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Dear Friends: The summer is hurtling along and saying the heat is on would be an understatement.Things are no less frenetic in the world of branding. See what New York Times COO has to share about the winners and losers in the digital revolution. Another seasoned stalwart WPP’s Martin Sorrell articulates that Amazon’s Alexa provides the greatest data threat that there could be in the times to come. Read more about what he has to say here in this issue. In these days of micro and macro influencer marketing, where do brands draw the line on social media endorsements? The jury seems to be out on that one. Branded content most certainly is the flavour of the season but in terms of impact and effectiveness, it is recommended to take the brand out of branded content. Understand more on that in the feature published herein.There is so much hype and hoopla about VR but the question everyone wants to know is will Virtual Reality ever be mass entertainment? Read about in this issue. The CFO is more concerned about the painless ways of measuring marketing effectiveness. There seems to be a way out as highlighted in this edition. All these and more that will keep providing you brand guardians with actionable evidence, as always. Till the next...
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CONTENTS
The Danger of Assertive Advertising It’s Time to Take the Brand Out of Branded Content Survival of the real brands: New York Times global COO on winners and losers in the digital revolution Will VR Ever Be Mass Entertainment? Stick with your schtick: three keys to brand consistency How to Take the Pain Out of Measuring Marketing Effectiveness Programmatic 3.0 advertising will take inspiration from the financial markets How Sophisticated Branding Aims to Make You Rethink Cannabis WPP’s Sorrell singles out Amazon’s Alexa as leading edge of new data-driven threat Social Media Endorsements: Where Will Marketers Draw the Line? Out-of-home ads experimenting with consumer interaction A Blueprint for Hit Marketing Campaigns: Collaboration [Infographic] Book, Line & Sinker
The Danger of Assertive Advertising RESEARCHERS FIND THAT ADS THAT TELL CONSUMERS WHAT TO DO OFTEN END UP TURNING THEM OFF INSTEAD By Alina Dizik
Some advertisers like to tell consumers what to do. Buy this. Do this. Don’t do this. But marketers should beware of being too assertive. That’s because consumers don’t like being told what to do, especially by brands they love, says Yael Zemack-Rugar, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Central Florida and one of three authors of a paper about assertive ads forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. “We have this innate need to feel like we are making our own choices,” she says. “That’s a huge problem for marketers who tend to tell consumers what to do.” Assertive ads can be especially damaging to companies’ relationships with their most valued customers, says Dr. Zemack-Rugar. “This effect is much worse for the consumers that tend to be the most loyal,” she says. “That kind of loyalty can backfire, because they get more annoyed than anyone if you tell them what to do.”
Spending is affected The researchers showed magazine advertisements to a total of more than 1,000 participants in a series of seven studies; 72% of the advertisements used assertive language. Responses measured how much people enjoyed the ads, their opinion of the brand and their spending intentions. The participants included consumers who felt committed to liking particular brands and others who didn’t. In one experiment, participants were asked how much of a $25 gift card they would spend on a brand in one of the ads. Those who saw an assertive ad chose to allocate $7 of the gift card to the brand on average, compared with $14 for those who saw a nonassertive ad. The best purchasing results came from ads that were
“informative and hint at action” by the consumer, Dr. ZemackRugar says. The results were consistent across consumer categories, including snack bars, personal hygiene and clothing.
Sensitivity is high It doesn’t take anything extreme to alienate consumers, Dr. Zemack-Rugar says. “We’re not talking about smack-you-inyour-face aggressive language,” she says. For example, “buy now” may not seem overly assertive but still has the negative effect associated with telling consumers what to do, she says. On the other hand, “now is a good time to buy”—a simple tweak—mitigates the effect, she says. Some companies try to soften their messages with politeness, using language like “please buy now,” but the researchers found that this didn’t help, Dr. Zemack-Rugar says. For companies, this can mean rethinking how they present their messages not only in advertisements but also in email communications, on their websites and even in face-to-face pitches by salespeople, she says. Much assertive messaging is so commonly used—for example, “Like us on Facebook”—that companies mistakenly assume that consumers are no longer paying attention to it, Dr. Zemack-Rugar says. The study found that a “Like us on Facebook” tagline increased the pressure that consumers felt to comply with the ad and as a result diminished how much they liked the ad. “We’re not immune” to assertive messages just because they’re common, Dr. Zemack-Rugar says. “They still evoke a reaction.” Ms. Dizik is a writer in Chicago.
It’s Time to Take the Brand Out of Branded Content
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BEHIND-THE-SCENES STORYTELLING TRUMPS TAKING THE LEADING ROLE By Molly DeWolf Swenson
A young and adored celebrity supermodel breaks free of her gilded cage (and wig) to unite a diverse but misfit group of creative souls whose intrinsic love for humanity is enough to transform an urban, socio-political clash into a moment of beautiful peace and understanding. Pretend you haven’t been on Twitter for the last month and you might agree this is a half-decent germ of an idea—you might even think it was compelling. Now go back and insert “Pepsi” between each word, and you’ll start to see why taking the brand out is so important. Taking the brand out of branded content extends beyond just the more commercial web spots. A rising tide of quality has lifted all content ships, and that includes branded content. Amazon and Netflix cashed in at the Oscars, and RYOT was fortunate enough to be at Tribeca this year with two branded documentaries: one with Gatorade, in competition as a short documentary, and the other for Apple, one of 10 Tribeca finalists. The world of moving pictures is not what it used to be, as these nontraditional players now have access to the same tech, talent and money as the big studios. Just as the newcomers have put some pressure on the traditional players, so have the newcomers had to up their game: they’re playing in the big leagues now and fumbling brand shout-outs simply won’t cut it anymore. No more mugging to the camera, Truman Show style, with your CoCoMix. Quality storytelling and narrative matter more than ever, and must be first and foremost in your mind when approaching “branded” content. The quotes are intentional. It is an opportune time to drop the word “branded” from that phrase and from your vocabulary. Content is content. Good content is good content. If a story is moving, no one is going to care that it’s brought to you by a brand. Rather, they’re going to be happy the brand brought it to them. And by the same token, content that is annoying is now amplified rather than ignored (because no one can resist a good call-out) and can be more harmful to a brand than ever. My fellow creators understand the irresistible gravity of narrative (I hope), but there is work to be done on the brand side as well. Brands must truly understand their DNA to make sure the content they are supporting aligns with their deepest values and their mission. Even the most perfectly executed documentary on an Amazonian superfruit may seem incongruous coming from Cheetos, or even sleazy coming from a Monsanto. It’s not easy finding that perfect fit, but when we do, it can really sing.
Young consumers are simply too savvy about when they’re being sold to. Disingenuous attempts at elaborate “ads” will be quickly transparent to a generation subjected to the Dark Ages of branded content. Not only that, but ill-thought out efforts will pale in comparison to the brands that are getting it right, as the gap between the good and the bad will get increasingly wider. Intentions matter. Brands must If a story is moving, believe that a story is worth telling and that people care no one is going about it and want to hear it, to care that it’s but most of all that their brand should be the one to tell it. In brought to you by an increasingly politicized era, a brand. Rather, brands are called upon to take moral and political points of they’re going to be view. We’ve seen how clumsy happy the brand interjections from brands can undermine even the noblest of brought it to them. messages. The other side is that compelling stories in the pure and confident voice of your brand can be one of the most powerful media for some of the world’s most important messages. Let your logo take a backseat for these stories. Your logo is not your brand—your story is. The days of nonconsumer-first formats are dwindling. Isn’t that what we are all striving for anyway? A consumer-first approach does not mean shoving logos down throats. The consumer didn’t start watching to see if there was a coupon at the end of a 15-minute commercial. Consumers are watching because they are invested in the story that you are telling and they are involved with the narrative and want to know what every human wants to know: how does it end? And when it does, the knowledge that a brand brought this story to life for them creates one of the strongest and most genuine brand associations you can imagine. The bar has never been higher for companies that want to produce content. Are advertisers up to the challenge of taking the brand out of branded content, and putting the humanity back in?
