BrandKnew Februaty 2023

Dear friends

The first month of a New Year has come and gone. 2023 seems to be in a hurry- maybe wanting to make up for lost time?

“ Heat Testing “ is not something that we normally associate with marketers and marketing. But in this issue, we do. Take a look. The jury is out and this is a tricky one: AI Vs Human CreativityWhere Do We Go From Here?

I understand outsourcing is the flavour of the season for a while now but if you ever are working on your Personal Brand, you would be better off working on it yourself rather than outsourcing it. Know more about it in this edition. ChatGPT is the thing and supposedly the next big thing that will transform marketing careers. We take a deep dive in this edition on the topic. They are Gen Z and were once Social Media Managers. Now they are CMOs- get to know more about the shifting landscapes in marketing roles here. It is the age of mechanical creation and we examine in this issue how Advertising is affected by the same. There is a congruence of Great Leaders being Great Storytellerswe articulate the formula here for Great Storytelling. The ‘ creator economy ‘ is witnessing an upsurge driven by brands - be witness to it in the feature on this topic.

There is ample more to soak in, and leverage actionable intelligence from them and I leave you to do just that. Till the next, my very best.

Suresh Dinakaran

@ISDGlobalDubai

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suresh@groupisd.com

Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran

@Brandknewmag

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Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir

Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher

Chief Strategy Director: Rishi Mohan

Chief Country Man, India: Rohit Unni

Brand Trends and Research Architect: Meeta Pendse

Marketing Sherpa : Sindhujaa Ayyappan

Marketing Sherpa : Shruti Manik

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

Creativity and the ‘in between’

How marketers can benefit from “heat testing”

5 Reasons to Work on a Personal Brand Yourself Instead of Outsourcing It

From 7-Eleven to Canada Goose, stores are going to get more awesome in 2023

Here are some of the quirkiest brand collaborations that got us talking in 2022

Why AI Will Disrupt Marketing Agencies in 2023

Why ChatGPT will profoundly transform every marketing career, starting now

The 2023 podcast advertising landscape, as predicted by several industry execs

Marketers forge ahead with metaverse experiments despite murky economy

Advertising in the age of mechanical creation

Brands are redefining the rapidly growing creator economy

All Great Leaders Are Great Storytellers. Here’s the Formula for Great Storytelling

Infographic Design Trends for 2023 [Infographic]

2023 Is A Pivotal Year For B2B Marketing—Are You Ready?

A.I. vs. Human Creativity: Where Do We Go From Here?

How Gen Z social media managers became the new CMOs

How Worried Should Creative Professionals Be About Artificial Intelligence? For PR, Is ChatGPT An Asset Or Threat?

‘Your dollar goes a little bit further’: Smaller brands are finding TikTok to be a more profitable advertising channel

Nancy Reagan, the Buddha, and You: On the future of your brand

Instagram, Spotify, and other modern logos get a 1980s makeover

Book, Line & Sinker

Creativity and the ‘in between’

By Faris Yakob, Genius Steals

Where does creativity come from, and where are the finest, most useful connections made? In the spaces in-between, observes

Faris Yakob.

Traditionally, it is a boon of the advertising industry that the agency is closed between Christmas and New Year. It’s a weird liminal time, literally on the threshold between two different years and modes of being. The recovery hammock between the festivities of the silly season that absorb December and the expected vigor of January. T’aint this nor that, it’s an inbetween, betwixt the gone and the unknown. Liminal spaces are where identities and certainties blur and new things become possible.

The in-between is the scene, the place to be seen, the source of scenius, that collective form of genius named by Brian Eno. It’s the intersection, the ecotone, the transition between two different ecological communities where there is significantly more biological diversity than in either alone.

It’s where novel ideas grow, spliced together from different cultures. According to Ronald S. Burt, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, “People who live in the intersection of social worlds are at higher risk of having good ideas.” Good ideas are chimeras, the more interesting ones held together with dynamic tension spanning different domains, and they can be risky.

We don’t like too much risk, especially when the world seems uncertain and scary. Indeed, creativity itself seems scary to many people, because it is about change and we have an implicit belief that the status quo is safe, even when it’s been pretty unsafe of late. “People actually have strong associations between the concept of creativity and other negative associations like vomit and poison,” according to Jack Goncalo, a business professor at the University of Illinois. We are all seemingly trapped in between what we think and how we feel and therein brands lie, reassuring the mind while stimulating the emotions that together lead us toward purchases.

Creativity is combinatorial and, as we discussed last month, new kinds of software can absorb all the available inspiration on the internet and then generate new combinations from that body of work. Beyond art and copy, my friend and former colleague Noah Brier recently debuted a tool which creates brand collaboration mash-ups using OpenAI tools.

By tapping a few inputs into BrXnd.AI you can see what products might happen in between any two brands, for better or cursed. The Cap’n Crunch x Brunello Cucinelli jacket looks awesome but the Clorox x Mountain Dew ice cream does not.

Noah was an agency strategist before founding various tech companies and he immediately gleaned the hint of insight from his experiment. “It wasn’t just that this thing could spit out amazing-looking imagery, it was that it seemed to understand which brands were strong and which were weak. Somewhere, deep in the system, were truths about what brands stand for and how they function that have been difficult to articulate, never mind quantify, before now.”

Some brands consistently overwhelm others in the collaborative rendering, they have more salience and definition, according to the machine. The biggest brands tend to be the most salient but there are also niche fashion brands like The Hundreds which seem to achieve salience without scale. There is some understanding of brands being built in the aggregation of all images, in the in between. Noah is beginning to explore using the system to analyze brand strength and recognition and announced a conference in New York to explore the topic broadly. As he points out, branding and AI are both ultimately about pattern matching.

In the recent movie Glass Onion, itself an homage and mashup of innumerable movie plots, references and images, the detective unwinds various different real and staged plots and schemes as the movie plays them back to you, showing the different sides of each story. This Rashomon effect reminds us that truth is created at the intersection of different stories.

As in the classic Points of View commercial for The Guardian newspaper from 1986, the same story told from different angles becomes a different story.

In those different interpretations is the in-between, the space where we all confuse each other with our different readings of the same ‘objective’ reality, which is also where new combinations can bloom. Misunderstandings can lead to clarity. Life, ultimately, is one (hopefully) long liminal experience, going through change as you move from one state to another. By the time you have acclimatized, things have changed again. This new year will no doubt contain surprises but hopefully, if we have managed to get some rest, we can use them to create new insights, ideas and enthusiasms that will propel us through to the next one.

How marketers can benefit from “heat testing”

by Heather Myers and Zasima Razack

Since the invention of surveys in the 1930s, companies have used market research to size up consumer needs. Focus groups generate inputs about behavior and attitudes. Tools like conjoint analysis explore trade-offs consumers make when considering a product purchase. Large panels estimate the market opportunity for a particular product.

What do all of those market research methods have in common?

None of them take place in a real-life environment. In every case, consumers are aware that they are part of a research effort. What does that mean for a product marketer? They get a wealth of data about how people describe their behavior and attitudes. What’s missing? Data and insights about actual behavior.

There is an easily accessible way to solve this problem: online advertising as market research.

Responses to a digital ad — clicks, likes, email sign-ups — are more reliable indicators of purchase intent because they reflect how consumers behave when nobody’s watching. Testing via advertising captures real-life data about how customers respond to new product concepts, rebrands, and other big strategic moves. We call this type of research “heat-testing” — finding that spark between offering and audience that is the genesis of product-market fit.

Here are three solutions heat-testing offers marketers:

1. Validating demand for new product concepts

Let’s say you’re working on a new beverage concept: a dissolvable tablet in exotic flavors like elderflower and hibiscus that enhance a glass of water. The product offers sustainability benefits — not much packaging, no shipping of water — and the artisanal approach to flavors makes it feel a bit luxurious. It’s also customizable: combining flavors creates a personalized concoction.

There’s one question everyone wants to answer before they launch a new product like this one: Is someone going to buy this thing?

Conventional market research has numerous shortcomings in answering this question: Loudmouths in focus groups drown out important opinions, conditional questions abound in surveys (“If ___ existed, would you buy it?”), and the extensive time and labor required for ethnographies and the like are not conducive to the pace of innovation that is required to stay relevant.

Fortunately, ad platforms lend themselves to multivariate testing, making it straightforward to access data-backed insights quickly. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google have instant access to millions of consumers who can be segmented into discrete audiences and targeted with multiple ads featuring a new product. Some ads will work and some won’t, providing data about where to retool variables.

Test variables may include a new product’s definition and features; the positioning, branding, messaging, and creative style that bring it to life; target consumer groups and calls to action to entice them; and other factors like pricing that make up the elements of a marketing campaign.

In the case of the beverage product, you might test three positions — Sustainability, Luxury, and Personalized Party — each brought to life by a couple of ads. (Ad creative alone should never be the reason a position succeeds or fails; using at least two creative approaches minimizes false positives.) And since your company wants to develop a younger customer base, you might target three discrete audiences ages 25–34 — let’s call them Planet People, Holistic Hipsters, and Spirits-Free Spirits — with ads.

Just like a regular marketing campaign, ads, landing pages, and supporting content are combined into a cohesive user experience. But a few elements are not like a regular

marketing campaign: a) The presence of “in development” or “coming soon” to reflect the status of the product concept, b) the lack of pre-existing customer data, and, of course, c) the fact that there are multiple marketing strategies being tested in parallel.

How do you know if there is demand for your beverage concept? When a potential customer gives your company their email address for a product that does not yet exist, you’re on to something. In an era in which privacy is increasingly valued, email is currency; a high rate of email sign-ups is the best possible validation of demand without actually building the product.

2. Finding new customers for an existing product

Heat-testing can also identify growth opportunities for existing products. Repositioning a legacy product for new audiences is risky: Fresh messaging or imagery can alienate an existing customer base.

Testing new positioning on a small scale with new audiences identifies product-market fit, giving brands the opportunity to unlock additional revenue streams without significant investment. Additional testing of winning positions with core audiences — again on a small scale — can pinpoint any risks presented by new messaging.

3. Learning how target audiences respond to offers

The goal of heat-testing is to find the heat — the match between product and customer — and the marketing elements to create that match. Heat-testing is not A|B testing, which takes place in environments where traffic already exists and where users are automatically directed to variations of existing web pages to guarantee randomized sampling.

Testing strategy via heat-testing is different. Because the product and/or audience is new, traffic to landing pages

needs to be generated, often in places where a brand lacks an existing mechanism to attract potential customers.

Generating that traffic for new product concepts isn’t a chore — it’s an opportunity to learn. Will an audience of “spirits-free” Millennials respond more to the Personalized Party position or the Sustainability position? Which combination of positioning, creative style, and audience works best to generate sign-ups for each concept? What proportion of people signed up to learn more once they reached the landing page? What does each email signup cost, and what can we infer about customer acquisition cost? Does behavior vary by ad platform? Answering these big, important questions de-risks expensive new marketing initiatives.

Heat-testing is revolutionary because it takes place in the real world. Every click on an ad is data. Every save or like is data. Every landing page view — yep, data. And when you compare the performance of every campaign variable, you learn a lot about how to position a new product. Best of all, those learnings are statistically valid.

Our approach to innovation takes Eric Ries’s minimum viable product (MVP) concept to a whole new level. In his book The Lean Startup, Ries espouses the benefits of launching an MVP and improving the product post-launch based on real user feedback. Heat-testing means that the MVP can be even more minimal than Ries imagined — that is, not even a product at all, but still something consumers can respond to.

Finding product-market fit via heat-testing requires iterating on lots of variables, so adhering to scientific principles is critical for a valid result. But capturing insights based on real-world behavioral data about purchasing decisions makes it worth the effort. The final product? A “heat map” showing the most responsive audience segments and the most efficient ways of engaging them.

5 Reasons to Work on a Personal Brand Yourself Instead of Outsourcing It

By Anastasia Chernikova

According to Pew Research Center, 74% of Americans trust someone with a respected personal brand, and over half would recommend, do business with or seek advice from these individuals.

Many businesses and entrepreneurs outsource the job of building a personal brand to a PR agency. I’m convinced that in the case of personal branding, it’s always better when founders are deeply involved in building them and not just outsourcing it on the side as another campaign on social media.

1. The proof is in the people

Founders like Elon Musk, Gary Vaynerchuk and Sara Blakely have all successfully built companies entirely around their personal brands.

Gary Vaynerchuk, a.k.a. Gary Vee, not only built his personal brand into a force of nature but leveraged it into an entire enterprise centered around helping others. His belief is that your brand must be “relentless, authentic and powerful,” which is something you can’t outsource to an agency.

The founder of shapewear company SPANX, Sara Blakely, used her own struggles to create a brand that is not only beloved but relatable for people around the world. No PR agency could have captured her thoughts, feelings and convictions as honestly as she could herself. A self-made billionaire, it’s clear that Blakely made the right choice.

2. Your perspective is unique and valuable

Yes, PR firms have a portfolio of success stories and brandbuilding. However, it’s important to remember that these PR managers are writing and rewriting dozens of similar columns and thought pieces for their clients.

