BrandKnew February 2019

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

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Dear Friends: It’s the month of Valentine’s and I hope we have put enough quality content in this issue to make you fall in love with BrandKnew all the more. Well, there are the usual mandatory suspects that we end up doing at the begining of each year like the Hottest Marketing Trends for 2019. Predictable but very utilitarian. We also go a little further to talk about Trends in Influencer Marketing for 2019. The dust is begining to settle and the prognosis is that AI is eating into Advertising and we take a closer look at that. Often times head honchos and corporate chiefs would be trying to grapple on what their corporate brand should stand for. We examine that in this edition. For the less initiated(not very many, if at all, in our audience I reckon), we also have done a feature on How Well Do You Know Digital Advertising. Brand differentiation is passe, in this issue we encourage brand owners and guardians to create ‘ brand desire ‘. If you want to know what would remain a flavour of the season, I think it will be ‘ In App Advertising ‘- this unsung hero has started to get some serious attention and advertisers are lining up. There is ample more actionable content that you will take delight in soaking up and I leave you to do just that. Till the next…

Best

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Suresh Dinakaran @ISDGlobalDubai

@Brandknewmag

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suresh@groupisd.com

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Business Development Director: Rishi Mohan Senior Hustler-Digital Marketing & Brand Development: Nikhil Thekkumkoottathil Brand Research & Creative Engagement Specialist: Anushka Kartha Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Regional Director: Krishna Chugh Country Manager, India: Vinit Chugh Performance Marketing Architect: Ryan Govindan Video Content Specialist: Mikhaela Cena Brand Engagement and Outreach Specialist: Anuva Madan Content Development Specialist: Abijith Pradeep

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CONTENTS

‘Welcome to #Hustletown’: How hustle culture took over advertising What’s in store for logo design in 2019?

Don’t Differentiate, Create More Brand Desire!

AI Is Eating Advertising – And 2019 Will Be Critical For Getting It Right What Does Your Corporate Brand Stand For? How Well Do You Understand Digital Advertising?

Social Media Is Ruining Our Minds - It Also Might Save Them ‘Going where the customer is’: Marketers are coming for messaging apps What’s next for 2019? Influencer marketing trends 10 Marketing Trends to Watch in 2019 Claus and brand effect!

Why You Should Optimize Your Email Campaigns With Artificial Intelligence It’s more than a long tale!

Why Books Matter for the Long Run In-app advertising has come a long way: Here’s why you should use it People love Instagramming billboards–and it’s great for advertisers Book, Line & Sinker

‘Welcome to #Hustletown’: How hustle culture took over advertising

By Shareen Pathak

A young agency planner recently started a new job. As part of her “welcome kit,” the planner, who declined to share her name or agency publicly for fear of being fired, got a flask, a map of the office’s neighborhood with lunch suggestions, and a tank top that read: “Welcome to #Hustletown.”

“People here routinely talk about what we do as hustle,” said this planner. “It is a little annoying, because it’s painted on all the walls, and I’m basically working a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. job for $60,000 a year, but somehow there is this idea that we’re doing more. We’re struggling and dying for what we do.”

Examples vary. On stage at the Cannes Lions, a group of panelists including Alain de Botton and Arianna Huffington said creative lives “require suffering.” At the same event, Michael Kassan, CEO of Medialink, spoke on the main stage about “The Art of the Hustle” this year. Regularly, agency employees are asked to make sure they have a “side hustle” on their resumes they can point to as proof that they can go

above and beyond. Two agency recruiters said that they’ve seen more mentions of “hustle” as one of the qualities agencies are looking for, especially in more junior employees.

“It’s this underlying tone at work that hustle is good and struggle is good,” said Olly Rzysko, a consultant who recently quit the industry after 13 years, most recently heading digital at Primark. “I’ve seen people apologize for not posting on LinkedIn often, I’ve seen basically KPIs put against tweets and hustle.”

In some ways, the original “hustler” of the industry is probably GaryVee, the anywhere-and-everywhere persona of agency executive and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, who managed to transform “hustle” into a way of life. “A hustler’s mentality” was a blog post he wrote four years ago about what it meant to hustle. To be clear, it wasn’t just working hard — it was “maximizing every last bit of energy you have in order to produce.”

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Hustle is everywhere. It’s on t-shirts that read “Eat. Sleep.

Hustle”; it’s on tote bags sold for $25 on Etsy so it can be publicly known that you don’t just work hard, you have a higher calling. It’s painted on walls inside offices. There’s even an IPG agency named Hustle.

Nat Eliason, who calls it “struggle porn,” is the founder of an SEO, branding and content agency called Growth Machine.

Two weeks ago, he wrote a Medium article about the problem — that “struggling is good,” as is “working long hours, failing for 10 years, starting a side hustle to fund your side hustle.”

Of course, every industry has its fair share of hustle idolization, but ad agencies and advertising in general are unique, said Eliason, because they operate in a time-based way. “You’re valued at agencies by how many hours you bill, and you work more hours than you actually work anyway.” So you have to show it off and make sure people know you’re working hard and working constantly.

To be clear, hustle isn’t just hard work — it’s showing that you’re working hard. It’s Instagram posts about how much you have to travel for work, it’s LinkedIn and Medium memos about how if you’re not working yourself to the bone you’re not doing enough. It also smacks a little bit of “work at all costs.” And if you’re not struggling, you’re probably not working hard enough.

“There’s this whole thing about how being an entrepreneur, or even just a person working, has to be like falling on your face while eating glass,” said Eliason. “That’s bullshit. This is a job, and you can quit any time.”

For Rzysko, what this says about the industry is how much pressure it is under. The advent of digital media and its constant changes also meant that people had to be more “on it.” “People got accused of being dinosaurs when money was flipped into digital,” said Rzysko. In some ways, hustle culture is an outward manifestation of advertising’s incredible pressure — constantly under change, constantly asked to be innovative and prove new things. It also has drawbacks: “People are too distracted by the gimmick and the new thing and the hustle they forget the basics. After all, there isn’t any glamour over improving a conversion rate. There’s nothing to hustle over that.”

Chapin Clark, evp and managing director of copywriting at R/GA, said that it’s a big phenomenon because the language of “hustle” has become more familiar. “It has appeal. And I think what’s appealing about it is that in a world where so much in business is out of your control, you really don’t know what’s gonna take off,” he said. “But hustle and work ethic is in your control.”

(For his part, Vaynerchuk responded with a Medium post as well as a video about how he does agree about “struggle porn” and how it’s important to be self-aware and balanced.)

Timothy D. Malefyt, a clinical associate professor at Fordham University who specializes in marketing, said that he’s found his students in the advertising industry expressing that “hustle” is what you have to do. “The push from advertising is saying it’s OK,” he said. “It’s even part of the mystique of the profession: work hard, and play hard.”

Agencies also have their own flavor of hustle because traditionally, as a creative, you’re taught that you need to run 100 lines through before you get to anything interesting. “Or you have to put hours and ideation in and throwing things up on a wall,” he added.

That’s true, especially in the creative side of the industry, giving people rejection, multiple times, is a known tenet. Ad legends like Jeff Goodby, for example, have openly spoken about how many tries it takes to really get something right.

“There’s wisdom in that — you don’t want to be a firstdraft person,” said Clark. The issue comes when hard work is replaced by hashtag hustle — the outward show of hard work. “My antenna goes up when people make a huge show of how much they travel for work and how much they’re doing.”

Another reason hustle may be more prevalent in advertising than other industries can be because of the nature of the job, said Tom Goodwin, evp at Zenith. “It’s very hard to be objectively correct and better in our profession,” he said.

“It’s not like maths where we come and solve the equation.

It’s mushy.” In those instances, hustle often matters because otherwise, if you’re not always struggling, how will people know you’re working hard?

Hustle is public. And in the ad industry, publicity matters.

All industries have people who talk more and do less, but advertising is in throes of a giant change that’s made it more difficult to assign credit. The rise of digital media has created a veritable crisis of “talkers.”

“Our accomplishments are subjective, making the notion of a personal brand much more prevalent in our industry than others,” said Goodwin.

There is backlash coming to this. Eliason is one of them — he’s instituted new rules at his agency that include flat fees, not time billed. People are now focused on balance, mindfulness, and not dying because you have too much to do.

Still, there’s a difference between hustle and hard work.

Hard work is just that. Hustle denotes something more — for Clark and Eliason both, it’s that outward masochism at play, something about showing people how hard you’re working while not necessarily working hard at all.

“Younger employees rightly question their return on doing things 100 times. Is the work getting better as a result of this?” said Clark.”The approach to creative ideation is necessary and good and yields better work, but there is a point where it gets to diminishing returns.”

“GaryVee portrays a hustle and ‘get at ’em’ like a marketing Tony Robbins,” said one agency executive. “Very bro-y, drink Red Bull all night. Gary evangelizes the hustle, and he’s got young pups doing the hard work. So tough to say there is a clear distinction to be made.”

Shareen Pathak, Managing Director, Editorial Products

What’s in store for logo design in 2019?

8 INNOVATIVE LOGO DESIGN TRENDS AND STYLES FOR 2019

By Amanda Bowman

A logo is the visual centerpiece of a company’s brand identity.

specific qualities of your logo in an unexpected way.

A well-designed logo will help boost awareness and can improve marketing and a brand’s bottom line.

A poorly designed logo, or one that has outgrown a brand, can tarnish it.

When you set aside design trends and styles, at its core, a logo must: 1.

2.

3.

4.

Embody the brand.

Be instantly recognizable.

Be versatile.

Be timeless.

Everything else is optional.

Simplistic letter play, “swooshy” people, pixelated designs and bright colors were popular logo design trends in 2018.

Whether a brand wants a logo design for a new business or is considering a rebrand, a custom logo design in 2019 should feel fresh and relevant for a long time, and not dated a year from now.

Here are eight innovative logo design trends and styles that will happen in 2019.

1. Responsive design logos Whether you print your logo on marketing brochures, outdoor billboards, product packaging, on your website, on a business card or as an icon on a smartphone, you want your logo to be flexible and usable in different situations.

This is called responsive design.

Here’s a site that lets you play with famous logos and see how they respond to different screen sizes.

How does your company’s logo change based on screen or display size?

One way to be sure this style works for you is to ask your graphic designer to show you some mock-ups with your logo on items.

Many graphic designers are now providing mocked-up visuals of their logo designs on a t-shirt, business cards, business brochures, stationery, web design, infographic or wall signage in addition to their beautifully rendered design.

3. Bright colors Colors -- especially bright colors -- continue to take center stage when it comes to modern logo trends and we expect this will continue throughout 2019.

2. Perspective-play logos Playing with perspective is a great way to challenge the norms of traditional logo design.

Distortion, fragmentation, warping and visual breaks are all interesting ways to break the mold in an engaging way.

You can even overemphasize certain elements to highlight

That’s because color has a deep impact on how people see the world and is often used to influence people’s decisions.

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Want to learn more about the importance of color in logo design? We recommend you read: How 21 Brands Use Color to Influence Customers How Color Influences What People Buy Small Business Branding: What Color Says About Your Business

4. Simple typography Simple design is hardly a new trend.

With clean lines and memorable presentation, it’s easy to understand the draw of simple logo design.

In 2019, you can expect to see designers playing with metaphors, puns and innovative concepts in their logo designs.

These logos make everyone take a second look at a product and add a fun element into a business’ persona.

Simplifying an existing logo is an easy way for businesses to build on their foundations - ironically, by stripping them down to their visual cores.

We’ve seen brands like Uber undergo redesigns recently, whether to strip down overly ornamental logos or to move away from tarnished reputations.

Whatever the reason, simple typography can give your existing logo a contemporary, modern facelift or create a contemporary new brand.

5. Playful designs Playful visuals that offer unexpected, clever designs can have a major impact on customers.

6. Detailed vintage Brands that want to create an aura of vintage sophistication and authenticity will use intricate, detailed illustrations in 2019 to represent their artisan, handcrafted, top-shelf products.

The food and beverage industries are especially drawn to the lux, detailed design work trend, and for good reason.

Wine, spirits and other artisan treats all naturally fit this logo trend.

Any natural, organic, house-made products and businesses can benefit greatly from a super detailed, vintage influenced logo.

7. Cut typography Typography plays a huge role in logo design.

The font you choose has a powerful impact on how your brand, and your company, is perceived.

cutting part of it away, leaving behind something new.

The venerable news site Slate used this to great effect with their major rebrand.

It’s a simple but effective technique that reshapes how type is used in logo and brand design.

If you want a look that’s straightforward but with flair, think about what you can cut. You might find that less really is more.

But be sure that your company name is readable once you cut the font. After all, you can’t create awareness and loyalty with your brand identity if people don’t know the name of your business.

8. Geometric shapes Logos are, at their cores, symbols.

Geometric shapes can work as powerful, memorable symbols.

With bright color choices and invitingly arranged shapes, the geometry trend is both minimalist and friendly.

In 2018 we saw companies invest time and money to create custom fonts for their brands: Netflix debuted Netflix Sans, Uber got their Move on and Airbnb poured themselves a bowl full of Cereal.

We’ll continue to see this trend grown in 2019 as companies reject available fonts and create their own.

For companies that don’t have the budget (or interest) to create their own custom typeface, another type-based trend is gaining popularity.

Called “Cut”, this trend sees brands taking type and literally

Are you ready to embrace logo design trends and styles in 2019?

Logo design trends and logo design styles can offer a great way to breathe fresh life into your brand.

However, as with anything, it’s important to exercise caution.

You don’t want to carelessly update your brand for the sake of trendiness and wind up with a logo that doesn’t resonate with your business or market.

When you’re looking through 2019’s logo design trends, make sure that trend represents your brand thoughtfully, and can be integrated into the rest of your existing branding.

Don’t Differentiate, Create More Brand Desire!

By Brian Beitler

In today’s cluttered and over-assorted market, the conversation in organisations often focuses on the importance of brand differentiation. The need to create or identify a position or particular area of emphasis that is different than what competitors currently offer customers. At face value, the idea of differentiation appears healthy and serves to foster crucial internal dialogue that can help shape and improve a company’s product or service.

But if you look deeper, the focus on differentiation as a driving discussion for a company or brand is flawed. The primary reason is that differentiation starts with a focus on what competitors are doing and not necessarily on what the customer wants, needs, or will value in your brand. The goal is not to be different from a competitor to compete but to be more valuable to a customer than your competitor.

But “differentiation analysis” often doesn’t lead you in that direction, it tends to focus around what you shouldn’t do because someone else is already doing it, versus helping you identify what you should do to win more customers.

I encourage you to stop over emphasising what your competitors are doing and to start focusing on what you can do to make your brand more desirable than your competitors in the eyes of your target consumers. And sometimes that means doing exactly what they are doing, only better.

As a guide, here are three core areas that you can explore to drive brand desire with today’s consumers.