Molly DeWolf Swenson (@mollydewolf) is a co-founder at RYOT.
Featured Image: Getty Images
Survival of the real brands: New York Times global COO on winners and losers in the digital revolution
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DR JAMES SLEZAK TELLS THE STORY OF HOW THE NEW YORK TIMES HAS THRIVED AND OTHER BRANDS HAVE SUFFERED IN THE FACE OF DIGITAL DISRUPTION. By Dr James Slezak
Barely six months ago, Uber was riding high. Bill O’Reilly dominated cable news. Donald Trump had just won an unwinnable election. And the New York Times – according to him – was “failing”. Today, Uber faces boycotts and declining market share. O’Reilly is out. Donald Trump faces a special prosecutor. And the New York Times has added more subscribers than ever before. What the digital revolution disrupts, it can disrupt again. But are broader trends emerging to shape who wins and loses? Today’s super-charged information environment seems to be allowing the true values and priorities of organisations to surface more easily than before. Authenticity is becoming harder to fake. United Airlines has told the world it’s the ‘Friendly Skies’ since the 1960s, but today, passengers with smartphones can show the story behind involuntary ‘re-accommodation’. Uber asks us for trust as it rewires transport systems and waves off regulator concerns, but when employees write blog posts and drivers share videos that go viral, we know how top management actually thinks and behaves. On the positive side, years of playing nicer with drivers and cities are starting to pay off for competitor Lyft, now winning market share from Uber in all 20 top US markets, according to founder John Zimmer. Users seem to like what they’re on about, despite their smaller network. Briefly, in January, downloads even surpassed Uber’s, when Lyft pledged $1 million to the American Civil Liberties Union to fight discrimination. Meanwhile, community backlash forced Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to back out of Trump’s advisory council. For the New York Times, after spending years optimising paywall rules, pricing and social policies, the greatest leap in subscriptions came from none of these optimisations. Instead, it came from explaining more clearly why the work it does is important to the world and showing it through actions by standing up to a President who declared the press an enemy. Readers came together as a community, inspired by a common purpose, and more than 600,000 signed up for new digital subscriptions in the six months since the election—four times the previous year’s rate of growth. So what does this mean? With data flowing at an unprecedented pace, organisations increasingly have to be real to succeed. Leaders must manage substance, not just perception. If my call is really a priority, customer service would answer the phone. If the real priority is saving costs in
the call centre, I’ll find out from a torrent of review site data, blogs and social media. For marketing teams, the firehose of data from online interactions must now be harnessed to solve problems and improve services, not just optimise messaging. Top brands and even government agencies are repurposing social media accounts to manage relationships and help people. When I tweeted last year about problems with their pre-check service, the US Transport Security Administration solved them with me over direct message. It also means that corporate governance, previously about as interesting to the digital innovation crowd as plumbing, is increasingly sexy. The New York Times places great weight on its mission because its board is controlled by a trust dedicated to journalism, despite the stock being traded publicly. Decades ago, publisher Punch Sulzberger famously pushed back against cuts that could compromise that mission: “in lean times, it is best to avoid the temptation to thin the broth, and instead put more tomatoes in the soup”. His persistent investments led directly to the prominence the publication now enjoys. Resisting financial short-termism is difficult when managers have no counterweight in the boardroom to the market’s demands. Companies exposed to full sharemarket control, like Australia’s Fairfax Media, know top teams will be replaced if stock prices go low enough. Resistance is futile. That’s why some of the biggest technology players, including Google and Facebook, now have top-level governance that looks more like the Times, keeping control in the hands of early owners with longer-term accountability and buy-in to the founding mission. Snapchat’s IPO this March offered no voting rights at all to the market. Twitter even considered a resolution to become a user-controlled co-op last month. Etsy, Kickstarter and others are now structured as B Corps, a form of corporation that commits the team meaningfully to a clear social mission. No breakthrough in technology or organisational structure can change the fact that human institutions represent compromises of one kind or another. But as people increasingly have the means to demand that organisations they interact reflect their values as people, their operations, marketing and governance are flexing in response. Amongst all the disruption and fake news, what increasingly may matter most is keeping it real. Dr James Slezak is COO of NYT Global.
Will VR Ever Be Mass Entertainment? EXORBITANT COSTS, CONFUSED CUSTOMERS, AND FIRE RISKS: BRINGING VR TO THE PEOPLE IS PROVING TRICKY. By Katharine Schwab
There’s a lot of talk about virtual reality as the future of entertainment. And with big companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and Apple pouring money into the technology’s development, VR might seem like an inevitable medium to transform the way we spend our free time. But how will people experience it? The technology itself is too expensive for the vast majority of people, with full consumer models running upwards of $600–a lot of money to commit if you’ve never tried something–and cheaper versions on mobile offering little more than 360-degree video, which can be viewed without a headset.
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“You go to a film festival, you get ticket in advance, you know when to line up,” says the media scholar and tech expert Tim Wu, the author of The Attention Merchants who’s part of Sundance Film Festival’s advisory group. “A reasonable number of people get to experience the films. We don’t have this figured out in VR.” At the virtual reality conference Versions earlier this year, Wu described the chaos of attending the VR gallery at Sundance Film Festival, where there are usually only a few headsets for each experience, often resulting in long lines for VR films that typically range between 5 and 10 minutes. “Overcoming those frictions is key,” he says. “If I had the magic bullet for how you do it, I would tell you.”
at Sundance and Tribeca [Film Festivals], even at a smaller scale where there’s less specific demand.” But with the market size projected to be worth $5.2 billion by 2018, many companies are looking for ways to give consumers their first taste of VR, while dodging the logistical issues that come with the medium. Whether that’s in a dedicated arcade, a bar, or your local multiplex, VR is likely coming to a venue near you soon.
BACK TO THE ARCADE Arcades have all but disappeared from the commercial landscape today, but in the 1970s and 1980s, they were hugely popular. Video game makers like Atari made millions on games like Pong, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man before consoles became cheap enough for people to purchase them personally and play games at home. In 2017, some believe that the arcade model, where visitors go to a dedicated place specifically to play games, is VR’s best bet at making its way into popular culture–just like its media predecessors before it. “TV itself was in salons and bars before it went to people’s houses,” media scholar Wu says. “It’s a natural step. Maybe the rush to try to get into everyone’s houses has been a little premature and the natural step is the arcade.”
Because while the content itself is important, the experience surrounding VR is vital in encouraging more people to try it. One part of that is just finding a place to put it. “Space is a huge issue. If you want to set up a Vive, you need a 12-by-12-foot square. Increasingly, space in New York is not necessarily available all the time,” says Alex Darby, head of operations and production at the New Museum’s art and technology incubator, New Inc. Darby puts on events like the Versions conference, which is dedicated to VR and has two days of talks and workshops. Ironically, the opportunity to actually see VR experiences is limited to the conference’s afterparty. Setting it up is incredibly difficult from a production standpoint, she says. “The gaming engines required require dedicated circuits. Not all venues can support this,” she says. “If you can’t guarantee me this required AMP or a dedicated circuit, it might actually set your building on fire.” Darby’s job entails working with New Inc’s VR creators, but she finds that even though she has incredible access to content, VR is still difficult for her to see. “Even if you can solve all of these problems and set something up, there’s maybe one headset,” Darby says. “It’s been a huge problem
There are some examples of VR arcades sprouting up in the U.S. But the business model is most prevalent in Asian countries like China and Japan, where the Taiwanese company HTC, which makes the Vive VR headset, is bringing VR to thousands of arcades by the end of the year. In Taipei, the company opened a giant arcade-cum-theme park called Viveland at the end of 2016 that’s meant to act as an example for what a great arcade could look like, and inspire third parties to open their own. Part of the problem is that anyone who wants to start an arcade has to independently negotiate licenses for content with each developer. For instance, if someone wanted to get a license to screen the VR film Life of Us, which has made the rounds on the festival circuit this year, they’d have to go directly to the film’s production company to buy the rights– and then do the same thing for every other experience they wanted to provide.So the company is launching a platform where HTC does that negotiation on arcade owners’ behalfs, and they can purchase a license for hundreds of hours of content directly through HTC. “Anybody with a Vive essentially can start an arcade,” says Drew Bamford, a designer and the head of HTC Creative Labs. “We’re trying to make it as accessible as possible.” On the more immersive, high-end side of the spectrum, he images arcades that feature robust object tracking, haptic chairs, and even omnidirectional treadmills that would let you run freely in VR–something between an arcade and a theme park. “In a lot of ways, it’s the Apple showroom,” says Jamin Warren, the founder of video game publication and company Kill Screen. But that’s in Asia, where arcade culture is generally already accepted. It may not necessarily translate over to an American audience. “In some cases, those cultures have
the lobby of a New York City AMC theater. It’s the second of 10 pilot VR arcades that the company is rolling out over the course of 2017, starting with a standalone VR center in Los Angeles, and with multiplex arcades coming to theaters in Manchester in the U.K., Shanghai, Tokyo, Toronto, and more. Imax has also created a $50 million fund to invest in content developers, showing just how much it’s betting on VR’s future.