The media is ravenous for fresh angles, “hot takes” and genuine, expert knowledge. This gives you an advantage. You need to come up with a list of topics that fall under your expertise. After that, you can expand on those topics either by offering a unique perspective or even a “spicy,” controversial opinion that can be shared as a way to spark discussion in the media. You can talk about that with your assistant or friends who you trust and ask about the spiciest and interesting points of your talk.

Your writing doesn’t have to be perfect; you can hire an editor or collaborate with a copywriter to get the final form down just right. The important thing is to infuse your personality into the pieces and build your brand.

3. Remember that you can’t delegate your voice

As an entrepreneur, there are many things you can task others with doing. However, building your personal brand simply is not one of them. Nobody else in the world can replicate your voice, so you will always be presenting a watered-down version of yourself if you allow someone else to take the reins of developing your personal brand.

For example, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian has ensured from the beginning that his voice is loud, clear and all his own since day one. He is not afraid of speaking up about issues he’s passionate about, and he makes a point not to take himself too seriously. As a result, top tech companies want to collaborate with him.

When you think about your online presence, try to allow glimpses into all of the important aspects of your life, showing a relatable, human side that strikes a chord with people.

4. Journalists appreciate the personal touch

Journalists love when founders and entrepreneurs send them emails and article ideas directly rather than using a PR agency as the middleman. This signals that the founder is serious about their goals and willing to put the work in. It also helps to build trust and rapport more quickly. Plus, it’s always great to receive ideas and drafts from the source directly.

When pitching to journalists, remember that they get dozens or hundreds of these emails per week and, on average, only respond to about 3% of them. Take the time to understand the journalist and outlet before sending them a succinct and relevant pitch.

5. Research shows a personal brand can make or break your success

At least 65% of people use the internet as a primary source of information about people. In the same way that it’s normal to Google a potential date or new acquaintance to learn about their lives, clients, employers, media and peers will do the same to learn about the founder before taking the next steps.

Studies have proven that it only takes 50 milliseconds for someone to develop a first impression of you, and 94% of the time, this impression is based on design (a.k.a. feelings). The more you can showcase the things that make you stand out and prove you’re trustworthy, the more people will resonate with your personal brand and flock to you.

Big PR firms can’t give you the unique, authentic voice you need to succeed, so skip spending on an agency, and keep your personal brand, well, personal.

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

From 7-Eleven to Canada Goose, stores are going to get more awesome in 2023

By Elizabeth Segran

If you’re in Dallas and feeling peckish, you might stop by a sleek, industrial store that sells made-to-order tacos. Conveniently, it also has a wine cellar, a nitro brew coffee bar, and a prepared-food fridge full of healthy snacks, like yogurt and fruit. The name of this chic new retail concept, you ask? 7-Eleven.

For two decades, the 7-Eleven store experience hadn’t changed. Harsh florescent light exposed stores that could be unsafe and unsanitary, stuffed with junk food and Slurpee machines. But today, consumers have higher expectations than ever about brick-and-mortar stores, and 7-Eleven knows it. It’s hired design firm CallisonRTKL to develop new store concepts, which have been unveiled in Dallas and Washington, D.C., and will eventually be rolled out across the brand’s entire fleet of stores. “Consumers can now buy everything online,” says Carlie Russell, a senior designer who worked on the project. “Even convenience stores need to step up their game to get people to come in.”

7-Eleven’s efforts to create more compelling stores is part of a broader trend. COVID lockdowns forced consumers to shop online and many have continued to do so as the pandemic has receded. As 2023 dawns, brands across the industry— from convenience stores to luxury labels—are working harder than ever to entice people back into physical shops. To woo them, brands are going beyond shopping and trying to offer other experiences, from dining to art to music. And experts believe that retailers that don’t offer interesting, exciting instore experiences will struggle in the years to come. “This is great news for consumers,” says Dan Frommer, founder of The New Consumer. “We’re just not going to put up with subpar stores anymore.”

EXPERIENCES WITH A PURPOSE

Experiential retail isn’t new. Before the pandemic, digitally

native startups realized that their customers could easily buy their products online, so they had to create more exciting retail concepts to convince them to shop in person. Glossier created all-pink stores that were a hit on Instagram; Everlane offered free lectures in-store; Warby Parker did book launches.

When the COVID hit and retail came to a standstill, this wave of creativity stopped, too. But the pandemic is receding. Frommer’s research for his annual Consumer Trends Report reveals that consumers are no longer worried about COVID and are eager to shop in person again. As stores reopen, they have an opportunity to reimagine what their stores can be, and the first wave of experiential retail offers a template. But while retailers need to provide interesting, elevated experiences in store if they want to stay competitive, Frommer says they need to offer more than gimmicks. An Instagrammable store design won’t keep customers coming back, nor will flashy, but unhelpful technology like robots that greet you. Experiences need to be useful and solve problems for customers. He points to a store like Eataly that creates an inviting environment where people can explore new brands and stop for a meal. “They really understand what their customer is looking for,” he says. “We want to sample great new products and they make that experience fun.”

STORES OF THE FUTURE

Canada Goose has nailed this formula by creating stores that are interesting and actually solve problems. The brand shifted from a wholesale to a direct-to-consumer approach seven years ago, and now, 70% of its sales come from its own channels, including its nearly 50 stores, says Carrie Baker, Canada Goose’s president.

The brand is known for its luxury outerwear, designed for

the coldest climates on the planet. But post-pandemic, it is expanding its retail footprint to the West Coast, where the weather is milder. This coincides with the launch of new products for warmer climates, like lightweight down. But Canada Goose also has Cold Rooms in store, where customers can put on a coat in glass cube where temperatures drop down to -10°F and there’s a daily snowfall. It’s a fun experience, but it also helps customers decide if they want to buy a coat for an upcoming trip.

Canada Goose realizes that customers aren’t going to buy an expensive new coat regularly, so it sees its stores as a way to keep customers connected with the brand, even when they’re not actively shopping. This realized led the company to start designing each store like an art gallery; they’ve invested heavily in paintings and sculpture that helps tell the company’s story, and particularly its relationship with the Inuit people, which first invented the parka. “We do have the occasional art connoisseur come in just to take in the collection, which we welcome,” Baker says.

Canada Goose now has 400 pieces of art in its permanent collection, as well as temporary installations, all by indigenous artists. The artwork travels across the brand’s 45 stores, so the collection in each store changes periodically. This gives customers a reason to stop by to explore what’s new.

EVOLVE, OR GET LEFT BEHIND

On the other end of the spectrum, 7-Eleven has also been on a mission to keep customers coming back—and sticking around. As a convenience store, the brand relied largely on meeting customers most basic needs: They’d pop in to pick up cigarettes, water, or a hot dog. But Carlie Russell, the designer who worked on the Dallas store redesign, says the brand recognized that its stores weren’t particularly welcoming. “Even convenience stores are now investing in

their in-store experiences,” she says. “7-Eleven realized that it had to rethink its stores now, or it would fall behind.”

Russell says that having a beautiful, well-designed store that makes customers feel comfortable is now a basic requirement. The designers created a space with durable, industrial materials that also look chic, like concrete floors and walls made of brick and wood. The stores are also open late at night, so sometimes customers can feel unsafe; the designers placed all fixtures below eye level, so employees can see what is happening across the whole store, and located women’s restrooms close to the registers, where employees can keep an eye on people going in and out.

But Russell says that the goal was to create such an inviting space that customers would want to hang out for a while. And this meant offering more than traditional convenience items. This is why 7-Eleven has partnered with a Mexican restaurant, Laredo Taco Company, to make freshly prepared food, and created indoor and outdoor seating areas. It has also created stations where people can create customized drinks, from nitro brew coffee to iced fruity beverages. (It’s a healthy new take on the Slurpee.)

After years in lockdown, many of us want to shop in stores again. The good news is that brands are just as eager to have us back and are working hard to make the in-store experience even more enjoyable. “The industry is getting better are meeting consumers’ needs,” says Frommer. “And for those of us who love shopping, that’s a great thing.”

Elizabeth Segran, Ph.d., Is A Senior Staff Writer At Fast Company. She Lives In Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her Work Has Been Published In The Atlantic, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs And The Nation.

Here are some of the quirkiest brand collaborations that got us talking in 2022

By Julian Cannon

Brand collaborations aren’t uncommon. And marketing executives maintain it’s for a good reason: these partnerships generate interest and improved engagement which can lead to valuable new opportunities.

But what happens when a brand gets involved in a collaboration or product launch that is seen by the public eye as, let’s say, stranger than most?

Boosting relevance and driving massive media attention, marketers have gotten creative in their partnership strategies this year. As 2022 is coming to an end, Digiday takes a look back on some of the strangest product launches and brand collaborations of the year.

The stunts could help brands connect to a new audience, said Damian Areyan, vice president of lifestyle marketing and partnerships at the ad agency Team One. “The brand can bring experiences to a new set of consumers that hopefully creates both buzz and intrigue and it’s the perfect time to make a strong first impression,” said Areyan.

Men’s hygiene care brand Old Spice teamed up with Arby’s over the summer to produce a limited edition “meat sweat kit” that infused the fragrances of the brand’s products with a slightly meaty scent. This is in line with the trend of fusing scents with meatiness. In the wake of an exhausting day, you have to wonder why would anyone want to smell like the local fast food chain when they are anticipating taking a shower?

Liquid Death x Martha Stewart

A Halloween-inspired luxury candle called “Dismembered Moments” was created by Liquid Death with Martha Stewart as part of its Halloween partnership this year. The candle features a matte black hand, that appears to be severed, holding a Liquid Death can. The partnership between Stewart and Liquid Death is a contrast to Stewart’s partnership with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, as it is in no way in line with her personality. Maybe that’s part of the brand’s strategy to stand out? Who knows!

Tropicana

Taking full advantage of TikTok’s trend of #theperfectmimosa, in which users are creating their own version of the drink, Tropicana created a mimosa maker to take advantage of this hot trend. You can craft your perfect mimosa with the

Tropicana Mimosa Maker thanks to its three spray settings (Whisper, Spritz, Shower). “The brand quickly capitalized on the #theperfectmimosa online trend with a unique orange juice sprayer product, witty storytelling and a strong influencer network, to create a real cultural moment around people’s level of affinity for OJ in their bubbly,” said Areyan.

“Does anyone really need a meat-scented spray or a mimosa sprayer? Absolutely not,” said Marcus Wesson, chief creative officer at the ad agency 9thWonder. “But as media and engagement opportunities become more fragmented, we’ll likely see more of these unconventional, limited-run products turn heads.”

Fireball Whiskey x DC Shoes

After its recent campaign to win over Gen Z (of drinking age), Fireball Whiskey and DC Shoes released a gift set for the holidays that included red suede sneakers with whiskeyinspired gum soles branded with the Fireball branding. The liquor is aiming to capitalize on nostalgia specifically from the year 2009. The problem is, there is no proof anywhere that suggests Gen Z or millennials are so-called partying like it is 2009 all over again.

Warner Media x Hello Fresh

One brand rolled out the red carpet for the holiday season to close out the year of the weirdest brand collaborations. In collaboration with Warner Media, HelloFresh created the spaghetti dish from the beloved holiday movie Elf. You won’t find this plate of pasta anywhere else as it features Colavita spaghetti, maple syrup, chocolate syrup, marshmallows, chocolate nonpareils and chocolate frosted pastries. This is enough to book a dental appointment for cavities, or to stop eating sweets for a while if you’ve bought it, especially since the ad touting the partnership just screams “yuck.”

As social media and content continue to blend, brands need to find new ways to get noticed and to let people talk about their brands, Areyan explained. Collaborations are all built on OBI (other brands’ influence) and it is all about taking a piece of that pie. “Combining two very different brands or categories raises eyebrows and generates conversation as it’s a viable strategy to stand out in today’s environment,” said Areyan.

Why AI Will Disrupt Marketing Agencies in 2023

ByPaul Roetzer

Artificial intelligence is going to disrupt a lot of marketing agencies in 2023.

Some will seize the opportunity and create enormous value for themselves and their clients, while many will be obsoleted. These laggards won’t all die off overnight, but their relevance and value will quickly fade, and their clients (and people) will move on.

My former agency, PR 20/20 (now Ready North) was HubSpot’s first partner back in 2007. I believed deeply in Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan and their vision, and I saw inbound marketing as the future.

HubSpot went on to build an incredible agency partner ecosystem that transformed thousands of agencies, created billions of dollars in value for their partners, and continues to drive massive growth for their customers.

AI presents a similar, but exponentially larger, opportunity (and threat) for agencies today.

The rate of change in professional services (not just agencies) will be profound. If I was running an agency today, I would focus on a few key areas: billing models, creativity, and innovation.

Billing Models:

The first chapter of my 2012 book, The Marketing Agency Blueprint, was titled, “Eliminate Billable Hours.” That has never been more important, or true, then today. Your agency has to use some form of value-based pricing (I created Point

Pricing in 2014, which is one option) to survive. For example, let’s say you are charging $150/hour to create content. A 1,000 word blog post today may take 7 hours (or $1,050). That same blog post with ChatGPT, or any of a dozen AI writing tools, can probably be written, edited, optimized, and published (with AI-generated images) in under an hour. You can do the math. Billable hours are dead.

