business.” And for whatever reason, to this day, I’m not really sure why, I decided to recast the syllabus of the course for my section of it. This was not going to be a course on the mechanics and challenges of a being small business manager, it was: How to take an entrepreneurial

venture and turn it into an enduring great company.

I think I got infected by…this idea that if you’re going to go to do something entrepreneurial, then you should set out to try to create something truly worthy of lasting, that can endure. There are people who have built these companies that are worthy of admiration that have had an impact on the world. That’s the standard that you should aspire. So that’s why the book is called Beyond Entrepreneurship. The key is the word “beyond,” and the subtitle is about turning your business into an enduring great company.

At the very time that we were working on Beyond Entrepreneurship, Jerry Porris and I had begun our research on visionary companies, looking in a very rigorous, databased way, at the long course of history of companies that had attained this visionary status. We found that the companies that were the visionary over time, the enduring great companies, were guided by a purpose beyond profits.

The economics were simply fuel to do something really purposeful. And those two [projects] coincided, and ended up in the Vision [chapter] in Beyond Entrepreneurship.

Fast forward a few years and Beyond Entrepreneurship kind of got lost a little bit because Built to Last became so big and then Good to Great became so big. But this book that Bill and I did together had a very loyal and small following. I don’t tend to ask for very many endorsements, but Reed Hastings endorsed this one. He said Beyond Entrepreneurship shaped his leadership style more than any book or any person. And it’s because it gave him the confidence to trust his inner core as to what was trying to

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do.

Bill Lazier died in 2004, and I really wanted to write something about Bill, to extend his legacy, to share his great wisdom with the world, to inspire a whole other generation of entrepreneurs. My wife, Joanne said, why don’t you rerelease and upgrade Beyond Entrepreneurship? Give it the life it deserves. Bring people back to that spirit.

FC: What are some of the upgrades?

JC: After 30 years of research, I had a single map. If an entrepreneur said to me, “I want to build an enduring great company,” I would say, “read BE 2.0 and follow the map.”

I want to gift the map to the entrepreneurial generation to come.

I believe that business done right, meaning in the most aspirational way, is one of the most meaningful and noble things you could do with a life. You think about what Walt Disney’s life added up to. Or William McKnight, inventing the idea that you could make innovation a systematic replicable process, which is what he did at 3M. Or you think about [Patagonia founder] Yvon Chouinard saying, “I’m going to think of accompany as a role model and a tool for change in the world. And I’m going to prove it with our success and the quality of what we do.” It’s not about flipping and cashing out, this is a choice. And then you could get to the end of your life and say, “Wow, what a life well spent.”

FC: Speaking of flipping, you wrote one of Fast Company‘s most iconic articles, Built to Flip, which ran in 2000. It was meant as a warning, but there’s a short-termism that still pervades entrepreneurship today.

JC: On the front page of the paper there’s [Doordash’s] $71 billion IPO. I’m not saying that’s good or bad. I’m not saying it’s the right or wrong number. I’m simply saying that it sort of sends a signal that the definition of success is, “wow, you took your company public for this amount of money.” And of course, in an era of tremendous liquidity and zero interest rates, it’s just the fuel, right? You’d almost feel dumb not to take advantage of it, right? And, and of course, if you I’m stocking up fuel to build, [your] version of the next Google or the next Amazon or Netflix, then it could be just like, ‘Hey, this is a chance for me to put a a lot of oxygen canisters for the climb on the mountain.”

But if it’s like, “No, this is just a great time to, get rich, and three years later we don’t really care what’s happening to the company,” if that’s what’s happening, then we’re back to “built to flip” world. One of my great mentors, Michael Ray, who had a big impact on me at Stanford, had a wonderful line, which is, “Comparison is the primary sin of modern life.”