been in the lead in influencing the west so it’ll be interesting to see whether that’s the way it works this time,” Bamford says. “On the flip side, in general there’s a trend toward people wanting their own personal technology, driven partly by things like smartphones. You wouldn’t consider sharing that with somebody else.”
KARAOKE, WITH ZOMBIES If dedicated arcades may come up against some cultural resistance, why not put virtual reality inside an establishment that’s already inside every neighborhood–the bar? That’s what VR guru Michael Deathless thinks. His company, Deathless VR, which develops content, runs workshops, and even does VR art therapy classes, has experimented with putting virtual reality inside bars over the last year or so. He now puts on VR showcases at the restaurant The V Spot in Manhattan’s trendy East Village neighborhood on weekend nights, where you can eat vegan food (of course), grab a drink, and paint in Tiltbrush, all in the same venue. “You go in, you drink a beer, eat a burrito, shoot some zombies,” he says. “It’s kind of like a karaoke situation.” Deathless also opened a more permanent location–called Jump Into the Light–in September of 2016, where he offers four types of VR experiences from 5 p.m. until early in the morning, mostly targeting partiers who’d stumble upon the arcade after a night of drinking. Jump into the Light recently moved into another location, next to the lobby of the Indigo Hotel in the heart of one of New York’s hippest places to go out. Deathless is a die-hard believer in VR’s future–and he means the name of his establishment quite literally. “We love screens. We love the light. We put thousands of people into their first experiences–the vast majority of people are blown away by it,” he says. “I don’t see it just as technology evolution, it’s the future of humanity.” But the next step of combining VR with 21+ entertainment will have to wait for now. “I wish weed was legal,” Deathless says. “We want to pair weed with VR experiences. That’s the next level.”
HEADING TO THE GOOD OLD MULTIPLEX While Deathless’s vision of VR is decidedly for adults (though he says he also hosts kids’ birthday parties all the time), other companies are looking to truly take it to the mainstream. Most prominently is Imax, the large-format film company that has chosen VR as the next product in the evolution of its business. And it’s putting it in a place that makes the most sense for a company primarily in the movie business: the multiplex. Over Memorial Day weekend, Imax opened a VR arcade in
“The model that we like is similar to the model we like in cinema,” says Rob Lister, the chief development officer at Imax. “We partner with the exhibitor, provide them with Imax technology, we install it, and split the box office.” Because Imax has relationships with movie theaters in 74 different countries, it could quickly scale up from 10 theaters to hundreds or even thousands, depending on how the pilot process goes. To avoid the problem of lines, all Imax VR experiences are ticketed. Each VR center is composed of modular pods that are either 11-foot or 12-foot squares that are partially enclosed, designed to allow for a more social experience because they’ve found that most people who buy tickets are attending with two or more friends. The flexibility of the design, created by the architecture firm Gensler, allows the company to adjust the number and configuration of pods to fit into any space. In New York’s AMC, it takes up 2,900 square feet of the multiplex’s lobby, while another one the company is building is in retrofitted auditorium. Lister says the company is testing everything from the cost (usually a dollar a minute), to the length of experiences (most range from eight to 12 minutes), to the amount of interactivity (so far, the more interactive the better), to the demographics. He says that while they expected their main demographic to be what he called “fanboys”–men in their late teens and early 20s who love Marvel movies–instead the attendees at the Los Angeles center has been less than 60% male. In March, they hosted a birthday party for a 35-year-old man on the same day as an 11-year-old girl. Currently, that center is pulling in between $13,000 to $15,000 per week, or about $700,000 per year. “That’s a very health business model,” Lister says. It’d be a boon for movie theaters, too–the prospect of VR has the potential to bring millennials and generation Z back to the multiplex. A Nielsen report in 2014 shows that young people are seeing 15% fewer movies, while 87% of surveyed 12-to-24-year-olds were streaming movies online. But Imax is hoping to make VR more of a social experience, giving groups of young people more of a reason to try out the next kind of entertainment. Rolling out VR in movie theaters would also give people a place with which they are already familiar to experience the new medium for the first time. Will the barriers to experiencing VR finally come down when it’s accessible in an arcade, a bar, or a movie theater? Developers still need to design content that’s so good, people will willingly pay $10 for a 10-minute game. But the first step is making the user experience around VR good enough to convince someone to put on a headset in the first place.
Katharine Schwab is a contributing writer at Co.Design based in New York who covers technology, design, and culture.
Stick with your schtick: three keys to brand consistency CONSISTENCY IS THE BACKBONE OF BRAND SUCCESS, BUT MANY BRANDS ARE LEAVING IT BEHIND. SUSANNA KASS HAS THREE KEYS FOR CONSISTENT, SUCCESSFUL BRAND MANAGEMENT. By Susanna Kass
Consistency is the backbone of brand success. It fosters confidence. It grows recognition, understanding and loyalty. Yet consistency, and the quality of conviction required to deliver it, appears to have fallen out of fashion. It’s being left behind. Business thinking has instead been swept up in a passionate obsession with fluidity, iterative adaptation and agility. Nimbleness to change fast and often is king.
exercising techniques to enhance their brand’s grit – because ‘stick-with-itness’ builds stickiness.
Where has our grit gone? Technology has enabled unprecedented speed and fragmentation of communication, production, distribution and choice. As a consequence our organisations, governments and societies have become spellbound by ‘short-termism,’ played out like an addiction to fast, tangible returns.
To be clear, I’m a change optimist. A fresh approach to thinking and working are essential to both survive and thrive in today’s marketplace. I would simply venture to suggest we need to adopt a multi-speed approach to business components – specifically brand.
From a brand identity perspective, we marketers are faced with the opportunity to re-invent ourselves. To take advantage of the availability, access and speed of change opportunity presented by internal and external factors.
The marketing business has always been at the tight end of the orbit, with cycles exponentially speeding up to deliver growth and stay ahead of competitors.
Paradoxically, the easier change becomes and the more choice we’re presented with, the less happy we are in the choices we make – perpetuating a cycle of choice evaluation and more change.
Yet brand equity figures show us the surest way to brand strength is through brand consistency. After all, a brand must first achieve recognition and awareness before it can attain affinity. As such, I propose the brand community might benefit from
And then there’s the other human truth that perseverance can be boring, and novelty is fun. Like sticking to a diet or practicing piano, we know tenacity produces better long term results, but most of us reach for the instant(ish) gratification of quick returns.
