BrandKnew July 2019

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

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Dear Friends: I write this on July the 4th, American Independence Day and ‘may the fourth be with you‘ is what I have to say!

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Brands and marketers are striving to come to terms with the increased independence that consumers are demonstrating as they expect and demand better, more, NOW! As ever, this edition of BrandKnew is packed to the rafters with the content that is actionable intelligence. We talk about how Brands can let AI do their talking and thereby unlock greater value and potential. We ruminate and mull over why Advertising still treat people like strangers (inspite of the mountains of data and insights at their command). A little bit of crystal ball glazing helps us picture ‘The CMO of the Future‘. Humor as an arsenal is still under utilised in marketing and communication but in this edition we show How Seven Brands are killing it with Humor on Twitter. Advertisers are resorting to ‘ Dadvertising ‘ to connect emotionally with Dads and reaping the benefits. We start up a conversation on how ‘restricted brands‘ can use disruptive marketing trends to reach a wider social audience. Things that have never been tried before. At ISD Global(publishers of BrandKnew), we have been crying hoarse about the fact that in the times to come, customer experience will be a brand’s best product- we dive in on that with the feature on customer centricity. We also take a look at how 6 second ads are capturing viewer attention. The article on Unlocking Marketing led growth- using data, creativity and credibility will capture many a brand owner’s attention. We also have laid out a road map on how best to chart your SEO strategy. There is truckloads more, as is always the case and I leave it now to your time and attention. Till the next…

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Suresh Dinakaran @ISDGlobalDubai

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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

How six-second TV ads capture attention How Disruptive Marketing Trends Can Help Restricted Brands Reach a Wider Social Audience How Brands Can Actually Let AI Do The Talking 20 Ways to Bust Through the Digital Noise With a More Human, Relevant Brand A redefinition of customer-centricity The future of OOH media through a commercial lens Why does advertising still treat people like strangers?

The CMO of the future How to unlock marketing-led growth: Data, creativity, and credibility Want to be more effective? Here’s five ideas to consider In the august company of one!

The ultimate guide to strengthen your local SEO strategy 7 Brands Killing It With Humor on Twitter A History Of Brands Hacking Wikipedia The 30-second trick that can make anyone more creative Building Strong Brands: The Inside Scoop on Branding in the Real World The uncertainties of judgement Senior business leaders lack confidence in building brands Dadvertising: How marketers are using brand images to appeal to millennial dads Four things every young (and not so young!) planner needs to be doing more of‌ Book, Line & Sinker

How six-second TV ads capture attention

By WARC Staff

Many of the dynamics influencing six-second television ad performance vary compared with longer commercials, according to a study in the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR).

Henry G. Wolf VII and Paul Donato, both from the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), a trade body and the publisher of JAR, discussed this subject in Six-second advertisements on television: Best practices for capturing visual attention.

“Unlike with longer advertisements, for which daypart had the largest effect, daypart did not play a role in visual attention to sixes,” their study – spanning 3,000 six-second spots, as well as 15- and 30-second ads – reported.

“Instead, advertisement pairing and pod position” – namely, the placement of an ad in a series of spots – “both played an important role for sixes. Sixes had the best visual attention in solo pods, followed by first, last, and then middle position.”

Another finding: “Placing up to a total of four advertisements from one brand in the same program could increase attention to sixes,” they noted.

The ARF and TVision Insights, a company that measures TV viewability, utilised “computer vision” technology – which pairs tuning and audio data, tracks who is present in a room, and when their eyes are on the screen – from set-top boxes

in producing these insights.

And the final dataset included 165,843 “observations” – that is, a national ad “playing on a television in one of 1,372 households where at least one six-second advertisement played during the period of data collection” and viewed by at least one person.

One knowledge point from this information related to timeshifted viewing on set-top boxes, which “tended to increase visual attention to sixes, whereas same-day viewing decreased visual attention for 30s and different-day viewing improved it for 15s”.

A more cautionary note emerged from the study, too, as 27% of all ads that played had “nobody in the room to see them” – indicating the limits of traditional set-top box data, and an important consideration for short-form spots.

“Analysis of these ‘invisible’ advertisements showed that sixes made up a greater proportion of invisible advertisements (11%) than advertisements played when someone was in the room (4%),” they wrote.

“This may be because it is easier to miss the entirety of a short advertisement than a longer advertisement. Moreover, sixes tended to be in solo or first position.”

How Disruptive Marketing Trends Can Help Restricted Brands Reach a Wider Social Audience

By Jonathan Crowl

Social media is the cornerstone of most branded marketing strategies. But for certain companies and industries that don’t have the luxury of using the full slate of social promotion channels now available, putting to use disruptive marketing trends becomes a means for survival.

While any company can start its own Facebook Business Page, a number of regulated industries are barred from paying to advertise on social media. In other cases, social networks have their own restrictions on advertisers, independent from what federal and state law says. And some businesses and industries, while allowed to advertise on social media, must grapple with restrictions on targeting, messaging, and other criteria.

Harness the Power of Strategic Content Partnerships Forming relationships with influencers and other companies can help your brand expand its social reach, without breaking the rules of any particular social network.

These strategic content partnerships could include collaborating on posts or articles, which are then shared by brands with more developed social networks. Or your team could work with influencers to generate brand awareness and visibility in a way that might function as paid advertising, but without directly violating a social platform’s marketing rules.

As a result, disruptive marketing trends can be a restricted company’s best friend when working around these paid advertising limitations on social media. Companies in the alcohol, pharmaceutical, cryptocurrency, cannabis, direct selling, tobacco, nutritional supplement, and gambling industries are just some of the victims of these social media restrictions—but that doesn’t mean marketers in these industries have to forgo a social strategy.

Influencer marketing has become a big boon for brands whose paid advertising is banned or restricted on social networks. According to Vox, pharmaceutical brands have been able to make a big splash with influencer marketing.

They explain that brands creating prescription medications that treat conditions such as pregnancy nausea and psoriasis have been utilizing these partnerships to their advantage.

Influencer-sponsored content like this can be a great way to get around advertising restrictions on social platforms without getting into hot water.

Here are some of the ways brands can work around all this red tape and use social media marketing as a means to generate ROI.

Also consider working with other brands to utilize non-social marketing channels, such as email and original published content, which can be used to promote your social accounts

and build an organic following. Even though paid social ads may be off the table, there’s still value in building your social following, and leveraging the audiences of other brands is a great way to make that happen.

a new audience, even though federal law—which social networks tend to follow in their policymaking, as opposed to state-specific regulations—bans the advertisement of cannabis and cannabis-related products.

Employ Community-Centric Strategies

Brands also shouldn’t overlook the value of creating or joining Facebook Groups related to their area of business.

As The Verge reports, Facebook’s redesign is shifting the user experience focus away from newsfeeds and toward Groups.

These Groups are fair game for brands that want to extend their social reach but don’t have the luxury of paying for social ad exposure.

While hashtags aren’t exactly a new innovation in social media marketing, they remain a critical pillar of disruptive marketing strategies because of their potential to circumvent industryspecific restrictions on social ad content. These hashtags can be applied in two ways: To strengthen relationships with existing customers, advocates, and partners; and to expand a brand’s reach to a new audience.

In the first use case, brands can create their own hashtags that relate to a branded campaign, or they can simply create a social structure for their audience to easily engage with the company, its products, and its other followers. This has become a top point of emphasis for multi-level marketing companies, which are banned or restricted from paid advertising products on most social networks. As Jason Lee HQ points out, network marketing operations use branded hashtags not only to promote their products and support social selling efforts, but also to recruit new brand representatives and improve networking among existing reps and sales associates.

Backchannel Engagement and Chatbots For brands shut out of the more conventional social ad strategies, dark social engagement needs to become a priority. One of the most valuable disruptive marketing trends is the rise of new tools to drive better backchannel engagement with an audience, particularly with private messaging channels on social media.

Green Entrepreneur points out that, even though social media advertising isn’t allowed, cannabis brands can use their social channels to drive organic means like influencer marketing and by creating brand ambassadors. Meanwhile, as Adweek reports, direct messaging on Instagram and through the Facebook Messenger app has become a hotbed of interaction for cannabis brands looking to reach prospective customers.

In many cases, these brands have their Messenger chat box programmed to automatically pop up when visitors reach their business page through a desktop device. Chatbots are being used to automate responses and initial interactions with users, creating personalized interactions and engaging with an audience at scale.

The ability to use social media to start a dialogue can be very valuable for certain brands and industries, especially in cases where consumers are seeking more information and familiarity. Cannabis, as well as cryptocurrency, telehealth, and other emerging industries where social ad policies haven’t caught up to innovation, are well-positioned to use this backchannel engagement to increase awareness for their products, build a relationship with new customers, and activate a mainstream audience—even as paid social advertising remains out of reach.

While social media can be an excellent path to audiences, paid advertising there shouldn’t be the end-all and be-all in your marketing strategy. By employing a little disruption and some creative thinking, restricted brands can still use social platforms to promote their products and captivate audiences—no matter what stage of development they’re in.

At the same time, brands can leverage existing communitybased hashtags that insert their brand into reels of social content unified around a common interest or theme. Cannabis brands in the United States, for example, can use hashtags like #cannabiscommunity to extend their brand’s reach to

Jonathan Crowl specializes in digital marketing and content creation for both B2B and B2C brands, with an emphasis on startups and technology. His past and current clients include B2B brands IBM, LinkedIn, Mad Mobile, Oktopost, BrightSpot, and Waze, as well as B2C brands Porsche, Epson, and PayPal.

How Brands Can Actually Let AI Do The Talking

By Robert Ravensbergen

Advertising is experiencing a fundamental shift. Social media stories and influencers now drive growth for both brands and platforms. Digital now accounts entirely for Out Of Home advertising growth. Brands are increasingly emphasizing human sales and customer service. Experiential marketing budgets are shooting up. Every brand is looking for new, more targeted or more intimate opportunities to connect with consumers and help guide them to purchases.

All these cases are creative, agency or production-intensive, and rely on broad-based messaging or high degrees of human effort. There are an increasing variety of examples complementing this, where automated personalization is improving the results of campaigns and driving more consumer choices.

Ultimately, for all their effort to get closer and more targeted, brands still don’t get to reach consumers on a true one-to-one basis. This is because, in all these efforts, the messages only go one way - that is, towards the consumer. The consumer rarely gets an opportunity to talk back (unless they’re dealing with a person), and the brands don’t have an opportunity to then continue the conversation in a predictable, cost-effective and scalable way.

Conversational AI is emerging to challenge this framework, however. By allowing brands to automate conversations with consumers at any point in their customer experience, brands are creating ultra-personalized, two-way engagements that lead to truly one-to-one experiences. Leveraging solutions like chatbots and voice assistants, brands can let AI do the talking, and benefit with greater engagement, insight, sales and satisfaction. This trend is only just started, yet Juniper research predicts that by 2023, chatbots alone could drive over $112 billion in annual retail sales.