Self Esteem At the top of Maslow’s famous hierarchy sit Esteem and SelfActualisation. And never has the need for being “actualised” (even if in a superficial way) been more transparent. Thank

you, Selfie-Nation. Consumers make hundreds of purchase decisions a year based on whether or not a product helps them “feel” more personally confident and/or more “esteemed” within their social circles. There are dozens of other dimensions that play into self-esteem that we don’t have time to go through here, but a simple google search will help you find them.

Brands can increase value and win amongst their competitive set by creating products/services that enhance the selfesteem of their customers better than their competitors. Of course, the key is doing the customer field work necessary to identify which dimension(s) you need to enhance to elevate your impact.

Brands like Nike focus on making you believe you are your best athlete through brand positioning/advertising, businesses like LVMH focus on creating a sense of prestige through exclusivity/quality/pricing with their brands, Apple focuses on making you feel relevant/on-trend through design aesthetics/frequent product enhancements, and Starbucks elevates your feelings of sophistication through the product experience.

Do you think any of the above brands are worried about being “different” from their competitors or do you think they are focused on building, strengthening, and maintaining their positions in the eyes of their customers?

Utility Being useful is still one of the most straightforward and most direct ways for a brand or business to succeed. To understand the potential of this dimension you have to define “utility” in its correct terms and understand the dimensions of “utility” as

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they affect the consumers in your particular industry.

In retail, utility comes in the form of low prices, broad assortments, convenience, ease of shopping, friendly staff, and the list goes on. In the automobile industry (excluding the luxury segment which operates first on self-esteem, and secondarily on utility), it can be horsepower, towing capacity, safety, technology integration, and other options.

One of my favourite recent examples of winning on utility is Uber. Uber revolutionised the taxi and car service industry by creating an incredibly useful new product. Now some have argued that Uber won on the cool factor, which would be connected to Self Esteem. And don’t get me wrong, it’s cool, and it helped you look even cooler among your social circle if you were an early adopter, but that is not why it grew so fast. It exploded because scheduling a car service for about the same price you could pay while standing on the corner waving your hand like a maniac was better in every way. You were not cold in the winter, hot in the summer, wet in the rain, the cars were cleaner, the drivers were more helpful, and they showed up when you wanted them too. Now that is useful.

My point here is that if the Uber leadership team had started by saying, how can we be different than the competition. I don’t think they would have landed on the current product.

Their solution was a customer first approach (i.e., they were starting with how do you make the customers experience better in every way, not different). Disruption almost always rises from being customer centric.

Connectedness/Community This last dimension of desire has evolved rapidly over the last decade or so. I believe, in part, due to social media and the shared experience, it creates for all of us. As well as because some visionary leaders felt that doing good could be an essential part of good business.

In this space, brands are focused on finding ideas and belief systems that a group of consumers rallies around. It could be social consciousness, environmental consciousness, or even an activity like running or yoga. Several brands have capitalised successfully on this dimension over the last decade. Think Toms shoes for social well-being, or Lululemon and their fanatically Yogi base that establish a brand that

has become so much more, or Method cleaning products and the environmentally minded with whom they connected.

Although this area is arguably related to self-esteem at some level, it is a significant enough sub-area that I feel it should be broken out. Also, I view the focus here as being less selfcentred than brands built around self-esteem.

Importantly, we are seeing significant brands use this area very differently than their traditional self-esteem models to build strong brand connections. Think the Superbowl ad by Budweiser where they show their factories being converted to “canned water” plants. Or, Aerie’s stand on no-retouching as a way to connect with the Body Positivity minded young women or P&G’s support of the mothers of Olympic athletes.

I share these frameworks because they are the ones I have used as a guide over the last 20 years and across six leading brands to help build “desired” and not necessarily “differentiated” brands.

Always start with your customer and not your competitors. I know this is easier said than done. We love to talk about our competitors because they are so knowable. Everything they do is documented so clearly in the products they make, the marketing they produce, and often the financial statements they publish.

Customers, on the other hand, are often difficult to know, their lives are less public, and even when they are (thanks again social media), it requires significant effort to aggregate it into digestible information. And even when you can see how they have behaved at large, it is still hard to understand their internal motivations and drivers. But that is where the ideas are that will help you build something truly “desirable.”

Fight the hard fight; it will be worth it in the end.

Brian Beitler has led the marketing teams for several leading brands including Kohl’s, Bath & Body Works, Hot Wheels, David’s Bridal, and Lane Bryant, among others. He believes in pushing brands to think differently about how they engage and earn loyalty from their customers, and is driven by the belief that the key to success is listening to your customers personally and first hand, and then combining those personal insights with big data to innovate your brand strategy, products, experience, and marketing. He is currently Chairman of the Board for the Global Retail Marketing Association.

AI Is Eating Advertising – And 2019 Will Be Critical For Getting It Right

By Orchid Richardson

Lexus recently released the first ad written by AI – and it was surprisingly good. Was it a stunt? Sure.

But it’s also a wake-up call about how AI is changing the very nature of advertising as we know it – and a preview of what’s ahead in 2019.

Already, 95% of advertisers have terabytes upon petabytes of demographic data, including personal data, location information and interests they can use to target prospects they know almost nothing about. Artificial intelligence is a way to tame that data and take it to the next level.

A recent Deloitte study affirmed this outlook – and the ROI of AI for advertising.

In a survey of 1,100 US executives from companies considered to be early AI adopters, 82% report a positive return on their investment for their AI initiatives.

That’s why I’m willing to posit that at least 80% of the digital media market will be using some kind of AI in advertising in 2019.

In the year ahead, we can expect smart algorithms that help brands and publishers find new audiences. We’ll see AI that analyzes customer behavior to make smart recommendations based on attributes such as age, gender, location and millions of other data points. And we’ll all start seeing unique web pages that are built on the fly just for us – a custom shopping catalog for one, compliments of AI. Our industry is at the center of a seismic change in the ways people engage with the world around them. Up and coming direct-to-consumer brands in particular are built around data and leveraging it: They create value by creating a mutually beneficial, two-way relationship between the brand and the consumer, a relationship that throws off data that is vital to every part of the business. When machine learning and advanced algorithms are applied to these oceans of digital information, we can intimately understand the motivations of almost any consumer.

AI-powered conversational intelligence and voice-enabled platforms (hello, Alexa) are also radically changing our ideas of what digital marketing can do. It’s a heady time.

But technology has a way of outpacing our ability to understand what is actually going on – and that’s definitely the case with AI. As AI pervades the advertising ecosystem, we

need a common vocabulary for what AI is, and what it’s not.

AI is used in programmatic advertising, but programmatic advertising is not AI. Retargeting looked like magic when it first arrived, but it’s clearly not AI, either. In fact, as an industry we don’t have a common vocabulary to define what AI is (and isn’t) in marketing and how we should and shouldn’t use it.

Now that ads are delivered through a medium marketed on the promise that it would be personalized to us, mass ads don’t cut it anymore. Under GDPR regulations, for example, consumers are able to decide what information they share with companies. They trust this information will be used responsibly and in their best interest.

It’s time to define in marketing and digital advertising how we use AI to make the ecosystem better, how we build better ad experiences, how we ensure brand safety and how we help buyers and publishers find better audiences. As AI evolves we need standards and guidelines for how to use it for practical applications and for ethical applications. As smart as AI is, we need to be sure it’s not inadvertently discriminating against people in ways that are not intended.

Make no mistake: The ethical challenges our industry faces with AI are far-reaching. The recent New York Times exposé about how app makers are harvesting unprecedented amounts of personal data is just the tip of the iceberg.

Together we need to ensure we are all good stewards of AI so our entire industry can grow with it. This requires a set of guiding principles that helps govern how companies communicate and use consumer data.

We need standards and best practices for efficiency, effectiveness and real safety with how the industry operates.

AI leaders all have a responsibility to keep our collective commons safe, secure and thriving.

AI will have a profound effect on how brands talk to consumers and will deliver better, smarter and more relevant conversations and experiences. Consumers will get better and more relevant ads that they actually want. Everybody wins. But only if we get it right.

Orchid Richardson, vice president and managing director of the Data Center of Excellence at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

What Does Your Corporate Brand Stand For?

By Stephen A. GreyserMats Urde

Companies are extremely good at defining their product brands. Customers, employees, and other stakeholders know exactly what an iPhone is and means. But organizations are often less sure-footed when it comes to the corporate brand.

What does the parent company’s name really stand for, and how is it perceived and leveraged in the marketplace and within the company itself?

A clear, unified corporate identity can be critical to competitive strategy, as firms like Apple, Philips, and Unilever understand.

It serves as a north star, providing direction and purpose.

It can also enhance the image of individual products, help firms recruit and retain employees, and provide protection against reputational damage in times of trouble. Many firms, however, struggle to articulate and communicate their brand.

Consider the EURO 35 billion Volvo Group, which sells a broad portfolio of trucks, buses, construction equipment, and marine and industrial engines. After its new CEO decentralized the organization, turning its truck brands (Volvo Trucks, Mack Trucks, Renault Trucks, and UD Trucks) into separate units in 2016, questions about the parent company’s identity became pressing. Because that identity wasn’t well defined, people in

the group were uncertain about how they should strategically support the “daughter” brands, and people in the new brand units had trouble understanding how the group’s mission, values, and capabilities extended to them—and even how to describe their brands’ relationships with the Volvo Group in marketing and investor communications.

But using a process we’ll detail in this article, Volvo was able to clarify its corporate identity and the roles and functions of its daughter brands. That alignment resulted in greater corporate commitment to the brands, sharper positioning in the marketplace, a stronger sense of belonging to the group, and more-coherent marketing and communications.

The approach we used to help Volvo achieve this turnaround is the product of 10 years of research and engagement with hundreds of senior executives in organizations around the world and across several sectors, including manufacturing, financial services, and nonprofits. At its core is a tool called the corporate brand identity matrix. As we’ll show, many companies have adapted this tool to their particular circumstances and used it to successfully define a corporate identity, align its elements, and harness its strengths.

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Introducing the Matrix The framework we’ve developed guides an executive team through a structured set of questions about the company.

Each question focuses on one element of the organization’s identity. There are nine elements in total, and in our matrix we array them in three layers: internally oriented elements on the bottom; externally focused elements on top; and those that are both internal and external in the middle. Let’s look at each layer in turn.

Internal elements.

Forming the foundation of a corporate brand identity are the firm’s mission and vision (which engage and inspire its people), culture (which reveals their work ethic and attitudes), and competences (its distinctive capabilities). These things are rooted in the organization’s values and operational realities.

Consider Johnson & Johnson’s credo, which is carved in stone at the entrance of the company’s headquarters and is a constant reminder of what J&J’s top priorities are (or should be). It describes J&J’s ethos of putting the needs of patients (and their caregivers) first; how it will serve them, by providing high quality at reasonable cost; and a work environment that will be based on dignity, safety, and fairness.

When we conduct matrix workshops, we advise participants to follow these five guidelines:

External elements.

At the top of the matrix you’ll find elements related to how the company wants to be perceived by customers and other external stakeholders: its value proposition, outside relationships, and positioning. Nike, for instance, wants to be known for helping customers achieve their personal best, a goal that shapes its product offerings and is captured in its marketing tagline, “Just Do It.” Elements aspects.

that

bridge

questions “What engages us?” and “What is our direction and inspiration?” Answer in short phrases, not paragraphs, as Starbucks does when describing its mission: “To inspire and nurture the human spirit—one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.” Answer the questions in every box, in any order, without thinking (yet) about how they relate.

internal

and

external

These include the organization’s personality, its distinctive ways of communicating, and its “brand core”—what it stands for and the enduring values that underlie its promise to customers. The brand core, at the center of the matrix, is the essence of the company’s identity. Patagonia’s is summed up in its promise to provide the highest-quality products and to support and inspire environmental stewardship. Audi captures its brand core with the phrase “Vorsprung durch technik” (“Progress through technology”). 3M describes its core simply: “Science. Applied to life.”

When a corporate identity is coherent, each of the other elements will inform and echo the brand core, resonating with the company’s values and what the brand stands for.

The brand core, in turn, will shape the other eight elements.

Mapping the Elements The exercise that follows can reveal whether your corporate brand identity is well integrated and, if it isn’t, show where problems and opportunities lie and help you address them.

While this process can be tackled by an individual, it’s most useful when undertaken by an executive team.

Starting with any one of the nine elements, formulate answers to the related questions in the matrix. For example, if you begin with mission and vision, you’ll answer the

1. Be concise.

Think of the short phrases you use in your answers as headings, under which you will later write more-detailed descriptions fleshing out the brand’s identity and story.

2. Be straightforward.

Avoid jargon and keep your responses uncomplicated. Less is more. IKEA describes its relationships as “Hello!”—reflecting in a single word a down-to-earth attitude in line with its core values.

3. Seek what is characteristic.

Capture words or concepts that resonate within your organization—that you’d agree signal “This is us.” A real estate company answered the personality question this way: “We are not sitting on a high horse.” A newly opened hotel in Oslo described its customer relationships like this: “We treat rock stars as guests; we treat guests as rock stars.”

4. Stay authentic.

Some elements of your identity may already be firmly rooted in your organization. Be careful to be honest in your expression of them. Some elements may be aspirational, calling for adaptation within the company if they are to ring true.

5. Seek what is timeless.

A corporate brand’s identity should be lasting—like this signature expression of one watchmaker: “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.” Forward looking but rooted in the past, it has stood the test of time.

Every company’s matrix will be different, but to get a sense of what a final one looks like, consider the matrix from

field research we did with the Nobel organization. The prizewinners are chosen by four independent institutions: the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the Karolinska Institutet, and the Swedish Academy. Each is responsible for a different award, and each has its own identity and strategy. But the Nobel Foundation manages the prize funds and has a principal responsibility for safeguarding the standing and reputation of the Nobel Prizes. Our research and analysis helped define the common ground among these entities: the goal of rewarding people who have conferred “the greatest benefit to mankind” (recently retranslated to “humankind”), a phrase from Alfred Nobel’s will. That eventually became the brand core and helped clarify the Nobel Prizes’ organizational identity.

For example, if your competences don’t support your promise and value proposition on the competition axis, what capabilities do you need to develop? If on the interaction axis your organizational culture doesn’t mesh with your corporate values in ways that reinforce external relationships, can HR be helpful in understanding the source of the problem?

Creating a fully stable matrix is an ongoing and iterative process. Ultimately, the leadership team needs to converge on a shared narrative about the corporate brand identity, so the stories the company tells will be unified and consistent throughout the organization and beyond.

Applying the Matrix Companies have used the matrix to address a range of identity issues, such as clarifying “mother and daughter” brand relationships, retooling the corporate brand to support new businesses, and improving the company’s overall image.

Strengthening the parent brand’s identity.

The Finnish industrial group Cargotec, which is in the cargohandling business, has three well-known international daughter brands: Hiab (the market leader in on-road solutions), Kalmar (the leader in port and terminal products and services), and MacGregor (the leader in the marine segment). A decade ago the mother brand was eclipsed by these high-profile daughters. To address this, management decided to pursue a “one company” approach, centered on the corporate brand, integrating its service networks and bundling the daughters’ logistics solutions for individual customers.