Creativity:

AI unlocks previously unimaginable creative possibilities in all forms of media, including audio, video, text, images and more. If your creative work isn’t infused with AI tools, you will be at a significant competitive disadvantage.

Innovation:

With AI, the only limitation is your imagination. You must reengineer what an agency is and does. This includes products and services. Anything is possible now.

If you own, lead or work for a marketing agency, make understanding and applying AI a top priority in Q1.

Don’t wait for the agency world to get smarter around you. Our Piloting AI for Marketers Series is specifically designed to help any marketer understand and pilot artificial intelligence.

Paul Roetzer is founder and CEO of Marketing AI Institute. He is the author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence (Matt Holt Books, 2022) The Marketing Performance Blueprint (Wiley, 2014) and The Marketing Agency Blueprint (Wiley, 2012); and creator of the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON).

Why ChatGPT will profoundly transform every marketing career, starting now

by Deroy Peraza

What do climate change organization Extinction Rebellion, pop star Justin Bieber and global brand Apple have in common? They’ve all got something distinctly cult-like about them.

Whether with intentional savvy or by instinct or accident, the following and recognition they have achieved is straight out of the cult playbook of success. It is something mainstream brands can learn from—and use for good.

After all, which brand wouldn’t want to be built around a belief in something, which brings together people who then spread the word far and wide? That sounds like the most desirable form of brand loyalty. So it’s worth taking note of what some of the common themes are among Bieber et al…

Charismatic leader

As with some of the most nefarious cults, many of the world’s best-known brands are led by charismatic leaders who can be admired—even worshipped. Think Virgin and Richard Branson; KFC and Colonel Sanders; even Frosties and Tony

the Tiger.

Whether they’re a matter of fact or fiction, true leaders live and breathe the brand and everything that comes with it to build an ambassador community. We imitate people we admire, and using leadership figures can mobilize people to take action.

Purpose and meaning

But no amount of charisma can secure success if there isn’t something to stand for. Cult-like personalities or organizations invariably embody something.

For brands, this translates into an important shift: Rather than selling a product, brands need to be selling a cultural standpoint or belief system. This is not just about declaring a guiding purpose, but about letting people buy into something that gives a product more meaning.

It’s these brands that can bring communities together. Depop, for example, has brought people together not merely by providing a practical way of buying secondhand clothes, but by allowing them to buy into sustainability.

Find an enemy

Taking this a step further, another common trope among cults is the tendency to dial up the feeling of righteousness by identifying a common enemy or an evil to fight against. It helps mobilize a community.

In the same vein, brands should be asking themselves what they’re fighting for, and what they have to overcome to achieve that. To be a successful brand today, you need to think as much about whose nose you’re prepared to put out of joint as what you stand for.

Nuud, the plastic-free chewing gum, has recently gone full “anti-plastic” in all things, stepping up its brand message from “Gum should not contain plastic” to “Reduce all plastic consumption.”

Systems of influence

The importance of community building is another marker brands can look to. Cult-like organizations are often built around older, established members modeling for the younger ones and guiding behavior. While dyed-in-the-wool cults’ use of this approach veers into coercive behavior and brainwashing, brands can use it to positive effect, making social proof a key part of brand strategy.

Dr. Martens is a perfect example of this. The different demographics of its following are united by a feeling of rebellion. Whether it’s a “punky” aesthetic in your early teens or bucking the stereotypes of what a 50- or 60-year-old should look like, the brand can tailor itself to each community.

Signifiers of belonging

While a clear vision and a strong leader are key to building something people believe in, it’s the followers who create the cult-like status. They do so with the help of signifiers, distinctive ways to create that sense of belonging. Hand gestures, rituals and expressions are often very distinctive— and noticeable by non-members—to create a feeling of an “in group.”

Such signifiers need to be easy to use, adopt and adapt by as many people as possible. The use of signifiers goes way beyond the logo, especially in the world of brands. Monzo’s coral card in the early days marked you out as an early tech adopter, while the Apple logo identified you as a creative. Huel, meanwhile, provides a free T-shirt to users to easily spot the “Hueligans.” The use of signifiers is not so much about “branding” your users but about enabling them to express a lifestyle and attitude.

So, while cult-like behaviors have historically been associated with some of the most notorious organizations of our time, they are also inherent in some of the world’s most innovative and successful brands. Understanding how they can be used for good should give every brand owner the tools to build the holy trinity of trust, advocacy and loyalty they crave.

Kathryn is Managing Director of Mother Design London. With over 15 years’ experience in building brands, she has worked with a diverse range of sectors across an equally broad range of consumers, and has been fortunate enough to build brands,...Terrys Chocolate Orange.

The 2023 podcast advertising landscape, as predicted by several industry execs

ByAlyssa Meyers

“With great power there must also come great responsibility.”

Uncle Ben was probably not thinking about podcast advertising when he passed this advice along to Peter Parker, but it kind of applies anyway.

Last year, IAB research showed that podcast ad revenue in the US surpassed the $1 billion milestone in 2021.

As the sector continues growing, podcast ad pros predict there will be increasing demand for programmatic inventory, measurement solutions that can verify campaigns are reaching promised audiences, and more crossover with video content in 2023.

Year of programmatic?

Programmatic marketplaces exist for podcasts, but they’re not incredibly popular. Only 1.7% of podcast ads were sold programmatically in 2021, per the IAB. They might gain some more traction in 2023, several execs predicted.

Lisa Jacobs, VP of media operations and analytics at radio and podcast agency Ad Results Media, said programmatic inventory will increase as podcasters “continue to come around to the idea of an additional revenue source,” but

perhaps less quickly than it did in its early days for other channels.

As that inventory becomes more available, programmatic revenue could grow at a “much faster rate than other podcast ad revenue sources,” Matt Turck, head of podcast growth and strategy at audio ad sales company AdLarge Media and cofounder of Megaphone, predicted.

“We’ve learned from digital and can be smarter about how we work in the space, keeping CPMs fair for creators and advertisers,” he wrote in an email.

For advertisers, programmatic podcast buys are more scalable, added Seraj Bharwani, chief strategy officer at adtech company AcuityAds. Since it’s generally been harder to reach mass audiences via direct buys with individual networks or shows, that spend could become “concentrated toward the top 2%–5% of the podcast publishers,” he wrote in an email.

Prove it

Next year might also bring about the “age of verification” in podcasting, Dan Granger, founder and CEO of audio agency Oxford Road, predicted.

If programmatic buying does grow in 2023, as Jacob Schwartz, associate media director for national audio investments at Mediahub, thinks it will, “the need for transparency into delivery is going to come to a forefront,” he wrote in an email.

Third-party impression verification, for instance, will be in high demand among advertisers, Glenn Rubenstein, founder of podcast ad agency Adopter Media, wrote. Some of that demand might be a result of the macroeconomic climate, which has led to budget cuts, Christiana Brenton, US director of sales and brand partnerships at Acast, wrote.

“For advertisers, this means there are going to be increased pressures to prove out ROI on every dollar spent,” she wrote. “Looking specifically at podcast advertising, as an emerging medium, this means there will be even more demand to quantify and measure ad performance.”

The industry might also grapple with attribution issues, and “the best companies [won’t rely] on any one attribution service,” and will test multiple tools in order “to see what works and what doesn’t,” Giancarlo Bizzarro, VP of sales at Crooked Media said.

Spotify made moves on the attribution front with its 2022 acquisition of Podsights and plans to “continue to triple down” on that part of the business in 2023, “working with marketers on showing ROI and effectiveness within podcasts,” Brian Berner, Spotify’s head of enterprise sales, the Americas, told Marketing Brew.

When Spotify acquired Podsights earlier this year, some in the industry expressed concern over what losing what was previously a third-party solution would mean.

YouTube has entered the chat

Podcasters have been distributing their content on YouTube

over the past five years or so, according to Grant Durando, director at Right Side Up, but the number of them doing so will “reach critical disruptive mass” in 2023, he wrote in an email.

If that happens, it could spark a need for new attribution solutions, Durando wrote. The industry has largely addressed tracking campaigns in RSS feeds “via pixel and prefix-based attribution,” he explained, but as more podcast engagement comes from YouTube, “we will need a new technological solution to deliver conclusive performance marketing attribution.”

Factors like social shares and listener retention are becoming almost as important as podcast downloads, as “podcasters and marketers are getting more savvy about what will move the needle for their clients and their goals,” according to Jeff Umbro, founder and CEO of podcast distribution and monetization company The Podglomerate. “The advertising market will be thinking about how they should consider these same metrics soon.”

“The competition for maintaining and growing audience is fierce,” wrote Lizzie Widhelm, SVP of B2B marketing and ad innovation at SXM Media, which could encourage podcast creators to get creative about new ways to grow their audiences. Crooked Media is “really focused on” simulcasting content in an effort to engage younger audiences in particular, Bizzarro said.

“As the lines between podcast, video and social get blurrier and blurrier, brands will need to get super smart about how to produce high-quality content that can be used across multiple platforms, but is clearly edited & differentiated for each one,” wrote Rachael King, CEO and founder of podcast production company Pod People.

Marketers forge ahead with metaverse experiments despite murky economy

By Marty Swant

Since computer scientist Gavin Wood coined the term “Web 3.0” nearly a decade ago, the concept has become a blanket reference for everything from crypto and metaverse platforms to emerging tech like augmented reality and virtual reality. And despite all the hype and hullabaloo about Web3 over the past two years, marketers say 2023 will be another year of experimenting amid uncertain budgets and uncertain results.

As companies test various aspects of Web3 tech, more brands such as Tiffany & Co., Starbucks and Nike have moved beyond merely collectible NFTs in favor of tokengated commerce, loyalty programs and other ways to interact more directly with consumers via first-party data. These types of projects still make up just a small part of marketing compared to Web2 social channels such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. However, research firm Gartner expects that by 2027 more than 40% of large organizations around the world will be using Web3, spatial computing and other metaverse-based projects as ways to

increase revenue

Data challenges and the economic climate are also putting marketers in a challenging catch-22 situation. Privacy changes and less reliance on third-party data give marketers new reasons to try alternative marketing channels, said Andrew Frank, a vice president analyst with Gartner’s marketing practice. On the other hand, budget pressures and negative crypto news make marketers more cautious about trying potentially risky Web3 initiatives.

“There are so many issues at play in the evolution of marketing data strategies and operations,” Frank said.

“This is resulting in a broad range of approaches to Web3style innovations in customer data and relationships, with a cautious majority and an ambitious minority. We expect to see some successful patterns in Web3 loyalty begin to emerge and be replicated, but economic conditions make it hard to predict how long this will take.”

Marketers look to move beyond cookies with

As third-party cookies continue their slow process of deprecation, some see more potential in using first-party data with Web3 capabilities. But many of the promises of Web3 are still in their infancy — and in most cases still unproven. There’s also the chance that 2023 might be a year of what Forrester describes as “metaverse washing” by trying to make old media fancy with new terms. However, analysts say brands would be smart to try new things rather than repackage the old.

This year will be “the year of the dynamic NFT,” according to Rob Davis, chief digital innovation officer for MSL U.S. But instead of seeing the adoption of truly decentralized platforms, he expects the year will see increased interest in “safe” and “less radical” aspects of Web3 such as “metaverse-ish” experiences that are still just Web2.

“If we are going to discuss who is bullish about Web3 and who is not, we have to agree on what Web3 is,” Davis said. “If we are talking about using blockchain as a platform upon which experiences are built, I’d say quite a few brands are bullish. If we are talking about decentralization and demolishing the status quo, then my answer would be quite the opposite.”

To that point, crypto-enabled Web3 platforms still have a tiny user base compared to Web2 virtual worlds like Roblox, which had 13.5 million app downloads in November 2022, according to data from Sensortower. For example, The Sandbox — which has worked with more than 200 brands including Adidas and Gucci — had just 2,000 app installs worldwide in November. And Decentraland, which has worked with brands such as Heineke and Samsung, had just 1,000 installs worldwide in November for its Decentraland Explorer app and only 10,000 downloads to date.

Marketers experimenting with Roblox and other emerging platforms say there still aren’t enough measurement capabilities yet to prove what’s worth it or not. Meanwhile, others note that it’s important that platforms like Roblox and others don’t become too cluttered with ads. Instead, it’s better to be smart about creating experiences rather than clutter, said Kevin Renwick, media director at Mekanism, which worked with Eos on its Roblox experience.

“Otherwise it’s just going to be like Times Square in the metaverse,” Renwick said. “A lot of noise but into the abyss.”

Testing the waters in the metaverse

In November, Red Wing made its first experience within Roblox by inviting gamers to design virtual “tiny houses” in exchange for the company donating to an organization that makes miniature homes in real life. A month later, Eos — a millennial and Gen Z-focused beauty brand — made its own debut on Roblox with a Christmas-themed starring Mariah Carey that included a multi-day event with a digital playhouse, free in-game items and ways to interact with Carey’s avatar on a virtual stage.

“If you want to remain a modern brand in today’s world, if you want to be a contemporary brand in today’s world, you have to play with some risks,” said Red Wing CMO Dave

Schneider. “One of the risks is playing in spaces that frankly we don’t know where it’s gonna go exactly.”

Eos CMO Soyoung Kang wanted to reach users where they already were. “We start looking for new opportunities for where there are emerging platforms where you’re getting an outsized investment,” Kang said.