Why a Brand “Talking” Is Nothing New Typically, brands talk to consumers in two ways—either through campaigns, directed at an audience, or through representatives in sales and support that interact with consumers on the brand’s behalf. We hear a lot about brand integrity, consistency, and the importance of customer experience practice in winning and retaining more business.

What software providers don’t talk about is the degree to which human involvement is still needed in most of these interactions, and how the limits of legacy technology may be leaving brands behind.

There are a variety of challenges with both of the classic

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ways in which brands talk to consumers. For instance, most consumers are inundated with brand messages (as many as 10,000 per day). Most consumers distrust advertising, associate them with fake news, or are otherwise “cordcutting” away from major marketing channels and choosing to pay for ad-free experiences.

As for brand representatives, most consumers don’t necessarily trust that their opinions are objective, and will often avoid them and their own research on their mobile devices, even while in brick-and-mortar stores. Brand representatives can also be worn out by repetitive tasks, offer sometimes inconsistent messaging, and otherwise be too expensive to deploy in most cases where consumers need help.

In both these cases, changing the conversation and providing messaging solutions that are instant, immediate and personalized can yield positive benefits by engaging consumers a different way. Instead of relying exclusively on channels and experiences that may be tiring your audiences out, giving them something that they can actually talk to lets you then tailor the messages to their wants and needs. This provides more value to the consumer, but it also allows you to learn more about them, and gives you an opportunity to generate deeper investment in what your brand offers.

How Conversational AI Works

messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, and through voice assistants, mobile assistants, smart speakers and more.

All these many channels add up to opportunities for AI to communicate directly with consumers, and when framed properly, take on relationships with them that provide the assistance and support they need to find the right products and get the most value of them. This is even possible through solutions like conversational advertising, where formats like display ads are being shaken up by including chatbots that consumers can use to start evaluating products—all directly from an ad!

Conversational display adMost marketers believe that AI is best applied to backend functions where large amounts of data, obtuse analytical challenges, or other predictive tasks can be automated to increase the overall efficiency of our traditional marketing solutions. In reality, those solutions aren’t the real strength of AI, because they don’t have the capability to yield compounding value as brands use them. Brands need AI that can actually generate data and automate the interactions that consumers are looking for.

This approach can yield better results by creating a more seamless customer experience from a first path-to-purchase, all the way to replenishment and support scenarios. Added benefits also come when brands “remember” consumer preferences as expressed in conversational experiences,

Conversational AI is basically any machine that a person can talk to (learn about it in-depth here). In the past, this was usually isolated to technologies like Interactive Voice Response systems, which fielded and routed customer support calls through a conversational support interface. Later iterations of that technology through channels like email and live chat were still focused on customer support, but recent advances in AI technology now make a host of new interactions possible across marketing channels, in ecommerce and also through new support scenarios.

These interactions are done primarily through chatbots, which can be deployed on a brand’s website, through social storing them in systems of record like CRM and leveraging them in later campaigns.

This is exactly what conversational AI is built for, because it can provide consumers instant, personalized responses to their most immediate questions, while also offering the guidance and recommendations necessary to make their product choices as easy as possible. For large brands with multiple lines of business, this is where conversational AI can have the most impact—the more complex the decision, the more a consumer needs quick, easy and informative answers they can rely on.

How Brands Can Use Conversational AI As a brand or marketer, deciding where to start with conversational AI comes down to understanding the use case

you want to serve. These use cases depend partly upon your industry, partly upon your short and long term goals, and partly upon the ways in which you think you can improve your relationships with customers. A couple examples are as follows: Beauty Brands: Consumers face a lot of complexity when choosing beauty products, and given the nature of the products, they also expect interactive, personalized experiences that speak to their own needs, wants, and sense of self.

With conversational AI, you can create a diagnostic or quiz that reveals a consumer’s biggest concerns, preferences, or interests. Whether it’s for something like makeup or skincare, you can use that information to provide them recommendations around routines, product regimens, and other product choices. This ultimately has an immediate impact in increasing sales, and gets more out of an ecommerce investment.

through all the information available can be overwhelming.

Conversational AI can offer consumers relevant questions, generate data about them that makes other messaging easier to personalize, deliver rich, relevant content through messaging channels and ultimately convince consumers to convert, whether through booking test drives, visiting a dealer or other milestones in the path to purchase.

All of these scenarios offer tremendous variability and flexibility, but come down to the core concept of providing consumers the answers they need while offering guidance and recommendations that direct them to their best choices.

When consumers and brands find the most possible value in each interaction, everybody wins!

Banks: The variety of digital services available today have increased consumer expectations for instant and seamless experiences. Having become accustomed to various fintech solutions, consumers also want relevant and instant responses to even their most delicate financial concerns.

Providing a virtual assistant (which many banks have already done) can allow consumers to book and prepare for appointments, perform basic account management functions and even give them quick access to support representatives who can manage any issues or tasks for them. This can also be used for lead-generating activities, where chatbots consistently outperform the types of detailed forms that are required in financial services.

Automotive Companies: Consumers spend a long time considering the best vehicle to purchase, and usually want to narrow down the options available to them know all the options available before visiting a dealership, getting a test drive or making a final decision. If they don’t know a lot about cars, they’ll also need recommendations, since going

Letting Conversational AI Do the Talking It may seem like a great leap forward to hand off customer interactions to a machine intelligence, but, in reality, it’s one of the best, most reliable choices that you can make.

Conversational AI still requires proper scoping, design, and expertise to ensure that the experience delivered gives people the most possible value. It can only provide a human touch if it’s built with the sensitivity that marketers and designers have to human interactions, as well as the industry and product knowledge required to be a true expert on its own. Once deployed, the solution can take on a life of its own in driving deeper engagement with consumers, all in the ways that matter to them.

The benefits speak for themselves: multiple minutes of engagement per interaction, along with multiple data points per interaction and 30% sales lift compared to traditional web experiences. The opportunity for brands lies not only in meeting and exceeding basic consumer expectations, but offering connected experiences across more channels than ever before. From ads and search portals to websites, social media, voice assistants and even in-store through utilities like QR codes, you can let consumers pick up conversations right where they left off, seamlessly, and ultimately create deeper relationships than you may have previously thought possible.

20 Ways to Bust Through the Digital Noise With a More Human, Relevant Brand

By Pam Moore

Building a brand that’s relevant, memorable and valuable online requires a lot more than fancy visuals, fast-moving video or knowing how to play the latest Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn algorithms.

Standing out from the digital noise requires more than hopping on the latest social shiny technology object. At core you have to earn attention, then trust and inspire subsequent action.

Don’t pretend you’re someone, or some brand that you’re not. Find your authentic voice, personality and tone and share that worth the world.

Life and business work so much better when lived in high human definition, with no filters. Share your story, and invite, engage and bring others with you for the journey.

Let them help build you. When you win, they win also.

Social currency on the web today = attention + action. You need both, and to achieve this, you need to learn how to connect with humans in a real way. You have to know how to leverage the technology to be more human, make people laugh, share your story and inspire them to take action.

2. Find where your passions intersect with the opportunity to create and drive business results

Here are 20 ways you can bust right through the digital noise to grow your business.

3. Create a content calendar and plan

1. Be authentically you There is only one you, so be that person, period.

The best way to attract your ideal customer, which will create energy, mutual joy and value, is letting your true colors shine.

When you’re ignited by your passions, your energy, excitement and happiness will often exude from your being. Customers will feel this and be attracted to work with you.

Though it may seem fun to wake up every morning and spontaneously post content to your many social profiles, your results will increase exponentially if you take the time to plan out your content.

The more you can focus on the right audiences, objectives

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and strategies to attract your ideal audience, the more successful you’ll be.

By planning out your content in advance, you can ensure that your visuals are new and fresh, and stand out in busy feeds.

4. Know and love your audience

10. Double down on one specific industry or niche

Think about the brands you love. What is it about them that attracts you to them?

Get laser-focused on a niche in which you have experience and ideally case studies.

The more you know your audience and ideal customer, the better you can create content, products and services which connect with them in meaningful ways.

You should aim to become the “go to” leader and trusted advisor in your industry. Narrow your focus to streamline and prioritize content creation, influencer marketing and all areas of promotion, advertising and marketing.

Personal experiences make your brand more relevant and memorable. Look to create consistent, meaningful and unique experiences which will separate you from the crowd of status quo.

5. Know your value You also need to know your greatest strengths and weaknesses, which will highlight your key opportunities to improve.

When you’re crystal clear on the value you provide to your ideal audience and customers, your content will pop out to them in a positive way. They’ll be thinking “hey… that brand has just what I need now”.

11. Double down on one or two social networks In our training sessions, we teach attendees a three-tiered approach to prioritizing social networks.

It’s always better to start with one or two social networks where you can have a major presence, versus spreading yourself too thin across more than you have time or budget to achieve a measurable return on your investment.

Going deep can help you connect, authentically, with your target audience, and build a more human brand. Less truly is more in this respect.

6. Know the goals your audience has for life or business

12. Look for the cracks of opportunity competitors in your industry are missing

We must inspire our audiences to connect with us with a goal of helping them achieve their objectives.

For example, we hopped on LinkedIn 14+ years ago when they were still in beta, and we’ve been building our community and network there since.

When we do this, we also achieve ours by default, as they are both one and the same.

Inspire – Connect – Achieve.

7. Create content that helps your audience achieve their goals How can you help them save time, make more money, lose weight, feel better, get more sleep - the list goes on.

You need to know what they want, then create content that will help them achieve their biggest dreams. Then create more content that provides the path, roadmap and actionable steps to help them get to the desired state or level of success they’re seeking.

8. Create content that inspires and empowers Knowledge is power. Inspire your audience to take action with content that empowers them to win.

Inspiration does not equal a link to your blog post or sales page - you need to truly connect with the heart if you want to stomp the status quo.

Create content that’s easy to digest, share and remember.

Inspirational quotes or short stories that people connect with are both great ways to create meaningful and inspirational content, without spending a ton of time.

9. Get visual… as in really good visuals Don’t simply post the same ol’ same ol’ stock images and creative for your content, blog posts, videos, Instagram, Linkedin and email newsletters.

While others in our industry are just now realizing that LinkedIn is for far more than job searching - and that it’s now one of the best ways to connect with professionals - we already have a solid network, including 365,000 followers, and over 25,000 connections.

These connections have been nurtured for more than 14 years and deliver one of the highest ROIs of any social network our agency leverages.

13. Double down on one or two marketing mediums such as video, visual or audio Have you thought about digging deeper into video and/or audio?

Choose one and find ways to leverage the content you already have to reach new audiences. Add another layer of context and relevancy to not only pull over your existing connections, and re-engage them with your brand, but also to connect with new people and make new friends.

14. Tap into the personal brand ‘YOU’ factor People buy from people they know like and trust. When was the last time you woke up in the morning excited to talk to a logo on social media?