Walk the Paths After the team has tackled the questions for all nine elements, examine whether the answers fit logically together, reinforcing one another. You’ll want to gauge how clearly they align along the matrix’s diagonal, vertical, and horizontal axes, which all pass through the brand core at the center. Each axis illuminates a different kind of organizational capability: The diagonal one that begins in the bottom left corner highlights capabilities related to strategy; the diagonal one that begins in the top left corner, competition; the horizontal one, communications; and the vertical one, interaction. If your corporate brand identity is clear, the elements on each axis will harmonize. The stronger the connections along each axis are, the more “stable” the matrix is. One of your team’s goals should be to maximize stability.

One way to gauge the strength of connections is to use the answers to the questions in a short presentation describing your corporate brand identity. The notes you’ve jotted down are, in effect, a rough outline of a script. (For an exercise that helps you craft one, download the PDF.) Ask yourself, Does that outline hang together?

In rare cases a team emerges from the analysis with a perfectly aligned and stable matrix, integrated along and across all four axes. But more often it finds gaps and inconsistencies among the elements of identity. The next job, then, is to examine the weak links and explore how to strengthen them.

Cargotec’s CEO led the initiative to bolster and elevate the corporate brand and align it with its daughters’ cultures, values, and promises. First, the firm held 11 workshops in which a team of 110 managers used the matrix to articulate the individual elements of the three daughter brands’ identities. Then everyone gathered in a plenary session to develop an aggregated framework for the corporate brand identity.

To confirm the legitimacy of the new identity and get buy-in, Cargotec involved employees, sending out an internal survey (completed by more than 3,000 workers) that tested the validity of the proposed elements of the redefined corporate brand. Did they fit with the vision of aligned corporate and daughter brand identities? The new frameworks from the workshops were shared with everyone on the corporate intranet, soliciting input. An external survey of customers and other stakeholders provided additional input and led to further adjustments to the proposed Cargotec identity.

At the end of the process, Cargotec and its daughter brands had agreed on a shared brand core: the stated promise “Smarter cargo flow for a better everyday” and the values “global presence—local service,” “working together,” and “sustainable performance.” One result of the strategic and rebranding initiatives is that major international customers, such as Maersk Line, are now offered Cargotec-branded solutions integrated with products from the daughters. The company has also strengthened its focus on the corporate brand in its marketing and communications—for instance, by developing a new logo and visual language.

Supporting business development.

Bona is a century-old company that has long specialized in products and services for installing and maintaining wood floors. Based in Sweden, it operates in more than 90 countries.

In recent years Bona expanded its offerings to include stoneand tile-cleaning products and developed a new system for renovating vinyl-type floors. These moves opened significant growth markets for the company but also raised a question about its positioning: How should a corporate brand that was known worldwide for wood-floor expertise change to accommodate the new businesses? On the surface the answer seemed simple: In its messaging Bona could just shift from its historical emphasis on wood floors to include other kinds of floors. But the executive team saw an opportunity to formally clarify the corporate brand identity, recommitting to its heritage while embracing a new positioning—inside and out.

Led by marketing executives from headquarters and America, the company conducted a series of workshops in both Europe and the United States that brought together managers from across functions and around the globe. The first task was to reach a common understanding of the company’s current identity. Extensive discussion revealed a surprisingly broad variety of perspectives and answers to key questions in the matrix. But through further talks, consensus on those questions was eventually achieved, capturing Bona’s corporate brand identity as it stood then.

Next these managers set out to develop an aspirational corporate brand identity, considering the firm’s new products, technologies, and market opportunities—and in particular, new kinds of customers. The group modified the brand promise to “Bringing out the beauty in floors,” aligning it with the newly articulated mission: “Creating beautiful floors to bring happiness to people’s lives.”

To bring the revamped identity to life inside the company, Bona held dialogues about it with employees, encouraging discussion, and created a welcome program for new staffers that emphasized the values in the revised matrix.

For its outside stakeholders it created new communication programs about lifestyle trends relevant to floor decoration and design, directed at consumers and at Bona’s certified craftsmen partners; launched a website redesign; and set up a marketing program introducing its vinyl-floor renovation system. Translating a revised brand narrative into internal and external initiatives takes time, however; at Bona the process began 21 months ago and is still under way, with progress being benchmarked against the new aspirational matrix.

Changing the brand’s image.

The European company Intrum provides debt collection services to businesses and helps them with invoicing, receivables and debt management, and credit monitoring. By 2014 the company had grown rapidly through acquisitions, and management considered it essential to have a common view across the organization about what Intrum stood for.

Its leadership was also concerned that the company had a negative image—and self-image—as a collection agency

and wanted to give it a more positive identity as a provider of financial services. So over three years Intrum invited management teams from 24 countries to take part in a program, held at the Stockholm School of Economics, that used our matrix to work out a new, improved identity that would enhance the group’s performance. That initiative was led by the senior HR executive Jean-Luc Ferraton.

With input from 200 managers, Intrum’s vague tagline (“Boosting Europe”) was revised to “Leading the way to a sound economy,” which underscored the company’s brand promise. A core value challenged by managers as “fluff” was dropped. Intrum’s mission was reformulated to be more positive. What does the company aspire to now? “To be trusted and respected by everyone who provides or receives credit. With solutions that generate growth while helping people become debt-free, we build value for individuals, companies and society.” The managers’ discussion of the new mission inspired Ferraton to comment, “I’m sure that none of us dreamt as kids of working in our line of business.

But when I hear how you describe your job, our company, and what we actually do, I am proud to work here.”

Intrum tracks the implementation of the new brand identity by measuring employee and customer satisfaction, employee engagement, attitudes about leadership, and the adoption of the corporate brand’s core values. Its internal and external surveys reveal an overall improvement of 15% on these measures over the past three years.

The Cargotec, Bona, and Intrum cases illustrate three ways the corporate brand identity matrix can be used. But these are by no means its only applications. The chairman of a private equity firm has used it to gauge the strategic value of candidates for acquisition and investment. The matrix helped the CEO of Falu Rödfärg, a traditional paint company founded in 1764, clarify his firm’s brand identity and competitive position by highlighting its distinctive heritage and hard-tocopy craftsmanship. And Trelleborg, a polymer-technology maker, used the matrix to enhance its corporate identity so that acquired firms, which had initially rejected the parent brand name, actively embraced it.

CONCLUSION Sometimes a sketch of a parent firm’s identity can be done quickly—and even be helpful. But developing a comprehensive understanding of a corporate brand identity usually takes much longer, involving many sessions and leadership and teams throughout a global organization. The process can happen faster, though, if the company already has strong core values and other essential elements of identity.

Examining and refining your corporate brand is a true leadership task that requires far-reaching input and commitment, passion, and grit. The outcome—a sharpened Stephen A. Greyser is the Richard P. Chapman Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School, where his specialties include brand marketing and advertising/ corporate communications, and a former editor and editorial board chairman of HBR.

brand, stronger and at a unified organization— Mats Urde is anrelationships, associate professor Lund University School of Economics Management. can provideand a clear competitive edge.

How Well Do You Understand Digital Advertising?

TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE AND SEE HOW IT COMPARES TO THE EXPERTS’.

By Jessica Love

You’ve surely noticed that digital marketing has become more sophisticated. Maybe you can recall a pair of shoes that seemed to follow you around the web for weeks. Or perhaps, just days after adopting a puppy, ads for organic dog food popped up in your social-media feeds.

know what I will probably purchase tomorrow.

But how effective are these ads really? And, should you care to, can you get them to stop? We have gathered a list of common perceptions—or misperceptions—about the industry and asked a pair of experts to tease them apart: Which are true and which are false?

There’s simply a lot of randomness in what you do. Suppose you see an ad today for a new product you’ve never heard of, it sounds like a great product, and then maybe you check it out online. But just before you consider buying it, life intervenes: your baby starts crying, you need to make dinner, you’re out of paper towels, and so on. Even when an ad is a great match for someone, it doesn’t necessarily do anything, because everything else is just more important. Advertising relies on that one-in-a-thousand chance where the ad lands and where nothing else gets in the way of a purchase.

Learn from Kellogg’s Brett Gordon, an associate professor of marketing, and Boston University’s Garrett Johnson (formerly a visiting assistant professor at Kellogg) just how much your perceptions of this quickly changing industry match reality.

When I go online, websites track a lot of information about my movements and actions.

Garrett Johnson: If you’re going to the average news website, you’re tracked by something like 50 to 100 firms.

One thing I recommend people do is use the Disconnect browser extension (if you use Chrome) or the Lightbeam extension (if you use Firefox). These will actually show you all the different companies that are tracking you when you visit a website. As you press the “unblock” button, you get to see this explosion of trackers that learn of your visit.

Digital advertising is so sophisticated that marketers

Brett Gordon: Most people don’t know what they’re going to do tomorrow! So it’s very hard for marketers to make such accurate predictions.

Johnson: I have work looking at the effectiveness of retail advertising for an apparel retailer. We have two years of sales data from that retailer, we have detailed data about people’s ad exposure on the online platform, we know those people’s demographics—and we are only able to predict 10% of the retailer’s sales over the course of two weeks.

Most people never click on ads—so they must not really do anything.

Johnson: About a dollar for a thousand ads, or 0.1 cents per ad, is a reasonable price for banner ads. So you shouldn’t expect that ads are going to cause earth-shattering changes

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in behavior. But, I can tell you from my work examining 432 display ad experiments at Google that the weight of evidence is that overall ads work.

Plus, clicking on the ad isn’t necessary to actually be affected by the ad.

Gordon: That’s right. In one advertising campaign that we observed during our work with Facebook, around 75% of all conversions—instances where people saw the ad and made a purchase within about 30 days—never clicked on the ad.

To put online ads into perspective, a product’s price is a much bigger deal compared to advertising. I like to think of pricing as the hammer of marketing and advertising as the little feather that tickles you into maybe making a purchase or not.

Psychographic ad targeting—where people are targeted based on various psychological attributes— has been proven to be especially effective.

Gordon: This topic recently received a great deal of attention after the scandal surrounding Cambridge Analytica, where the firm was able to obtain a lot of data on Facebook users and link those data to psychographic profiles compiled from personality tests these users had taken.

An important question people should ask is not how well psychographically targeted ads work compared to no targeting, but whether targeting using psychographic information does a better job compared to the existing abilities of advertising platforms to target you.

After all, many advertising platforms have a great deal of information about their users. So, if you already told me that this particular user or cookie visited my site 7 days ago, and that the user is likely male between the ages of 18 to 35, I have a pretty good idea of what kinds of ads to show them.

Does telling me something about their psychographic profile change the kind of ad that I would want to show them? It’s not clear that the psychographic information really adds much.

Johnson: Cambridge Analytica was trying to upsell what they’re doing, so they’re basically creating this notion that they can get inside your brain and know exactly what you’re thinking and target you based on your psychology. But there really is no evidence to suggest that psychographic targeting is more effective than any other form of targeting. In fact, the most prominent study in support of psychographic targeting used an experiment on Facebook to show effectiveness. But as we’ve written in a letter published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, the evidence is not quite as strong as it appears. Even Aleksandr Kogan, the research psychologist who sold the psychographic data to Cambridge Analytica, recently called psychographics a “dead end” for marketers.

Spending on digital advertising is growing quickly and is now as big as spending on TV advertising.

Johnson: The dollars have followed consumers’ eyeballs, and in 2017, digital overtook TV for the first time in the U.S. Platforms like Facebook and Google are just trying to sell me things I don’t need or want.

Johnson: Ad platforms are becoming increasingly sophisticated in matching consumers to advertisers by making inferences about what consumers like. So it’s actually in their interest to serve you the most related ads.

And you can see that progression: the early days of the Internet were a bunch of yucky teeth-whitening ads, but now we get ads that are very specific to the life phase that you’re in. So if you’re pregnant, you’re going to be getting ads that are relevant to being pregnant and expecting a child to arrive, and as you’re retiring, you’re going to get ads that are relevant to that and to the stores where you shop.

Customers demand privacy. So if offered the chance, lots of customers would pay to keep their data completely private on platforms like Facebook.

Gordon: I’m sure that some people would be willing to pay to keep their data totally private, but my understanding is that surveys suggest that there are not that many people like that.

Johnson: The reality is that most people are very happy to get Facebook for free, and would not pay for it if it was offered for a price. They may complain about the advertising. But that advertising does, in fact, support a service that they get a lot of value from.

When I go online, I have no control over what data are collected about me or how ads target me.

Johnson: In the United States, people are tracked until they say “no.” If you look at a banner ad and you see a little triangle icon in the corner of the ad, you can click on that “AdChoices” icon to learn about online behavioral advertising and opt out of it if you choose. That’s an extraordinary offering. But, I was the first to collect data on actual opt-out rates, and only 0.2% of ad impressions in the United States are from people who have opted out of tracking.

Now, I think most people are unaware that they can opt out.

But, I think you have to keep in mind that awareness itself is a choice: if people really cared enough about tracking, they could find out.

With the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Europe, I expect publishers will eventually be required to get their users’ explicit opt-in consent for online behavioral advertising. This will spell the end of these tactics as almost no one will say “yes” to being tracked online.

To date, most European websites are resisting this strict opt-in approach because, of course, opting out is not a costless trade-off. If you look at people who opt out of online behavioral advertising, they fetch something like 65% lower prices from advertisers.

FEATURED FACULTY Brett Gordon Associate Professor of Marketing Jessica Love is editor in chief of Kellogg Insight.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS RUINING OUR MINDS - IT ALSO MIGHT SAVE THEM

By Emma Grey Ellis

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29 THE INTERNET, YOU have undoubtedly heard, is bad for your brain. It can be especially damaging for those struggling with mental illness. Trolls are everywhere. Searching for information about your struggles may lead you into dark places. Websites that promote self-harm, suicide, and eating disorders abound, and many have hard-to-spot social media presences that no platform has quite figured out how to moderate: They’re arguably some of the internet’s most toxic filter bubbles. Even if you don’t wander into someone else’s stability-compromising clutches, you may end up compromising yourself; after all, search results last forever.

But telling anybody to stay offline in 2018 is impractical and myopic advice. Besides, the internet solves many of the problems therapists and other researchers have been thumping against for decades. Seeking mental health care in person comes with stigma, but it’s easy to remain anonymous online. Getting to a therapist’s office can be too logistically challenging (think teens without driver’s licenses) or expensive for some. What’s more, the web makes suffering searchable—painful social media posts and searches related to mental health are now indexable data.

Into that amalgam, two approaches to using the internet to save our minds have emerged: using targeted ads make people aware of services that already exist, and starting new social platforms designed to The internet solves encourage peer-to-peer support.

Neither is without risk.

many of the problems therapists and other researchers have been thumping against for decades.