And when you get into an era where you have competing IPOs, competing valuations, competing cash-out moments, competing houses in Silicon Valley…the comparison gene starts to take over, and your measurement starts to become defined by these visible events. And maybe building a company that is going to do really great over time isn’t so visible. Especially if you decide to keep it for yourself, you might choose to remain private and take a longer time to do it. Chouinard is a great example of that. And so when you get into the comparison as the primary sin of modern life, and then you get into a frothy period like

this, the comparison starts to run rampant and people start [thinking], “Well, gosh, this is what people are doing.

Maybe this is what I should be doing. Maybe this is what the real definition of success is.” But as Bill [Lazier] always pointed out to me, if you measure your success by money, you always lose.

FC: Since you wrote, Built to Last, several huge companies have been founded: Facebook, which was founded in 2004, Google in 1998, Amazon in 1994. Do you feel like these companies embody the tenets that you laid out in the book?

JC: Some of them are, in a modern way, picking up, [on] Beyond Entrepreneurship and Built to Last. I think that Reed [Hastings] at Netflix is a good example of that. One may or may not agree with what his values are, or Google’s values or Amazon’s, but they were really clearly setting out to try to build something enduring and impactful in their way.

Amazon really grabbed the flywheel idea from Good to Great, which is in the map [in Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0].

FC: How does the flywheel contribute to longevity?

JC: Imagine you would have said the finish line of Amazon was 1999. The “built to flip” view is, let’s build it up to a hundred turns [of the flywheel] and flip it. The “built to last” view is a hundred turns is just the first hundred terms on the flywheel. Then it’s a thousand to a million turns on the flywheel. Then it’s a million to a billion turns on the flywheel and the great results happen down the road, right?

Look at Disney today. That flywheel started in 1927. If it would have stopped the flywheel after three films, there’s no Disneyland, there’s no streaming services. There’s no, you know, harnessing Pixar. I think that folks like [Amazon founder Jeff] Bezos and the folks at Google, Reed Hastings at Netflix, they understand this long-term flywheel effect.

FC: If the core message of Beyond Entrepreneurship hasn’t changed in 30 years, has the storytelling needed to change to get the message across to a new generation of entrepreneurs?

JC: Yes and no. The vision framework or the concepts that are in the map were research-driven. It was a very rigorous process. We know what correlates with having a much greater chance of building an enduring great company.

Then you put those into concepts that people can really absorb, whether its Level Five Leadership, or BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) Then there’s this step that’s really critical, which is picking precisely the right story to teach the idea.

The purpose of the story is not the story is not the idea. The story is the, is the, is the human vessel for teaching an idea.

There are maybe 30 different stories you could pick to help somebody really grasp an idea, but picking the right one for the right audience at the right time, that I think is the art. Take The Illiad, which I’ve read multiple times. It is a story about honor. But maybe if you want to communicate the same idea, you instead teach about Katharine Graham taking over The Washington Post and facing this really difficult choice after her husband had committed suicide.

She has to step outside the walls and, and, and fight for what is dear, which is the soul of The Post and its role in the world. And, and that’s a human story, right? But it ties into something deep and timeless.

Book,

&

Line

Disruptive Branding: How to Win in Times of Change

by Jacob Benbunan Disruptive forces have rewritten the rules of business. In an age of continuous change the strength and authenticity of brands has become more important than ever. The organizations that can master their brand experience are able to survive disruption by disrupting themselves; companies that can’t do this will leave themselves ripe for disruption.

Build Your Brand Mania: How to Transform Yourself Into an Authoritative Brand That Will Attract Your Ideal Customers

By Jeremy Miller The missing piece of internet marketing that almost all business owners miss is transforming themselves into an authoritative brand that attracts their ideal customers.

Yes, traffic is very important for getting your prospects to find you online.

Sinker Branding: In Five and a Half Steps

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

Creative Blindness (And How To Cure It): Real-life stories of remarkable creative vision

By Dave Trott Creativity is all around us. Not in art galleries. But on the train, at work, in the street outside, and in schools, hospitals and restaurants. Creative vision exists wherever people are. In this entertaining collection of real-life stories, Dave Trott applies his crystal clear lens to define what genuine creative vision looks like.