Invest in your personal brand and the payoffs will be significant in regards to building relationships, earning trust and growing your business.

Learn the difference between authenticity and transparency, and know that you don’t have to share everything you do

24/7 in order to build a rock-solid personal brand which generates result.

Prioritize social networks, content and mediums that will help you connect with your ideal audience, customers, influencers and partners you want to work with.

15. Power up with the OPC – ‘Other People’s Content and Community’ You don’t have to embark on your digital and social media journey all by yourself - connect with other leaders in your industry, such as influencers and highly connected thought leaders, both online and offline.

Share their content, build relationships, then partner up for strategic, fun and inspiring co-marketing campaigns that ignite your combined audiences.

as well as retargeting, in order to place paid advertisements in front of them on the other blogs, websites, and social networks they visit.

Retargeting works so well because you can target and connect with your audience by increasing brand impressions. It takes 6-7 brand impressions before someone will remember your brand.

17. Leverage data While your competition is more worried about looking, sounding and performing like everyone else, dig deep into the data. When the market starts to shift, find out why. When you feel you’re losing your edge, don’t be afraid to pivot.

However, leverage the data, and make the smart decisions that will help you not just survive, but thrive for both the short and long term.

Oftentimes, short-term sacrifices lead to long-term gains.

Success in business today is more of a marathon than a sprint. To win the marathon, you have to keep yourself and your team educated and on top of the latest trends and best practices to become the leader in your market and niche.

18. Focus on the big picture and the big wins. Stop sweating the small stuff The right baby steps that are aligned to the bigger vision will ensure you that you keep winning. Don’t get down with small setbacks or short term losses. Imposter syndrome is real and can kill your creativity and confidence if you let it.

You will win and you will lose deals, and even social media followers. However, the world is big, and there will be more where those came from.

Stay focused on your goals, and don’t give up.

19. Create once use many Create pinnacle pieces of content which you can use over and over again. This doesn’t mean you post the same piece of content repeatedly - instead, you can create amazing pieces of content that can be sliced, diced and served up in different formats, mediums, lengths and more.

Get creative and work smart. This will help you stay agile, while at the same time, building a solid foundation of evergreen content that can serve your audience for months and years to come.

20. Invest in humans You can never go wrong by investing in the passionate human beings within your community.

Learn and understand who they are, why they’re there, what they need, what they desire, who they hang out with, where they hang out with and more. The more you know about them, the better you can inspire, connect with and serve them.

16. Leverage smart paid media and retargeting Imagine capturing the attention of visitors to your website or blog multiple times after their initial or repeat visits?

You can tap into the power of social media paid advertising,

Inspire – connect - achieve. That’s the process you want to stick to, and the one that will ultimately set you up for optimal success.

Pam Moore, Owner/Partner, Marketing Nutz, LLC

A redefinition of customer-centricity

By WARC Staff

To be successful in future, brands will need to ditch longheld and generic demographic segmentation labels, such as ‘millennials’, and instead focus on needs-based communities and on how they can anticipate changes in the emotional needs of their target audience.

Writing for WARC, Richard McLeod of Netfluential cites the insights consultancy’s own research, conducted amongst 10,000 UK respondents, to argue that the fastest-growing brands are those that “can re-engineer products, experiences and communications to meet those needs more effectively than competitors”.

Growth is only one of six core values (the others being certainty, significance, variety, contribution and love), each with a set of underlying emotional needs that drive instinctive decision making, he says.

But this particular value (characterised by the needs for learning, ambition, meeting goals and overcoming difficulties) “is rising in importance, particularly with young adults”. (For more, read WARC’s report: How customer-centricity is driving brand growth for Netflix, Deliveroo and more.)

“Within growth, the underlying need to learn and discover

new things has emerged as the most important emotional impulse driving the decision making of young adults today,” he states.

An exemplar of this, he suggests, is Deliveroo, which, by offering content that inspires people to try new things – with website features such “our picks” and “healthy options” – is able to deepen its relationship with customers.

“Whilst its competitors provide access and choice, Deliveroo is becoming the destination for people who don’t yet know what to choose and need inspiration and guidance,” McLeod notes.

Consequently, Deliveroo is already ahead of better-known rival Just Eat, as well as established restaurant brand McDonald’s, in responding to the rising emotional need amongst young adults for learning and discovery (a key dimension within Growth).

In Netfluential’s research, 35% of people strongly agreed that Deliveroo is “helping people to learn and discover new things”, compared to 26% for Just Eat and 20% for McDonald’s.

The future of OOH media through a commercial lens

By Stefan Lameire

Having worked for almost eight years as a senior executive at Clear Channel International – a role I recently left – it left me with some interesting insights into the commercial opportunities of the fascinating industry of outdoor advertising, and how it might develop in the coming years.

1. Data boosts contextual relevance It comes as no surprise that, besides regulation, data and technology will be at the heart of OOH’s future transformation. The digitisation of media and media buying has turned this into an even bigger opportunity than for any other advertising medium.

The reason is pretty straightforward: outdoor has no content to monetise, content which in other traditional media is now freely available in a digital world. Outdoor is a pure-play advertising platform where content will only be added when contextually relevant for the advertising message or for the build-up of a specific audience or reach.

Even if content can add some value, the biggest value creating aspect for outdoor is probably context: making sure the right advertising message lands at the right time, in the right location and with the right audience. This is where

data comes into play. The advertiser which gets most out of its data will have a higher ROI. The media owner that best understands the value of that data will be best placed to obtain higher yields with its limited inventory.

An example I particularly like is from Spain, where the brand achieved a very high ROI. Nivea launched its face care-line Urban Skin using digital outdoor panels near relevant points of sales, and adapted the message based on a few freely available environmental data sets (temperature, air quality and UV-index).

A more recent example in Sweden, widely covered in the press, also used location and temperature to direct homeless people to nearby shelters, showcasing how outdoor advertising can do really good for society. It is no surprise this was one of the most awarded outdoor campaigns of 2018.

Where big advertisers and media agencies have been investing heavily in data, and in the understanding of data, the outdoor industry is still catching up.

Contextual, and especially location, data is starting to be used on a regular base, but the use of more detailed audience data is still in its infancy. Radar (Clear Channel) in the US is

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probably the exception among media owners, where media agencies have taken more structural actions acquiring major data companies (Dentsu-Aegis acquiring Merkle in 2016 for example, and most recently in 2018 IPG acquiring Acxiom).

Where recent GDPR-regulation is – rightly – aiming for a respectful treatment of the privacy of data, it should not stop the media industry, within those boundaries, exploring the value of using the available data.

2. The value of OOH digitisation: competing while completing other media With the digitisation of OOH comes not only additional flexibility, but also extra complexity. Managing that complexity is still in the process of being automated. This automation is developing rapidly, and it has to develop rapidly if the outdoor industry wants to capture the value of digitisation and the automation of media buying.

Putting digital panels in the ground, and exploiting the creative value that brings, is one opportunity; entering the world of selling over digital platforms, both for paper and digital assets, is another.

The industry has long hidden in a small, safe OOH ‘village’, where outdoor specialists plan and buy outdoor ad solutions for outdoor advertisers. The first digital panels were seen as an evolution of those solutions, but did not revolutionise the industry overall. Luckily OOH media owners have started to realise it cannot continue to operate in a silo.

The true potential of outdoor depends on how it completes and competes with other media. This is even more valuable in a digital world where the likes of Facebook and Google take away all growth in media spend. Outdoor is the perfect conversation-starter for any advertiser or brand wishing to continue that conversation with consumers via other communication channels. Twitter’s OOH campaign, which won a Cannes Lions Grand Prix in 2017, offered exponential value taking into account all the conversations it provoked on social media.

Platform sales (I prefer not to refer to ‘programmatic’, which is narrower and doesn’t do credit to the value OOH can bring) can facilitate that, with access to different players in the value chain, to different advertisers and ad budgets, adding an extra opportunity for media owners to better meet the needs of new and existing customers, and to further increase yields.

Today, outdoor media owners have access to new budgets from Heineken, for example, which can combine its objectives of acquisition and consumption in one campaign, conditionally triggered by location and audience, using 12 different creatives. That is revenue coming in from an existing advertiser for a campaign which simply was not within reach before, because outdoor media owners were not capable of delivering it. Now they are.

In order to fully exploit the potential, the outdoor industry will have to invest in more sophisticated pricing mechanisms, and in processes which manage at best the opportunity of multi-channel sales. Only then will it be able to sell the right product, based on the available inventory, at the right price,

to the right customer via the right sales channel. We just have to look at the hospitality and travel industry to see at the potential value this will bring.

3. Artificial Intelligence at the heart of further value creation Another source of inspiration for B2C communications industry comes from the Amazons of this world. By using data and AI, they manage to predict my needs as a consumer, and thus upsell their products. I am convinced that the value of platform sales will not only come from managing the sales process, but should evolve into a direction where media owners can predict (and thus steer) the usage of OOH’s limited inventory.

The day an outdoor media owner combines the intelligence of its own inventory data (real time availability, historical seasonality and yield) with more sophisticated audience data (who is reached when and in which mood), contextual data (weather, time of day, events, social media feeds, etc), and with data from existing or potential advertisers, it creates a new paradigm.

That OOH media owner will be able to suggest to Ford, for example, that the brand might be interested in booking a bespoke campaign based on available (or predicted available) inventory for its convertible car model at a certain point in time, because data analytics have shown that consumers tend to be more receptive to buy a convertible within those specific conditions.

Or the platform may decide that would be smarter to make a bespoke suggestion to Benadryl (assuming data would show hay fever season is approaching) because the pharmaceutical industry might tend to pay higher yields than the automotive industry.

The longer this approach is used, the smarter the platform will get, and the higher yields we will see for the media owners, whilst still serving its customers in the best possible way.

The outdoor industry is getting really good at meeting at best customer needs whilst maximising its yield potential by looking backwards at historical data. But if it wants to stay ahead of the curve, really take its share of the growth of media (and not just win share from other media), and further develop profit margins, I think it should radically increase the usage of data, accelerate the investment in tools and technology to manage that data, and start adding AI and predictive modelling.

The time has come to start looking forward, and not only looking backwards.

Customer ownership will determine who is in control I imagine the outdoor industry would fully agree that this is the right way forward. The biggest challenge might remain who will manage this platform or these platforms. Because there is one other thing we can learn from the big technology players: whoever owns the customer relationship will be in control.

Why does advertising still treat people like strangers?

By Simon Andrews

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of listening to a stranger at a party talk incessantly about his recent surgery, his divorce, or his collection of porcelain kittens, then you know it’s not an experience you’re anxious to repeat. That kind of behavior — droning on about topics that aren’t relevant to those you’re speaking with — isn’t just impolite and annoying. It defies the norms of how people interact.

A lot of advertising is just like that stranger at the party. It approaches the wrong people at the wrong time and with the wrong message. Despite the oceans of data that companies have about customers, and the technology available to tailor messaging, a significant share of advertising still happens via the old “spray and pray” method. That’s why people with no kids see ads for diapers and baby food, and why grandparents see ads for party cruises.