The first round of digital mental health interventions came out of telemedicine. Many of these early efforts focused on connecting veterans suffering from PTSD with therapists online, since many veterans are uncomfortable with the stigma of seeking mental help and also may have mobility issues. But as of this spring, services offered to the average citizen are on the rise too. But almost as soon as these average citizen services arrived, studies found that these apps’ usage numbers were low.

A new round of products focuses on meeting prospective patients where they are—on social media—and drawing them to tools and services that already exist. “There have been excellent results in suicide prevention when researchers have been able to recruit patients right off the internet, just based on what they’re clicking,” says John Naslund, who studies digital mental health at Harvard Medical School.

“There’s a lot of interest in learning from those clicks, getting people a targeted ad, and getting them the help they need that way.”

Last year, Facebook created an algorithm to monitor teenagers’ moods for signs of insecurity and worthlessness (both risk factors for suicidal thoughts) for the purpose of serving them ads for mental health services. Other offerings like Betterhelp, an online counseling service, have zeroed in on influencer marketing as a way to draw in patients. Health care companies have been refining this strategy for about a year—it’s not as natural for an Instagrammer to hawk a pharmaceutical firm as it is, say, sneakers—but Betterhelp managed to get endorsements from over 100 YouTubers, including superstars like Phillip DeFranco and Shane Dawson.

(BetterHelp was even a sponsor for Dawson’s infamous Jake Paul series.)

This approach, though, has been beset by scandal. In an ongoing brouhaha, many of the influencers who promoted BetterHelp have now denounced the service after users accused the company of profiting off mental health problems while providing unprofessional, substandard service. (In a recent Medium post, BetterHelp’s CEO called these claims “false.”) Facebook’s ad targeting system has been widely criticized as invasive and profiteering, and in some cases, therapists have found that being bombarded with reminders that you’re depressed is, well, depressing.

Plus, no matter how successful influencers and ads are at raising awareness, there’s still that waning supply of qualified mental health professionals to sit at the other end of those services. Bolstered by research suggesting that social networks aren’t all bad, other companies are focused on building supportive peer-to-peer networks. East London & City Mental Health Trust psychologist Darren Baker found that some online communities can foster genuinely nurturing environments for those suffering from mental health problems, even when the problem was as serious as suicidal ideation. Naslund’s research found “naturally occurring peer support” in YouTube comments sections, of all places.

Boaz Goan, CEO and founder of Wisdo, built a whole social network around that idea. Wisdo connects users with others who already have been through whatever tough life experience they’re having, whether that’s breast cancer or gender transition. But Goan wanted to know if he was falling into the same isolating trap as, say, Instagram. Using the same methodology as researchers at the University of Pittsburgh who found that social media increases loneliness, Goan conducted a survey of Wisdo’s users, asking them to gauge their feeling of isolation. “Loneliness dropped by 15 percentage points compared with other social media sites,” Boaz says. “It means that what we put in place is helping people find the wisdom and support and human connection that they’re lacking.”

Now, there’s a difference between active mental health support and a less depressing Facebook. There’s anecdotal evidence that this peer-to-peer system is works, but so far it’s just anecdotes. “The challenge has been generalizing,” Naslund says. “No one knows why some of these groups are damaging and toxic and others have been helpful.” But proof of concept for technology for mental health is a slog, because good science about human beings (especially for techies and investors) is frustratingly slow. It’s only in the last few weeks that a study has shown that in-app therapy is beneficial not just in improving patient outcomes, while studies about its disuse and (promising) impact on health care costs were out months ago.

Standard social network problems like monetization and finding a user base will take time and iterative thinking to sort out. Still, these new mental health social sites show no sign of going away. They may help patients and give scientists access to unprecedented data sets. Despite the scandals and ambiguities, they’re too promising to be drowned out in the backlash against techno-optimism, and for once that might be a good thing.

‘Going where the customer is’: Marketers are coming for messaging apps

By Kerry Flynn

Marketers want to put ads everywhere — on boats, in Ubers and even inside fortune cookies. But one place that still remains unfulfilled is messaging.

Ads in messaging exist, and they will only expand, marketers said. Messaging apps such as Facebook’s Messenger, Snapchat and Twitter each have ad formats ingrained within the messaging experience. Tools within messaging such as GIFs from Giphy and stickers from Emogi can be branded.

And as more traditional spaces such as Facebook’s News Feed and Google search get more competitive, marketers are looking for other cheaper but effective options.

“Advertisers have to follow the mantra of going where the customer is. No doubt that monetizing messaging will continue to be a focus area as digital advertising continues to spread its wings and follow platforms where customers are spending their time,” said Jerry Canning, vp of digital sales at National CineMedia.

Twitter offers standard ad units such promoted tweets and promoted trends, but the service also has opened up the service’s direct message feature to marketers. For example, Microsoft’s Zo, an AI chatbot, is available on Twitter. This month, Zo messaged its Twitter followers, “Need help finding the perfect gift? I’ve been working with BuzzFeed to help you find just the right gifts for even the hardest to shop for ppl in your life. Say #hacktheholidays to get started!”

In partnership with BuzzFeed, Zo shared personalized gift guides to people on Twitter DM, Messenger, GroupMe, Skype and Kik. “BuzzFeed is known for their gift guides and shopping content with insights that made them a great partner for the Zo team to explore opportunities to make gift discovery a novel, more personal experience,” said Ying Wang, Microsoft’s director of Zo and AI, in an email.

Facebook offers ads in Messenger and has been growing its chatbot business as well. The company touts that 10 billion messages are sent between people and business every month. This year, Lego created a chatbot called “Ralph the Gift Bot” that provided recommendations to users. According to Facebook, the campaign’s cost per conversion was 31 percent higher with click-to-Messenger ads compared to other conversion-based ads.

Canning, who worked at Facebook from 2014 to 2017 as an industry director of financial services, said that Messenger not only has the advantage of scale — more than 1 billion users — but also the “backbone of Facebook’s tech spine.”

“As Facebook continues to roll out the integration of ads across this platform, marketers will benefit from their willingness to pursue closed-loop attribution within Facebook’s environment,” he said.

This year, Snapchat has been pushing ads in conversations through augmented reality experiences, some of which offer shopping directly through the AR. For example, Domino’s created an AR pizza that where users could tap order a pizza.

Adidas ran a shoppable AR ad where users could “try on” shoes and has previously run other lenses where users could click to purchase. According to Snap, sponsored lenses are played with for 10 to 15 seconds, on average, before being sent to friends on the app. They drive a 19-point lift in ad awareness, a 6-point lift in brand awareness and a 3.4-point lift in action intent, the company has said previously.

Giphy, the GIF maker with its own apps and integrations across several platforms, started making money this year through branded campaigns.

“Messaging has resisted traditional, interrupted advertising for a very obvious reason: It would be super annoying.

Search, though, is intentional behavior. We have the search bar inside every messaging app. The opportunity for us is to surface conversational content and gives users the opportunity to see them, click them and share them,” said Alex Magnin, Giphy’s head of revenue.

So far, Giphy has seen interest from two main advertising groups. One is brands that have visually recognizable products such as those in consumer packaged goods or quick service restaurants. The other is advertisers who are interested in marketing around “culturally relevant moments,” Magnin said.

“We’re having conversations with every major advertising category and really when we think about this space, it truly is enormous. People spend more time on messaging apps than they do on the mobile web, and mobile web is $10 billion in U.S. ad spend,” Magnin said.

Looking ahead to 2019, Canning said he expected Facebook to continue leading the way with chatbots and ads in Messenger, along with WhatsApp. He also noted that he and other marketers pay close attention to WeChat in China and Line in Japan.

“Marketers will continue to keep an eye on those two platforms to understand where messaging is headed in the U.S.” he said.

The ‘safest’ ads are at greatest risk of going unnoticed!

Play Unsafe: Get Attention!

Marketers are prone to this flaw.

There’s a tendency to overestimate people’s interest in our brands.

Perhaps because we’re so interested in the minutiae of our brands, we assume others share that enthusiasm.

Psychologists call this the ‘false consensus effect’, the finding that we overestimate the prevalence of our own behaviours and views.

This overestimation of the level of interest manifests itself in ads being created that take being noticed for granted.

– or advertising copy that fixates on the second-step problem of perfecting its message rather than the first-step problem of grabbing people’s attention.

Get your advertising noticed. Attract attention. Talk to us to see how we can get your brand the attention it seeks and desires!

Call +9714 3867728 or email nikhil@groupisd.com

groupisd.com/story

What’s next for 2019?

Influencer marketing trends WILL PROFESSIONAL INFLUENCERS BECOME ALL THE RAGE IN 2019 – OR WILL THEY DISAPPEAR AS THE NEXT NEW INFLUENTIAL TECHNOLOGY ARRIVES?

By Eileen Brown

With the influx of Instagram Stories and IGTV, brands are investing heavily into influencer content and relationships.

Instagram’s overall users have grown significantly over the last four years with no plans of stopping.

It examined Instagram posts published between January 2013 to July 2018 which were labelled as paid partnerships by the use of 68 sponsoring hashtags such as #ad, #commercial, #spon across 15 different languages.

As social media strategy becomes more important, CIOs and IT have a new lever to drive conversation with peers in marketing and other departments across the company.

It discovered that 39 percent of Instagram accounts with over 15K followers are influencers, with the rest being brands or companies. Almost one third of Instagram channels are micro-influencer, with fewer than 100K followers.

On YouTube in 2018, the number of channels earning six figures per year grew by more than 40 percent year on year.

Influencers certainly seem to have a place in brand awareness campaigns. So what could happen in 2019?

Cologne, Germany-based Influencer DB looked at the state of the influencer marketing industry with predictions for 2019 and beyond.

Mega-influencers with over 5 million followers account make up less than one percent of influencers. These microinfluencers – who have between 15,000 and 100,000 followers - account for the majority of sponsored Instagram posts.

Technology is not favoured on Instagram, accounting for just one percent of posts. A quarter of all sponsored posts cover

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fashion, followed by food (12 percent) and entertainment (11 percent).

Whats next for 2019 Influencer marketing trends zdnet Influencers can earn big bucks on YouTube. Aurora, IL-based packaging distributor Shorr Packaging conducted an analysis of more than 1,500 YouTube user channels. It wanted to learn more about the growing impact of YouTube influencer marketing.

There is a clear growth in micro-influencers and though influencer marketing appears as though it is here to stay, it will shift towards a more personalised niche influencer program Co-founder and CEO at influencer marketing platform Traackr, Pierre-Loïc Assayag outlined his three predictions on influencer marketing in 2019

Over a thousand of these types of videos are produced each week, and top influencers count their total views in billions.

Brands will focus on alignment and brand fit over followers.

Brands will will reassess the way they pay their influencers.

No longer focusing on reach, brands will focus on the quality of engagement, identity and voice of the influencer, audience relevance and how the audience is interacting with the content relevance.

A haul video is where an influencer discusses a number of products they have purchased, on shopping spree, known as a “haul”. An unbox is where a person opens a package with a product in it, then reviews or uses the product.

Brands will move away from transactional to relational influencer marketing. Influencer marketing used to be a buy – however this method often appeared inauthentic to their audience, resulting in a lower ROI than expected.

Top Haul categories are clothing at 59 percent, general discount at 11 percent and beauty and makeup at 9 percent.

In 2019, brands will shift from transactional strategies to invest in cultivating organic relationships in-house with influencers and longer term partnerships with paid influencers.

In October 2018, it analyzed the 3,000 most recently uploaded “haul” and “unbox” videos on YouTube.

Top unboxing categories are: toys at 29 percent, phones and accessories at 16 percent, computers tablets and accessories at 10 percent, and gaming consoles and accessories at 7 percent.

The estimated annual earnings for the average haul-er is less than $6,000 per year and the typical unbox-er earns no money at all.

So what can we expect in 2019?

Professional influencers will become more valuable in 2019 – especially influencers who influence others in the same industry.

Micro influencers, who work at a local state, or country level will be in more demand as brands move further into experiential marketing to give the customer a personalised experience around events and cross channel programs

Brand marketers will focus on creating an advanced approach for measuring success. Brand marketers in 2019 will quantify the impact influencer programs actually have on marketing objectives. This advanced approach will deliver deeper insights into how to optimize influencer investments for stronger alignment with business goals.

Whatever the next new technology happens to be, brands had better make sure they have a good influencers marketing plan - and focus on nano influencers as well as influencers with a large reach.

Eileen Brown is a social business consultant who has been working with collaborative technologies for 20 years. Eileen creates the social business, energises communities and ignites social commerce and social CRM. She develops social business strategy, customer reach and online branding.

10 Marketing Trends to Watch in 2019 MARKETING IS BEING SHAPED BY EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, METHODS AND PATTERNS.

By Deep Patel

It’s difficult to predict which methods will connect with consumers most effectively in the ever-changing landscape of marketing. Just when marketers believe they understand their audience, a new technology, new behavior or even an entirely new audience alters everything.

That said, it’s practical to reflect on the past year’s patterns and pay attention to growing trends that will influence next year’s success. Here are 10 marketing trends you would be wise to keep your eye on going into 2019.

1. The marketing funnel is shifting.

The current marketing funnel accepts anyone, assessing them for profitability and rejecting them if they’re deemed unfit. As John Hall writes in Forbes: “Too many companies see customers as gatekeepers to wallets; meanwhile, customers feel ignored at best -- and insulted at worst -when the journey ends.” Rather than opening up a marketing funnel that swallows whoever it can, businesses are starting to efficiently leverage content to target niche audiences.

Reaching out to people who are more likely to be interested in your brand is not only more cost-efficient; it’s also more sustainable and less time-consuming. Consumers do not

want businesses to gloss over them; they seek legitimate trust and genuine relationships.

2. Content is everything.

In the current climate, content is everything. You already know that you need to entice your audience: inspire them, provoke their thoughts, excite them or appeal to their emotions.

The goal is not to simply put content in front of people and hope they respond to it, but rather to encourage them to share and engage with it. Content -- whether it’s an article on an outlet or a video on social media -- opens the door for two-way communication, which is crucial for building trust and letting customers know that you appreciate their business.

3. Chatbots aren’t going anywhere.

Customer service is essential, but not everyone feels comfortable talking to a real person on the phone or has the time to do it over email. That’s what makes chatbots so convenient. These are little AI helpers integrated into websites that can answer questions and fulfill requests quickly -- and many can accomplish this without sacrificing personality.

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Grand View Research reports that the worldwide chatbot market will reach $1.25 billion by 2025, growing at an annual rate of 24.3 percent. Forty-five percent of end users actually prefer turning to chatbots for customer service, so if you have one, you can win the allegiance of people who enjoy interacting with these little programs.