Hype and uncertainty are paired with plenty of scrutiny

There’s also still the big question of whether people even want whatever the metaverse has to offer: a recent Forrester report pointed out that less than half of online consumer plan to ever become metaverse users. And after non-fungible tokens were all the rage in 2021 and 2022, NFT trading volume dropped 97% from its January peak through September.

Amidst the myriad challenges, mixed expectations and more skepticism, surveys of business execs say they think the metaverse will be a part of their business in the near future. According to PwC’s 2022 survey of 5,000 consumers and 1,000 business leaders in the U.S., 66% of executives said their companies were already engaged in something related to the metaverse, 38% said it would be part of their business in 2023 and another 44% said it would be within three years.

“I use the analogy that someone came up with via the early days of the internet and dial-up with no graphic user interface until the late 80s or early 90s,” PwC CTO Joe Atkinson told Digiday in an interview last fall. “If it took us 30 years to get here, it might take us another 15 years to see the early power of Web3.”

Some see Web3 tech as beneficial beyond marketing. According to Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing officer at Mastercard, the “tsunami of emerging technologies” will continue bringing disruption to the sector. Despite the economic uncertainty, he said marketers should still experiment with them and decide which ones to prioritize, monitor and adjust.

There is also plenty of scrutiny on the sector. Last month, the Federal Trade Commission fined “Fortnite” maker Epic Games $520 million over allegations including deceptive marketing and data collection practices directed at children. Roblox has also faced criticism from consumer advocacy groups, which claim the company doesn’t properly disclose ads or have enough protections for safeguarding users against malicious actors. Meanwhile, some celebrities have faced increased skepticism, lawsuits and government settlements related to their roles as paid spokespeople for cryptocurrency companies.

Amid all the crypto criticism, one could see how this part of the budget could be the first to go facing bumpy economic conditions. But Geoff Renaud, co-founder and CMO of Invisible North, a Web3 marketing agency, expects VC funds to continue to support metaverse innovation.

“The tens of billions of dollars raised by VC funds must be deployed, so despite market conditions, you will see a lot of fresh funding for new projects,” Renaud said. “Innovative ideas will be awarded as funding scrutiny will be much tighter in 2023 as the bear rages on,” Renaud said.

Advertising in the age of mechanical creation

By Faris Yakob, Genius Steals

Faris Yakob on how a new S-curve for artificial intelligence will change advertising and agencies.

Over the quarter century duration of my ‘career’, we have experienced a number of distinct waves of technological disruption. I came into the working world at the end of the last millennium when some elements of a digital revolution were already in place: PowerPoint, Photoshop and Excel. InDesign was just beginning to disrupt the ubiquitous QuarkXpress layout software that was still used in publishing houses, as I learned when I worked at Maxim Magazine (UK). Apple’s Keynote wouldn’t herald an era of beautiful decks until 2003.

Outside, larger waves were turning early adopters into

surfers on an information superhighway. As a consultant I showed WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) adoption curves to corporations, urging them to get on board the new ‘internet in the palm of your hand’. These descriptions and curves proved to be optimistic. As an agency employee I helped market 3G, and then 4G, to consumers for telecoms companies in three different markets, whilst selling companies on the opportunities presented by the web, and then web 2.0, smartphones, apps. Others are doing the same for web3 and whatever the metaverse might become as we speak. Each time, the hype cycles through, and things always take longer than you think.

Being too ahead of your time is the same as being wrong, commercially speaking, so many ‘first movers’ ended up

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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building businesses for an infrastructure and consumer behavior that wasn’t to exist for a few years more than their funding would last, especially when they spent a lot of that funding on Super Bowl spots during the first dot com explosion. As in the current crypto era, many collapsed, but some were lucky enough to get acquired at absurd valuations before the music stopped. Mark Cuban sold broadcast. com, an early live-streaming service, to Yahoo! For $5.7bn in 1999. This is regarded as one of the worst acquisitions of all time (except by Cuban) since practically everyone was on a dial-up connection and therefore the service failed to find users and was soon discontinued. Various new model consultancies that sprang up during this wild time (I worked at a tiny one) collapsed but some survived by pivoting into digital agencies, including AKQA and Razorfish, before attempting to pivot back into consultancies decades later.

Technologists and investors use shapes to understand these waves – they are known as S-curves. At the beginning a new technology appears and is slowly refined to the point of being useful. This is followed, after a much longer period than people expect, by a period of rapid growth as technologies become user friendly and find business models, consumers, and scale. Then, after another unknown period of time, that curve flattens out at the top, growth slows as the market matures until It finally sputters to a halt. We have just lived through the most important consumer media S-curve since the adoption of the printing press, at the nexus of social media, smartphones and wireless connectivity. As Steve Jobs said when he launched the iPhone, “it works like magic”. This spawned new media giants, agencies, jobs and business models. Over the last few years, we have come to the end of that curve. Each new iPhone is indistinguishable from the previous year’s model, apart from a slightly better camera. I assume no one is queueing up for days for an iPhone anymore – they no longer seem magical at the tail end of the curve.

Meanwhile, agencies began to adopt new internal technologies. Today there might be more than a dozen applications used to do the job, even if most of it is still done in Ppt, Xls and Psd files. Digital asset management and distribution software, collaboration and resource management tools, media planning and insight tools, whatever Marcel is.

We are also at an inflection point in a new S-curve for ‘artificial intelligence’ that will change advertising and agencies in ways yet impossible to know. When I started writing about IBM’s Watson as a creative department in 2014 I was indulging in pie-in-the sky thinking partially because I’d been fed misleading PR about what Watson could really do. In January this year I used a version of GPT3 to write most of this column. A year is a long time at this point on the curve.

In the last couple of months Stable Diffusion and DALL·E 2, generative applications that create images based on text prompts, opened fully to the public. ChatGPT launched last week and it has come on leaps and bounds in understanding and topics it can write cogently about. These may seem like proof-of-concept novelties but as investor Chris Dixon likes to say, the future often starts out looking like a toy. Creatively minded people have already begun to incorporate AI into their workflows. I should note here that none of this is actually ‘artificial intelligence’, these apps don’t think, this is just optimistic branding. They are machine learning models

trained on a huge corpus of human created art and writing, generating new combinations through statistical inference. There are issues of copyright here, since the systems are trained on art and words they didn’t create, although that is also how human artists and writers learn. Already, bespoke systems are being trained for advertising purposes across the entire media-industrial value chain.

Seenapse is an inspiration engine, fusing a human created database of associations to GPT3, that develops divergent concepts for advertising and activations. Remesh’s research platform allows “qualitative conversations at quantitative scale” by training an AI on an audience’s social media corpus and then asking it questions. DAIVID trained its AI on a combination of eye tracking, facial coding, claimed emotional responses and more to develop a creative effectiveness suite that understands and predicts attentional and emotional impact of video and even media plans. Media agency Reprise has invested in AI to bring to life its vision of using “high-frequency data’’ to plan and optimize media in real time.

Within creative agencies, structural change is likely with interesting implications for the business model. A significant amount of expensive creative time is spent making composites, sketches of ideas for presentations, to sell them to clients. Generative AI can do this in a fraction of the time and cost. Google’s Imagen platform announced it can now generate film clips from text prompts so ‘ripomatics’ won’t be long coming. According to storied venture investors Sequoia, the technology will be making logos, artwork and even websites and user interfaces better than humans can in the next few years. Sequoia of course has a vested interest here and things always take longer than you think – but Microsoft already announced a product called “Designer” that uses AI to inspire, design and publish social media content and Designs.Ai can create presentations in seconds.

Some will see this as a threat but that’s unhelpful. Rather, it will free up creative time and create demand for new roles, as previous waves did. This can make agencies faster and cheaper, and hopefully better, which is all clients ever really want. It will however require radically re-thinking a business model that sells hours of creative time making mock-ups, or even designing websites. Agencies are already emerging based on this approach. Supernatural in New York is a “a place where people and machines work together to make advertising better”. They have a tech stack dubbed “The Machine”, a suite of insight, strategy and creative production tools powered by “sophisticated AI algorithms and machine learning models sitting on top of an enterprise grade data stack that have been trained in the ad-making process.”

Before photographs emerged, advertising was illustrated by artists. This business was disrupted but photography didn’t destroy art, as Walter Benjamin feared it would in “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, it simply became a new tool. It opened new possibilities and needed new kinds of artists and creative directors to use it. Planners and creatives will need to develop their ‘prompt engineering’ skills to work out how best to collaborate with AI to get more, better ideas, faster, and creative directors will need to tune their sensibilities accordingly. Lots of change will happen, eventually, as we ride along this new S-curve, and once again, for a brief window, technology feels a little bit like magic.

Brands are redefining the rapidly growing creator economy

by Trusted Media Brands

Rose Ferraro, Chief Revenue Officer, Trusted Media Brands

In the age of the influencer, a substantial amount of brand recognition and revenue dollars can be attributed to celebrity endorsements of a product, service or brand. In July 2022, the creator economy was estimated to be worth more than $100 billion (up from $20 billion just half a year prior), proving that there is much to be earned for companies that invest in the creator community.

To stand out, the way a brand implements an influencer campaign must be innovative, including a clear strategy and a variety of creators.

Redefining the brand-influencer relationship

It is estimated that the creator economy is currently used by 75% of marketers, a number that is projected to climb as high as 86% in the next three years. In working with creators, brands must be considerate and thoughtful in selecting partners and ambassadors since not all guarantee success. Consumers are becoming more and more critical when it comes to the authenticity of brand-influencer partnerships. Campaigns seeing the most success clearly define the connection between the brand and the creator. People who are part of a community based on shared interests want to see someone who also deeply cares about

a topic as a spokesperson with a brand centered around it. In-depth research and analysis of talent audiences are imperative to create the right partnership. This brandcreator connection can be more difficult with an influencer who is more of a household name than it would be with someone recognizable to a specific niche crowd.

Assembling an in-house pool of talent

For brands, there is a tremendous benefit from amassing an owned network of creators. By working with creators that are genuinely passionate about a brand and its products, services or content, marketers and influencers collaborate on more effective content. These contributors can also have tremendous social influence, but the prioritization for alignment should start with relevance and a deep understanding of and appreciation for the community, not social followings.

Brands unable to assemble their own networks can enlist partners with built-in communities of creators. As one example, Trusted Media Brand’s culinary brand Taste of Home has a collection of cooking aficionados at its fingertips. These “Community Cooks,” as they are aptly nicknamed, can be leveraged at a moment’s notice for media and marketing opportunities around the U.S., providing notoriety to the Community Cook, purposeful alignment for a brand and excitement for the Cook’s following. As a

large food publisher, Taste of Home understands audience interests, preferences and passions on a granular level, beyond simply categorizing someone as a food influencer with importance prioritized based on social following alone.

Given the pivot to remote work, which has increased content consumption entirely, and the continuous evolution of technology via smartphones, the possibilities for content creation are endless. Putting increasing amounts of power in the hands of the creators, understanding them and defining connection and alignment is more important now than ever before.

Leveraging influencer partnerships to drive business outcomes

Savvy marketers looking to create consumer engagement understand that a large social media following is not enough to drive desired consumer behaviors. To truly maximize ROI, they are now leveraging publishers’ first-party data to garner deep insight into their highly engaged audiences to create hyper-personalized campaigns of target consumers, which include selective creator participation.

One example is KitchenAid’s use of TMB’s first-party audience data, revealing that two in three members of TMB’s reader panel “Inner Circle” own a KitchenAid stand mixer. Deeper insights revealed that its readers are four times more likely than the average user to be a “holiday enthusiast.” Moreover, 55% of Taste of Home’s kitchen survey respondents are highly interested in handy kitchen helper content (hand mixers, stand mixers, food processors, choppers, etc.). Using this insight, TMB and Kitchen Aid partnered for the ‘Mixing and Mingling’ holiday campaign, presenting custom-produced videos by the Taste of Home Test Kitchen and three influencers in the culinary space, Zestful Kitchen, Elena Besser and JessicaInTheKitchen.

“At KitchenAid, we know influencers are a key component to driving measurable brand lift and authentic consumer

engagement,” said Mitchell Cooper, brand manager at KitchenAid. “That’s why we were excited to partner with TMB to create a customized campaign based on first-party audience data that inspired consumers to mix it up this holiday season with unique, festive recipes. We can’t wait to see how this resonates with consumers and all of the delicious dishes to come.”

Conceptually, each influencer provided a close-to-the-heart “mingling moment” where they relied on their KitchenAid Stand Mixer to make the recipe of choice for the occasion. This “mingling” moment was brought to life on video in their home and paired with a step-by-step recipe video produced by the Taste of Home Test Kitchen. Each influencer posted their video to their Instagram and TikTok platforms, and KitchenAid distributed it across their owned ecosystem as well.

All the content produced in this campaign was aggregated on an easy-to-navigate, shoppable digital destination with support from organic and paid social drivers, streaming ad units, multiple home page takeovers as well as custom ad units on mobile and desktop across TMB’s network of brands. The campaign resulted in video views at 124% to goal.