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Growing some grit So how do we adopt the right mindset and skills to slow down and build some more grit into our brands, without disengaging a consumer base itching for novelty and proof of minute-by-minute relevance? By borrowing inspiration from recent self-help manual sucesses such as Grit, Outliers and Peak, we can begin to unpack the techniques common to achieving success through perseverance. The three key outtakes I believe to be most pertinent to brand consistency are:
1. Find your driving purpose Interest, or passion, comes first. In some ways, this can be the only thing a great brand needs. A truly clear, driving idea that can be re-expressed over time to sustain relevance without losing its identity. Like the way Coca-Cola has anchored its brand to powerful emotional platforms of happiness and nostalgia, Disney’s commitment to wholesome values and magic, and GE’s belief in imagination. These brands are able to re-express their visual identifiers, their photography styles, campaign ideas and even products, yet sustain consistency through clear alignment with their core reason for being. From this perspective it’s clear that innovation can and should happen – for your products, your operations, your service design – but these innovations should ideally strengthen, and be guided by your core brand truth; not overthrow it.
2. Stick with it This point reinforces the value of continuity in brand application, yet brings us back to our original challenge – how do we overcome our natural resistance to practicing (it’s boring) and craving for novelty? Firstly, it’s easier to make your hard work feel meaningful if you start with a clear purpose in which you believe. Then there are some practical tips to guide successful practicing: •
Measure and focus
shifts in productivity or culture that don’t otherwise show up on ROI alone. Clear feedback should guide minor changes and tweaks that serve to fine tune the machine; it is not a case for re-inventing the machine in response to every setback. •
Break up your challenge into tangible parts
Break long term goals into smaller tasks. Large scale consistency is created through multiple minor consistencies – many drops make an ocean, as they say. Think about your brand through both a macro and micro lens. How can you drive consistency through every touchpoint – product experience, retail experience, visual, verbal, service design, sensory design, employee experiences, NPD. Continue to fan your purpose by choosing depth, nuance and richness over novelty and change.
3. Teach your people to fish This point is about employee engagement, empowerment and ownership of your brand. If you can successfully align your organisation around a shared vision and purpose, you will impart a sense of responsibility and opportunity within the individuals who are charged with delivering your brand. Clearly articulating what the brand stands for will also engage employees in a longer-term collective goal; limiting turnover, HR expenditure and the dreaded brand itch. In summary, find your schtick, stick with it and empower others to amplify it. What will result is more room to move, as well as a more focused and productive approach to marketing activity. Imagine your brand is in a position where achieving awareness is a given and your messaging can instead focus on each innovation in product formulation or service change, however small. Imagine the energy and resource you’ll free up by not reinventing the wheel with every seasonal shift or communications channel. Brand grit works because consistency can unlock creativity, not restrict it.
Continued improvement calls for continuous focus, feedback, optimisation and investment in how that time is spent. In marketing, this focus and direction can be supported through regular measurement, applied rigour and accountability. Setting up robust processes can assist in determining dial
Susanna Kass is senior planner at media, CX and advertising agency Affinity
How to Take the Pain Out of Measuring Marketing Effectiveness By Kara Burney
As a marketing leader, you’ve likely read your share of articles talking about how hard it is to measure marketing effectiveness. And while I agree that marketing performance measurement is not something a lot of marketers feel comfortable with, the truth is, with the right tools and processes, it doesn’t have to be as painful as most people think. In our 2017 Marketing Leadership Survey we uncovered some interesting insights around marketers’ perceptions of measurement and marketing ROI, which reveal that most marketers still struggle with measuring digital marketing effectiveness. If you’re in the same boat, the tips in this article will have you on your way to proving your marketing value without losing your cool.
What marketers think about measuring marketing effectiveness
According to our leadership survey, 66 percent of marketers actually think it’s easier to prove the impact of marketing nowadays, but further exploration shows that they’re not making use of the tools and tactics necessary to demonstrate that impact in their own businesses.
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Consider this: Slightly less than 28 percent of marketers say they’re very effective at demonstrating the value of marketing, while 69 percent note they’re only somewhat effective.
When it comes to measuring return on marketing investment, a whopping 71 percent say their top challenge is attributing social media and content marketing efforts to revenue. This is significant because we also found that marketers rank content performance measurement (65 percent) and social media analytics (60 percent) as the two most important components needed when measuring marketing effectiveness. So which metrics are today’s marketers using to prove value? Most (91 percent) are using engagement metrics such as likes, comments, shares and clicks. About 82 percent use consumption metrics like pageviews and downloads. The third most widely used metric is audience growth (78 percent), which looks at paid versus organic search traffic, share of voice and social shares or followers.
attracting new customers, including those most likely to convert. Be sure to look at channels like social, paid social, search, paid search, lead nurture programs, ads and events for a complete picture. •
Most effective campaigns: Track which campaigns are most effective at generating new opportunities, and converting both new and returning customers. You can get the full story by looking at conversions and opportunities influenced by campaign, source and medium.
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Lead generation: Find out how well your lead generation efforts are working by tracking the number of new leads and marketing opportunities brought in across all of your social, paid, ad and referral programs.
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Competitive benchmarking: Stay on top of how your competitors’ content is performing so you can shift your tactics if necessary. It’s best to get a full view of performance across your blog and all of your social media channels.
By making both your social media marketing effectiveness metrics and your content metrics available on one marketing dashboard, you can help everyone know exactly where they are in meeting their KPIs, while gaining a complete view of what’s working and what’s not across all of your marketing activity.
Calculating marketing ROI The end goal of tracking marketing performance is to understand how much revenue your efforts are pulling in, so you can do more of what’s working, and less of what’s not. In addition to calculating revenue, there are several ways you can calculate marketing ROI when measuring marketing effectiveness, including gauging your spending efficiency, proving brand ROI and assessing customer lifetime value. •
Marketing revenue: In order to prove the value of marketing to your fellow executives, you’ll need to show how much revenue your group is generating for the business as a whole. To do this you can use revenue attribution models to track marketing-influenced revenue as a percentage of the company’s total revenue.
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Spending efficiency: To understand how efficient your marketing investments are, take the average cost of customer acquisition vs. your average spend on marketing efforts per customer. If the number isn’t what you expect, it’s time to adjust your strategies accordingly.
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Brand ROI: This article gives you all the details for how to prove brand ROI, but in a nutshell, you can demonstrate the ROI of branding activity by creating and tracking goals around conversions, opportunities, purchases and revenue from both direct and referral traffic. You can also use social attribution to show how social engagement and community building impact the bottom line.
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Customer lifetime value (CLV): This metric gets to the heart of revenue and ROI by predicting how much value a customer will bring to your company over the course of the entire relationship. By knowing your CLV,
The best metrics for measuring marketing effectiveness One thing to note about the metrics currently used by marketers is the fact that those used most often aren’t tied to revenue — a major disconnect we found in our survey, as marketers prioritize increasing sales as a top goal. When looking at your own metrics, it’s important to keep your eye on revenue impact, including how content and social influence your marketing pipeline and revenue goals. Here are some metrics you should consider using to prove impact related to revenue. •
Most effective channels and mediums: Find out which channels and mediums are most effective in
you can better estimate costs associated with acquiring and keeping customers so you can better demonstrate marketing’s contribution to growth over time.
How to use competitive and industry benchmarks the right way
and social. TrackMaven’s marketing analytics platform makes this easy by providing a breakdown of competitor performance against your key metrics, which could include audience growth, content distribution, content engagement or share of interactions.
Understanding how your content and social performance compares to that of your competitors is an important way to know how effective your strategies are for reaching your target audience. With so much data out there, it’s hard to know the best way to go about your competitive analysis, but at TrackMaven, we’ve done much of the heavy lifting for you. Start by getting a broad view of industry performance. Our Digital Marketing Analytics Performance Report is a great source for this, as we’ve broken down performance of social, blog, website health and PR across 13 industries and 39 subindustries. For example, below you can see a snapshot of the software industry performance benchmarks:
The data shows where businesses in this industry can expect to get the largest social media audience (Facebook), and the most engagement (Instagram). They can also find out how blogs typically perform, the impact of press mentions, and the average website health of the industry. Once you’ve gotten the lay of the land, you can then drill down into specific competitor performance around content
You can also get insights into how specific competitor posts are performing so that you can be sure you’re focusing your efforts on the right topics and channels to reach your audience. As you can see, measuring marketing effectiveness isn’t as
mysterious as many people think. With a clear picture of your goals, the right metrics to support those goals, and a little help from technology, proving the value of marketing is definitely within your reach. To find out about more about how today’s marketing leaders are measuring marketing effectiveness, download your free copy of the 2017 Marketing Leadership Survey today.