4. AI continues to grow.

On a related note, artificial intelligence is growing in prominence. It makes data analysis more efficient, can target potential leads rapidly and can perform tasks that humans struggle with. Sometimes it takes the form of advanced machine learning, but even Netflix’s recommendation system that suggests new TV shows to watch is technically AI. AI can also monitor consumers’ online patterns and help you understand their behavior in real time, though there are legitimate concerns about whether this is ethical or not. Even if you decide not to take advantage of AI in this way, however, it’s smart to pay attention to how consumers react to it and whether your competitors use it.

5. People are cautious about security.

Every company should ensure that its security is thorough.

Even if customers do not notice it, they deserve the utmost respect when it comes to their privacy, data and financial details. Not every company promises this, though -- and customers are starting to notice. With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) taking effect in Europe this year, consumers are beginning to pay more attention to how businesses handle their information.

Talk about your security with customers. What makes it better than others? In an economy where people are rightfully cautious about hacks, leaks and theft, they will favor establishments that can promise them the safest business experience.

6. Voice search is getting louder.

According to Search Engine Land, voice-based commerce sales in the United States reached $1.8 billion in 2017 and are projected to reach $40 billion by 2022. Yep, that’s 40 billion! This trend means 2019 is the year to get ahead of the game.

Voice searching is an ingenious bit of technology. After all, who doesn’t like being able to simply say out loud to the nearest smart speaker, “Place an order for school supplies”?

Not only does voice searching make it easier to find information online without pulling out a device; people love it because it reduces their screen time. Next year, make sure you’re optimized for voice searches.

7. Vertical video is on the rise.

You already know that video is imperative. It used to be one aspect of your marketing strategy, but now you need an entire strategy just for your videos! People watch countless hours of video every day, and YouTube is the largest search engine after its sibling Google. Whether it’s on Facebook, Instagram or some other platform, video is not going anywhere.

However, people do not always like turning their mobile devices to the side. Instagram -- one of the most popular social media platforms at the moment -- launched IGTV in June for the express purpose of watching videos in vertical mode.

IGTV allows longer content, so you could publish animated videos, demos, interviews, case studies, 360-degree virtual reality, live streams and more. Your social media strategy needs to keep vertical-form IGTV videos in mind.

8. It’s time to focus on Gen Z. Gen Z is getting older, which means they are beginning to enter the workforce and possess buying power. You might recall how marketers scrambled to understand millennials (there didn’t seem to be an industry they didn’t kill -- but hey, they’re just broke and much harder to lie to), so now is the time to pay attention to Gen Z. It is impossible to make monolithic statements about members of the second-youngest generation, but you should remember a few things: they seek authenticity, and they prefer socially responsible businesses. They’re growing up in a scary world and a struggling economy, so they’re more likely to turn to companies that make the world a better place.

9. Visual searches are taking off.

Besides voice searches, can you name another kind of search method on the rise? Visual. Google has long enabled reverse-image searches, but new camera technology makes it possible for people to take a picture of something in the real world and find information about it.

Pinterest launched its Lens feature back in February, and the social media platform reports that its users conducted over 600 million combined monthly searches with it. To leverage the power of image searching, don’t neglect Pinterest in your marketing efforts, and optimize your site (and social) images for SEO.

10. Influencers have different identities.

Influencer marketing is also a classic social media strategy, but who influencers are is beginning to change. Companies previously relied on celebrities to convince people that products are worth buying, but consumers are now leaning toward their peers.

The frozen-food retailer Iceland, for instance, recently switched from celebrity marketing to partnering with “real” people (micro-influencers) because their customers -- mothers, in this case -- trusted other mothers above brands and so-called industry experts. Next year, adjust your influencer marketing strategy according to who your audience is most likely to respond to.

Marketing is becoming increasingly complex, so it’s practical for marketers to keep their eyes on emerging technologies, methods and patterns.

Deep Patel, VIP CONTRIBUTOR, Author of A Paperboy’s Fable: The 11 Principles of Success

Claus and brand effect!

THE BRAND STORYTELLING GENIUS OF THE COCA-COLA SANTA

By Peter Minnium

Since 1995, Santa trades in his sleigh once a year for a Coca-Cola truck and tours the UK, sharing the soft drinks that have become closely associated with the winter holidays.

This year, facing pressure from health advocates, Coca-Cola plans to scale back the campaign.

Controversy aside, the Christmas trucks are a prime example of brand purpose and messaging aligning. The brand, which encourages consumers to “share happiness,” enacts this same principle on tour – embodied by the festive Santa that adorns the modern sleighs.

Coca-Cola and Santa Claus have developed an effective “partnership” in a series of holiday ads that stretch through the better part of a century. The two are so close in the popular consciousness that many (falsely) attribute Santa’s modern appearance to the brand.

In truth, the Santa that we know and love didn’t spring fullyformed from a hat (or a Coke ad). Brought to the U.S. as St. Nicholas—a benefactor to the poor and sick — Santa Claus gradually took shape in our collective imagination through a decentralized evolution.

Building a snowy story world Over the years, Santa has been depicted as a gaunt giftgiver armed with a birch rod—for disobedient children, a supporter of the Union during the Civil War, and as a George Washington-esque figure riding a broomstick. Fortunately, none of those stuck.

Writers like Washington Irving and Clement Moore helped fill in Santa’s backstory, while artists like Thomas Nast popularized the Christmas hero’s iconic red coat and white beard. Though each iteration was created independently, together they formed the Santa we know today.

By the 1920s—when he first appeared in a Coke ad—the Santa story world was already a robust collection of poems, songs, and images. Coca-Cola built their holiday advertising campaigns on this edifice, linking themselves to a story that already had a place in our hearts.

While most brands won’t be lucky enough to tap into a ready-made story world that is so closely aligned with their brand purpose, Coca-Cola Santa can serve as a model for how such worlds are effectively built on — and where their greatest strengths lay.

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More than milk and cookies One of the most powerful aspects of the Santa story is its disruptive potential. While fully-formed stories do invite participation, when we are presented with an incomplete narrative we are more compelled to try and fill in the blanks — a phenomenon that drives empathic engagement.

We store Santa’s North Pole workshop, complete with Mrs. Claus, elves, and reindeer, snugly in our memories. The story is enriched by our personal experiences with the characters — and holidays past. Santa is thus never just a jolly elf; he calls us back to his world in its entirety.

Each time we see a Santa ad, we fit it into our own Santa — and Coca-Cola — story. In broad strokes, we know how the narrative begins and ends, but the colorful details (think a hungry Santa raiding the fridge) renew the story for us and draw us in again year after year.

Even Santa loves a bit of drama Kris Kringle sits at the center of a story world that is well suited to brand messaging. The emphasis on sharing joy is not only a fortuitous partner to Coca-Cola’s brand purpose; it is at the heart of a compelling narrative structure that engages and informs.

The most effective stories are simple, clear, and dynamic; the contrast between beginning and end create a dramatic

tension that encourages the reader to move from one to the other, while the middle offers a clear roadmap from a suboptimal present to a brighter future.

Christmas songs and storybooks teach children that if they behave well — if they share in the holiday spirit — they will be rewarded. As adults, we no longer think of this as a quidpro-quo, but the essential message (really the Golden Rule) still resonates with us.

Transportation to a winter wonderland As kids, we all participated in the Santa story as recipients (if we were good); as adults, we keep the story alive by assuming the role of gift-givers. Just as we enact the story in our own lives, we can see ourselves in the Santa that adorns CocaCola cans and ads every Winter.

Research has shown that this narrative immersion, which is triggered by dramatic tension, is driven by a measurable increase in the production of oxytocin, the neurotransmitter responsible for building empathic bonds and encouraging prosocial behavior.

The same neurological infrastructure that allows us to bond with our favorite characters in movies supports our struggle to enact the Santa story in our own lives. Oxytocin brings us into the story world and helps impress the values of kindness and generosity the tale imparts.

isn’t ubiquitous but, even a century ago, he wasn’t.

The Santa story features a clear and compelling narrative arc; a plot that leverages the neurological infrastructure of empathy. Developed over decades with the input of countless writers, artists, and oral storytellers, the distinct pieces came together into the story we know.

Coca-Cola made excellent use of the similarity between their brand purpose and Santa’s and developed a close association between the festive figure and their products. In doing so, they were able to reflect some of the holiday cheer he elicits onto their messaging.

Not just nostalgia, it’s science Every year we add to our personal Santa story, and Coke’s ubiquitous ads ensure that the brand plays at least a small role. These stories are cumulative and, adages aside, familiarity breeds fondness — the older we get, the more these stories mean to us.

Both the Santa story and CocaCola’s ads apply behavioral and psychological principles that have been used for millennia to make stories stick. Modern research has begun to define, if not understand, these tools, which can be used to craft impactful content of all kinds.

Known as the mere exposure effect, even the grinchiest among us become fonder of the Santa story — and ads — over time; the same effect is what lodges that annoying pop song in our head and, after a few dozen listens, convinces us that we like it.

Though it seems obvious, it is important to note that at the heart of Coca-Cola’s strategy is their association with the story of Santa Claus. This goes beyond the symbolic linkage of purpose, or the fond memories it may call back: the relationship makes us feel better about Coke.

Known as the halo effect, the more that we associate Coca Cola with Santa (and we do), the more that our feelings about Santa (and the holidays) will inform our perception of the brand — a link Coca Cola encourages in their holiday ads (Taste the Feeling).

The cynics among us may decry the appropriation of a heartwarming symbol for the sale of soft drinks, but smart marketers will see in the Coca-Cola Santa the well-executed transformation of a complex but powerful story world into a refreshingly clear branded narrative.

The Santa story sticks; yours should too It is no surprise that the Santa story leverages so many narrative and behavioral principles. After all, it has become one of the most popular narratives among children and adults alike. It is difficult to imagine a world in which Santa

Peter Minnium is President of Ipsos Connect, where he leads the US team in helping companies measure and amplify how media, brands, and consumers connect through compelling content and great communications.

Why You Should Optimize Your Email Campaigns With Artificial Intelligence HAVE YOU HEARD OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?

By Berta Melder

Today, it’s a favorite topic among email marketers.

targeting, and statistics, as well as scheduling, much simpler.

Experts from different areas get excited about the possible applications of AI. On the other hand, most marketers don’t really understand how to use AI solutions in practice.

AI is capable of predicting the content and special offers that will bring you the best conversions, making your audience more engaged. AI tools can easily determine the right frequency and the best time of day so that your emails can reach out to the right audience at the right moment.

AI has its specifics, it requires proper investment and resources. At the same time, some simple solutions are nevertheless effective and capable of improving your marketing campaigns dramatically.

[The effectiveness of different means of marketing]

How AI is changing email marketing Even though artificial intelligence is a relatively new technology, its influence on email marketing is already apparent. AI tools are all about optimization and making cumbersome tasks simpler. For example, all marketers know that the success of emails to a large extent depends on the time they are sent. People from one part of the world are less likely to open emails optimized for another time zone. AI solves this problem, along with many others.

[How companies use AI solutions]

According to eMarketer statistics, more than 80% of retailers think that email is the most effective way to get new customers and to keep existing ones. More than 90% of Americans check their emails every day, and the purchase rates of such consumers are 17% higher than in the case of social media promotions.

However, the success of email campaigns directly depends on the chosen strategy. You have to make sure that you target the right audience. In addition, it’s important to know that they actually interact with your emails, responding by buying your products or services. Fortunately, machine learning and AI makes such overwhelming tasks as email verification,

AI is capable of personalizing subject lines which are 95% more effective than those written by humans. Many experts

also notice that cognitive content written by machines gets constantly improved, and making it more effective than human-written content is just a question of time.

Machine learning allows marketers to forget about large segments, as machines can learn when any particular recipient is most active. It’s impossible to do manually, but for AI, it’s a simple task.

actively interact with your emails and bring you profits.

Everyone has specific preferences and habits, and there’s no marketer who has enough time to record and analyze this sort of data. Fortunately, AI can make it.

[Human vs AI personalization ]

Timing is not the only advantage of AI tools. Adobe has already integrated its AI called Sensei into Adobe Campaigns.

Sensei writes personalized subject lines and even improves other content, such as images. This algorithm can calculate how customers react to a certain image and find alternatives based on a particular customer’s preferences.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are also great solutions for A/B testing. Even though it’s nothing new in the world of marketing, A/B testing has never been as effective as now, when it can be optimized by using machine learning and AI solutions. Marketers can make predictions and detect trends faster than ever, taking into account minor details that otherwise would remain unnoticed.

The best AI tools to optimize your email campaigns Of course, the main advantage of AI solutions for email campaigns is an opportunity to significantly improve customization. Creating custom email campaigns manually would be unbelievably expensive and time-consuming.

Fortunately, now business owners don’t have to choose between the effectiveness of their campaigns and budget.

Tool #1. Phrasee Phrasee is a great example of a tool that can increase clicks and conversions by just choosing the best subject lines for your emails. Smart algorithms of this tool analyze your content, predict the responses of a contact, and choose the appropriate writing style to reflect the specifics of your business. The best thing about Phrasee is what makes all the AI solutions so good – the more you use it, the better it understands your business, constantly learning something new.

AI-based tools can also make your email campaigns more engaging, selecting better images and optimizing text content. It’s important to understand that the actions of your recipients depend on whether or not they are engaged. Even though the substantial improvement of the content may seem to be a time-consuming task, AI is able to deal with it much faster and more effectively than people.

Tool #2. Boomtrain Boomtrain is an AI solution designed for different types of content. It personalizes your content for each user, increasing engagement and clicks. This tool can increase your sales by choosing the most relevant content that fits the preferences of your audience. It can also analyze user behavior, taking into account activity on your website, in mobile apps, or emails, building a profile for each customer and increasing engagement.

As we’ve already mentioned above, timing is very important if you want your emails to actually work. If all your subscribers receive emails at the same time, only a few of them will

Tool #3. Seventh Sense Seventh Sense is a tool that will be appreciated by all Marketo and HubSpot users. Seventh Sense is tracking your customers’ activity and calculates the perfect delivery time for every email. It can also personalize the number of emails and their frequency so that your recipients won’t be annoyed by your emails and won’t mark them as spam.

According to statistics, more than 50% of consumers switch brands that don’t customize their communications.

Multivariate testing and A/B testing can help you adjust your campaigns for different segments, but AI tools turn out to be more effective than any traditional approach.

Tool #4. Optimail Optimail is a tool that automatically adjusts the content and timing of your emails. It shows better results than traditional A/B testing. It leads your subscribers towards your business goals, analyzing their online activity. It also monitors shares on social media and purchases.

Tool #5. Siftrock Siftrock is a very useful tool which can be integrated with your automation platform and help you manage the replies to your emails. Any new replies are recorded and new profiles are immediately transferred to your database. Using this tool, you can also know when someone leaves your company.

Moreover, this tool will immediately notify a responsible member of your team to quickly take action.

Wrapping up Email marketing has always been time-consuming and complicated. It required manual adjustment and analysis of large amounts of data. Such technologies as artificial intelligence and machine learning make all the overwhelming marketing tasks simpler, showing results that would be impossible to achieve without AI. Simply put, artificial intelligence makes you a better marketer, expanding your capabilities and making you able to take into account all the details about your subscribers’ behavior and preferences.