The next frontier of the creator economy

Creators and brands have unique opportunities to create more sophisticated campaigns that can simultaneously live across multiple distribution touchpoints. These campaigns successfully target audiences with relevant and editorialized messaging on their platforms of choice. When it comes to achieving a successful social campaign going into the new year, it is essential to stay consistent across brand authenticity and initiatives, especially when deciding which influencers are a fit for a brand’s messaging. Choosing creators and media partners that are passionate and knowledgeable about the product and subject matter is paramount.

All Great Leaders Are Great Storytellers. Here’s the Formula for Great Storytelling

BY HEIDI ZAK

Every leader knows (or should know) that storytelling is important. In an age as data-rich as ours, many leaders’ natural inclination is to tell stories in terms of the numbers-total addressable market, up-and-to-the-right graphs, and other KPIs.

Numbers may tell a story. But without humans, numbers are meaningless. Particularly in a business context, the numerical side of the story will always matter. But from a leadership perspective, the most compelling stories start with people.

Storytelling is the great unifier. It makes different people feel connected to the same overarching missions; it helps people see their own objectives in the dreams of their companies and leaders. There are proven ways to do it powerfully--and powerful upside for those who do.

Why storytelling is so important for leaders

Stories create meaning. There was a great anthropological study involving two researchers who tried to sell objects worth pennies for as much as possible. To do this, they made up stories about each object--including cups, medallions, and even a tiny rhino. Ultimately, they were able to sell the pieces (which cost $1.25 on average) for more than $8,000 total. The study is a prime example of how meaning isn’t inherent--it comes from the stories we tell. Meaning is only imparted, and the primary means of imparting meaning is through stories. The same is true in a corporate environment. Through stories, leaders have an opportunity to give meaning to the activities that every member of a team does on a day-to-day basis.

Stories unite people. Once you’ve articulated your meaning in a story, it allows people inside and outside of your company--employees and customers--to unite around the common purpose. It tells employees that their actions contribute to the well-being of a broader collective, and it tells customers that every time they interact with you, they’re really contributing to a movement.

Stories humanize brands. The cliche that all corporations fight against is that they’re impersonal, faceless institutions that care only about their bottom lines. In other words, that

they’re inhuman. Nobody wants to buy anything from an inhuman brand. People want to feel that their purchases, in some small way, contribute to the health of a human endeavor. By putting your mission in terms of a human-first story, you give your brand a face and a pulse.

Basic principles of compelling stories

You can go very deep on the principles of great storytelling (and if you want to, I recommend reading this interview with screenwriting lecturer Robert McKee). But here’s a very brief overview of focus areas for great stories.

Mechanical elements. Think back to those middle-school writing classes: All stories need characters to root for, settings in which the action takes place, structures (the fiveact structure is most common), and calls to action. It’s easy to forget these basic elements when you get absorbed in your own story; make it a checklist that all your stories have to abide by.

Human-first. Start with a micro-level version of your story. What specific impact do you hope to have on what specific type of person? How can you trace the influence of your collective effort down to the most singular human level? For example, Amazon told the story of AWS--which powers about a third of the multibillion-dollar public cloud market-in terms of a kid in their dorm room. They wanted a college student with a good idea for a software application to be able to run with their idea, and not to be creatively inhibited by money or database constraints. There is no business more far-reaching than the cloud, and no story more localized than that.

Broaden with statistics. Once people understand the granular human impact of your initiative, then you can generalize with an overarching statistical picture. Illustrate the breadth of potential impact, showing your audience the size of the opportunity--and the number of people like the one in your story for whom your solution can be meaningful.

It’s important to realize that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel as a storyteller. Getting familiar with the storytelling formula gives you a plug-and-play model to use the elements driving your business.

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Infographic Design Trends for 2023 [Infographic]

By Andrew Hutchinson

Looking for ways to make your visuals stand out in 2023?

This could help – the team from Venngage have put together a new overview of key visual trends in infographics, and how you could look to present your data in the new year.

The trend notes incorporate several key design updates that you’ve likely noticed of late, including Spotify’s festival flyer format for its year-in-review listings.

There could be some valuable notes for your brand – check out Venngage’s full overview below.

2023 Is A Pivotal Year For B2B Marketing— Are You Ready?

BY MARK WILSON

Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo, of the B2B Institute for LinkedIn, talk about how B2B is the next big thing in marketing. Similarly, others posit that B2B will rev up to power the surge in demand for data and technology to drive sustainability, efficiency and other major changes to our economy.

With this acceleration comes competition. Artificial intelligence was forecast to see a compound annual growth rate of 21% year over year from 2020 through 2025. Sustainable tech is expected to grow at a similar pace.

2023 is a “pivotal year” for B2B as spending in the U.S. approaches $15 billion on digital advertising alone. B2B marketers have more competition than ever. In my opinion, 2023 is likely to mark the first breakout B2B marketing campaigns on connected TV (CTV), dramatic improvements in the use of data, and unique new approaches that marry online and offline into a new buyer journey.

B2B Is Coming To A Show Near You

I recently saw an ad for a new luxury winter coat. The ad had all of the expected elements for a luxury product: an interesting product name, glamorous models, cool music and an exotic location. The ad was also a high-definition commercial shown next to premium CTV streaming content. That’s what it takes to make a first impression in the crowded field of luxury retail.

While that coat clocks in at a hefty $1,500, that’s peanuts compared to a typical B2B purchase. It got me thinking about how B2B marketers are incorporating “first impressions” into their budgets for next year and where they’ll need to step up their game to get out in front.

One important element that B2B marketing needs to incorporate is memorability. B2C brands are major spenders on things like premium placement, unique-format creatives and pricey design. It’s worth B2B marketers’ time to invest in some creative expertise to understand which elements really make a bigger impression on their buyers—be it a splashy commercial on CTV, a more powerful website experience or something else.

Good thing that B2C marketers have done so much work for us already. We can look to industries with long purchase cycles to get some ideas for how to bring some “sexy” to B2B marketing and step up our game. In addition to luxury retail, travel, real estate, auto and financial services can all provide important lessons for the next phase of B2B marketing.

How B2B Marketers Can Adapt To B2C Tactics

B2B buyers are also human, and the buyer journey is as much about their personal experience through that process as it is about the product offering. Marketers should consider the experiential elements that make a great B2C buying experience and see if they can apply them to their own buyer journey.

Salesforce tapped actor Matthew McConaughey in their Super Bowl ad, which had a big-budget movie feel. (Full disclosure: Our company partners with Salesforce.) The ad appealed to people’s interest in sustainability and progress—emotions that work just as well for a B2B message as a B2C message. Not every B2B marketer has the budget for a Super Bowl ad, but the concept is similar: Appealing to people’s emotions grabs attention.

B2B marketers can also tap into the concept of conversational marketing to help give prospects information more quickly and speed up the buying cycle. For example, more B2C companies in insurance, healthcare and other highconsideration industries are starting to use chatbots and outbound calls with products such as Regal.io to reach people who are stuck in their online journey. For complex B2B sales, this makes even more sense. B2B companies can employ triggers based on online behavior or email responses to generate conversations and create a more personal connection.

Another pillar of B2B marketing—content—can benefit from a B2C makeover. Companies that bury important information deep in their website or gate every piece of content make it harder for people to get the information they want. Collecting lead information shouldn’t get in the way of a great experience.

The Power Of Data Grows Stronger

For anyone who is skeptical about B2C tactics having value for B2B marketers, note that the devil is in the details. A critical study of advertising concluded that a lot of what’s invested in TV commercials actually delivers negative ROI—if the brand is not careful about how it advertises. With data and insights, brands can absolutely achieve higher ROI for their investments.

One trend many B2C marketers are following is the use of creative analytics to make smarter design decisions. This fits in well with B2B marketers’ more scientific approach to marketing. Companies like VidMob and Memorable help

ensure that extra money spent on creative actually drives higher outcomes.

What’s more, many B2C brands are leaning into their own first-party data to target audiences more accurately. B2B marketers can do the same—and should. Using identitybased ad targeting can help B2B brands reach their highestvalue audiences with precision across channels.

Advancements in how data is matched can also help B2B marketers continue with an account-based marketing strategy using “account-level IDs.” A media plan can execute a series of targeted messages across a buying group to ensure everyone gets the right message at the right time for a highly orchestrated approach.

With uncertain economic times ahead, B2B marketers should be open to testing tactics that could have a material impact on sales, especially if they aren’t particularly difficult to implement. While implementing new data and technology do require a heavier lift, the good news is that our company’s recent research found that most marketers are already investing in those areas, so they just need to sharpen their focus on a few key tactics taken from the B2C world. With small wins, B2B marketers can lean into their success and advance their marketing strategy in a new, more profitable direction.

As a senior marketing and events professional with over 15 years of strategic sales and marketing experience, I am best known for producing boutique corporate events that drive engagement, as well as pipeline acceleration, content development, demand generation and revenue growth.

A.I. vs. Human Creativity: Where Do We Go From Here?

By Charlie Warzel

“Because I was born believers. If you can beat him—legend that thing. If you have only one hand, don’t just watch a marathon. First—marathon.”

This text is part of an experiment by Wieden+Kennedy. The agency trained a neural network with seven years’ worth of its work for Nike and let it generate its own text.

It was cutting edge three years ago; imagine where this can go today. Can natural language processing develop into dominance for creative advertising? Can it outstrip human creatives when measured on output?

How does adland sit with A.I. at the moment?

Most sources agree there’s a massive potential for A.I. and that its market across sectors worldwide is expanding at a ferocious pace. While A.I. has been a part of advertising technology for several years, from sentiment analysis to audience clustering technology, it is now playing a more pivotal role in the creative process.

Technologies like IBM Watson’s Advertising Accelerator use A.I. to create multiple personalized digital ads for all sorts of media requirements and audiences. The power of technologies like this allows for optimization at scale in any industry, by microtargeting demographics, psychographics, purchase triggers, customer journeys and various KPIs like conversion, video view rate and app downloads.

A fully developed case study in this area can be found in the Ad Council’s Covid Vaccine Education Initiative, carried

out in the U.S. in 2021. The project’s aim was to increase vaccine uptake amongst the population, buttressed by IBM’s creative A.I. technologies on the optimization side. IBM’s findings as the campaign progressed were that there were four key barriers to overcome: the safety of the vaccines, the sheer speed at which they were made, mistrust toward Congress, and other miscellaneous conspiracy theories.

Based on these uptake barriers, IBM’s tech was able to tailor messaging at scale to convince audiences to get the jab. The campaign directed 39.6 percent more people to visit GetVaccineAnswers.org than standard creative.

In similar fashion and in a completely different sector, Vanguard used Persado’s NLG A.I. platform to disseminate personalized ads on LinkedIn. The financial services industry exists in a heavily regulated advertising environment, so uniqueness is a priceless commodity for brands in this space. Persado was able to personalize Vanguard’s LinkedIn ads and test them at scale in a similar way to IBM’s software, in order to optimize messaging on a person-to-person basis. In a sector where the front lines move in meters, not miles, Vanguard was able to boost conversion to 15 percent via the platform.

All very exciting stuff. The issue, however, is that these technologies are essentially doing iterative A/B testing at hyperspeed, not creative development from scratch. As groundbreaking as this optimization technology is, the promised land of an A.I. that can create an idea, the genesis of the strategic and creative process, is not yet here.

Or is it? The case for GPT-3 and DALL-E

OpenAI’s GPT-3 has been viewed as something of a messianic moment for the A.I. sector. Trained on 570 GBs of text, or just shy of 1 trillion words, and sourced from Internet pages deemed of high enough a linguistic quality, the A.I.’s ability to produce cogent and relevant writing off the back of a short human sentence was astounding.

The ability to instantaneously generate new, interesting and cohesive content, but at incredible speed, on the face of it looks like a strategist and creative’s dream. However, there are pitfalls. The first serious drawback that GPT-3 faces is the result of the language source upon which its foundation is based—the internet.

A.I., a play put on for a three night run in 2021 at the Young Vic, was based around the innovative production technique of letting the cast create a script live using GPT-3, and then performing the results. While the A.I.’s ability to generate uncannily accurate, human-sounding text lends itself to this structure well, it repeatedly put one of the cast’s Middle Eastern actors, Waleed Akhtar, in negative stereotypical roles—for example, a terrorist or a violent criminal. In this sense, GPT-3’s reliance on the internet as the source of its language patterning creates serious problems; it effectively acts as a mirror to the internet’s ugly underbelly.

The second and more commonly manifested problem with using GPT-3 as an ideation tool is its uncontrolled randomness, and unpredictability of generated content.

While some companies, partnering with OpenAI’s API program, have developed software that mitigates GPT-3’s more chaotic outputs to focus on media and performance focused tasks (similar to IBM’s program), purely creative experiments have generated telling results.

Adweek experimented with Copysmith, a copy-generation site with a GPT-3 integration, to produce ideas for ads based on brand names alone—the results, while certainly inventive, were not necessarily award hopefuls.

Brand: Ford

A.I. ad idea: “What if we did something with a skydiving car chase?”

Brand: Lay’s potato chips

A.I. ad idea: “What if we performed an experiment with a vending machine that would only accept your shadow as payment?”

Brand: Adweek

A.I. ad idea: “What if we did something with a giant red button that when pushed, would break some news?”