Why targeting works Targeted ads present a significant opportunity to reach customers more effectively. While this isn’t a new concept, it also isn’t being used to its full potential. The good news is that most media agencies have already become quite skilled at this, deftly sifting through data to build a highly detailed plan.

The next step, which is much less utilized, is for companies to tailor their creative to narrower audience segments. Right now, a company may present a spot with three slightly different executions for different demographics, but the fundamentals of the ad typically remain the same. That’s understandable since creative costs money. But, based on what I’ve seen in the market, the payoff associated with deeper targeting justifies the investment.

Consumers who see an ad with products and services that are relevant to them, packaged with creative that resonates with them (and even models who look like them) are far more likely to buy.

The evidence • 78% of respondents to the Curalate Consumer Survey say they’ve discovered products on Facebook. That discovery isn’t serendipitous, though it may seem that way. Social media platforms allow companies to target customers far more accurately than mass media thanks to the ability to base ads on detailed user profiles.

• Virgin Trains recently used TV advertising service Sky AdSmart to target specific metro areas where audience members were far more likely to travel by train. The result? The audience seeing Virgin Trains spots was

50% more likely than a test group to be interested in the creative, and six times more likely to book tickets.

• Even small brands can benefit. When UK bike manufacturer Ribble Cycles wanted to target consumers using video ads, it created audience profiles based on gender, interest in cycling, and location. It then used artificial intelligence to dynamically update videos according to customer profiles on Facebook. The number of people watching the entire video increased by 837%, and the cost per result decreased by 42%.

You have mountains of data. Use it.

Agencies have volumes of data available to them through syndicated research firms that track customer behaviors such as previous purchases and browsing histories. But it’s worthless until you start sifting through it and separating signal from noise. Once you have a signal that seems promising, you can call in creative and start working with them to tailor spots accordingly. Be systematic about measuring the effectiveness of various spots so you build a convincing business case for continuing that process in the future. Clients are far more willing to spend on tailored creative if they see that it delivers a clear ROI, so you need to show them hard numbers.

At the same time, being over-zealous with targeting can raise privacy concerns. It’s easy to imagine applications that spook people. (For example, a firm used mobile phone data to target people in emergency rooms and sent them ads for personal injury lawyers.)

Sometimes finding that line comes down to common sense.

Think about a store salesman a century ago. He would remember your name, the names and rough ages of your family members, and which sports teams you root for. He would greet you each time you came in and weave your information into his sales pitch. If he overplayed his hand by, let’s say, asking about your last doctor’s visit, you would have left and not returned. Digitally targeted advertising, essentially a form of communication, should apply those same principles.

In that way, it can’t just be handed off to an algorithm. AI systems are extremely powerful, but they can’t be trusted to make these kinds of judgment calls. The right approach to targeted advertising requires human oversight, and it likely always will.

Understand the relationship and the context, and tailor your message accordingly. And don’t bring up the porcelain kittens.

The CMO of the future

By Sam Peña-Taylor

Though the CMO is a powerful position in the business, it requires constant adaptation to survive. At Cannes Lions, WARC’s Sam Peña-Taylor heard executives from Tencent and LVMH explain their view of the future for the profession.

At Cannes, the most audible conversations are around the threats to agencies – specifically, the slowing growth and the painful restructuring of the big six holding groups. There’s probably as much fear as there is scepticism about the ability of consultancies to replace the role of the creative agency.

But, everyone agrees: this industry is changing.

Despite the lunches on yachts, the Riviera hill views, and all the other perks, the CMO isn’t safe either. The budgets that have fuelled their power in this town are increasingly having to meet different objectives. Where the role of a brand’s marketing chief was once simply to build awareness of the brand, the expectations of the budget and its keeper have become more complex and more diverse.

These executives are more than alive to these shifts. Beginning at last year’s festival, they decided to do something about it.

Along with the Association of National Advertisers (the ANA) in the US and Cannes Lions, marketing chiefs from around the world have been gathering periodically to talk about the challenges to the profession and how to deal with them.

It’s called the CMO Growth Council, and they have been meeting all week.

“This is the only way to bring back glory to marketing,” said Mathilde Delhoume, global brand officer at the luxury giant LVMH. She was speaking at an event at the festival following

a series of discussions that the group has had over the week.

Next to her stood Seng Yee Lau, Tencent’s SEVP and chairman of group marketing and global branding.

Neither of these are struggling brands. Tencent’s strength at a platform company is the envy of many western brands; its interests stretch over messaging, gaming, advertising, mobile payments, transportation. It has fingers in many, many pies.

LVMH is no meek challenger either. I could list some of its brands (or maisons) but the name alone gives you three.

These guys know what they’re doing, and they’re concerned about the future.

The escalation of the role contends with the narrative that CMOs are losing control. There is perhaps something to this. Whereas finance, for instance, may have tooled up, it remains a discipline that a Florentine merchant might still recognise: just balance the books.

Marketing is newer; its definition ultimately unstable. Like finance, it is about inputs and outputs: insights and creative, desire and business results, but the tools of the job bring the modern CMO only marginal gains in this multi-dimensional world. Many occupants of such positions have witnessed their discipline metamorphose before their eyes. The job of building brand awareness through advertising has become an expectation that CMOs and their departments should deliver customer-level personalisation at scale. This, Lau says, “requires a significant, fundamentally different, skill set, that, unfortunately, many of our colleagues around the world don’t have”. There is a plan to change this, however with three strategies.

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Revive the mission of the CMO There’s a lot of talk of missions in this town, but we might read it as a reconsideration of the idea of what the CMO is there to do. In this, both Delhoume and Lau are clear: the purpose of the CMO should be to think long-term about the brand. But the long-term requires ongoing work: “no one builds a legacy by standing still,” Delhoume cautions.

A brand, Lau said on Monday, is like a family trust. Too many people think of it and treat it more like a will left to the next person to do with what they want. As CMOs, they must recognise that going into the future isn’t about reacting to every single new event, but about putting the pieces in place to ensure the brand will survive and perform – both shortterm and in building long-term value.

“Lots of us will be pressured for short-term growth,” says Delhoume, “this is where you have to be very vigilant and never sacrifice the long-term growth of your brand.”

The science of brand building This is a priority for the Growth Council. Though marketing has creative opportunities, there is a more scientific side that can be measured. That’s not just clicks and impressions. The value of a brand is an almost-tangible, like a kind of dark matter: its effects on the rest of the business are significant, though its form is blurry.

Crucially, the establishment of an agreed cross-industry measure of brand value will now be a focus, the two marketers

declared. As part of its actions to enhance the brand side of the CMO role, the Growth Council announced that it will develop a brand equity valuation index.

This is fundamental to the business. The translation of brand equity to financial value in order to bring in greater investment has long been a difficult sell. If successful, there is great potential to create a new, fundamental metric whose effects on the industry could be huge.

Craft Craft, as an idea in advertising, is more typically associated with agencies, but there’s much that a CMO can learn. A lot of it is around understanding what’s possible, how the brand relates to the people it serves and who serve it. It is also about redefining what the discipline is.

To this end, says Delhoume, the focus for CMOs should be to create products, services, and experiences that exceed the expectations for the value they bring. This is quite different from traditional creative commissioning, media buying, and measurement. If this element of craft can take hold, it places the marketing chief far closer to the elements of the business that really pull the levers of growth.

There are also lessons to be learned from new markets.

Lau points to China as an example of a rapidly growing, mobile-first marketing universe that the west is beginning to resemble. The ideas of always-on, necessary sustainability and opportunities for e-commerce are all shaped by the influence of technology.

How to unlock marketing-led growth: Data, creativity, and credibility MARKETING HAS BEEN ON THE FRONT LINES OF THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION, BUT THE LANDSCAPE HAS BECOME MUCH MORE COMPLICATED, REQUIRING A FOCUS ON GROWTH, DATA, AND NEW MODES OF CREATIVITY.

By Simon London

In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, Simon London speaks with McKinsey senior expert Biljana Cvetanovski and partner Jason Heller about the next chapter of marketing, which is focused on digital—across many touchpoints—and the role of the chief marketing officer (CMO) as the architect of a company’s growth engine.

Podcast transcript Simon London: Hello, and welcome to this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, with me, Simon London. Today we’re going to be talking about marketing: a discipline that, in many ways, has been in the front lines of the digital revolution. Once upon a time, marketing was mostly about brand management and advertising. Now it has become a lot more complicated, and so has the role of the CMO. As we’ll hear, the scope of the role has increased enormously: from being a steward of the brand to, these days, being an architect of growth. So what does the successful marketing organization look like? And what skills do CMOs need to deliver against this challenging growth mandate? To find out, I spoke with McKinsey partner Jason Heller and senior expert Biljana Cvetanovski. Later this month, Jason and Biljana will be presenting their latest research at the annual Cannes Lions Festival. In this conversation, they give us something of a sneak peek. So Jason and Biljana, welcome to the podcast, and thanks in advance for doing this.

Jason Heller: Thanks, Simon. Exciting topic.

Biljana Cvetanovski: Thank you, Simon. Good to be here.

Simon London: So we’re going to be talking about the past, present, and future of marketing—big topic. For those of us

who don’t work in marketing, Jason, could you just start by stepping back and telling us what has changed over the last five to ten years? How has the day-to-day job of a marketer evolved?

Jason Heller: Marketing has been transforming for well over a decade—probably into two decades at this point. That said, the last five years or so really have seen this monumental shift in several areas. First, there’s never been as much data available for better targeting, segmentation, personalization, and analytics. The increased use of first-party data, the growing privacy regulations around it, new approaches to data governance: these are all part of the day in the life of a modern marketer and modern CMO, which was not true five to ten years ago—certainly not ten years ago.

The analytical horsepower required to mine through that data and create actionable insights to unlock new opportunities: it’s within reach for everybody. That used to be the heavy lift.

It used to be a really bold aspiration to think that you could have such a rich, data-driven marketing practice. Now that’s even available to the small- and midsize marketers.

Two years ago, we crossed a tipping point where digital-media spend outpaced TV-media spend. That’s not true for every marketer. But it’s interesting when you think about digital becoming the primary investment area for media—and this is driven largely by mobile, by the way. The capabilities, and the measurement, and everything that comes along with that need to change within the marketing organization.

With all that being said, consumer loyalty is on the decline.

Competitors are even closer. They’re one click away from your customers. And so there’s a lot of disruption that

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marketers have to deal with. Marketers and agencies are struggling to keep up with that pace of change. That degree of change—and the response and structure around the response to the change—is probably the biggest thing that’s happened in the last few years.