WHAT WILL PROGRAMMATIC 3.0 LOOK LIKE? THE INTERSECTION OF WALL STREET AND MADISON AVENUE By Rob Rasko
In the world of programmatic advertising, there have been many evolutions. If Programmatic 1.0 was best represented by companies using the Right Media Exchange for trading — where two companies could come together, sign a written contract and execute media transitions among only those two parties, with some of the elements being automated — then Programmatic 2.0 is representative of today’s exchanges and marketplaces: trading desks to DSPs (demand-side platforms) to exchanges to SSPs (supply-side platforms) and the inevitable ad tech tax. Real-time bidding (RTB) has allowed parties to do business across partners and on an impression-by-impression basis, both via open-audience-driven campaigns or in private marketplace environments, eventually throughout the entire supply chain of a publisher, the header through the waterfall. So what will Programmatic 3.0 look like? If the pipes and the connections are in place, what then remains is the opportunity to consider sophisticated business rules and relationships
which can only come from a next level of thinking. In financial markets, groups of commodities or stocks are in many cases bundled together (think exchange-traded funds or mutual funds or futures contracts where buy and sell prices are guaranteed for long periods of time, sometimes years). Once those contacts are established, they are free to trade repeatedly for the duration by any entity that would have capital to invest.
So, why does advertising need futures? In today’s digital ad sales environment, a publisher’s direct sales team negotiates inventory sales with advertisers, which result in a “guaranteed order.” However, those guaranteed orders typically contain “out clauses” that allow the advertiser to cancel the contract for a variety of reasons. These out clauses can wreak havoc on a publisher’s revenue stream, making it difficult to forecast what their actual earnings will be.
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Programmatic 3.0 advertising will take inspiration from the financial markets
So perhaps a guaranteed order isn’t really, well, guaranteed? In a true forward and futures market, advertisers or their agents could buy inventory for future use and lock it in with a truly guaranteed contract, allowing them to forecast longterm spending on digital advertising and buy a package of inventory holistically versus disparately. Can you imagine the ramifications of this? The machinations are incredible if you think about it. Just imagine a publisher selling inventory, buying it back and selling it again.
What about other media outside of digital? Potentially print, TV and radio could be afforded the same capabilities. Once this solution is mainstream, there’s no reason why their inventory can’t be traded in a similar fashion. In the beginning of any new paradigm, market education and research serve as a building block to align interests and bring the market entrants to the table. In previous columns, I’ve written about educating digital leaders on cutting-edge issues around digital brand safety, including viewability, ad blocking and data protection, as well as mobile and native ad monetization. I believe programmatic 3.0 is an equally important topic, because publishers must
continuously find innovative ways to generate revenue to sustain their business. This type of trading would open up a world of possibilities for the publishing community. I asked Richard Bush, CTO of NYIAX (and a partner of The 614 Group), about this and he said, “I have been involved in media trading and its automation for 18 years now and have seen it all. These concepts are new and really exciting. They invoke a new way of thinking about the future of programmatic trading. This endeavor will be educational, and I look forward to hearing what the market thinks about these ideas and what they still need to learn.” As we work to educate the market on the next iteration of programmatic, I invite the publishing community to join us in helping to shape this content. Email me your thoughts, and I’ll share what we learn in a future Marketing Land column. I would love to hear what others think programmatic 3.0 will look like at the intersection of Wall Street and Madison Avenue. Rob Rasko is a thought leader in the digital marketing industry. His venture, global digital solutions firm The 614 Group, enables results-driven client marketing efforts in the practice areas of content monetization and revenue strategy, brand safety, technology and digital systems integration, and corporate strategy.
How Sophisticated Branding Aims to Make You Rethink Cannabis AS THE MARIJUANA INDUSTRY BEGINS TO MATURE, PURVEYORS RECOGNIZE THE NEED TO SEPARATE THEMSELVES WITH DISTINCT BRANDING. THE HAND-PAINTED SIGNS, BAD PUNS, AND RASTAFARIAN FLAGS THAT ONCE DEFINED THE INDUSTRY ARE GIVING WAY TO SOPHISTICATED DESIGN THAT ABANDONS AGING STONERS IN FAVOR OF MORE UPSCALE CLIENTELE. By Scott Kirkwood
Before marijuana was legalized, the plant’s design aesthetic was somewhere between the tie-dyed patterns of the Grateful Dead, the Rastafarian color palette of Bob Marley, and the Jamaican flag. But that’s starting to change. Colorado legalized the sale of marijuana for recreational purposes years ago, but as you drive along the fringes of Denver or Boulder, you’ll still find plenty of former pawn shops and liquor stores that were hastily converted to cannabis dispensaries. Today, the hand-painted signs, the
bad puns, and the Rastafarian flags that once defined the industry are finally giving way to sophisticated design that abandons aging stoners in favor of more upscale clientele. And with good reason. As the Washington Post recently reported, half of the country’s population, spread out among 28 states and the District of Columbia, can legally smoke marijuana for medical purposes; eight states have legalized recreational pot. In 2016, the North American marijuana market posted $6.7 billion in revenue, according to Arcview
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Market Research, which anticipates the industry will top $20 billion in annual sales by 2021. Those sales represent far more than loose “flower” rolled up in a joint. So-called “budtenders” behind the counter serve up chocolates, mints, topicals, and liquid concentrates. As the industry begins to mature, purveyors of cannabis recognize the need to separate themselves with distinct branding, just as breweries and distilleries have done for decades. In the last few months, Christopher Simmons, creative director for MINE, has designed branding and packaging for several dispensaries in San Francisco, including BASA, Dutchman’s Flat, Petra, and Prophet. “With Prophet, the question was: How do you get away from the dominant paradigm in the industry, which is still holding on to that Bob Marley stoner culture? Because that’s not where the market’s going,” he says. “When I design packaging for these premium brands, I don’t ask if it’s going to look good in a head shop; I want to know if I could reasonably expect to see this at a Whole Foods or a Starbucks.”
“Many designers use the cannabis leaf as a motif, but I’ve tried to treat it as an icon—the way you might indicate if a product is vegan or kosher,” says Simmons. “Its job is not to romance you—it’s to inform you. If you remove the leaf icon from Petra packaging, it’s less clear that it’s a medicated product, and I think that’s irresponsible.” When Mexican design firm La Tortilleria tackled branding and packaging for Seven Point, a cannabis dispensary outside Chicago, they went in the other direction, finding inspiration in high-end cosmetics and natural supplements. Their designs eschew leaf iconography and swaths of color in favor of a minimalist black-and-white design that’s pared down to the essentials (including the amount of THC, which is front and center).
Simmons’ work for Prophet’s flower features a sophisticated, bold, sans serif typeface and masculine color palette on a canister that mimics chewing tobacco tins. On the other end of the spectrum, his work for Petra mints is aimed at women, who generally prefer edibles to smoking. Each color hints at a flavor, and each pattern draws inspiration from a country where the plant is indigenous: A Moroccan pattern is paired with mint, and an Indian pattern is paired with mango.