A.I. programs like DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, specializing in image generation based on text inputs, run into the same issue. A 2022 project run by London-based agency 10 Days sought to use Midjourney to create A.I.-generated campaigns around 10 enterprise brands, including Ray-Ban, KFC and GymShark. The only

inputs were the brand names, and six genre-based words to power the A.I.’s algorithm (such as “noir” or “cinematic”). The results were both impressive and shocking.

The issue, then, for strategists and creatives looking to leverage A.I., be it for idea, copy or art generation, is that current models like DALL-E and GPT-3 must either be hemmed in by guardrails that increase focus but drastically decrease creative output and potential, or let the proverbial pig out of the sty and see which way it runs, come what may.

This state of affairs is reflected by people in the marketing industry attempting to use this tech, and even those selling it. 10 Days, the performers at the Young Vic, and various creative technologists interviewed on the topic all believe that these iterations of A.I. tech are brilliant starting points that provide provocative creative springboards, but are simply too inclined to randomness to be relied upon to create a cogent campaign from scratch. Even Jasper.ai, a GPT-3 powered copywriting tool, reassures its users that “A.I. isn’t here to replace you. Every Batman needs a Robin. Jasper will be your best assistant.”

What can be done?

A marriage of the kind of performance marketing technology and the raw creative potential of A.I.’s like GPT3 and DALL-E 2 could provide possible answers.

Panagiotis Angelopoulos, chief data scientist at Persado, says GPT-3’s strength is volume, not quality—the vastness of the dataset it was trained on means its creative linguistic scope is huge, but it is not equipped with the functionality to be able to adapt text to a reader or medium.

IBM’s Advertising Accelerator, and software like it, is a mirrored product—its entire architecture is precisely engineered toward being able to constantly tailor messaging through hyperspeed A/B testing, thus becoming an A.I. that is truly able to learn, but without the unbridled creative potential of GPT-3.

A potential solution would be to use GPT-3 as a starting point, and work with its closely guarded API to significantly widen the range of possible data inputs—to include typical strategy starting points for a campaign, like audience demographics, psychographics, buying behaviours, seasonality and so on.

If NLP A.I. is to eventually become a viable foundation stone for an “ideas machine,” the content it generates needs to be informed by more than just its enormous lexicon— contextual information is also required.

The debate on A.I. outside of advertising—is it real creativity?

Even if we are eventually able to manufacture an NLP/image generation A.I. solution which is able to “learn,” respond to new data inputs and use insight sources to generate content which doesn’t meander into meaninglessness, there is a wider debate about whether these technologies can ever produce work that is genuinely “creative.

” Anna Ridler, an artist who uses creative technology to inform her work, summarized its limitations: “A.I. can’t handle concepts: collapsing moments in time, memory, thoughts, emotions—all of that is a real human skill, that makes a piece of art rather than something that visually

looks pretty.” A frequently cited example is the astronaut riding a horse experiment. When using a tool like DALL-E to depict this, the results are convincing—but a reversal of the dynamic results in essentially the same image, but with the actors flipped. The issue here being that causal dynamics between actors in a given scenario is not captured—nuance is missed.

A potential solution to this can be found in GAN (generative adversarial networks), a clever way of training an image generator by working through two networks—one which generates imagery repeatedly, and a second which tries to classify those images as either real (an actual picture created by a human), or fake (generated by the A.I.). This goes on until the second network is fooled roughly 50 percent of the time, thereby indicating a level of plausibility for how “human” the first network’s images are.

What GANs do has been termed as a form of transformational creativity (creating something in a completely novel style), versus the combinational creativity displayed by A.I.’s like DALL-E 2 (where the images generated are trained to be in the exact same style as the others in the training dataset).

This conundrum, while in this case focusing on art generation, also applies to the current state of affairs in language generation. Even if, however, after years of innovation and development, it turns out these forms of A.I. cannot be creative in a human sense, a question still remains. If what they create is virtually indistinguishable from what we can create, then from the point of view of a consumer viewing an advert, does it even matter?

And finally—a GPT-3 generated BBH short story

The only line of the below that is human is the first sentence. The rest was written by Novel.ai, a GPT-3 story generator, using its Arthur Conan Doyle creative module.

BBH was an extremely loud advertising agency. The sound of the buzzers had been a familiar sound to me for many years—I had heard it so often that it had become a part of my life as much as the clank of the coffee maker or the sound of traffic outside. But now my world had come to an end. I was no longer listening to BBH; but the sound itself, the noise of those metal boxes, had somehow remained with me. It continued on and on in my ears, without any of its former meaning—devoid entirely of power to disturb me or to move me.

The owner of BBH had died suddenly. His death had occurred while he sat at his desk and worked late into the night. The cause of death was unknown. A few days later, three young men from BBH were found dead in their beds. One had been stabbed through his heart by a blood-stained dagger; another lay face downward upon his pillow, pierced through the back of his skull. The third man had fallen out of bed onto the floor, his neck broken. It appeared that they had all been asleep when they had been killed. The police found no sign of foul play. Everyone had apparently died peacefully in his sleep. The whole incident was strange and mysterious.

Will Roscoe has been active in the the gay movement since 1975, when he helped found Lambda, the first gay/lesbian organization in Montana. He worked with Harvey Milk in the “No

on 6” campaign against the Briggs Initiative.

How Gen Z social media managers became the new CMOs

BY SARAH LYNCH

There was an owl in the room.

Zaria Parvez entered Duolingo’s Pittsburgh headquarters for the first time in September 2021 and spotted a human-size green and orange owl costume slumped on an empty table. Before the pandemic, this mascot had only been trotted out to promote the language learning app at recruitment events. But Parvez had an idea.

After writing some scripts and coaxing coworkers into the costume, she created Duo: a cheeky, oversize owl who twerks, taunts the company’s legal team, shames Google Translate users, and pines for the similarly-named Dua Lipa on TikTok. Duo has since garnered more than 5.2 million followers on the platform, and Duolingo was given the Social Marketer of the Year award from Ad Age in April. All of this has earned the 24-year-old Parvez a reputation as a branding savant.

Parvez, who’s since been promoted to global social media manager, is just one of several young corporate marketing staffers who, thanks largely to TikTok’s meteoric rise, have quickly become leaders in their companies when it comes to messaging and positioning. These Gen Z’ers are not just in

tune with the brand voice, but actively shaping it, and altering marketing departments along the way.

“As the impact started increasing, [senior leadership] actually started retroactively getting more invested . . . like, ‘Wait a minute, something’s happening here. There’s a cultural shift,’” Parvez says.

The selfie cam driven, “lo-fi” nature of TikTok‚ which surpassed one billion active users in September 2021 and is expected to double last year’s ad revenue with a forecasted $10 billion, makes overproduced ads feel distinctly out of place. TikTok users “will sniff an ad even before they scroll,” says Anthony Hamelle, executive director of digital and social TBWA\Chiat\Day New York. Only native users seem to grasp the vibe––and that instinct is in hot demand.

Mike Vitiello, head of content for Wieden + Kennedy’s inhouse social studio, says that the bulk of his team ranges from 23 to 27 years old. In May, Nerf hired a “chief TikTok officer” named Sophie Jamison who is 22. Instead of starting at the bottom, learning the business, and paying their dues, Jamison and her cohort have the whole brand in their hands.

MAKING TIKTOK TICK

Haines, Alaska has an annual snowmobile race, a museum dedicated to hammers, and a population of 1,905. This is where Milo Simpson, upon graduating from the University of California, Santa Cruz, took a job creating social media content for a 75-year-old puppeteer. Simpson moved back to California after a year, worked odd jobs, and ultimately scored a social media internship at Taco Bell in March 2020. A year and a half later, he was running the brand’s TikTok account. This involved managing other producers and bringing demonstrable results to one of the world’s most recognizable fast-food companies, and also appearing in videos. Taco Bell’s TikTok account now has 2.4 million followers.

“His personality became infused with the brand personality,” says Nicole Weltman, head of social at Taco Bell. Simpson, 26, first appeared in the company’s TikTok out of necessity. Mere days after he started his internship, the pandemic hit. At home, with just his phone, he was forced to become the talent in the spots he wrote. Today, as resident

content creator on the content team, his daily work involves shooting, editing, writing, and scrolling for ideas. He has two producers working with him who assist in organizing preproduction, finding locations, talent, wardrobe, and more.

He brings ideas to Weltman and her social team for approval. The two teams work closely together and have established a high degree of trust. At times, Simpson will see a trend and need to act immediately, creating a video in full and presenting it to Weltman for her sign-off.

Simpson got to this point through lots of testing and getting to know the audience. After starting out by posting mostly repurposed user-generated content, Simpson saw that followers preferred original videos that had a lighthearted point of view. For a recent spot promoting Taco Bell’s Nacho Fries, Simpson didn’t write a wordy pitch to sell the product; he cut together funny clips of hired actors serving the fries with glee.

“I just added a really cool song and just told people to pose in weird positions and do different dance moves and stuff,” Simpson says. The post has 1.2 million likes.

Nerf’s Jamison encountered a bit of a learning curve, too. She had been almost preternaturally equipped for the role: she grew up with Friday night Nerf battles, became a Nerf influencer in her own right (as “Sophie Lightning” on Instagram and TikTok). So when Hasbro posted its opening for a Nerf Chief TikTok Officer, she received more than a dozen phone calls (including one from her eye doctor) telling her about the position.

Yet despite having this deep familiarity with the brand, she needed to differentiate the content from her personal account and develop the Nerf voice. Like Parvez, she found success with a mascot, Murph, and her own “frenemy” relationship with the character, who resembles Cousin Itt made of Nerf darts. She scored again with a TikTok that riffed on a trend of highly realistic cakes disguised as inanimate objects. It garnered 9.8 million views (Nerf’s most viewed to date).

Olivia West, 24, ran Dunkin’s TikTok account for about three and a half years, first as an intern when she was 21 and then as the associate manager of social. (She now helps run social media for WeightWatchers.) While still an intern, she had the idea to reference Charli D’Amelio, the TikTok phenom and Dunkin fan, in a TikTok that prompted users to hold up their fingers and put one down for each Dunkin fan trait they related to, including if they “share Charli’s Dunkin obsession.” Her supervisor approved it. The same day it went up, D’Amelio saw it and used the audio from West’s TikTok in her own video, tagging Dunkin. West says Dunkin’s follower numbers skyrocketed overnight.

“That was the first time that I saw the insane impact that influencers and content creators have,” West says.

CREATORS IN THE HOUSE

TikTok’s popularity has upended corporate marketing departments to such a degree that they now include a whole new category of employee: creators. Until recently. the term has been used mostly to describe brand influencers and other social media generators who may get paid by brands to promote products and services. Now, creators work alongside people who are typically referred to as the “creatives,” immersing themselves so deeply in the brand that they sometimes embody it, taking it in directions others would never think to go.

Teresa Pearson, Nerf’s vice president of global franchise strategy and management, says that she pitched the idea of a hiring a “chief TikTok officer” to her superiors by explaining that TikTok is “a creator platform” and that “creators should be running these platforms for us.”

Agencies are adapting, too. TBWA\Chiat\Day New York’s Hamelle says that the company added creators to its team in 2022 to help make social content for clients including Nissan and Hilton. Those creators are intentionally positioned at the intersection of the production and creative departments so they can bring ideas to life from the beginning, adapt them quickly, and see them through to launch. (Some creators work for the agency full-time, while others continue pursuing their own projects.) Hamelle explains it as a “paradigm

shift”: before 2022, the approach to working with creators was more opportunist––now, it’s an imperative.

The arrival of creators has even affected workflow, says W+K’s Vitiello. A traditional advertising creative team might spend weeks developing a point of view for something like a multimillion-dollar Super Bowl ad, but social-first teams are able to experiment, sometimes bringing prototyped TikToks to an early pitch meeting. “One thing we learned quite quickly was that you can’t really pitch a TikTok in a script. It just doesn’t translate,” Vitiello says. “Our M.O. is more to make the thing and then show it to people.”

But this approach isn’t always welcome, especially at first. Vitiello says that some brands are averse to giving their TikTok account a voice that differs from the rest of a campaign. “There was a degree of anonymity that platforms like Instagram and Twitter could afford a brand. It’s harder to maintain that sort of smokescreen on a platform like TikTok where the whole thing is selfie cam,” Vitiello says.

About a year ago, Simpson remembers seeing his face attached to several pitches being shared by Deutsch LA, the brand’s agency of record. “It was a little jarring at first, for sure,” recalls Simpson, who only thought he would be on the Taco Bell TikTok out of necessity during the pandemic. Now, he’s embraced that he’s “the guy,” but he admits it was unexpected. “We have created this Milo Taco Bell character, almost.”

UNDER PRESSURE

Parvez found herself in a mad scramble last May when, after eight months at the helm of Duo, she had a lapse in judgement: she made a snarky comment about Amber Heard that sparked nearly immediate criticism from disappointed followers. She quickly apologized on her personal account and deleted the comment from Duolingo’s TikTok.

“I’m glad I was held accountable . . . I knew the right thing to do was to apologize, because that’s what any normal human would do if you hurt someone’s feelings,” Parvez says. The company was supportive, Parvez says, and she received numerous encouraging messages from fellow employees––even one from the CEO. “It’s a pressure that a lot of social media managers carry,” Parvez says. “You’re responsible for your company’s comms, in a way, and people love to find one person that they can talk to or go after, good or bad.”