Simon London: So that is, indeed, a lot of change: more data, more digital, more mobile, more opportunity, but less loyalty. So, Biljana, you pick up the thread from here. What does that mean for the role of the CMO? Biljana Cvetanovski: It has always been part of the CMO role remit to drive growth. But I think it’s becoming much more of an explicit capability that they’re accountable to deliver. There’s been a movement The increased use of first- from the CMO taking on a more classical role—which may be around party data, the growing privacy regulations around advertising, brand stewardship, maybe even customer experience—and it, new approaches to data leapfrogging elsewhere.

governance: these are all part of the day in the life of And, increasingly, what we’re seeing is that CMOs are not only responsible a modern marketer. for delivering on the growth agenda,

but they’re also more and more accountable for designing and defining what it is that the rest of the organization is moving toward. It’s actually a very natural place for the CMO to be. They have access to many approaches to deliver on that growth agenda. That could be everything from building brands to growing loyalty to improving the end-to-end customer experience. What we’re finding is that, ultimately, the CMO is being judged on how well they can grow the business.

Simon London: So that’s very clear. But just make sure I understand the connection between the context that Jason just described and this new growth mandate for the CMO. What’s the connection between the two? What are the cause and the effect?

Jason Heller: Five to ten years ago, the thought of a CMO owning the end-to-end customer experience, even just the understanding of what an end-to-end customer experience was, was really immature. So I think we’re at a natural inflection point and evolutionary step in the role of the CMO and the role of marketing in driving growth.

Ultimately, the CMO is

being judged on how well The modern CMO needs to be able they can grow the business. to manage their profit and loss [P&L] effectively. They have to have a mind-set of delivering ROI [return on investment] on every investment that they make. They need to transform the operating model to be more agile. Agile marketing is the ability to rapidly test and learn. They need to work in true partnership with the technology organization. They also need to attract and nurture the talent to drive world-class performance. They also need to inspire their peers across the C-suite to have the aspiration and the risk appetite to foster this culture of experimentation, bold creative thinking, and the delivery of growth. None of that is trivial.

Simon London: I guess the next question is, What does it take for CMOs to deliver against this new mandate? What skills do they need? I know this is something that you’ve been

doing some research on, which you will be presenting later this month in Cannes. So Biljana, without giving too much away, just describe the research very briefly and give us some takeaways on what we found.

Biljana Cvetanovski: We spoke to over 200 CMOs and over 80 members of the C-suite and the board—CFOs, chief technology officers, and other executives. What we found is that the ability to reach out and influence across the C-suite is becoming increasingly important. The CMO can’t drive the company growth agenda on their own. They really need to build strong working relationships with the rest of the C-suite.

So in our research, we identified three archetypes for CMOs. The most successful archetype has the closest relationship with each and every member of the C-suite. They also work closely with the board. Not only does the CMO have a seat at the table in defining the strategy, they also have broader P&L responsibilities that go well beyond what you might expect for a classical or traditional CMO. So they own everything from the marketing agenda to customer experience to product to pricing and so on. They’re also much better at identifying and nurturing talent in house, especially talent that balances creativity and analytics.

Simon London: So the research shows a clear correlation between companies that have this archetype of CMO and the growth rates that they’re delivering. Is that right?

Jason Heller: Growth companies are eight times more likely to have this archetype of CMO. Companies with this specific CMO archetype are nearly twice as likely to have high growth than companies that have the other archetypes of CMOs. And, again, we’ll be unveiling all of this at Cannes later on this month.

If we tie this back to the work that we led last year, which was the integration of data and creativity, this highperforming archetype is three times more likely to attract what we call “whole-brain talent.” These are people who have an understanding and appreciation of reaching across functions—for example, if they’re in data-driven roles, reaching across into the creative and content functions, and if they’re in the creative and content functions, reaching across into analytics—and really embracing these new capabilities, or at least embracing the capabilities that the other side is doing. They’re also three times more likely to have dedicated analytics resources versus their peers, which prevents fighting and competing for priorities for some of the critical analytical capabilities that are required to make that integration happen.

When you have data and creativity living hand in hand every single day in practice, that’s what’s actually driving the growth, even more so than having the capabilities. Many companies have those capabilities. Not as many companies are integrating them properly.

Simon London: So just say a little more about this notion of cross-C-suite relationships. What are the critical relationships for a successful CMO to get right?

Biljana Cvetanovski: The critical relationship for the CMO to build is with their CEO. The CMO really needs to focus on making sure that the CEO is clear on their role: What part of

the growth agenda will the CMO drive? And the CMO needs to maintain the proximity with the CEO to make sure that the CEO is clear on the activities that they need to champion or support for marketing investment. There’s a second critical relationship, and that’s with the CFO. We found in our research that only 45 percent of CFOs believe that their CMOs are delivering on their organizational growth agenda.

Jason Heller: The CFO is the gatekeeper for the marketing budget. You need to invest in measurement. You need to be able to articulate clearly what the forecast is of the return on that investment. At the end of the day, the whole role of the CFO is to make fiduciary, responsible decisions about the way that investments are made at the organization. For us, it’s really more around marketers needing to get past vanity metrics. Invest properly in the measurement and analytics around investments, so that they come back to the CFO with a credible level of trust that what they’re presenting to them is going to happen.

I’ve heard from CFOs of our clients that everybody has a $100 million business case. Nobody delivers on that $100 million business case. And I have to decide which $100 million business case to invest in every year when I’ve got 20 of them being presented to me.

Biljana Cvetanovski: Exactly. So CFOs are really looking toward their CMOs to help them translate marketing metrics into the business objectives.

It’s not talking about brand awareness, or reaction to creative campaigns, or what the customer-sentiment analysis is telling them but instead about allowing the CFOs to understand exactly how the metrics will give you predictable and accountable growth. How will they drive the top line?

Marketers really need to focus in CFOs are really looking on, What are the metrics that will toward their CMOs to help really drive the business forward?

And what’s driving growth? them translate marketing

metrics into the business objectives.

Jason Heller: Another interesting thing is, from other research, we know that the percentage of board members who have marketing experience or a marketing background is really low. It’s on the rise. But you can’t fall off the floor, so it’s starting from a really low place.

Everybody thinks they’re a marketer. Everybody has an opinion. And the interaction model between the CMO and the board is probably quite important as well. I think what we’re hearing here is just that should be a level of practical, proactive engagement on the part of the CMO to make sure that the CEO, who ultimately is responsible for the growth of the company; the CFO, who is the gatekeeper to the funding; and the board, who effectively hires and guides the entire C-suite, are fully aligned on what the biggest bets are to drive growth.

Simon London: You mentioned there that the relationship between the CMO and the CFO, historically, can be a little bit tricky. Do we know from the research, Are there any other relationships that are standing out as maybe being not quite as smooth as one might hope?

Jason Heller: The interesting one, in terms of a relationship

that probably could be improved, is that with the CHRO [chief HR officer]. That was a bit of a surprise to us. It hints at some pain points related to attracting and retaining top marketing talent, which is a complex endeavor. It’s not as simple as going out and recruiting and paying people a competitive compensation structure. It’s as much about the value proposition of the organization, the culture, the interaction model with the rest of the marketing organization. We read this as just a struggle to attract talent in general. And that, reading between the lines a little bit, more enablement and empowerment are probably needed at the CHRO level.

Simon London: Jason, you mentioned agile marketing. And I think it’s no secret that marketers were some of the first parts of the organization beyond technology to get interested in agile working styles and methodologies. So how far have we come? Is agile commonplace now? Is it broadly adopted across the industry?

Jason Heller: I wish I could say that agile marketing was the rule and not the exception. But that’s not the case yet. We are slowly but surely seeing more marketing organizations adopting agile, at least for some of the more addressable, closed-loop parts of their marketing.

One of the challenges is you have a lot of individuals who have been in marketing for ten to 20 years and are really comfortable in a certain way of working. And agile actually upends that—repurposes them to be more operators than managers. There is a change of management that’s required there.

But agile marketing is one of the most effective ways of modernizing traditional marketers who have operated in slow, waterfall processes for their careers. When you pit, again, creative content, media, analytics, technology, and marketing ops together in a team, that’s where the magic really happens. It makes it possible, for example, to create and launch tests in a matter of days Agile marketing is one of versus a matter of months.

the most effective ways of

Now that’s not true in every channel. modernizing traditional That’s not true for every client. There are marketers who have scale implications there. But this is where the rubber meets the road in terms of the operated in slow, waterfall operational reality of how to drive growth processes for their careers. more effectively.

Simon London: The other thing that’s interesting to me here is that we’ve talked quite a lot about digital, analytics, the growth agenda, business cases, and so on. We haven’t really talked about creativity. Yet when you think about the big brands we all grew up with, they were built on the back of these iconic, memorable, creative campaigns. What’s the role of creativity in this new world? Does it even matter?

Jason Heller: Brands still matter. Creativity still matters.

And like all things, technology has evolved the way that we develop, deliver, and improve upon the creative ideas and, honestly, the way that we create connections with consumers: emotional connection, that creativity, certain messaging and imagery, and the way that we engage consumers. That all is still as relevant, if not more relevant, where we have less consumer loyalty than we have before.

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You see creativity thriving in the inspiring work that we see at Cannes every year. A couple of years ago, and in partnership with Cannes, we looked at 16 years of Cannes Lions award data. We created an index of companies that had a trajectory of wins at Cannes—not a direct correlation between winning an award and economic impact, but more the trajectory of creativity. Creativity is a very subjective topic. So if we look at the biggest, most widely recognized award as some proxy to some recognized creativity measure, we’re able to see that total return to shareholders, organic growth, and all of these indices were relatively correlated to the number of awards and the trajectory—the longitudinal nature—of the way that creativity was manifested within an organization.

And maybe more experimenting, more segmentation, more always-on campaigns.

But if we tie this all back to what matters, driving growth, last year’s research found that modern capabilities alone are not enough. Rather it was the integration of data and creativity: that was the accelerant. Companies that integrate data and creativity drive twice the growth rate of their peers. There are a few things that they did to facilitate that. Again, it’s sort of the theme of this conversation: treating data and creativity as equal partners—hiring and nurturing whole-brain talent who are eager to contribute to that integrated equation.

Biljana Cvetanovski: What we’re seeing is that marketers are having a much more conscious, deliberate, and structured approach to how they work with their agencies. Over the last few years, we’ve seen a few shifts.

And the last one, and maybe the most important one, is adopting a new operating model—adopting agile marketing—where test and learn and curiosity are at the core of both the DNA of the organization as well as the day-to-day operating model.

Simon London: Just to be devil’s advocate for a minute, it does strike me, as a layperson, that there’s a fundamental sort of arithmetic at work here. If the marketing organization is spending more on data analytics, data science, building its martech stack, and all that good stuff, surely there are going to be fewer dollars available to spend on creative, copywriting, design, big campaigns, and that kind of thing.

Is there any truth in that?

Jason Heller: It’s a great question. And I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game. I think that the investments in data and marketing technology, in particular, are unlocking sources of value that didn’t exist before. Therefore if you take a P&L approach to this, you get to a point where the investment in marketing execution and the investment in the enablement and instrumentation to unlock new opportunities will require additional investment.