“So many people have this idea that cannabis is something bad,” says Zita Arcq, the agency’s co-founder. “But if [science] had just discovered this plant today, without its long history, we would consider it some sort of superfood. So we wanted to take a very different approach—one that wouldn’t limit its appeal to teenagers.” When designing packaging for the cannabis industry, there’s one big question: Use the iconic leaf or not? On the one hand, it’s become a cliche that could tether a brand to stoner culture; on the other hand, it’s a recognizable symbol that immediately telegraphs the presence of THC. As any Colorado resident will tell you, that icon could have prevented a few houseguests from innocently devouring chocolates they discovered in their host’s pantry—the source of a surprising number of visits to the ER.
Back in Chicago, Curioso was charged with designing the interiors for Seven Point, a challenge that goes far beyond most retail establishments. Although laws vary from state to state, in most cases, dispensaries require an ID check before customers can review a menu of offerings or even look at the product, which must be stored behind closed doors. That means proprietors have to find unique ways to make the shopping experience feel more like a boutique and less like a back-alley drug deal.
To achieve that end, Nina Grondin, one of two partners at Curioso, drew on the firm’s long history with hospitality clients, from restaurants to hotels and resorts. “Our goal is always to make people comfortable, and to make spaces approachable and inviting,” says Grondin. “Seven Point sells medical cannabis to patients who may be quite ill, so we wanted to get away from the stereotype of a guy with huge muscles standing by the door checking IDs like a bouncer at a club. We want people to think of a concierge rather than a security guard, so that the space feels more like a high-end pharmacy.” Another challenge: Seven Point isn’t licensed to grow cannabis to be used in its own products, so for now, the dispensary is selling goods manufactured by dozens of suppliers. Presenting all of those items on a shelf would have created a hodge-podge of garish colors and textures, as if customers were wandering through a flea market. So Grondin created a mammoth glass “humidor” that holds branded Seven Point boxes, glass jars, and canisters to provide a unified appearance. After customers make their selections on one of the store’s many iPads, employees remove the individual products from the branded containers and place them in a branded paper bag at the register. In San Francisco, laws regarding the display and handling of products are less restrictive, so Simmons had plenty of options as he worked with Dutchman’s Flat, which takes its name from the historic neighborhood that locals now know
as Dogpatch. “Dutchman’s Flat is in the old dock yards area, where there are a lot of brick warehouses and an industrial feel that’s now being gentrified, like much of the city,” says Simmons. “We tried to make it look like everything that was in the space was either already there or repurposed from something that was already there.” The historic building featured a long white wall with painted bricks that would crumbled into dust when holes were drilled into it, so rather than hang menu boards, Simmons designed a display that’s cast onto the wall using projectors. Products aren’t locked away, but simply arranged on custom wood countertops, in magnetic metal canisters perched atop repurposed steel I-beams. “If someone really wanted to steal the product, they probably could,” says Simmons. “But we decided the trade-off was worth it, to make people feel at ease and welcome. Most people haven’t bought drugs before, but most people have bought an ice cream or a cookie, and we wanted it to feel more like that experience than anything else.” As the cannabis industry continues to grow up, agencies like Mine, Curioso, and La Tortilleria are helping to erase stereotypes, creating a new language that doesn’t yet exist. And that’s part of the fun. “One of the big reasons that I’m excited about designing for this industry is that we’re not beholden to history,” says Simmons. “If you’re designing liquor packaging or chocolate packaging, you already know what high-end liquor looks like and what bargain chocolate looks like. Walk into a liquor store and you can see, from a distance, what’s vodka, what’s gin, and what’s scotch, because they all have an established look and feel that telegraph the category. Pot doesn’t have that yet; it’s too new. We’re like the designers who created computer packaging back in 1985—it’s exciting to be at the forefront, setting a standard that other people will follow.” Scott Kirkwood is a freelance copywriter and creative director in Denver, with a focus on nonprofits and “do gooder” brands. His editorial work has appeared in Communication Arts, Eye on Design, HOW, and Modern in Denver.
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WPP’s Sorrell singles out Amazon’s Alexa as leading edge of new data-driven threat WPP CHIEF SIR MARTIN SORRELL HAS SINGLED OUT AMAZON’SALEXA PERSONAL ASSISTANT AS PROVIDING ONE OF THE BIGGEST THREATS TO THE ADVERTISING INDUSTRY GOING FORWARD – ALONGSIDE THE EXISTING TECH DUOPOLY OF FACEBOOK AND GOOGLE. By Jon Feagain
Sorrell’s fears centre on the growing pervasiveness of the online retailers Alexa personal assistant, to which it has begun attaching a camera to hoover up even more data from consumers. Arming it with a treasure trove of data to which more traditional ad giants can but dream. Pointing to the Echo Look ‘style assistant’, a tool designed to help individuals find their desired clothing, Sorrell told an audience of French marketing professionals in London (via video link) that this was merely the thin end of the wedge, saying: “So you are looking for clothing, and one could assume that the artificial intelligence or algorithms will be able to order you clothing. You can try it on, like you would in the changing room of a bricks [and mortar] retailer, using digital technology. So the data that comes from that will become critically important.” Elsewhere Sorrell was effusive on the rise of programmatic advertising, foreseeing ‘unlimited opportunities’ going
forward, though couching this with a warning that… “the constraint is going to be privacy and having walled gardens like Apple, Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Tencent, Amazon and the like. It is our ability to get access to that data.” During his tenure at WPP Sorrell has become increasingly alarmed at moves to control access to data as advertisers battle to retain access to customer data for their own competitive advantage. It isn’t just ad agencies to which Sorrell harbours fears however, in previous exchanges he has predicted that Amazon’s ‘tentacles’ could suffocate Google itself.
John Glenday is responsible for compiling The Drum’s daily morning bulletin and ensuring that overnight breaking news is covered while you’re still brushing your teeth. Can also make a mean cup of tea.
Social Media Endorsements: Where Will Marketers Draw the Line? By knowledge@wharton
What if advertisers found a stealthy new way to get their pitch across — a form of messaging perceived more as a friendly recommendation than hard sell? In an over-crowded media environment, marketers would surely flock to such an innovation. And they have. In the nascent realm of social media influencing, paid endorsements are burgeoning. Celebrities and other influencers present their taste and choices in the marketplace as nothing more than the act of sharing tips with fans and the public — even while failing to make clear that, often, they are being paid to do so. The only hitch, of course, is that failing to publicly disclose compensation for promoting a product or service is illegal. The practice falls under the category of deceptive advertising, and the problem has become widespread enough to capture the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which recently sent a shot across the bow of the industry. In a letter to 90 influencers and marketers, the FTC reminded them of the obligation to “clearly and conspicuously disclose their relationships … when promoting or endorsing products
through social media.” There is nothing about social-media technology itself that makes identifying paid messages difficult, points out Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger, author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On. “Native advertising can note that it is an ad, and tweets can include hashtags that note someone was paid.” But though there is a way, it is less clear that there is always a will. “Companies don’t want to adopt these tactics,” says Berger, “because it will reduce the effectiveness of their message. One reason word of mouth is 10 times more effective than advertising is that people trust it more. Knowing someone got paid to talk about something
“One reason word of mouth is ten times more effective than advertising is that people trust it more. Knowing someone got paid to talk about something makes us much less likely to trust that message.” – Jonah Berger
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makes us much less likely to trust that message.” In one respect, the proliferation of this kind of practice is just one more skirmish in the ageless game of cat and mouse between advertiser and consumer. But right now, the stakes are particularly high. “First, consumers are getting desensitized to ads. In fact, the install rate of ad blockers among millennials is very high,” says Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions Kartik Hosanagar. “Advertisers are looking for new ways of getting their messages through, and native advertising where ads are built into the content are more commonplace. Second, and a related point, is that media influence is becoming increasingly decentralized with bloggers and social media influencers taking over. This makes it harder for the FTC to regulate. This is not going away, and so it makes the FTC’s job extremely hard going forward.”