It’s no surprise that many social media managers face burnout. The stakes are high. A 2018 study that looked at brands affected by “social media firestorms” found that 40% had long-term negative consequences in terms of brand perception. One misguided post could easily light that spark. But one opportune post could also send views soaring and bolster the brand. It’s up to the 20-something brand savants to know the difference.

“It’s definitely intimidating to be the face of a global brand that has been around for 50 plus years,” Jamison says of Nerf. “Even [when] not at work or creating TikToks, that’s on my mind. I get recognized in public. That’s something that I always need to uphold . . . that reputation of the brand.”

Brand Builders

Role Models

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

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How Worried Should Creative Professionals Be About Artificial Intelligence?

by Ellen Shapiro

Someone in the “AI Art Universe” Facebook group called it “art harvesting.” It’s an interesting analogy: sprouts planted by many other people are ‘scraped’ into a giant blender that sorts and readies them to be grown into exotic new gardens. But it’s more than a poetic analogy— it’s a worldwide phenomenon, way bigger than a garden. It’s a jungle of fields and plantations, meadows and forests filled with fantasy characters and creatures, scenes and settings that could be in the distant past, the far future, or another galaxy. And it’s springing up, morphing, regenerating before our eyes. Some of the results are dark and ugly, some are eerily beautiful, and all you have to do to participate is type a prompt that describes your vision. A minute or so later, a suite of images springs up on your screen, ready to be enhanced by you (and, apparently, by anyone else).

I trolled around for a while, trying to find an AI-generated garden “good enough” to show as an example. I finally settled on an alien landscape credited to Bryan Price on NightCafe. studio. With it came a 25%-off-my-first-month offer. Ah yes, another income-generator for someone who is not me, i.e.

for NightCafé and all the similar sites that are popping up.

Traditional illustrators are up in arms. On Thursday, December 22, the Society of Illustrators posted this message on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

In less than 24 hours, this collaborative post by the award winning duo of Society of Illustrators President Tim O’Brien and illustrator Edel Rodriguez had more than 8,500 likes on Instagram, 16.2k likes, and 3,280 reposts on Twitter.

For more than 30 years, O’Brien has been painting meticulous oil portraits of famous people, from his hero Muhammed Ali to Elon Musk, and many have been featured on the cover of TIME. He and his colleagues are insisting that illustrations for publication must be created by real, thinking humans who interact with real clients and use real artists’ tools. “The sudden availability of artificially designed images creates a moral challenge to the illustration community and to the broader design community,” O’Brien said. “We are at the critical point at which illustrators and designers must value human interaction and reject the output of AI image

generators. The inclusion of a credit highlighting an AI generator should bring on a sense of shame.”

O’Brien went on to note that athletes are subject to drug tests for trying to enhance their performance artificially, and those who fail are punished. “Humans can run faster, jump higher, and perform better using synthetic means, [but] we as humans are interested in what a human alone can do. That’s what makes us human.”

Illustrator Victor Juhasz, best known for caricatures that have graced the pages of Rolling Stone, TIME, Newsweek, and many other publications, takes the argument a big step farther. “The current craze for AI-generated ‘art’ is a symptom of a disease,” he said.

Juhasz did not mince words. “The temptation to take the fast, easy way rather than put in hard work is enormous. Contemporary society thrives on celebrity, fame and notoriety, and much of it has nothing to do with honest craftsmanship. It’s about the con and getting away with it.”

Other notable illustrators like Anita Kunz, known for her

New Yorker covers and feminist responses to classic art have spoken out on how much they hate seeing their work scraped into databases. Karla Ortiz, a painter, printmaker, and concept artist at Marvel Studios, has been especially vocal on social media, posting impassioned arguments against the commercial use of AI art and spearheading a GoFundMe campaign to hire a lobbyist to make the voices of artists heard.

At the present moment, the creative heads of magazines sound largely uninterested in AI. Michael Mrak, the creative director of Scientific American, a science publication with over 10 million subscribers, “[sees] no reason to replace real artists with AI-generated anything.”

“AI can generate interesting and elaborate imagery, but there are many problems from a legal and moral point of view,” he continued. “AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted and therefore has potential legal issues attached to it, a principal one being that it uses art from across the internet to make the final image. That, and the fact that it scraped or pulled copyrighted art into its learning algorithm.”

Art director and designer Alexander Isley treasures his oneon-one collaborations with artists. “I have never used AIgenerated artwork, and have no interest in doing so, unless it’s in the context of how odious it is,” he said. “From all I’ve seen and read, machine-generated artwork is based on modifying, remixing, or adding to real artists’ existing work without acknowledgment or compensation. With commissioned artwork, sketches and revisions are often required. How does this process work with AI-generated images? I can’t deny that the results can be interesting to look at, but it’s a fun parlor trick.”

While art directors might not see AI as a threat, the competitive aspect of design complicates matters. Will AI-generated art be eligible to win contests and grants?

“The short answer is yes,” was the initial answer from Patrick Coyne, editor/designer of Communication Arts, one of the world’s most important design publications. “We always tell jurors to select work based on the quality of the idea and the execution. We celebrate compelling imagery regardless of how it was created.”

Managing Editor Michael Coyne noted that Communication Arts had already featured a few campaigns that used AIgenerated art “because they were interesting or appropriate applications for AI as an artistic tool rather than a medium on its own.” He cited an ad campaign by Dentsu Creative Portugal for Jardim Sonoro, an electronic music festival held in a national park near Lisbon, is an example. According to the agency’s creative directors, the challenge was to blend the musicians’ portraits with natural elements. “We learned that AI is a great tool,” they commented. “We are still at its beginning and will certainly see significant developments that will dazzle us all. But it won’t replace anyone. It needs someone to guide the creative process.” They added, “Novelty and discomfort often lead to great work.”

However, a few days later, the Communication Arts‘ team’s stance evolved. “We’ve been approached by several illustrators upset over our position regarding accepting entries for the Illustration Annual produced with text-to-image AI software,” Patrick Coyne wrote via email. “While I still see the longterm potential for AI-assisted creative exploration, I better understand the position that illustrators and photographers are currently facing with copyright infringement and the unauthorized use of their work to ‘train’ the current crop of text-to-image AI software. Consequently, we are reversing our position and will not be accepting AI text-to-image generated submissions in our Illustration competition.”

Hobbyists have a different relationship to the software. Daniel Rocha of São Paulo is an active contributor to Facebook’s “AI Art Universe” group, and one of the many thousands of people who make AI art for fun. “I use [Mage’s Standard Diffusion program] daily, many times a day,” he said. “I click ‘enter’ on a prompt many, many times, until I get something good or see that I need to change it because something is not nice. I’ve generated more than 22,000 pictures, but that’s not at all time-consuming, since all I have to do is click, click, click.”

Oddly enough, Rocha works in Brazil’s patent and trademark office, where he analyzes the registrability of trademarks. However, “that has nothing to do with what I do on Mage,” he clarified. “I think it is an extremely useful tool for artists. They can use it to fill in details or compose a complex scene extremely fast.”

Stable Diffusion can be trained to fit an author’s style, which allows them to make grandiose scenes in a short time, in their own style. “An amateur like me can reproduce the work of a skilled artist, art that could surpass in quality and inspiration the Sistine Chapel ceiling,” Rocha continued. “That took years for Michelangelo to make, and [similar work] can now be completed in a few days or weeks. Right now, the artists are too scared, but I think they will come around soon.”

Since I have family members who like to play with DALL-E, we decided to try it ourselves. I went in wondering if I could recreate one of the world’s most iconic posters, Milton Glaser’s 1966 “Dylan.” When I used Mage, the results were dismal. Apparently, the Mage database doesn’t have the stuff. We had no luck on DALL-E either (“does not follow our content policy”), but got meh results with Midjourney, where we typed “/imagine the famous 1966 Milton Glaser Bob Dylan poster” and got:

The curly hair must have gotten scraped in, along with some old album covers. And possibly black-and-white portraits to which the photographer owns the copyright. Then we tried: “/imagine the famous 1966 Milton Glaser Bob Dylan poster, but for Lady Gaga” and got:

The whole process took about three minutes. Fortunately— for now, at least— AI isn’t giving Milton Glaser’s brilliant work any serious competition.

To get clarity on where AI stands in regards to legality, I reached out to Martin Schwimmer, a partner at top-rated New York intellectual property law firm LeasonEllis. In his opinion, text-to-image AI models “present novel [new, unexplored] legal issues, including the extent to which the creator of the repository of images makes use of images that were previously displayed on the internet, and to what extent can an AI model look at an image and derive ‘rules’ about that image.” While that language is a little murky to me, it sounds like the lawyers are working on it.

However, Schwimmer didn’t agree that all AI repositories consist of ‘scraped’ images without regard to copyright. For example, he said, a repository named Laion consists not of images, but links to images, which apparently makes a legal difference.

As to who owns the so-called final product, Schwimmer said that he views AI models as one more tool that helps users generate content. “The copyright analysis will be comparable to the analysis we use today when artists use the various illustration tools, graphics editors, paint programs, and other digital art tools: Is the work sufficiently original when divorced from the accompanying tools?”

For now, that will be the last word.

By Vidhi Choudhary

In the past year, TikTok has become a more lucrative advertising channel for smaller brands.

According to a recent survey published by Capterra, a division of Gartner, more than half of small businesses that use TikTok feel it has had a significant impact on their overall marketing performance. Among the 168 retail and

restaurant brands surveyed, 78% of them reported that they have realized a positive ROI on their TikTok ads. And more than half of them reported that the positive ROI came within six months, according to Capterra.

Marketers and founders who spoke with Modern Retail agreed that they’ve been able to get more bang for their

‘Your dollar goes a little bit further’: Smaller brands are finding TikTok to be a more profitable advertising channel

buck on TikTok compared to other platforms, for a variety of reasons. For some brands, that’s because they’ve been able to generate viral hits on TikTok that they’ve been able to repurpose into other videos, and are still driving millions of views months later. Others point to the app’s improved advertising tools and whitelisting functions. Other marketers report that TikTok video ads have a lower lift in terms of content creation compared to other social platforms.

In turn, TikTok has become a more reliable paid channel over time for these brands. Prebiotic soda brand Poppi estimates, for instance, that roughly 15% of its sales come from TikTok overall, after launching on the app nearly two years ago. The company said it spends four times more on paid ads on TikTok compared to rival Instagram.

However, that reliability is not guaranteed, particularly as scrutiny from government officials grows. At least 20 states have now banned the use of TikTok on governmentissued devices. And for many direct-to-consumer startups, Facebook and Google still account for the lion’s share of advertising.

“We believe as a team there’s not just one lever that you can pull to make the entire program work or not work. But rather, we’re really focusing on that kind of integrated strategy,” said Zoee Silber, brand marketing director at Kindly. The Gelmart-owned intimates brand, which launched in 2021, launched its TikTok channel in mid-2022. Thus far, Kindly has mostly experimented with low-cost guerilla marketing tactics, like a campaign in which the brand gave $500 to creators to perform random acts of kindness for strangers.

“We’ve seen over the past few years — as it relates to Instagram and Facebook ads — that your dollar doesn’t go as far as you would like it to. And on TikTok, we find that your dollar goes a bit further,” Silber said.

And, some of the brands that have spent the past couple of years experimenting with TikTok ads say they continue to see dividends from some of their most early viral hits.

Poppi Founder and Chief Brand Officer Allison Ellsworth told Modern Retail TikTok has changed the way the prebiotic soda brand executes paid advertising. In 2021, Poppi posted a simple video introducing TikTok users to the brand. “It was just me sitting down, talking to the camera telling my story of why I started Poppi,” Ellsworth said.

Nearly two years later, the video has close to 60 million views thanks to a mix of organic and paid marketing efforts behind it behind it.

“It’s still our number one converting ad and we’ve been putting paid behind it for close to two years. Usually you don’t run an ad for two years. You wouldn’t do that on a lot of other platforms,” she recalled. “From a pure sales standpoint, we’ve seen incremental returns as much as 10 times,” she added.

Ellsworth added that the video hit was posted on a Friday

night, and the next day Poppi had clocked over $100,000 sales overnight on Amazon. Still, Ellsworth said that Poppi’s overall goal on TikTok is to drive “overarching brand awareness, versus driving them to the bottom of the funnel, converting them to buy now.”

Poppi has also managed to build its email and SMS reach to almost 500,000 after two years on TikTok, Ellsworth said. Another TikTok feature that has worked well for Poppi, Ellsworth said, is the platform’s Spark Ads, which allows brands to put paid spend behind organic posts from users that have been trending. “You don’t actually have to run the ads through your page — they can be separate, which makes this a fantastic platform to just run paid on,” Ellsworth said.

Arrae, which sells digestive health supplements, also started off on TikTok by posting organic content to tap into the highgrowth frequency platform and went from zero to 30,000 followers in a couple of months in early 2021.

Arrae Founder Nish Samantray said that the wellness brand has found success in ads that most closely mimic a regular TikTok post. That entails everything from using “extremely native text, native fonts and the style of talking to the camera,” he said.