Now in the short term, there are plenty of companies that do make it a zero-sum game because they haven’t proven to themselves yet that there’s an accountability and a predictive quality to the value that they’re going to unlock. But once you get to that point, it’s really easy to make the business case that marketing is just managing P&L. And as the investments in technology, data, customer experience, media, and creative increase, as long as they can forecast what comes out of the tail end of that engine, the investments don’t need to be a zero-sum game.

Biljana Cvetanovski: And even going beyond budget, there is the old paradigm of how marketers used to build their creative campaigns: maybe one, two, three campaigns throughout the year. What we’re actually seeing now is more of a shift toward more iterations of those campaigns.

You’re seeing a proliferation of the amount of the creative or the volume of the creative that marketers are creating. This can present some challenges. Creating those new iterations is not only having an impact on the cost that it takes and the engagement with your agencies, but it also has implications in the type of the agency ecosystem that you build for yourself in order to sustain that.

Simon London: Just double-click on that, if you don’t mind.

What are the implications for agencies in all of this? Do agencies have a future? And, if so, what is it?

The first one is an increasing shift toward insourcing, especially in relation to creative and content. That could be very simple creation of quick, cheap, fast, low-risk-type content—for example, creating a new banner ad. We see that being insourced with marketers because it’s less timeconsuming, less costly, than engaging the agency. But we also see the “in housing,” or insourcing, of the big idea—the big, creative idea on which all the campaigns will be based.

We see that spectrum, from simple activities to the bigger ideas, being insourced.

The second big shift is around the evolution of the agency ecosystem. If we think about ten years ago, as Jason mentioned earlier, you can count the number of marketing capabilities on one hand. You have creative, you have media, you have PR, you have promotions, and you have design. What you’ve seen over the last ten years is an explosion in the types of capabilities that you need for marketing. That’s everything from programmatic to media planning to ideation—you name it. It has become increasingly difficult for one agency to provide the one-size-fits-all solution for marketers. So we see a tendency toward marketers being very selective, in terms of the ecosystem and choosing specialist agencies to meet their specialist needs.

The third shift that’s been happening with agencies is around the emergence of joint ventures, of partnerships. This could be something as simple as tying more closely the incentive structure for an agency to the success or performance of the marketers or the organization. But we’re also seeing the opportunity where agencies are investing in or cocreating the intellectual property of some of their clients. So they are building close relationships and tying together their performance metrics.

Jason Heller: And let me just add to that. Agencies are in the process of reestablishing trust with their clients. There’s been a lot of controversy around transparency in the agency world. As a recovering agency executive, myself, I still see agencies as being as relevant as ever, maybe even more so to help clients navigate a really complex world around them.

Most clients are still working with agencies. I think they will continue to do that, despite the rise of insourcing. Agencies are not going away. But there is a crossroads, where we are

right now, where agencies just have a lot of trust to reestablish with their clients.

Simon London: We’ve talked a fair bit about the rise of data-driven marketing: test and learn, personalization, all of this good stuff. Yet on the other side, we have consumers increasingly nervous about who they give their information to and how it’s being used. We’ve got tightening regulation around how data can be collected and deployed, GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] being the poster child for that. Is this all having a chilling effect on the world of marketing?

Biljana Cvetanovski: Data-privacy regulation has had three major implications on marketing.

First, marketers require the explicit consent of consumers.

This really limits their ability to use the data. And sometimes they’ve been building their databases over a number of years. It really reduces the impact and the value of the assets that they’ve been able to create over the last few years.

The second implication is that the climate is forcing marketers to rethink the value exchange with the consumers and customers. It used to be just a checkbox that you could tick, and now marketers need to really push their thinking to say, “What is the value? What’s the value add if a consumer checks the box? And what’s the value add of them joining my database?”

The third implication is that there’s far less third-party data available in regulated markets. And that’s just a knock-on effect of the general, overarching privacy laws.

Jason Heller: One of the most important pieces there is this need to create the value exchange with consumers. This is a really good thing. Marketers now need to take the time to think about the customer experience, the value exchange, and how we’re actually going to create the value for consumers, which means better experiences and more value created for the marketer. I feel like we’re going to come out of the end of this with much better capabilities in how we engage with consumers in general.

Simon London: So marketers, maybe, had gotten a little bit lazy in how they were collecting data and figuring out what they could do with it? Is that fair?

Jason Heller: I think that’s right. I’d argue that marketers were not fantastic at using data when they had blanket permission, because they, effectively, were just banking that permission for some later day when they figured it out.

Now they don’t have the permission at all. And so it’s really holding marketers to a higher standard of figuring out how to deliver the right experiences to consumers.

Simon London: Let’s end by looking forward. If you think about the big challenges facing marketers over the next two to five years, what are they? Biljana, Most companies are maybe you start. What would you still repurposing their put in that bracket?

content from traditional channels. So this is a lost opportunity for reaching your consumer in a more mobile, tailored way.

Biljana Cvetanovski: I think the first one is really building in the growth leadership mind-set: building in that culture—and making sure that they’re building

the collaboration with their C-suite peers and the rest of the organization but also making sure that they have clarity of role and metrics and making sure that they’re really robust in terms of how they think about the business organization.

The second big challenge is around measurement. It’s incredibly important as marketing is stepping more explicitly into the role of driving the growth agenda. If you want to be accountable, then you must make measurement a priority.

Simon London: But isn’t that something that’s been a priority every year for the last 20 or 30 years? This whole business of trying to measure your marketing ROI is not a new challenge, right?

Biljana Cvetanovski: Simon, you’re right. Marketing effectiveness and measuring marketing ROI have been around for a long time. What has made it more complicated in terms of measurement is what we talked about earlier, which is the proliferation of different channels—the proliferation of touchpoints.

Simon London: And as you mentioned earlier, I guess the execution of creative across all these different touchpoints and channels is a challenge as well.

Biljana Cvetanovski: And that’s exactly the third challenge.

There’s been a lot of discussion around the need for digitalfirst content. But most companies are still repurposing their content from traditional channels. So this is a lost opportunity for reaching your consumer in a more mobile, tailored way. It’s a missed opportunity in engaging your customers in a deeper way—in the touchpoints where they want to be reached—and really creating these personal experiences across all the addressable channels.

Simon London: Jason, what comes to mind for you if we think about challenges for the next few years?

Jason Heller: I’m going to shift us from challenges, to maybe end us on a bit of an inspirational note. I think the next phase of digital and marketing transformation is really a move from doing to being—a move from companies doing agile marketing to companies being agile marketing organizations, a move from doing things that are customer centric to being customer-centric organizations, a move from doing analytics to becoming data driven. It needs to be in the DNA of the organization. That’s what creates the performance-oriented culture that can deliver the accountability that we’ve talked about, the predictable growth to the organization. That really is something new.

Simon London: So we are out of time for today. Jason and Biljana, thank you so much for doing this.

Jason Heller: Thanks for having us.

Biljana Cvetanovski: Thank you, Simon.

Simon London: And thanks, as ever, to you, our listeners, for tuning in. If you want to read more about marketing, growth, and the role of the CMO, there’s a ton of good stuff on McKinsey.com. Or in the spirit of mobile first, you can download the McKinsey Insights app, which you’ll find on the Apple or Android app stores.

Want to be more effective?

Here’s five ideas to consider

By David Tiltman

WARC launches a new white paper: Anatomy of Effectiveness.

It’s a distillation of the current evidence, case studies and thinking around effective advertising.

Why do this at Cannes Lions, a celebration of creative excellence?

Well creativity, as the report shows, remains one of the most powerful tools for driving effective marketing – when it is properly applied.

But what sort of creativity? And what kind of framework should it sit in? With what budget behind it? In what channels?

Those are the kinds of question that broad-brush studies of the business impact of creativity tend to ignore. But they’re exactly the sort of questions WARC’s clients in both agencies and advertisers come to us with. They’re the questions we try to answer in the content we commission, the analysis we produce, and the sessions we run (including at Cannes). And they’re the questions we try to address with the new white paper.

As we sifted through the research, we found it coalesced into five core considerations brands need to make: • Invest for growth – are you spending enough on your advertising to drive growth?

• Balance your spend – how are you splitting your investment between brand-building and performance marketing?

• Be creative, be emotional, be distinctive – is your creativity set up to drive effectiveness?

• Plan for reach – is your media budget going to the right places?

• Plan for recognition – will consumers know whose ads they are seeing or hearing?

Sounds simple. But none of these concepts is easy to apply.

Every element involves trade-offs and hard decisions on where to invest. And, of course, insights and creative thinking are required to bring it all to life – that’s what makes marketing such a dynamic industry.

The report looks at the rules of thumb around effectiveness – and also what is changing in a fast-moving industry. It features expert comment from the likes of Les Binet, Peter Field and Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.

So at a time when growth-starved brands are wondering how to get more bang from their marketing buck, Anatomy of Effectiveness gives them a framework.

Read the report at makeitwarc.com (or, if you’re a subscriber, get it on WARC.com) – let us know what you think.

And if you’re lucky enough to be in Cannes this week, get a hard copy at the WARC stand in the Palais – and get some fresh thinking on strategy and effectiveness at the WARC day of sessions in the Palais on Wednesday.

In the august company of one!

By BrandKnew

A designer who writes. Or a writer who designs? You can comfortably attribute both to Paul Jarvis and you would still be spot on. There are many more hats that he wears and that is what prompted us at BrandKnew(published by ISD Global) to reach out to him and understand what keeps him going. As a tech designer and internet consultant, he has spent years working with professional athletes like Warren Sapp, Steve Nash and Shaquille O’Neal with their online presence, and with large companies like Yahoo, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz and Warner Music. BrandKnew caught up with him in this freewheeling interview where he shares a lot including his new book ‘ Company of One ‘.

BK: Could you tell us about your growing up years?

Paul: I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto. I had plans to go

to university and get a computer science degree, but dropped out after 1 year to take a job as a graphic designer.

BK: Do you want to share some of your childhood dreams and aspirations?

Paul: I never dreamed of becoming a writer or an entrepreneur, both of those things just happened by accident.

BK: You wear multiple hats: writer, designer, podcaster, online course teacher, software creator etc- which hat do you wear best?

Paul: Writer. That seems to be my main job, since every other hat I wear involves writing. I write for designs I do, I write for podcasts I host, I write courses and software. It all involves a lot of writing, which I really enjoy.

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BK: The core narrative that you are propagating seems to be ‘ Small is the new Big ‘ or ‘ Better is the new Bigger ‘ - would you want to elaborate on that?

we don’t want to focus on – companies can adapt and pivot as needed without leaving a huge trail of workforce or equipment that no longer serves its purpose in its wake.

Paul: I think in business the predominant narrative is that growth is always good. But I think that needs to be challenged, since not all growth is good and not all growth is necessary.