The Rise of the Influencer Influencer marketing is growing rapidly. Mediamix, a major influencer marketing firm, notes that some key demographic groups now receive media content solely through social media channels, apps and platforms, and that the total ad spend of the influencer market will rise from $500 million in 2015 to between $5 billion and $10 billion by 2020. “The issue now is that so many companies, large and small, have the opportunity to advertise on Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram – it’s a relatively cost-effective way to reach a global audience,” says Erin E. Rhinehart, a partner at Faruki Ireland & Cox in Dayton, Ohio, who leads the firm’s media and communications practice. “What we are seeing are a lot of traditional marketers forgetting the fundamentals of the need to disclose, and a lot of smaller and mid-size companies are not paying attention to the fact that regulations still apply to them.” Rhinehart notes that regulations have been in place for decades governing false and deceptive ads, as well as the requirement for disclosure when the “fan” of a product is being paid, through a patchwork of state and federal laws. Additionally, the FTC issued a set of guidelines in 2015 designed to instruct social-media influencers, making it clear that the same obligations that apply to traditional media apply to them. The agency says it does not generally monitor bloggers, but that “if concerns about possible violations … come to our attention, we’ll evaluate them case by case. If law enforcement becomes necessary, our focus usually will be on advertisers or their ad agencies and public relations firms. Action against an individual endorser, however, might be appropriate in certain circumstances.” This is exactly what led the FTC to send its recent warning letter to 90 influencers and marketers. Public Citizen, the consumer-rights advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader in 1971, filed a petition with the FTC, and the agency investigated. The FTC did not initially disclose the names of the recipients. But according to the National Law Journal, which filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FTC, recipients included Jennifer Lopez, who posted an Instagram photo with Beluga brand vodka in the background,
and Jersey Shore star Nicole Polizzi touting Flat Tummy Tea with an Instagram photo captioned with: “There’s just NO WAY I’m doing summer without a flat tummy.” Brands, too – such as Adidas – received FTC warning letters, according to the National Law Journal. Lines between advertising and editorial content have been blurring for years, but more so recently. On The New York Times website, for instance, while the company clearly labels certain ads with the line “sponsored content,” the online placement of these ads in the middle of the page, with a graphic treatment similar to that of articles, makes the distinction less clear than traditional pop-up ads or ads that are boxed off. Still, the distinction eludes “This is not going many. In a recent study of away, and so it makes 1,212 adults who regularly access the internet, Contently the FTC’s job extremely and the Tow-Knight Center for hard going forward.” Entrepreneurial Journalism at – Kartik Hosanagar the City University of New York found that the majority of readers, 77%, didn’t interpret native ads as advertising. Small wonder that native advertising is expected to zoom. By 2021, native display ad revenue in the U.S., which includes native in-feed ads on publisher properties as well as social media platforms, will make up 74% of total U.S. display ad revenue, up from a 56% share in 2016, according to one report from Business Insider. The FTC’s recent warning marks a change, says Rhinehart. For the most part, it has gone after companies it felt violated consumer trust; in 2016, the FTC and Lord & Taylor settled over charges after the store had paid 50 influencers to wear certain dresses and post about them while failing to disclose that they had been paid between $1,000 and $4,000 each. But the recent warning letters, she says, are “the first time they have been going after individual influencers. The Kardashians, for instance, can’t keep posting [paid endorsements without disclosing them as such] on Instagram and then claim it’s the company’s fault. The FTC is now watching you.” Technically, even much smaller fish are violating FTC guidelines when they fail to disclose — teens who have been sent a free pair of pants who then post favorable comments to social media feeds, or any individual being paid to post on the comments page of a retailer’s website. “There are a lot of companies that pay folks to put comments out there,” notes Rhinehart, adding that they risk the wrath of the FTC on a sliding scale. “If you have one person who is being paid five bucks and they put a comment on [a website] to get comments going … the FTC is not going to come knocking on your door. But if that is pervasive, and that is the way you do business, it tips the scale at a certain point, and you are perpetrating fraud.” The key is for influencers to clearly signal when they are being paid to influence. Just how prominent the label is matters. A single disclosure on one’s website or social media account is not adequate disclosure, the FTC says. “What matters is effective communication, not legalese,” state agency guidelines. “A disclosure like ‘Company X sent me [name of
product] to try, and I think it’s great’ gives your readers the information they need. Or, at the start of a short video, you might say, ‘Some of the products I’m going to use in this video were sent to me by their manufacturers.’ That gives the necessary heads-up to your viewers.”
Can the Influencer Market Police Itself? Part of the new need for disclosure comes from the melding of personal and professional lives on social media, points out Wharton marketing professor Americus Reed. “One of the things social media has done is to create perhaps a kind of unseen and maybe unwanted transparency by nature of the fact that you have multiple channels to which you can broadcast to various audiences,” he says. “And as you engage in this social media activity it may not be obvious that these multiple audiences might be overlapping. That introduces an interesting public impression management exercise — how am I going to manage my identities across all these different platforms?” Reed says he believes any social media user absolutely has an obligation to disclose whether gifts or favors have influenced a recommendation or opinion – whether or not that user thinks of him or herself as an influencer in a formal sense. “You have a network that you took a long time to build up and that network has value, and if you are smart the last thing you want to do is compromise that network’s perception of you as changing to selling stuff rather than recommending something.”
“The true influencers are not looking to get paid. They get something from the act of sharing, and marketers are trying to intervene between the influencer and their markets.” – Americus Reed
Is the influencer market capable of policing itself? In a 2016 survey of 347 influencers by influencer platform SheSpeaks, one out of four influencers said he or she had been asked not to disclose commercial arrangements with a brand. At some point, a self-correction mechanism in the marketplace will probably kick in, says Reed.
“The true influencer is someone who likes to share because the act of sharing gives them utility. They enjoy sharing stuff – the friend who is a movie buff, or the foodie who will share a restaurant recommendation. The true influencers are not looking to get paid. They get something from the act of sharing, and marketers are trying to intervene between the influencer and their markets. There is a social influencer market and it is constantly in flux, because you have marketers trying to influence the influencers.” Some influencers won’t accept compensation, and others will but will be up front about it, he says — essentially putting a premium on credibility. The current lack of disclosure on the part of influencers being paid is sometimes less about a deficit of scruples than a lack of awareness, says Rhinehart. “I think there are some bad actors out there that, quote, ‘forget,’” she notes. “But for the most part I think it’s really just a lack of structure and policy internally relating to the PR department, marketing and advertising, and a lot of times social media and traditional marketing departments aren’t talking to each other. The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.” Social media firms that want to protect their credibility might have to take action themselves. Michael Sinkinson, Wharton professor of business economics and public policy, suspects that Instagram will have to start “self-policing and giving users a way to disclose whether their posts include a paid endorsement — and if they violate that, [Instagram will] have to take punitive action against those users.” What lies ahead as marketing and advertising look for ways to get the message across on evolving platforms and technology? “Let’s not forget Google and Facebook are advertising companies, and they have a lot of data on us, and that’s how they make advertising money,” notes Sinkinson. “I would not be surprised if we saw more innovations of this sort. Facebook now has videos with ads in the middle of videos that you’re watching — that’s an example of an innovation. But you can see these firms have to find ways to make money off of the services they offer their users. As to what they will be, the sky’s the limit.”
Out-of-home ads experimenting with consumer interaction NOT YOUR FATHER’S BILLBOARDS: INTERACTIVE OUT-OF-HOME IS COMING OF AGE By Barry Levine
It’s not just that billboards — those static and fading printed signs along highways — have evolved into digital displays within an increasingly programmatic ad ecosystem. It’s that they — and their digital display cousins in city squares, bus stops, airports and elsewhere — have turned into an interactive platform. A new project from National Geographic and Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA) is the latest sign. On Endangered Species Day (May 19), several digital billboards in New York City’s Times Square participated in a one-hour event where members of the public could take a selfie with an image of an endangered animal (displayed as photos at street level) and then post it to the hashtag #SaveTogether on Twitter and Instagram. Using a moderation system, the event organizers then selected 175 selfies for projection on the participating billboards (see image above). The animal images were supplied by Nat Geo’s Photo Ark project, which seeks to document all the species in the world’s
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zoos and sanctuaries in order to encourage conversation. Twenty-five of the 6,500 species photographed so far are used in this project, including the Florida panther, the Golden Snub-nosed monkey and the Malayan tiger. This Nat Geo campaign — which its organizers describe as a “ground-breaking” interactive billboard project because of its scale — is now continuing at locations throughout the US, including Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Philadelphia. In all, over 45,000 DOOH screens in digital billboards, bus shelters, airport dioramas and mall kiosks are participating in the effort. It is administered through OpenLoop, a real-time campaign management and distribution platform donated by ad tech firm QDOT. QDOT, which was spun off in April from digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) production house Grand Visual, offers ad serving, optimization and tracking tools for this market.