When Arrae first launched its TikTok account, there were “days where you could grow extremely [fast], get a lot of views and go viral extremely quickly.” But, he said that’s getting harder to do.

Still, in 2023, Samantray said Arrae has plans to spend close to a million dollars on the platform because of improvements TikTok has made in making its ad platform more sophisticated over time.

“The way they collect data, their algorithm, their AI and their overall structure for how to run and show ads has gotten better. It’s more interesting for people like us to run ads on the platform, because we just literally see it getting better in real time. And the better it gets, the more money you like to spend,” Samantray added. About 25% of the brand’s overall ad spend is on TikTok, Samantray told Modern Retail.

Poppi, as well, has also increased its TikTok ad spend over time. Last year, Poppi’s spending on TikTok increased by 100% compared to 2021. In 2023, the company plans to roughly increasing its advertising spend by roughly 40% over 2022.

“TikTok is a dynamic platform, so, if it returns even better than we’re used to, we won’t hesitate to double down at a moment’s notice,” added Ellsworth.

For PR, Is ChatGPT An Asset Or Threat?

By Dorothy Crenshaw

Everyone’s talking about ChatGPT, including most of us who work in public relations. Opinions and experiences vary, but ChatGPT will likely be a game-changer when it comes to how PR teams work. AI has been promoted as a tool to automate repetitive tasks, freeing us to engage in the strategy and creative work involved in a typical PR engagement. But the latest iteration promises much more. It’s different from previous generations of chatbots.

Can ChatGPT make our job easier?

So, what is ChatGPT? In simple terms, it’s a languageprocessing tool powered by artificial intelligence. It was trained on a huge dataset and uses a predictive model to generate content in real time in a fluent, conversational style. To date, bots just haven’t been able to mimic that natural fluency. ChatGPT content, on the other hand, mostly reads like an actual person wrote it.

ChatGPT has real limitations

I’ve played around with ChatGPT; in fact, I asked it to write this blog post to see how useful it is for first-draft content.

The results were underwhelming. It spat out 350 words of a perfectly coherent post, but it was light on substance, and there were claims I thought were blatantly wrong, like that ChatGPT can do media monitoring. The tone was neutral to the point of being pedestrian. It was about as sophisticated as a junior-high-school history essay. You can judge for yourself here.

ChatGPT has many strengths as a research tool, but there are also limitations, at least for now. It can’t access information beyond the end of 2021. That’s a big deal when your work includes generating content based on upto-the-minute trends as it does in B2B tech PR. That’s why I was surprised that its post claimed to be a tool for media monitoring. In its current iteration, it can monitor trends, but it’s not up-to-date on current events, because, contrary to what many people think, ChatGPT isn’t connected to the web. It’s also prone to factual mistakes. This piece in Fast Company about its lack of reliability is positively scary.

But ChatGPT is amazing for other tasks. It’s useful for analyzing data, like consumer behavior, demographic trends, or media consumption patterns, all of which can

support PR program research and key audience targeting. And the speed with which it generates readable content, even when mediocre, is breathtaking.

Banish the blank screen

Some PR professionals claim they use Chat GPT to draft press releases, speeches, and written content. I’ve run into many of the same limitations I found with that experimental blog post with that kind of content. But, in fairness to my AI companion, I fed it very little information. It learns as it goes, so the more time you invest, the better your result. And let’s face it, a first draft offers an instant starting point when it comes to creating content. Any writer knows that it’s generally easier to edit from a rough draft than write something from scratch. Editing ChatGPT’s work probably beats staring at a blank screen in most cases, and we can even feel smug and superior in the process.

My colleague Chris Harihar is a big ChatGPT booster. He’s used it for quick generation of agendas, reports, captions, titles, and even executive quotes and rough content. He says ChatGPT is a decent copyeditor and swears by it for creation of tables and charts to include in proposals.

I could go on with my criticisms of ChatGPT, but here’s the thing – it was released only a month ago, and it’s a prototype. It may be limited as a tool now, but 2023 will bring new iterations, and it will only get better. There’s no dismissing it as a fatally flawed tool or passing fad.

In fact, I’ll close with a paragraph straight from ChatGPT. In response to my query about how PRs can use AI, it produced a fairly generic post about AI as a PR tool. The draft ended with this caveat:

However, it is important to remember that AI is a tool, rather than a replacement for human PR professionals. The critical thinking, creativity, and judgement that PR professionals bring to their work cannot be replicated by AI. Therefore, it’s important for PR professionals to embrace the new technologies and find ways to incorporate them into their work, rather than viewing them as a threat to their jobs.

Founder/CEO of Crenshaw Communications. Successful communications entrepreneur with deep expertise in technology PR, health promotion, brand communications, and reputation management.

Nancy Reagan, the Buddha, and You: On the future of your brand

By BJ Bueno

The Buddha says, “The problem is you think that you have time.”

Nancy Reagan echoes and expands upon this wisdom, saying, “You learn something out of everything, and you come to realize more than ever that we’re all here for a certain space of time, and, then it’s going to be over, and you better make this count.”

And here we have you. How much time do you have to help your brand achieve greatness?

You’re One Brand Among Millions

This isn’t a post about your physical well-being, although I certainly hope you’re all taking excellent care of yourselves. This is a post about the pressures your brand is under when the typical consumer encounters at least 1,500 brands a day. And, that’s assuming that consumer doesn’t stop in at the corner grocery store to grab a soda. A simple errand like that raises the number of brands that one individual encounters to over 35,000.

To function in this environment, customers need to develop some level of brand blindness. No one has the cognitive capacity to remember the individual attributes of so many different organizations. They only see the brands that are relevant to them.

What makes a brand relevant? The relationship the customer has with the brand.

And, how long do relationships take to develop? You may believe in love at first sight, but, for the vast majority of people, deciding they like someone (and then even further that they love someone) takes some time. Relationships are built interaction by interaction, encounter by encounter. It’s why people date before they marry: they’re trying to discover what life will be like if they commit to their partner.

Think through the experience your customers have. Is it wonderful enough to make them fall at least a little bit in love with you? If the answer is no, you’re running out of time

to develop a relationship with that person. There’s always a competitor waiting in the wings who will see the value in being nicer and providing a better experience.

The time pressure is real. But, brands often make the mistake of taking their customers for granted. Look (back in time) at RadioShack: There was a brand who should have had fantastic relationships with their customers—home electronics enthusiasts who generally had no other avenues to source the components, tools, and toys they needed and wanted. When CB radios were extremely popular, RadioShack was right in the middle of that boom. And, they were early players serving the home computer market.

But the times changed and Radio Shack was suddenly in competition with online vendors.

Instead of moving to compete with these vendors, RadioShack stayed where it was—and let’s be real, the Venn diagram describing RadioShack shoppers and early adopters of online shopping have a lot of entirely predictable overlap.

RadioShack ended up losing a real opportunity to build love. And, trust was gone: the customers saw RadioShack as a brand that didn’t align with their technologically progressive values.

In the relative blink of an eye, the hundred-year-old brand was sold off as a defunct brand by REV, which is now using the branding to sell cryptocurrency.

You always have less time than you think. RadioShack had reason to believe in its stable, enduring nature, but they lost their customers’ love.

What would you have done differently if you were in charge at RadioShack?

What would you do differently now, if you believed your customer relationships were truly vulnerable?

The post Nancy Reagan, the Buddha, and You: On the future of your brand appeared first on cultbranding.com.

Instagram, Spotify, and other modern logos get a 1980s makeover

By Elissaveta M. Brandon

A good logo is meant to evolve with the times. Just look at the countless iterations the Microsoft logo has gone through since the company launched in 1975. But what happens when logos travel back in time instead of forward?

Portuguese graphic designer Rafael Serra has created more than 100 variations of famous logos from companies including Playstation, Nike, and Instagram rendered in an ultra-retro style that is reminiscent of the ’80s and ’90s.

“I was a child from the ’80s, I grew up seeing retro things,” says Serra, who was fascinated by objects like VHS tapes, cassette tapes, and graphic design on magazine covers from a young age.

In one iteration, Serra’s Spotify logo boasts a bold, purple typeface set against a flattened globe, with the brand’s name translated in Japanese. In another, the Ikea word mark is rendered in light pink, blocky letters, straddled by two intersecting ovals.

The logos are a survey of stereotypical ’80s design motifs. There are drop shadows and sans-serif fonts; circles, lines, and geometric motifs reminiscent of the Memphis design movement; and myriad references to space, like Saturn’s rings and stars.

Some of the companies that Serra included in his series already had logos in the ’80s, but none of them looked as distinctly ’80s as his renditions. Ikea’s now iconic blue-andyellow logo first appeared in 1967 and has remained largely unchanged since. Coca-Cola’s logo has barely changed since the 1880s.

Serra has been drawing a logo every day for the past three years. The resulting collection is more of a lettering art project than a branding exercise, but it makes up an interesting (and fun!) repository of retro symbols and trends.

“One thing I like is to mash up different shapes,” Serra says. “My work is a combination of forms, shapes, and textures that resembles that time with fonts from our time.”

& Book, Line Sinker

Emotional

Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People

by Marc Gobe

Emotional Branding is the best selling revolutionary business book that has created a movement in branding circles by shifting the focus from products to people. emotional branding has become a coined term by many top industry experts to express the new dynamic that exists now between brands and people.

Website Branding for Small Businesses: Secret Strategies for Building a Brand, Selling Products Online, and Creating a Lasting Community

by Nathalie Nahai (Author)

With so many customers taking to the web for information, every business needs to have an online presence, especially a small business. However, a simple website won’t suffice, and each enterprise has to properly connect with.....

Hello, My Name Is Awesome: How to Create Brand Names That Stick

by Alexandra Watkins

Too many new companies and products have names that look like the results of a drunken Scrabble game (Xobni, Svbtle, Doostang). In this entertaining and engaging book, ace naming consultant Alexandra Watkins explains how anyone—even noncreative types—can create memorable and effective brand names. No degree in linguistics required.

Bigger Than This: How to Turn Any Venture Into an Admired Brand

by Fabian Geyrhalter

Following the success of his #1 bestselling book, “How to Launch a Brand,” acclaimed brand strategist Fabian Geyrhalter is back with an enlightening new book that digs deep into today’s new world of brand creation. “Bigger Than This” challenges companies – from startups to Fortune 100s – to (re)discover their spark and connect with today’s consumers on a deeper level.

Typography Design and Application in Branding

by Li Aihong

This book focuses on typography in branding and explains in detail the basic techniques of typography - stroke design and typeface graphic - in an easy-to-follow format. With more than 50 commercial examples, selected from the work of world-renowned designers, this book is suitable for those involved in brand design, as well as for those new to type design.

Influenced: The Impact of Social Media on Our Perception

by MD Wachler, Brian Boxer

Individuals seeking to widen their tribes of friends, fans, and followers have an abundance of resources for building their digital footprints and social media popularity. All of this seems well and good from the perspective of revenue, exposure, and perhaps ego-building, but what is the impact of this on the human brain and our behavior? Is anyone paying attention to the lurking side effects of the social media influencer revolution?

How to Launch a Brand (2nd Edition): Your Step-by-Step Guide to Crafting a Brand: From Positioning to Naming And Brand Identity

by Fabian Geyrhalter

Most entrepreneurs, even seasoned brand managers, launch first and then work on slowly transforming the new offering into a brand. A logical progression, I would agree. offering—you have no legacy or advocates?

How Cool Brands Stay Hot: Branding to Generations Y and Z

by Joeri Van Den Bergh

Berry-AMA Book Award 2012 (1st edition)

WINNER: Expert Marketing Magazine’s Marketing Book of the Year Award 2011 (1st edition) How Cool Brands Stay Hot analyses Generations Y and Z, the most marketing savvy and advertisingcritical generations yet.

The Definitive Guide to TikTok Advertising: How to Access 1 Billion People in 10 Minutes!

by Perry Marshall, Dennis Yu

Guided by famed marketing consultant and bestselling author Perry Marshall and his coauthor, digital marketing magician, Dennis Yu, learn how to save 80% of your time and money by zeroing in on the right 20% of your TikTok Advertising efforts—then 10X, even 100X your success for as little as $10 a day in ad spend.

The New Multichannel, Integrated Marketing: 29 Trends for Creating a Multichannel, Integrated Campaign to Boost Your Profits

Now

by Craig Huey

Business owners and entrepreneurs…You’re losing time, money and opportunity if your marketing and advertising are underperforming.

Conviction Marketing

by Kelly Roach

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

Assemblage: The Art and Science of Brand Transformation

by Emmanuel Probst (Author)

Assemblage is supported by in-depth research in consumer psychology, extensive consumer insights, interviews with industry-leading marketers, and case studies of transformative brands, big and small.

The Automationist: Unlocking Marketing Automation Secrets

by Chandan Kamal Sharma

The time has come when you can connect with your digital customers one-to-one, doesn’t matter wherever he or she is. No more guesswork, no more uncertainty and no more technological stress. With more than 47% companies already implementing some type of business automation, it has now become important that you develop an understanding of how business automation is transforming the world and getting them closer to their customers.

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

by Nick Worth

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

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

by Mike Stevens

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

The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands

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