AI For Marketers: An Introduction and Primer: Second Edition

Hegarty on Creativity: There are No Rules

By Christopher Penn

Creativity isn’t an occupation, it’s a preoccupation.

It is at the very core of what makes us human.

It’s also a fundamental challenge that everyone faces in the modern world, be they in business, in education or a struggling artist or musician. Being creative and innovative and communicating our ideas effectively and persuading others is vital.

In this all-new, completely rewritten edition, you’ll see the future of marketing as AI changes it forever. What’s inside?- You’ll explore what AI is and isn’t- What questions marketers should be asking of vendors- The different types of machine learning- What great data is- 5 practical applications of AI for marketing

The Power of Ignorance: How creative solutions emerge when we admit what we don’t know

By Dave Trott “The wise man knows he doesn’t know. The fool doesn’t know he doesn’t know.” Lao Tzu “In the West they only respect experts. But the expert mind is the closed mind.” Shunryu Suzuki What’s the most important step in fixing a puncture? It isn’t jacking up the car, or taking the wheel off, or finding the puncture.

By John Hegarty

Fanocracy: Turning Fans into Customers and Customers into Fans

By David Meerman Scott From the author of New Rules of Marketing & PR, a bold guide to converting customer passion into marketing power.

How do some brands attract word-of-mouth buzz and radical devotion around products as everyday as car insurance, b2b software, and underwear?

They embody the most powerful marketing force in the world: die-hard fans.

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B.Y.O.B. Building Your Own Brand: Branding for Designers, Brand Strategy, Identity Assets, Logo Design, Blogging & Marketing

By Karan Gupta Who is this book for? This book is tailored for professionals in the fields of graphic design, branding design, visual design, ui/ux, business administration, brand management, public relations, architecture, interior design, content marketing and communication design.

Branding Bud: The Commercialization of Cannabis

By David Paleschuck

Once an underground commodity, with legalization in more and more states and countries, cannabis is now marketed under a variety of national brands, each with its own unique approach to targeting consumers. The global legal cannabis market was valued at US$17.7 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach US$73.6 billion in 2027. Celebrities, athletes, politicians, and large corporations alike are investing and competing in this fast-paced industry.

Linkedin: The Number One Social Network for Personal Branding

By Michael King Linkedin The Number One Social Network for Personal Branding is a comprehensive guide to building a successful personal brand on LinkedIn. This book will help you to understand how using LinkedIn can help you to gain an edge over your competitors.

Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World

By Brendan Kane Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World, by out of the box thinker Brendan Kane, breaks down the most effective strategies to generate new opportunities, innovate and scale your business, and create a compelling brand— both online and off—so you can thrive in the new micro-attention world in which we live.

Rebrand

By Bernard Kelvin Clive This book contains the following themes/titles: - Branding - Personal Branding - Rebranding - Reputation Management - Digital Marketing Social Media Strategies - Artiste Brand Promotion - Author Branding - Book Publishing - Public Speaking - Podcasting. It is your Total branding guide.

Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses Are Turning Marketing Cost Into Profit

By Joe Pulizzi What if everything we currently know about marketing is what is holding us back? Over the last two decades, we’ve watched the entire world change the way it buys and stays loyal to brands.

But, marketing departments are still operating in the same, campaign-centric, product-led operation that they have been following for 75 years.

Lifescale: How to Live a More Creative, Productive, and Happy Life

By Brian Solis Somewhere along the way, we got distracted.

As much as we multitask, love our devices and feel like we’re in control, deep down we know that something is off. Shortened attention spans, declines in critical thinking, lack of sleep, selfdoubt and decreased creativity are just some of the effects coming to light in an age of digital distraction.

Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences on Social Media

By Dan Gingiss Seth Godin has taught and inspired millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, leaders, and fans from all walks of life, via his blog, online courses, lectures, and bestselling books. He is the inventor of countless ideas that have made their way into mainstream business language, from Permission Marketing to Purple Cow to Tribes to The Dip.