It’s more than a long tale!

WHY IT’S HARD TO ESCAPE AMAZON’S LONG REACH

By Paris Martineau And Louise Matsakis

IN 1994, SOON after Jeff Bezos incorporated what would become Amazon, the entrepreneur briefly contemplated changing the company’s name. The nascent firm had been dubbed “Cadabra,” but Bezos wanted a less playful, more accurate alternative: “Relentless.” (Relentless.com redirects to Amazon.com to this day.) Twenty-four years later, perhaps no adjective better describes Bezos’ empire than the name he once wanted to give it.

The company is known as the “everything store,” but in its dogged pursuit of growth, Amazon has come to dominate more than just ecommerce. It’s now the largest provider of cloud computing services and a maker of home security systems. Amazon is a fashion designer, advertising business, television and movie producer, book publisher, and the owner of a sprawling platform for crowdsourced microlabor tasks. The company now occupies roughly as much space worldwide as 38 Pentagons. It has grown so large that Amazon’s many subsidiaries are difficult to track—so we catalogued them all for you. This is our exhaustive map of the Kingdom of Amazon.

You might be wondering, why Amazon? After all, other tech firms, including Google and Facebook, have also expanded outside their core businesses in recent years. But few other

companies can claim leadership in sectors as disparate as videogame streaming, online fabric sales, and facial recognition. Amazon also employs far more people than its competitors. Roughly 613,000 people work at Amazon, more than twice as many as work at Alphabet (94,000), Facebook (33,000), and Microsoft (135,000) combined. Most of those workers labor in one of Amazon’s more than 100 North American logistics centers, or at one of more than 450 Whole Foods stores.

Amazon employees are paid far less than other tech workers. In its annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in February, Amazon reported its median worker earned $28,446 in 2017 (it says that number jumps to $34,123 for full-time US workers). Facebook’s median salary in 2017, by contrast, was more than $240,000.

A bit of context: It helps to know how Amazon makes money.

While its retail business is the most visible to consumers, the cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, is the cash cow. AWS has significantly higher profit margins than other parts of the company. In the third quarter, Amazon generated $3.7 billion in operating income (before taxes). More than half of the total, $2.1 billon, came from AWS, on just 12 percent of Amazon’s total revenue. Amazon can use its cloud

cash to subsidize the goods it ships to customers, helping to undercut retail competitors who don’t have similar adjunct revenue streams.

Books Amazon began as an online bookseller in 1994, and although it quickly expanded into other ventures, it still owns and operates multiple publishers and online bookselling subsidiaries. Nowadays, most of these fall under the umbrella of Amazon Publishing, which is both a publisher and the owner of imprints for specific genres, languages and locales.

Amazon imprint Thomas & Mercer publishes mysteries, thrillers, and true crime novels; Little A handles literary fiction and nonfiction; AmazonCrossing is responsible for translated texts; 47North does science fiction and fantasy; Skyscape is for teen and young adult books; there’s Two Lions for children’s books; Jet City Comics for, well, comics; Montlake Romance handles—you guessed it—romance; Waterfall Press publishes Christian fiction; Grand Harbor Press is responsible for a category Amazon describes only as “inspirational;” Lake Union Publishing handles “book club fiction;” Amazon Original Stories publishes short stories and nonfiction 1; AmazonEncore is for “rediscovered works;” and TOPPLE Books spotlights works selected by Jill Soloway. Amazon also has acquired Avalon Books, The Book Depository, BookFinder, Westland Books, and AbeBooks.

In 2005, Amazon acquired BookSurge, an on-demand selfpublishing service, and CustomFlix, an on-demand video publishing service, which was later renamed CreateSpace.

Two years later it bought independent audiobook producer, Brilliance Audio, and launched its own e-book publisher, Kindle Direct Publishing, concurrently with the first Amazon Kindle e-reader. Soon after, the company paid $300 million to acquire audiobook seller Audible. It also owns ACX, an audiobook publishing company.

In 2009, Amazon merged BookSurge and CreateSpace to provide more on-demand options for publishers; the merged company did business under the name CreateSpace, but was officially named On-Demand Publishing. Four years later, Amazon purchased the book-review site Goodreads, which it later merged with Shelfari, a different book cataloging social network the company purchased in 2008. In 2014, Amazon acquired digital comics distribution platform ComiXology. The following year, it launched Amazon Rapids, a subscriptionbased app that presents short children’s stories in the form of fake text messages. In 2018, CreateSpace was merged with Kindle Direct Publishing, which now handles all e-book and paperback publishing services, while all media services were transferred to another new company, called Amazon Media on Demand, which is responsible for manufacturing and shipping disc content. Amazon also operates a digital Kindle Store, where customers can purchase ebooks and other content for the Kindle, and more than a dozen physical Amazon Books stores.

Media In 1998, four years after its founding, Amazon bought IMDb (Internet Movie Database) and expanded into music, offering users more than 125,000 titles at launch on CDs and DVDs.

The following year, Amazon acquired Alexa Internet, a webtraffic-analysis company not to be confused with the other, more popular Alexa that came later. It wasn’t until 2007 that Amazon launched its streaming service, which was originally called Amazon MP3 and later changed to Amazon Music. In 2006, the company launched Amazon Unbox, a service for purchasing and downloading videos, which was later changed to Amazon Video on Demand, then Amazon Instant Video, and finally Prime Video (which is also, confusingly known as Amazon Video). Prime Video showcases content by Amazon Studios, which began in 2010 as a script development entity but now produces and distributes television series and films.

(Last year Amazon bought the TV rights to make a Lord of the Rings spinoff for an estimated $250 million.) Through IMDb, Amazon purchased Withoutabox, which streamlined the submission and selection process for film festivals (and which Amazon is in the process of closing), as well as Box Office Mojo, which algorithmically tracks box office revenue, in 2008.

In early 2014, Amazon acquired American videogame developer Double Helix Games and renamed it Amazon Game Studios. Shortly after, Amazon bought popular livestreaming platform Twitch for $970 million, and Curse, a gaming information and communication platform with a robust community of users. Shortly after the acquisition, all Curse accounts were transferred to Twitch, boosting the platform’s user base. In 2015, Amazon launched Amazon Tickets, which sold tickets to concerts and other live events in the UK (it shuttered the service in March 2018).

Amazon also owns sites that provide educational resources, including Amazon Inspire and TenMarks.com (Amazon is winding down the latter). It also has Whispercast, a service designed to help educators share audiobooks.

Lastly, for some reason, Amazon also owns DPReview, a digital camera website.

Retail Over 6 million independent merchants pay to sell goods through Amazon’s ecommerce marketplace and many also shell out additional fees for services like shipping and warehousing. Amazon also sells its own products through dozens of house brands, including Mountain Falls (primarily personal care products), Rivet (furniture), and Daily Ritual (women’s clothing). Amazon Basics offers Amazon-brand alternatives to popular marketplace products.

Merchants also may pay to place ads on Amazon through Amazon Advertising; the company is now the third-largest digital-advertising platform, behind Google and Facebook, with an estimated 4.2 percent market share. The company also has Amazon Vine, an invite-only program for trusted reviewers, who are provided new products for free in exchange for sharing their opinion.

Need some cash to start your Amazon selling business?

Amazon Lending, another invitation-only program launched in 2011, has doled out billions in loans to businesses that may have difficulty obtaining credit elsewhere.

Nestled within Amazon.com are businesses such as $119 peryear Amazon Prime, which began in 2005 as a subscription

service offering free two-day shipping—but quickly ballooned into something much larger. In addition to Prime Video and Prime Music, Amazon launched a photo-storage service called Amazon Photos in 2014, giving users access to Amazon Drive a cloud-based file-storage service. Other Prime products include: Prime Reading, a rotating ebook loan service unrelated to Amazon’s other Kindle offerings; Prime Pantry, which ships non-perishable grocery items for an additional fee; Amazon Fresh, a grocery delivery and pickup service; Prime Now, a one-to-two hour direct delivery service for Prime members in certain cities; and Amazon Restaurants, which offers food delivery, among others. While Prime Now offers one-hour delivery for an additional fee, most of these services are included with a Prime membership.

There’s also Amazon Warehouse, for deals on used products, Amazon Renewed, for refurbished products with a warranty, and Amazon Second Chance, also for second-hand goods.

Lastly, there’s Subscribe with Amazon, which lets customers sign up for subscription services like monthly boxes of snacks.

Need someone to paint a wall or clean your carpet? There’s Amazon Home Services, a marketplace for hiring homerepair and cleaning professionals.

To hire and manage the contract workers making deliveries, Amazon created Amazon Flex; you can also start your own logistics firm through Amazon via Amazon Logistics. The company has its own payment processor, Amazon Pay, which was launched in 2007. Earlier this year, Amazon acquired the popular Indian payment platform Tapzo for $40 million, and then immediately said it would shutter it and shift users to Amazon Pay. Aside from Amazon.com, the company also owns several other ecommerce websites, including Zappos (shoes) Shopbop (high-end womens clothing), East Dane (men’s clothing), 6pm (discount clothing) and Fabric. com (you guessed it: fabric). Also in 2010, Amazon purchased Woot!, a site for daily ecommerce deals. Last year, Amazon bought Dubai-based ecommerce platform Souq.com for $580 million; Souq then bought Wing.ae, a startup that builds nextday delivery networks for ecommerce sites. In addition, Amazon also owned Junglee, an Indian ecommerce site.

In one of its highest-profile acquisitions, Amazon last year purchased Whole Foods, the highend grocery store chain with hundreds of locations. Earlier in 2018, it also bought a 49 percent stake in More, one of India’s largest grocery chains.

Amazon simultaneously operates its own chain of partially automated grocery stores, known as Amazon Go, which use ceilings’ full of cameras to offer customers a checkout-free experience.

It also operates three 4 Star Stores, where customers can purchase products rated 4-stars and above on Amazon Marketplace, and a fleet of Treasure Trucks scattered around the country, doling out everything from steak to Philips Hue

lights in a bizarre spin on the traditional food truck model.

Aside from traditional ecommerce, Amazon also owns Amazon Mechanical Turk, a site where organizations can hire individuals to complete piecemeal tasks, such as labeling data for machine learning algorithms. Started in 2005, Mechanical Turk is favored by academic researchers for collecting survey and experimental data.

Amazon Web Services In 2003, Amazon launched its web hosting business, Amazon Web Services. The unit begun several years earlier as Merchant.com, which helped other retailers such as Target and Borders build their own online shopping sites using Amazon’s e-commerce tools. In 2006, the company launched Amazon S3 a “simple” cloud storage service and hosting provider that as of 2013 stored more than two trillion digital objects, as well as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (better known as EC2), and Amazon Simple Queue Service.

Reddit, Tumblr, Netflix, Pinterest, and Dropbox have all used Amazon S3 as their primary host or storage provider at one point over the past decade. (This article is also powered by Amazon, as WIRED’s website runs on AWS.) AWS offers so many cloud computing products and services that it would be cumbersome to name them all. In 2011, Amazon introduced AWS GovCloud, aimed at government agencies. Four years later, it launched AWS IoT, a platform for connecting and managing the plethora of connected devices known as the Internet of Things. Shortly after, the company won a $600 million contract to build AWS Secret Region, a cloud storage service for the CIA. In 2015, Amazon purchased Shoefitr, a startup, that uses 3-D technology to help customers determine their shoe size

while shopping online, and Safaba Translation Systems, a machine-translation startup. In 2017, the company acquired 3-D body scanning and modeling company Body Labs, and game developer platform GameSparks. Research conducted by these two latter companies was used to flesh out Amazon’s expansion into augmented and virtual reality, which is

primarily covered by Amazon Sumerian, an AWS service. That same year, AWS acquired both the mobile video company Elemental Technologies and Israeli semiconductor maker Annapurna Labs . Around the same time, Amazon bought AIsecurity startup Harvest.ai and Sqrrl, a cybersecurity startup that was spun out of the NSA. AWS also offers controversial facial-recognition software known as Amazon Rekognition, which is used by some law enforcement agencies and has also been pitched to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. The service has drawn criticism for being inaccurate, particularly when used to identify people of color. In a test, the ACLU found that it incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress with people who had been arrested for a crime.

Energy and Transportation

Amazon also expanded Amazon Key delivery to the trunks of users’ cars, for some reason, with a service oh-so-creatively called Amazon Key In-Car.

Healthcare In 2014, Amazon started a secret internal lab dedicated to developing healthcare technology that goes by at least three different names, depending on who you ask: 1492, The Amazon Grand Challenge, and Project X. As of late, the project has reportedly partnered with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle to explore using machine learning to prevent or cure cancer, and is pitching health insurance companies on a new product called Hera, which mines patient medical records to flag incorrect codes and potential misdiagnoses, and help hospitals bill patients.

To power all those data centers, Amazon has contracted with multiple renewable energy companies to create more than a dozen wind and solar energy farms in Indiana, Virginia, Ohio, and North Carolina. In 2017, it finished construction on its largest wind farm yet, the Amazon Wind Farm Texas, an achievement that Bezos celebrated by smashing a bottle of champagne on top of one of the farm’s 300-plus-foot tall wind turbines in an ultra-dramatic video: Amazon also owns a fleet of Prime Air Cargo Planes and is facilitating ocean freight shipments. In addition, Amazon has been working on an army of Prime Air Drones since 2013. The project is still in its early stages, though the company first delivered a package to an English customer via drone in 2016.

Hardware In 2004, Amazon opened Lab126, a computer hardware research and development unit. The Sunnyvale, Californiabased laboratory has created some of Amazon’s most successful products, including the Kindle in 2007 (and its many updated versions), the Kindle Fire Tablet in 2011, the Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick in 2014, the Amazon Echo in 2015, and the smaller Amazon Echo Dot in 2016.

Another Alexa-equipped device, the Echo Look, is a camera contraption that provides fashion advice. Lab126 was also responsible for the Amazon Fire Phone, which was a commercial failure.

In 2012, Amazon acquired robotics firm Kiva Systems, for $775 million, which it later renamed Amazon Robotics. After the acquisition, Amazon ended Kiva’s contracts with other companies like Staples and Crate and Barrel, leaving Amazon warehouses as the sole beneficiary of the technology.

In 2017, Amazon launched Amazon Key, a service that allows Amazon workers to deliver items inside a user’s home by making use of the Amazon Cloud Cam security camera, a compatible smart lock, and the Amazon Key app. Soon after, Amazon acquired Blink Home, a home automation company that makes security cameras and a video doorbell, as well as Ring, best known for its smart doorbell, which includes a video camera, motion sensors, and other remote controls.

Amazon also sells medical supplies to hospitals through a healthcare offshoot of its business-to-business marketplace, Amazon Business.