Edward Abbey said it best in 1978: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

BK: In an era where scale is worshipped, your mantra is about un scaling- how has it been received? Pl take us through some examples if you will

Businesses no longer have to scale to succeed. Sure, there was a century where the ideal engine for business was growth and scale. It just doesn’t make sense any longer. Instead, our businesses can grow to a point and size that makes sense, and then we can shift our focus to optimising for enough.

MIT Sloan School of Management released a study, The End of Scale, showing that companies are staying smaller and “unscaling”, as the main way to gain traction and market dominance. Unscaling meaning that companies can do better with less by providing custom products and solutions, building on demand, and offering heavy customisations.

By staying small and lean – by renting or using scale on demand, by outsourcing tasks and parts of the supply chain

Paul: A study conducted by the Startup Genome Project, which analysed more than 3,200 high-growth tech startups, found that 74 percent of those businesses failed, not because of competition or bad business plans, but because they scaled up too quickly. Growth, as a primary focus, is not only a bad business strategy, but an entirely harmful one. In failing—as defined in the study—these high-growth startups had massive layoffs, closed shop completely, or sold off their business for pennies on the dollar. Putting growth over profit as a strategy was their downfall.

When the Kauffman Foundation and Inc. magazine did a follow-up study on a list of the 5,000 fastest-growing companies five to eight years later, they found that more than two-thirds of them were out of business, had undergone massive layoffs, or had been sold below their market value, supporting the findings of the Startup Genome Project. These companies weren’t able to become self-sustaining because they spent and grew based on where they thought their revenue would hit—or they grew based on venture capital injections of funds, not on actual revenue.

BK: Your first book was an e-Book ‘ Everything I Know ‘- what made you get into writing?

Paul: I started by writing a newsletter called the Sunday Dispatches. It became popular (over 35k subscribers), so I figured if people enjoy my writing, they may enjoy books I could write. So I started writing books. My first book was actually a book called “Eat Awesome”, Everything I Know, was my 3rd book.

BK: What was the big motivation behind writing ‘ Company of One ‘? What is the audience reaction so far been?

Paul: People are enjoying it so far, as it’s giving them the confidence to challenge “bigger is always better”. I wrote the book because I wanted people to know that they weren’t alone if they wanted to find “enough” instead of “more”.

BK: Greg McKeown wrote ‘ Essentialism ‘- the disciplined pursuit of less but better- are you both on the same page?

Paul: Agreed. “Less, but better” is actually a quote and one of ten principles from Dieter Rams, which I feel guides both Greg and myself.

BK: Would you consider it an advantage to be a journalist/ writer in the sense that it builds up an innate ability to be curious, understand an audience and create narratives that interests, captivates, engages and influences? Apart from the ability to see emerging trends?

Paul: Yes. All my writing is guided by how I feel, not according to trends. My audience enjoys that.

BK: In the work you did for the likes of Microsoft, MercedesBenz, Warner Music etc, could you share what project excited you most?

Paul: I’m a huge fan of cars and racing, so the MB project was definitely exciting, even though it was designing an interface for an internal tool they used, and had nothing to do with cars.

BK: Celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Ariana Huffington seem to be fans of your work- what would be your advice to ‘ solopreneurs ‘ to create their own fan base?

Paul: Write pieces that people will want to share.

BK: In the corporate space that you now straddle as a consultant, what are the glaring pain areas that you see and what you attribute those to?

Paul: I haven’t done consulting work for 5-6 years, so I don’t have an answer here.

BK: What prompted you to launch your online courses ‘ Chimp Essentials ‘ and ‘ Creative Class ‘?

Paul: I was getting a lot of email from people wanting to know what I knew on those topics. Basically, my audience

was asking me to create content to help them learn what I knew on those subjects.

BK: Which are some the books that have inspired you in your career thus far and which are the ones that you look forward to reading?

Paul: Deep Work, Cal Newport No Is Not Enough, Naomi Klein Lost and Founder, Rand Fishkin 10% Happier, Dan Harris The Punch Escrow, Tal Klein The Year of Less, Cait Flanders I look forward to reading Blake Crouch’s new book Recursion.

BK: What’s the story with all the tattoos?

Paul: I like tattoos :) There’s no story, I just enjoy them, similar to how I enjoy the artwork I have hung in my house.

BK: What makes Paul Jarvis go ‘ wow, another day at work ‘?

Paul: Work is just work. When I get up, it doesn’t matter how much I enjoy it or how motivated I am, it’s what pays the bills, so I do it. I obviously love what I do, but I also don’t put any more weight or preciousness on it than that—it pays the bills, and that’s motivating enough for me.

BK: What does Paul Jarvis do in his spare time?

Paul: I enjoy being outdoors, so I like to surf, bike, hike, kayak and simply be in nature.

The ultimate guide to strengthen your local SEO strategy

By Shane Barker

Every business should have a local SEO strategy if they don’t want to miss out on high-intent qualified leads and this is especially crucial for local businesses who need to target people in their city or region.

The priority of local businesses is to secure high ranking positions in a particular location. With that said, it’s important to note that the nature of SEO is not stable, it keeps on changing. So, it would be best if you think of actionable and effective ways to strengthen your local SEO and secure high rankings.

When done correctly, local SEO can help you generate more high-quality traffic, leads, and conversions. In addition to this, it can also help you compete with big brands and stay relevant in the competition.

This post will guide you with four effective tactics to strengthen your local SEO strategy. Let’s get started.

1. Optimize your “Google My Business” page One of the obvious yet the most important tactics to strengthen your local SEO strategy is to optimize your Google My Business page.

Listing your business with Google My Business makes it easier for people to discover your business. Once listed, your business will show up on Google Maps when users search for businesses like yours.

This will also help your business to rank better in search engine results.

Your business can also appear on the sidebar of Google search results pages when Google verifies your business as legitimate. You should follow the below tips to optimize your Google My Business page and strengthen your local SEO:

accurate, and up-to-date information about your business.

Add your business’ logo, relevant images, exact location, payment methods, the services or products you offer, and hours of operation.

Encourage your customers to add their feedback and ratings.

Always be quick to respond to your customer reviews.

These tips and tricks will help you strengthen your local SEO and generate more high-quality leads for your business.

2. Optimize your local business listings Local directories are one of the most common places where users search for local businesses. So, you should add your business listings to all popular directories in your niche.

These directories often rank high in Google search results for local search queries. Anyone who checks these directories can be redirected to your website or business if you optimize your listings. This will not only help you increase your organic search traffic but will also help you get qualified leads.

Update the name, address, and phone section These are the most important elements of your Google My Business listings because these will provide your contact details to potential customers.

It is crucial that all of your details are accurate and updated, otherwise, you might lose potential, high-intent customers.

Perform a hygiene check to your Google My Business listing.

Also, ensure that there are no misspellings and avoid using abbreviations or anything confusing.

If there is any change in your contact details, update all of your listings accordingly.

Make sure that you provide detailed,

Also, ensure that these details are

consistent across all listings. Otherwise, people might get confused and won’t know which one to trust.

3. Optimize your website content for local keywords You should optimize your website content with keywords that are relevant to your local customers too.

You can use Google’s Keyword Planner to find relevant yet local keywords using the location filter. The tool can help you identify the most popular and relevant local keywords that you should target.

Once you have a list of local keywords, you should include them in your website content, meta descriptions, titles, and URLs. However, you need to examine the competitiveness of your potential list of keywords before you use them. For this, you can use tools such as SpyFu to see if your competitors are also using these keywords. If the same keywords are strengthening your competitors’ local SEO, they might work well for you too.

However, a word of caution, never over-use keywords. That’s because keyword stuffing might make your website content seem spammy. Make sure that you evenly distribute your keywords throughout the content and add them in a way that they seem to fit in naturally.

For instance, Focus Booth, which is a famous photo booth in Toronto, uses their location-based keyword “Toronto photo booth” wherever possible.

As you can see in the screenshot below, they have mentioned the location of their business exactly at the center of their landing page. Similarly, their meta title also starts with the same local keyword.

7 Brands Killing It With Humor on Twitter IT’S REMARKABLE HOW BRANDS CONNECT WITH PEOPLE WHEN THEY STOP TAKING THEMSELVES SO SERIOUSLY.

By Deep Patel

Everyone loves it when brands mix it up on Twitter. For some brands, Twitter is the perfect place to let your hair down and rebel against corporate culture. It’s where you can really define your brand voice and personality.

But humor isn’t a one-size-fits-all type of thing. Some brands do it well. Others bomb when they try it. The ones that get it right usually know their audience very well, and they know how to come across as funny, quirky, strange or cute rather than weird, inauthentic or gimmicky.

The best brands use humor to develop strong followings with shareable tweets that go viral. If you want to know what it takes, here are 7 of the funniest brands that are killing it daily on Twitter.

1. Oreo If Oreo is the king of agile marketing, then Twitter is its crowning gem. The brand’s interaction on Twitter shows that it not only has a finger on the pulse of its audience, but it can react with whip-smart efficiency.

Remember when the power went out during the Super Bowl in 2013? Within minutes, @Oreo posted an ad on Twitter that showed a single Oreo in a shadowy backdrop with the title: “You Can Still Dunk in the Dark.” The caption below read: “Power out? No problem.” Viewers loved Oreo’s funny take on the power outage and retweeted the meme more than 10,000 times in one hour.

The quick-witted tweet likely had an even greater payoff than Oreo’s actual Super Bowl ad, which cost millions to create.

2. Old Spice Old Spice is best known for its surreal viral commercials featuring former NFL athlete Isaiah Mustafa. The company has managed to insert the same kind of outlandish and fun branding into all its social media accounts. Old Spice has developed its unique voice through its hilarious and sometimes ridiculous posts featured on both its Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Although the company has been diligently focused on being the loudest and quirkiest voice in preventing male stink, it’s

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not content to stay in its social media lane. For example, at one point @OldSpice decided to tweet at Taco Bell, taking umbrage at Taco Bell’s fire sauce because it didn’t contain actual fire, and claiming it was false advertisement. This apparently incited a Twitter “war” between the two brands.

The witty and funny exchange piqued user interest and is a great example of how to stand out in an otherwise mundane Twitter feed.

Old Spice is an example of a brand that is at its best the further it allows itself to venture from routine and embrace its entertaining and just plain weird brand of humor.

3. Taco Bell It makes sense that the fast food chain known for feeding many a midnight munchie would embrace playful banter and silly wisecracks on its social media accounts. Where @ tacobell truly shines on Twitter is with the company’s witty one-liners, clever photo updates and hilarious comebacks that are sure to make you crack a smile.

One of the reasons their brand of humor works so well is that their hilarious tweets show that they’re human. They use their exchanges on social media to showcase their unique personality. That, and the fact that they react almost instantly if they’re called out, so you know they’re engaging with people in real time, give their Tweets a feeling of being relevant and authentic.

4. Charmin Charmin is a great example of a brand that uses humor to align with the products it sells. Who would have thought that discussing toilet paper would result in one of the most engaged social media communities on the planet? But that’s exactly what Charmin has done, and has done quite successfully. Its presence on Twitter (@Charmin) is a mustfollow.