Last year, a campaign for Dannon Yogurt featured billboards whose imagery was related to one of four different speeds of passing traffic. San Mateo, California-based Pecabu displays the ads on its outdoor electronic displays according to a real-time assessment of area demographics, weather and similar local data. Some of its displays include a camera that anonymously counts passersby or cars, and there is also an app for smartphones that shares geolocation for tracking in exchange for rewards. And Outfront Media has been using digital displays in a variety of interactive ways, including as large outdoor kiosks:
But selfies represent only one way that outdoor digital displays are becoming more interactive. A number of outdoor displays, for instance, offer Near Field Communication (NFC) sensors or QR codes. A study last year by Nielsen found that nearly a quarter of people with smartphones who viewed out-of-home displays have interacted with them via NFC or QR, calling up additional material on their devices.
Wit, traffic and weather A recent New York City campaign for Amazon Prime’s TV series “Catastrophe,” produced by Grand Visual, showed “fill-in-the-blank” statements in several categories that were supposed to reflect the brutal and often comic honesty of the series’ main characters, Rob and Sharon. For instance, such a statement in the #Sex category might read, “The best form of contraception is _____.” Elsewhere in the display was the answer: “The 4am feed.”
This trend toward interactivity in outdoor digital displays has obviously just begun. New sensors in cars, clothing and other real-world items can be tapped for input, more sophisticated motion detectors will add a greater visual dynamism, and we’re not that far from Minority Report’s personalized imagery that is tailored to each passing individual:
It’s certainly ironic that billboards and similar signage, once considered static barriers blocking the world behind them, are now becoming more responsive to their surroundings than trees ever were. Passersby could then tweet to the “Catastrophe” account about the themes they’d like to see for such “fill-in-theblank” statements — either more #Sex, or #Relationships, #Romance or #Family. The participant would also see the vote results.
Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor.
A Blueprint for Hit Marketing Campaigns: Collaboration [Infographic] By Laura Forer
A successful marketing campaign can rarely be attributed to just one person. It takes a team of strategists, writers, designers, analysts, and, of course, marketers to come up with something from nothing that helps the business meet its goals. But working with various teams and individuals is not always simple. Coordinating schedules, communicating, and working together all bring challenges to what should be a collaborative environment. The team at Dropbox Business put together an infographic that lays out a plan for how to support collaboration across various teams. For example, starting with something as basic as a robust creative brief can help identify key goals and get everyone united on a campaign, the infographic suggests. Yet, it continues, only 23% of creatives say their projects are briefed well. Moreover, a streamlined feedback process can help set clear expectations, yet 44% of marketers say keeping track of feedback from different channels or in various formats is a serious pain point. What can you do? Defining strategy, using a central location to manage files, and debriefing the whole team are just a few of the suggestions in the graphic. To see the rest, check out the infographic. Just tap or click on the image to see a larger version.
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Laura Forer is the manager of MarketingProfs: Made to Order, Original Content Services, which helps clients generate leads, drive site traffic, and build their brands through useful, well-designed content.
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Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People By Marc Gobe Emotional Branding is the best selling revolutionary business book that has created a movement in branding circles by shifting the focus from products to people. The “10 Commandments of Emotional Branding” have become a new benchmark for marketing and creative professionals, emotional branding has become a coined term by many top industry experts to express the new dynamic that exists now between brands and people.
Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s Kindle Edition By Ray Kroc Few entrepreneurs can claim to have radically changed the way we live, and Ray Kroc is one of them. His revolutions in food-service automation, franchising, shared national training, and advertising have earned him a place beside the men and women who have founded not only businesses, but entire empires. But even more interesting than Ray Kroc the business man is Ray Kroc the man.
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In The End of Advertising, Essex gives a brief and pungent history of the rise and fall of Adland—a story populated by snake-oil salesmen, slicksters, and search-engine optimizers. But his book is no eulogy. Instead, he boldly challenges global marketers to innovate their way to a better adfree future.
The Content Marketer’s Guide to Ideation: One Framework & 32 Exercises For Unbeatable Content Kindle Edition
The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
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Feeling attention challenged? Even assaulted? American business depends on it. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of messaging, advertising enticements, branding, sponsored social media, and other efforts to harvest our attention. Few moments or spaces of our day remain uncultivated by the “attention merchants,” contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times.
The Content Marketer’s Guide to Ideation probes the minds of the greatest writers and thinkers on the subject of ideation, culminating in a powerful framework that Content Marketers can use to systematically produce better ideas, along with 32 exercises you can use to to put that system into action immediately.
By Tim Wu
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Experiential Marketing: How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act, Relate By Bernd H. Schmitt Moving beyond traditional “features-andbenefits” marketing, Schmitt presents a revolutionary approach to marketing for the branding and information age. Schmitt shows how managers can create holistic experiences for their customers through brands that provide sensory, affective, and creative associations as well as lifestyle marketing and social identity campaigns.
Unleashing the Ideavirus: Stop Marketing AT People! Turn Your Ideas into Epidemics by Helping Your Customers Do the Marketing thing for You. By Seth Godin Counter to traditional marketing wisdom, which tries to count, measure, and manipulate the spread of information, Seth Godin argues that the information can spread most effectively from customer to customer, rather than from business to customer.
Marketing 4.0: Moving from Traditional to Digital Kindle Edition
Digital Marketing For Dummies Kindle Edition
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Written with the marketer’s best interests in mind, this friendly, down-to-earth guide shows you how to use proven digital marketing strategies and tactics to expand the reach of your brand, increase audience engagement, and acquire and monetize customers. From current best practices in SEO and SEM to the latest ways to effectively use content marketing and influencer marketing—and everything in between—Digital Marketing For Dummies helps you get the most out of all your digital marketing efforts.
Marketing 4.0: Moving from Traditional to Digital is the much-needed handbook for nextgeneration marketing. Written by the world’s leading marketing authorities, this book helps you navigate the increasingly connected world and changing consumer landscape to reach more customers, more effectively.
A Winning Brand: How to Build a Powerful, Personal Brand in Today’s Modern, Digital World Kindle Edition By Kraig Kleeman
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In this book, you’ll find: Strategies that will help you create your winning brand to achieve your business and personal goals.Exercises to guide you through your personal brand inventory so you know what facets to focus on for reinvention.Five winning brand principles to guide you on your personal brand journey so your efforts are maximized...
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Digital change means that everyone today can reach and interact with others directly: We are all in the content business. But that comes with risks that Bharat Anand teaches us how to recognize and navigate. Filled with conversations with key players and in-depth dispatches from the front lines of digital change, The Content Trap is an essential new playbook for navigating the turbulent waters in which we find ourselves.
Using principles from cognitive psychology, Nick Kolenda developed a unique way to influence people’s thoughts. He developed a “mind reading” stage show depicting that phenomenon, and his demonstrations have been seen by over a million people across the globe. Methods of Persuasion reveals that secret for the first time. You’ll learn how to use those principles to influence people’s thoughts in your own life.
This book will help you to understand the basics of business and marketing plans, branding, image, customer service and public relations so that you can grow your business through simple and smart marketing practices. Getting the basics right can make such a difference to the outcomes.