Amazon has been hiring high-profile doctors, primary care specialists, and healthcare law experts. In the first quarter of 2018, Amazon hired more than 20 people with healthcare experience, including employees poached from CVS Health and UnitedHealth Group. In January, Amazon partnered with JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway to create a new, still nameless company ostensibly designed to improve healthcare and cut costs. In August, CNBC reported that Amazon plans to open primary care clinics at its headquarters in Seattle. In June, Amazon bought online pharmacy PillPack, a startup that ships medication directly to customers, for $1 billion.

Bezos Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns an equally ridiculous array of companies and ventures outside of Amazon. There’s Nash Holdings, which acquired the Washington Post for $250 million in 2013. Bezos also owns Bezos Expeditions, which manages his venture capital investments. The entity is responsible for spaceflight services company Blue Origin, numerous charitable organizations, a project to recover the Apollo F-1 Engine from the depths of the ocean, and the 10,000 Year Clock, under construction inside a mountain in Texas and designed to last for 10,000 years.

Why Books Matter for the Long Run

By Knowledge@Wharton

Book publishing is a business and increasingly a technical one, but at its heart it is an art, writes Peter J. Dougherty in this opinion piece. He is the editor-at-large at Princeton University Press, for which he was the director from 2005 until his retirement in 2017, and currently sits as the Fox Family Pavilion Scholar and distinguished senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Why have Eric Schmidt, Meg Whitman, Reid Hoffman, John Doerr and other leading technologists resorted to the venerable (some would say backward) practice of book-writing to communicate their visions? Why did Mark Zuckerberg introduce a quaint book-of-the-month feature onto the runaway train of Facebook? Why does Bill Gates regularly pen long, thoughtful book reviews in a whirlwind communications culture fueled by texts and tweets?

How have books survived the information tsunami, and what will authors and publishers have to do to leverage the success of books for the long run?

The answer resides in a seemingly incongruous combination of traits: First, in the time-honored authority of influence books hold among readers; and second, in the ways in which disruptive technological change can strengthen rather than weaken that influence.

The Long Goodbye The internet, having upset the culture and economics of books aplenty, has, in a stroke of Schumpeterian “creative destruction,” spawned a new and multi-dimensional market for them. This new market includes ebooks, books in digital library aggregations and indices, audio books, combined audio and digital editions, international editions, translations into growing language markets such as Chinese and Korean, all supported by online excerpts, Book TV, curated merchant sites such as Amazon, podcast services and a lively digital worldwide book discussion culture. The book review in your local newspaper may have disappeared, but it’s been reborn online and lights up like a digital pinball machine when a book gets attention.

Moreover, much as the internet belches oceans of dubious information, the best books now pay a social dividend by constituting a kind of intellectual reserve currency to challenge all that is fake, fraudulent and fractious. For example, in the free-for-all of presidential political commentary, the publication of Bob Woodward’s perennial books predictably punctuates this raucous conversation with facts and informed judgment. Books, trading on an ancient lineage, but thriving on the very technology bibliophiles feared, now buttress a public conversation beset by havoc and uncertainty.

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If understanding the durability of books means recognizing the authority of their influence, charting their future in the ever-shifting information undertow “The internet, having upset means knowing how the culture and economics this influence renews of books aplenty, has, in itself. The first lesson a stroke of Schumpeterian for prospective authors is that books establish ‘creative destruction,’ their influence within spawned a new and multi- their core readerships. dimensional market for While books intended as all things to all them.” people usually end up appealing to none, those that imaginatively pinpoint and engage knowledgeable communities of readers have the chance of achieving success, because it is within these core communities that influence takes root and spreads.

Authors of serious nonfiction and scholarly books interested in seeing their writing succeed need to realize that the goal of connecting to core readers remains supreme, but the means of reaching them change constantly. To the extent that authors get this message and work with their publishers to maximize it, they will promote the vitality of books for the long run.

Doing so requires an appreciation for what changes in the book market, what persists and how these forces interact.

Influence Spells Success Most authors are justly preoccupied with book sales, but sales result from influence almost as if a physical law. Creating influence among core readers is the first step towards healthy sales, as demonstrated throughout history.

John Maynard Keynes knew this in 1936 when, in his nowclassic work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, he captured the idea of influence in the following famous quote: “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

Books, because of the power they possess to exert “intellectual influence,” more so than any other form of serious communication, change the way readers — and even leaders — see the world and set the stage for them to change it.

This is a force that has held sway since the 18th century in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, David Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature and other books, coming up through Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. It formed the foundations of modern thought and social structure. These books reverberate until today. And this powerful current has carried on to the present in large ways and small.

Just in the past generation, think of the way Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy changed leaders’ approach to business planning; or how Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s Nudge shifted the thinking of policymakers in structuring public

programs; or how Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class shaped the direction of cities; or the way Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s Men and Women of the Corporation altered the discussion of power within companies; or how Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century galvanized the discussion of inequality among leading thinkers in America and around the world.

No other form of communication commands the understanding, respect, attention and enduring engagement that books do in guiding the course of political, cultural and economic decisions and practices. Nor does any other form of expression rival books in their capacity to integrate often disparate communities of scholars and leaders, humanists, scientists, professionals in law, business, medicine, education and public policy. Books elevate ideas above the hyperspecialized pockets of inquiry and build bridges across communities of interest. This public discussion is reflected in the review media, where books serve as the platform of debate and opinion from The Wall Street Journal to the New Yorker to the Financial Times to The Guardian and beyond.

For prospective authors, appreciating the power of influence is the first step in understanding success.

Let’s Get Small Authors are naturally given to extravagant descriptions of the market for their books (“anyone who lives in the suburbs will be interested in my book”) when in fact the real market usually is anything but extravagant (“mainly those who study the suburbs”). A dose of market realism is actually helpful for sales because if we succeed at specifying and capturing the “core” market in which a book is likely to become wellknown, its reputation can radiate beyond the core, and it can thereby become more broadly established for years to come.

Also, a realistic understanding of the market enables more productive, substantive conversations between author and publisher. So, it’s important to be realistic about the nature and size of the market, and strategic about “In an era when authors how to reach it.

can, and do, publish their

This trait is wellown books, the demand to exemplified in the market for economics be published by excellent books. Economics has publishers is as strong as experienced a golden ever.” age in book-publishing in the past generation, marked as it is by best-selling titles by the likes of Joseph Stiglitz (Globalization and its Discontents), Paul Krugman (The Conscience of a Liberal), Robert Shiller (Irrational Exuberance), Paul Collier (The Bottom Billion) and others.

What’s ironic is that economics is thought of as anything but popular — a dismal science coded in byzantine jargon.

So how do these otherwise dismal missives become best-sellers?

Because the core community of economist commentators — economics columnists, bloggers, editorialists and publicly engaged economists themselves — draw attention to them.

Economists and economics journalists can and do elevate the visibility of the work of their colleagues by reviewing or discussing their books, as Paul Krugman did a few years ago

when he reviewed Robert Gordon’s book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, in The New York Times Book Review, or as Tyler Cowen did Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms in his blog, Marginal Revolution.

What is true for economics applies as well to books in other fields: Core readerships incubate successful publication and often set the stage for broader exposure.

How this happens changes with the times and the technology.

From the days of newspaper book reviews, through the rise of the blogosphere, through the emergence of social media, the Republic of Letters reinvents itself. Authors and publishers need to focus on this question: How it will change in the coming generation?

An appreciation for what a book editor does provides the crucial clue.

Editors as Idea Engineers The stereotype of a book editor is something just this side of a modern monk, tilted over the manuscript, pencil in hand, glasses perched on the bridge of the nose, eyes pointed downward. In fact, it is a much more outward and active role than most authors realize. The editor is every author’s first tactical connection in engaging the core readership.

Acquisitions editors spend their working lives (and then some) studying the market, talking with all manner of colleagues, book reviewers, writers of all kinds, publicists, designers, booksellers and sales people in order to develop the best possible grasp of how to look for great projects and how to connect them to the core readership. Therein influence — and a book’s success — is born. In addition to engaging new authors and projects, good editors generate book ideas and imagine how to populate the world of ideas with books of powerful effect. But it is in firing their authors’ ideas into the core conversation that editors serve their most productive role.

The late Erwin Glikes, esteemed and successful president of The Free Press, once noted that the editor has the job of selling the book in its first market — its first core readership, if you will — within the publishing house itself, and then organizing and marshaling all the necessary support from colleagues in production, design, marketing, publicity, sales and international rights in building the publication strategy for launching the book towards its core market.

To do this, the editor must work with his or her eyes up, not down, constantly observing the outside world and finding ways to connect the book with core readers. This means collaborating with the author to develop the clearest and most compelling argument, framing it with a strong title and subtitle, punctuating it with great cover design and copy, and imagining how it will play out in all of the book’s prospective markets, especially among reviewers who will provide the book with its launching pad into the core conversation. In the pre-Google past, this meant mainly thinking about the domestic market and imagining how a book would play out in journal and newspaper review sections read by core readers.

While these publications still matter, since the internet

revolution, editors have had the opportunity to simultaneously think much more universally about targeting core readers in all manner of media and all over the world. Even for books with seemingly very small markets — let’s say, a scholarly work about the history of 19th century railroads — the internet provides editors and their publishing colleagues the opportunity to pinpoint core readers — railroad historians — worldwide, through the large and complex network of media venues — online journals, blogs, podcasts, etc. — that reach the core readers and stimulate interest “Economics has experienced among them.

a golden age in bookpublishing in the past generation.”

Today’s book editor thus should be thought of not as a monk, but as a 21st century idea engineer, orchestrating exposure for his or her book through a carefully cultivated network of contacts in the core market, at home and abroad. Done effectively, this kind of publishing surgically delivers the book into the core, incubating interest and opening up the opportunity for the review coverage and discussion that will ultimately result in print and ebook sales, excerpts, translation, library aggregation sales, and if the book really connects, long-term sales in courses.

How engaging the core changes in the era of artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital media and a tighter, more integrated global culture is a thrilling prospect.

What Do Publishers Do? I once watched an author pitch a book to publishers at an academic meeting I attended in Washington years ago.

Accompanied by his spouse, he pushed a supermarket cart filled with copies of his manuscript into the publishers’ exhibit and proceeded to deliver a copy of it to each publisher.

Random selection may work in nature, but it’s hardly an optimal strategy in getting published well. Getting to know book publishers, and choosing the right one for your book, means understanding what publishers do and what distinguishes one from another with respect to influencing the right conversation for the right book.

If a book editor can be usefully thought of as an idea engineer dedicated to delivering an author’s argument into the core conversation, the publisher serves as the aircraft carrier for launching the idea, providing the author with the troops and technology necessary for successfully hitting the mark. What gives successful publishers their staying power in today’s doit-yourself communications culture? Two things: reputation — that is, established standing within the core readership — and expertise — the ability to access it at the highest level.

As with books themselves, the defining values of a good publisher are both unchanging (reputation) and constantly changing (expertise). The key for authors is to find the right fit: a publisher with a strong reputation within the intended community of core readers, but with dynamic approaches and ideas for successfully cultivating the core.

Reputation In an era when authors can, and do, publish their own

books, the demand to be published by excellent publishers is as strong as ever. Why? Because certain publishers, from commercial conglomerates through university presses, enjoy powerful reputations within the constellation of core readerships, and these reputations serve as market signals.

A computer science book published by The MIT Press, or an art book published by Abrams, or a business book published

by Wharton Digital Press or the Harvard Business Press, or a history book published by WW Norton, commands a certain respect among the constellation of reviewers, booksellers, producers, journalists and other influencers who collectively showcase what is important to communities of readers.

Leveraging this status gives authors fantastic advantage in a market marked by copious supply and fierce competition.

But reputation in publishing is earned and needs to be constantly renewed, which results from the effective practice of the craft.

Expertise If successful books combine the authority of influence with the adaptability of technology, heads of publishing houses these days spend more time on the technology side, updating and integrating data systems to ensure access to global markets defined by print, digital and audio formats. As with the local newspaper, the corner bookstore may have shrunk in significance, but it has been replaced by a panoply of new and far-flung outlets, print as well as digital, domestic as well as global.

These systems cover every aspect of the business, from organizing the consideration of new book proposals through the comprehensive management of the publishing process, through marketing and promotion, rights management, financial management, and worldwide inventory and distribution.

Publishing executives have thus begun to look more like technology strategists than the pipe-smoking preppies of their caricature, none more so than Markus Dohle, the CEO who has overseen the recent merger and international integration of Random House and

“Today’s book editor thus should be thought of not as a monk, but as a 21st century idea engineer.”

Penguin, the two largest trade publishers in the world. But for all the talk of global supply chains and multi-format integration, for the best publishers one thing remains true: the overriding goal of delivering the work of their authors into the core conversations that will enable them to have the influence they seek.

Book publishing is a business and increasingly a technical one, but it remains at heart an art. Keeping the art center stage, while marshaling the science to support and advance it, is the publishing executive’s task and the essence of maintaining reputation.

The Long View for The Long Run How does an aspiring author find the right publisher?

Beyond making connections with editors and agents through previously published colleagues or friends, it is important to take the long view. Forget the shopping cart and cultivate a real appreciation for publishing and the culture of books.

Become a fan of the art and a student of the science. Study publishers from the outside in.

Start by reading regularly the major book review publications such as The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, and read the publishers’ ads as well as reviews.

Read the book reviews in the major publications in your field, say, The Economist, Foreign Policy or The Harvard Business Review, and listen to podcasts and interviews with authors in Knowledge@Wharton. In each instance, notice the publishers. Doing so will enable you to know the best publishers in your field of interest and expose you to the best editors in your field.

Educate yourself in its details. Learn how the best editors exercise their craft. Most of all, take a patient view because if you are serious about books and ideas, you are going to be living with books for a long time, and you’ll want to develop relationships with publishers for the long run, not just with your first book.

The better you understand the publisher’s art and the need to balance the tradition of influence with the imperative of technological change, the better you’ll be served as an author and reader. And not coincidentally, taking the long view conjoins you with the very core readership which you’ll need to engage with your own books.

In-app advertising has come a long way: Here’s why you should use it NEW DEVELOPMENTS FOR THE IN-APP ENVIRONMENT ALLOW BRANDS TO MEASURE VIEWABILITY, FRAUD, DATA QUALITY AND ATTRIBUTION, SIMILAR TO WHAT ADVERTISERS ARE USED TO ON MOBILE.

By Yoni Argaman

Mobile apps are the most direct conduit to consumers.

Americans love their cell phones and are rarely without them by their sides. Consumers spend 90 percent of their mobile internet time in them. And, according to Google, the number one smartphone activity outside of work is in-app shopping, and that 82 percent will “consult their phones on purchases they’re about to make in a store.” As a channel, mobile apps have an inherent appeal to marketers, and yet most brand advertisers don’t allot proportional resources when considering the time spent in-app.

comScore, measure data quality on behalf of advertisers in the app environment, and many agencies already use them.

For instance, Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings service combines aggregated, anonymous demographic data from various online data providers with Nielsen cross-platform panel data to verify the in-app audience for ads, making audience targeting available in-app, similar to mobile web.

Where are the brand advertisers? Where are the CPG companies that count on frequent purchases? Although they’ve been eager to advertise in-app, this channel has made them nervous. They have big budgets to spend, but they want the same campaign quality they expect out of desktop campaigns: is this user a human or a bot? Does this user meet my campaign demographic, psycho-demographic and behavioral criteria? Is this ad viewable and in a brandsafe environment? Will this campaign be optimized against KPIs that are important to me?

It’s true that viewability is more difficult to measure in the app environment – today. Technically speaking, any adtech vendor can measure viewability, but what advertisers want is validation of the viewable count by an objective third-party measurement company. The leading viewability measurement vendors – Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify and Moat – started out in the web environment, but scaling in mobile apps is an issue, as it requires a separate integration with each and every app developer.

The mobile app channel has had a bad rap among many brand advertisers. This is, in part, because many advertisers do not fully understand what is available for in-app advertising, especially with regard to targeting and brand safety.

Interestingly enough, there is actually a lot of developments on this front, with the industry introducing methodologies to measure viewability, fraud, data quality and attribution in the mobile in-app environment, similar to what advertisers are used to in mobile web. Let’s see where we are as an industry.

Fraud: Just one component to brand safety Fraud is still a pretty tough issue in all digital channels, not just mobile apps. The issue is that most of the fraud detection and prevention efforts started out measuring web traffic, and the app environment is significantly different. That said, some providers that began in attribution, such as AppsFlyer and Tune, began leveraging their technologies to monitor and detect fraud. Also, another benefit of the app environment is that apps must pass a screening process by Apple and Google before they can appear in the Apple or Google Play stores, which provides an extra level of security against fraud, that is non-existent in mobile web.

Trust but verify: Data quality measurement in-app Once you ascertained that the user is human, the next step is to determine whether that user is who you intend to reach. Many third-party companies, such as Nielsen or

Viewability at scale: Choosing the right partner

One of the ways to address the scale issue is VPAID, as its tags allow advertisers to track video ad performance directly, as well as get metrics on viewability, completion rate and click-through rate, without the app developer needing to have an integration with a viewability vendor. Similarly, the recent VAST 4.1 is designed to measure viewability, something that was not previously available on the VAST format.

Furthermore, there are interesting initiatives that will help scale viewability, and provide advertisers the assurance they need. IAB’s Open Measurement SDK allows app developers to incorporate one SDK that will support any of the thirdparty verification providers within their app. This allows the app developers to accommodate the advertiser’s preferred vendor, without needing to separately integrate with each.

Measurement even a brand marketer could love Measurement is far more within reach than brand advertisers may realize. In addition to viewability, fraud and data quality, many other KPIs of interest are trackable such as clicks, conversion, purchases, sign-ups for a newsletter, and so on.

In-app has come a long way. It has already caught up to the web in terms of traffic quality and is rapidly catching up in terms of campaign measurement. But there’s one gap that may never be closed, and that is a gap where apps actually have the upper hand – consumer mindshare. In-app is where the consumers spend most of their time, which is why brand marketers interested in the mobile channel must advertise there.

People love Instagramming billboards–and it’s great for advertisers 1 IN 4 AMERICANS HAS POSTED AN IMAGE OF AN OUTDOOR AD TO THE PLATFORM, ACCORDING TO NIELSEN–AND THE INDUSTRY IS TAKING NOTICE.

By Jeff Beer

It just takes one. One billboard, in one city, with a message can travel the globe in an instant. Remember Deadpool‘s Valentine’s Day magic? 20th Century Fox made a single gag billboard positioning the superhero action flick as a romantic love story, and it went around the world as soon as star Ryan Reynolds posted it to Instagram.

Back in April, Spotify turned one New York City subway stop into a worldwide art exhibition when it transformed the Broadway-Lafayette station into a David Bowie tribute, tying into the David Bowie Is exhibit at The Brooklyn Museum.

According to Spotify, it reached more 50 million people on social channels–with no paid amplification.

Both are examples of the influence Instagram is having

on both the placement and creative strategy of outdoor advertising.

As digital advertising’s path to prominence began a decade ago, more traditional ad forms like TV, radio, print, and outdoor saw their cultural relevance deflate, both in attention and the shift in ad budget allocation. But as they realized that our attention wasn’t stuck to one device or another, but constantly moving between media, brand and ad began to more effectively create work that complements itself across different platforms. With social media’s meteoric rise, the opportunity to use outdoor space to attract not only eyeballs but active engagement–like posting photos of billboards, posters, wall murals, digital installations, and more–became clear.

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59 “For us, [outdoor advertising] has become a social channel, and we trust that if the creative is compelling enough, people will do the work of amplification for us,” says Spotify’s global executive creative director Alex Bodman. “When we do a station takeover like the one we have at Union Square for our annual Wrapped campaign, the measure of success for me is seeing people stopping to take note of the creative, and then taking out their phones to snap a picture. That’s when we know we got it right.”

Spotify’s senior global brand director Alex Tanguay says that as the company has started developing more creative work in support of artists and their record releases, it’s the billboards that generate the most excitement. “For them, these billboards are iconic moment that they celebrated, often with a post on Instagram,” says Tanguay. “In turn, our media investment takes on a life of its own inside the earned-media world of Instagram for artists and their fans.”

Recent research by Nielsen reports that 1 in 4 U.S. adults surveyed have posted a photo on Instagram after seeing an outdoor advertisement. That’s higher than almost any other advertising traditional media–TV, radio, print, or digital banner ad–and it’s also the best bargain. According to the report, outdoor advertising on Instagram is seen by three times as many people, all for the same price as other forms of advertising. The ad industry calls unpaid news coverage of its work “earned media,” so getting your ad spread around Instagram for free by passersby is essentially earned social media.

Kym Frank, president of Geopath, a not-for-profit organization and industry standard that uses audience location data and media research to analyze out-of-home advertising, says that social networks and outdoor advertising are two platforms that have a natural synergy. “Technology is changing the game for [outdoor advertising], and with social networks being everyone’s go-to media for trends, it’s no surprise that Instagram, the place for all things photo and visual, is making waves,” says Frank. “In fact, despite the smaller portion of ad share garnered by [outdoor advertising], it was the top advertising platform to drive Instagram posts across all offline media and banner ads.”

Ad agency Cossette won the Cannes Lions Grand Prix for outdoor advertising this year for its work with McDonald’s.

Cossette Media’s chief strategy officer Wes Wolch says outdoor is one advertising environment that can still reliably reach consumers, and Instagram and other visual platforms are completely changing the opportunity for brands.

“We are living in an era where people are going out of their way not to consume ads–whether that’s using streaming services, unplugging their cable, or using adblocking technology,” says Wolch. “Creating a great outdoor campaign is no longer about devising a way to get a strong key message out in seven words or less. As we think about how to use out-of-home space, we need to think of it more as an art installation than an ad.”

For cannabis brand Tweed, Cossette partnered with experiential agency Behavior and multimedia artist Trevor Wheatley to design a series of outdoor art installations that featured large, sculpted letters spelling the word “Hi.” Through lighting and design, they could adjust the each piece to work for the context of where it was and how people interacted with it. At this summer’s Field Trip music festival in Toronto, the installation complemented the act onstage and acted as a meeting point for people trying to find their friends and snap photos with them. Wolch says it helped Tweed reach the No.

1 awareness position among cannabis brands in Canada.

Measuring the effectiveness of outdoor ads on Instagram is still rudimentary, but Franks says the platform’s impact and influence is driving more innovation. “Currently, measurement of the amplification of [outdoor] advertising as a result of posts on social networks is done in a variety of ways as an ad hoc solution,” says Frank. “Typically, this includes manual social monitoring via hashtags or keywords, although many in the industry are investigating image recognition technology to better measure lift.”

Of course, the staple of outdoor advertising–the billboard– has long been a figure of contention, often called a form of visual pollution. Vermont, Maine, Hawaii, and Alaska all ban billboards, while San Francisco banned off-site billboards (billboards not on the property of the business being promoted), and the Brazilian city of São Paulo famously banned billboards in 2007, removing more than 15,000 billboards and 300,000 oversized storefronts. By creating outdoor advertising that aims to also impress on Instagram, advertisers can also potentially improve the quality of brand presence in public spaces.

Ultimately, much like restaurants and retail spaces, brands are increasingly thinking about how their outdoor advertising can attract and encourage Instagram users to become a more personal form of earned media– the key word being earned. Instead of interrupting your sightline with some random billboard, a campaign must earn your attention–so much so that you actually might take the time to post it. The rise and popularity of firms like hand-painted mural specialists like Colossal Media signal that more marketers are seeing the potential.

“When you consider the Instagram factor, outdoor campaigns become less about creating ads and more about creating culture,” says Wolch. “How do people interact with content in public spaces? The key is to consider content and context– moving beyond the idea of filling a blank rectangle on a building.”

Jeff Beer is a staff editor at Fast Company, covering advertising, marketing, and brand creativity. He lives in Toronto.

Book,

&

Line

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

By Al Ries, Jack Trout

Sinker Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

The first book to deal with the problems of communicating to a skeptical, media-blitzed public, Positioning describes a revolutionary approach to creating a “position” in a prospective customer’s mind-one that reflects a company’s own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its competitors.

By Donald Miller

Identity Designed: The Definitive Guide to Visual Branding

The Branding of Tourist Destinations: Theoretical and Empirical Insights

By David Airey

Donald Miller’s StoryBrand process is a proven solution to the struggle business leaders face when talking about their businesses. This revolutionary method for connecting with customers provides readers with the ultimate competitive advantage, revealing the secret for helping their customers understand the compelling benefits of using their products, ideas, or services.

Ideal for students of design, independent designers, and entrepreneurs who want to expand their understanding of effective design in business, Identity Designed is the definitive guide to visual branding. Identity Designed is a must-have, not only for designers, but also for entrepreneurs who want to improve their work with a greater understanding of how good design is good business.

By Mark Anthony Camilleri

Upstart!: Visual Identities for Start-Ups and New Businesses

What Branding ISN’T: Have more than a logo, make your brand LEGENDARY.

By Gestalten, Anna Sinofzik Upstart! presents fresh branding ideas for entrepreneurs and designers. To stand out in a land of consumerist plenty, the new generation of small business entrepreneurs has learned to set high design standards. Poised between playfulness and professionalism, their holistic visual identity concepts become an integral part of their core business.

The 23 Commandments of Branding: 23 Proven Branding Strategies to Promote Your Business without Going Broke

By Jerome Ford The 23 Commandments of branding will show you how to build and grow your brand without going broke.This book gives you proven techniques that my freelance clients pay me for – on retainer every month.In fact, a client who owns a hair boutique in North Carolina is using these techniques to grow her brand...

The marketing of tourist destinations requires continuous strategic planning and decision making. The Branding of Tourist Destinations: Theoretical and Empirical Insights provides researchers and practitioners with an in-depth understanding of different tourism products, marketing strategies and destination branding tactics, as well as useful insights into sustainable and responsible tourism practices.

By Andrew J Oleson (Author), Natalie Turner (Designer) Branding is essential to the success of your organization, and it involves many things. In this book, we will tell you what branding ISN’T so you can avoid the unwise and costly errors that we’ve seen organizations make. Knowing what NOT to do is just as important as knowing what to do.

These principles are time-tested, and, if executed correctly, will guide you to having more than...

The Power of Licensing: Harnessing Brand Equity

By Michael Stone As CEO of Beanstalk, a leading, New York Citybased global brand licensing agency and part of the Omnicom Group (NYSE: OMC), author Michael Stone has worked with companies as diverse as HGTV, the Ford Motor Company, the Coca-Cola Company and AT&T to create highly ambitious and successful strategic licensing and brand extension programs for Beanstalk’s clients.

At an increasing pace over the past decade, all types of organizations with strong brands...

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The Ministry of Branding: A Biblical Approach to Brand Building

Beyond Sizzle: The Next Evolution of Branding

By Mike Martin

Award-winning management strategist Dr. Mona Amodeo brings together the best practices of change management, marketing, and communications to give readers an actionable process for creating brands that matterorganizations that are redefining workplaces, reimagining customer experiences, and creating innovative products and services that are building healthier, more sustainable communities in turn, creating a better world for us all.

The Ministry of Branding: A Biblical Approach to Brand Building, is a manual for businesses, ministries and organizations on developing a successful brand, with insight on how God views the practice of branding. Featuring biblical references, detailed processes, steps and activities, the Mike Martin helps even the most novice reader understand the importance of branding and its methods.

By Mona Amodeo

Developing Insights on Branding in the B2B Context: Case Studies from Business Practice

Logo-a-gogo: Branding Pop Culture

By Nikolina Koporcic (Author, Editor), Maria Ivanova-Gongne (Editor), Anna-Greta Nyström (Editor), Jan-Åke Törnroos (Editor)

For more than 20 years, Rian Hughes has been a versatile designer, illustrator and lettering artist working for international clients in the fields of publishing, music, sports, telecommunications, fashion and more. He has specialized in creating logo designs for the comic industry, notably for DC and Marvel products, including Batman and Robin, Batgirl, the X-Men, Captain America, Wolverine, The Spirit, The Invisibles, Shade the Changing Man, and The Atom.

This book presents real life business-to-business (B2B) branding cases. The book deploys a theoretical-practical approach, where theoretical and conceptual frameworks related to key branding topics are supported by empirical case studies. Each case helps to illustrate the framework and discuss its applicability in practice.

By Rian Hughes, Grant Morrison (Foreword)

Agency: Starting a Creative Firm in the Age of Digital Marketing (Advertising Age)

Fiesta: The Branding and Identity for Festivals

By Rick Webb

Fiesta: The Branding and Identity of Festivals is a compilation of remarkable branding designs and campaigns for a variety of renowned festivals from around the world. The festivals examined span the worlds of music, cinema, design, gastronomy, culture, and art. The identity and communication campaign strategies deployed by festivals encompass an endless array of design techniques, from graphic elements such as logos, posters, web pages, advertisements...

This book is for young startups and entrepreneurs in the advertising, marketing, and digital services space. It’s an A-to-Z guide for young advertising firms, full of advice that ranges from getting funding to how to value the company and sell it to how to hire your first employee.

The Story Engine: An entrepreneur’s guide to content strategy and brand storytelling without spending all day writing Kindle Edition

By Kyle Gray, Tom Morkes (Foreword) Every entrepreneur has a story to tell, whether they’re running seven-figure startups or small personal brands. Your story is the most powerful asset you have at your disposal. It can cut through the noise and connect you with your customers.

By Shaoqiang Wang

It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be: The world’s best selling book

By Paul Arden It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be is a handbook of how to succeed in the world - a pocket ‘bible’ for the talented and timid to make the unthinkable thinkable and the impossible possible. The world’s top advertising guru, Paul Arden, offers up his wisdom on issues as diverse as problem solving, responding to a brief, communicating, playing your cards right...