In fact, the company was named among the top “Sassiest brands on Twitter” for its hilarious banter with its audience and #tweetfromtheseat posts, which it uses to incorporate bathroom humor puns and to sometimes chime in on current news or pop culture.

Charmin’s feed aspires to a simple motto: “We believe that life is full of little pleasures.” It works because they keep a playful “mischief-maker” tone to break through all the noise on social media and they often say something unexpected, relevant and funny. The company’s Twitter minders know they aren’t going to please everyone, but those who do “get” the company’s humor love it.

5. Moosejaw Outdoor retailer Moosejaw has truly nailed its brand voice and mastered the art of using Twitter by letting its personality shine through. The outdoor retailer makes a point of not taking itself too seriously, and even calls itself “the most fun outdoor retailer on the planet.” @MoosejawMadness is all about being original and finding the humor in life’s absurd details. They’re also careful to stay

completely non-gimmicky.

Take, for example, this random Moosejaw tweet: “My will contains only one request: I want a motion detector on my tombstone with a speaker that plays Thriller whenever anybody is around.” That’s the kind of thing that would make you chuckle no matter who it came from.

The takeaway from their success is that always being professional will only put you in the category of “boring.”

You have to give your audience something unexpected that will stick with them. Food humor is often thought-provoking and tongue-in-cheek. You also need to nurture your brand’s unique personality and come up with what works for you and what doesn’t.

6. Casper In the battle to decide how America sleeps, Casper is aiming to be the Goldilocks of mattress brands -- the one everyone likes and wants to own. It’s also become the internet’s favorite mattress store because of its humorous one-liners and the riddles it asks Twitterdom to solve. The “Tweeting Mattress” won the Shorty Award for Best Overall Twitter Presence thanks to its laugh-out-loud tweets and culturally on-point humor.

Its main objective is to raise awareness of the brand, and Casper does this by focusing on its personality. Whether it’s something as simple as “Today’s forecast: cloudy with a chance of naps” or “Go big or go to bed” meme, @Casper has perfected its cute and appropriate humor and tone, resulting in widespread marketing success.

In short, the mattress company uses social fodder to help it gain comic notoriety, not to mention a sizeable following on Twitter.

7. Denny’s Denny’s is like that funny friend you like to have around because you know they’ll always say something to make you laugh. And on Twitter, their 140-characters-or-less wisecracks seem to tap into that surreal and sometimes nonsensical atmosphere its restaurants have around 4 a.m. on a Saturday night.

Usually bizarre, and always funny, @DennysDiner is an irreverent page devoted to pancakes, syrup and amusing (and strangely thought-provoking) memes. In true Denny’s fashion, it serves a dollop of humor with whatever current melee is taking place on Twitter.

The chain’s Twitter presence has also helped establish the brand with Millennials and Generation Z. Denny’s understands the importance of staying culturally relevant and continuing to feed its audience something other than (boring) business as usual.

Deep Patel is the author of A Paperboy’s Fable: The 11 Principles of Success. The book was dubbed the #1 best business book in 2016 by Success Magazine and named the best book for entrepreneurs in 2016 by Entrepreneur Magazine.

A HISTORY OF BRANDS HACKING WIKIPEDIA THE NORTH FACE FOUND ITSELF IN HOT WATER WHEN IT HACKED WIKIPEDIA FOR ITS OWN MARKETING STUNT. IT’S HARDLY THE FIRST TO TRY SUCH A TRICK

By Ilyse Liffreing

The North Face found itself in hot water this week when it hacked Wikipedia for its own marketing stunt.

Violations of trust

Violating Wikipedia’s paid advocacy guidelines, The North Face’s Brazilian office, working with Leo Burnett Tailor Made, switched images on Wikipedia pages of popular outdoor travel destinations to images of athletes wearing its products in order to appear higher in Google search. In response, Wikipedia updated The North Face’s Wikipedia page with a section linking to information on its Wikipedia deception.

Rearing from plenty of backlash online, The North Face has apologized and ended the campaign.

Of course, Wikipedia has conflict-of-interest and paiddisclosure policies in place to eliminate articles that that mislead its large audience. After all, it’s accessed by more than 1.5 billion unique devices a month and is edited more than 350 times a minute. That’s according to Zack McCune, senior global brand manager at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and its 250,000 volunteer editors, who have greater editing powers than the general public. But clearly, such policies haven’t stopped brands like The North Face.

The hacking attempt is nothing new to Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia launched in 2001, multiple brands and agencies have manipulated the site’s open format, which allows anyone to edit articles, for their own marketing gain. Among brands previously called out are Burger King, SeaWorld and NBC News.

“When brands or other actors manipulate Wikipedia for their own personal gain, it violates the trust we have with our readers to provide neutral, fact-based knowledge,” says McCune, “and it creates more work for volunteers who have dedicated themselves to a monumental project for the public good.”

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and Anheuser-Busch, among others, that were allegedly caught doing so. Griffith decided to create WikiScanner after it was revealed in 2006 that the staff of the United States Congress were editing Wikipedia articles of politicians like Joe Biden and Marty Meehan. Griffith correctly assumed that corporations might be doing the same. WikiScanner was able to connect company-owned IP addresses to Wikipedia edits, but it was impossible to track which individuals had made those edits and whether they were even employees. In 2007, The New York Times reported on the examples, one of which involved SeaWorld, then owned by Anheuser-Busch, which deleted a paragraph that stated the amusement park showed a “lack of respect toward its orcas.”

Rewriting history The ability to edit company articles and those about significant individuals have become stricter over the years. In order to make a change to the Donald Trump Wikipedia page, for instance, one would have to make a suggestion to Wikipedia and an editor dedicated to the page would decide if it is warranted. As a result, companies have shifted to pay outside sources to make those suggestions.

McCune says that while the Wikipedia Foundation doesn’t have specific numbers on how often conflict-of-interest edits occur, it has created a Wikipedia page of its running list of violations. These include: companies updating their own Wikipedia articles to paint themselves in a better light; garnishing their information to boost a marketing stunt; or even paying Wikipedia editors to do their dirty work for them.

Whopping misdemeanor Perhaps one of the most well-known examples of a brand hacking Wikipedia is Burger King. In 2017, Burger King released an ad from David Miami that triggered Google Home to read off a list of ingredients from a Whopper article on Wikipedia. An open letter signed by nine Wikipedia editors asserted that the burger chain had edited the site with “hidden ads” that broke Wikipedia policies. At the time, many in the industry applauded Burger King for its inventive use of the Google Home, without considering how it abused Wikipedia’s terms. For the most part, brands that take advantage of sites like Wikipedia in the name of a campaign are hoping to cause a stir to generate free publicity and, therefore, expect the backlash they receive.

As recently as 2018, HuffPost reported that Facebook, Axios, NBC News and Nextdoor had paid lawyer Ed Sussman to lobby Wikipedia editors to make changes to their articles about public-facing individuals at their companies, such as Sheryl Sandberg, Jonathan Swan, Chuck Todd, Andy Lack and Noah Oppenheim. In one of the suggested edits, Sussman argued that criticism appearing on NBC News’ Wikipedia page violated Wikipedia’s rules because it did not give an opposing point of view. The content under contention was about how NBC News handled the sexual misconduct allegations against Matt Lauer. There have also been instances where companies or PR firms have paid Wikipedia editors directly to change pages. One PR firm, called WikiPR, created more than 300 fake accounts for clients. In 2014, PR firms like Edelman and Burson-Marsteller committed to abide by Wikipedia rules and not edit clients’ pages.

Working with Wikipedia Despite a history of abuse from brands, agencies and PR firms, Wikipedia is eager to partner with companies in ways outside of marketing on its site. For instance, the Wikipedia Foundation worked with Universal last year to design Wikipedia T-shirts promoting Lil Wayne’s album release with proceeds going to the Foundation.

Besides blatantly using Wikipedia for marketing stunts, multiple companies have been called out for manipulating their profiles either by text that didn’t exist before or deleting content—either making the edits themselves or paying an existing Wikipedia editor to do them.

At a time when consumers are calling for more transparency, if brands attempt to hack open-source sites like Wikipedia for commercial gains, they may end up actually lowering the perception of their brands among consumers.

WikiScanner, a public searchable database created by Virgil Griffith that existed from 2002 to 2007, uncovered a lot of attempts to alter company Wikipedia pages. It also named companies, like Disney, Dell, Pepsi, Boeing, Nestle

“As we’ve seen from the responses to The North Face’s marketing stunt,” says McClune, “brands that unethically manipulate Wikipedia for their own gain also harm their reputations.”

The 30-second trick that can make anyone more creative “THE REASON IT WORKS IS BECAUSE EMPATHIZING, OR THINKING ABOUT SOMEONE IN AN EMOTIONAL WAY, LEADS TO MORE COGNITIVE FLEXIBILITY,” SAYS PROFESSOR KELLY HERD.

By Mark Wilson

If you’re designing a new product or marketing campaign, what’s the better source of creativity: Your brain or your heart?

That’s a question posed by the University of Connecticut and the University of Illinois in a new study published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Their conclusion? It’s your heart. It’s more important to think about how your audience or users feel than how they might act. And once you know that, you can actually change your own thinking to be more creative.

“A lot of people are told to be very objective. ‘You’re a professional. Think about this in an objective way. Don’t get caught up in emotions,’” says Kelly Herd, marketing professor at the University of Connecticut. “But what we find is that [the empathetic] process actually leads to more creativity.”

Over a series of five separate trials, Herd and co-author Ravi Mehta asked everyday people to conceptualize new products, like toys for children, grocery carts for the elderly, and new flavors of potato chips for pregnant women. Crucially, half of participants were instructed to think about these problems cognitively–to consider logical solutions. The other half of participants were instructed to close their eyes for 30 seconds and empathize with the end user, to try to feel what they were going through, before beginning the design.

Across trials and tasks, the empathetic designers were found to be measurably the most creative (the results were judged by various independent panels), and crucially, their ideas were no less practical than the logical group. In other words, their creative ideas didn’t come at the expense of realism.

For instance, when prompted to come up with potato chip flavors for pregnant women, the cognitive thinkers came

up with flavors like “salt” and “BBQ.” But the empathetic thinkers thought up with flavors like pickles and ice cream, sushi with wasabi, and something called “margarita for mom.” Sushi and margaritas are not just surprising choices, they’re both foods that most pregnant women abstain from for nine months.

But why is empathy such an effective creative tool? Is it that when you begin to think about someone’s feelings you just care about them more and work harder? No, says Herd. In fact, the study controlled for that possibility.

“The reason it works is because empathizing, or thinking about someone in an emotional way, leads to more cognitive flexibility,” says Herd. “Cognitive flexibility comes in when thinking about new ideas and new pieces of information as you brainstorm.” Basically, that mental agility helps you consider many possibilities and iterate on ideas more fluidly.

“Empathy actually just makes you better and more cognitively efficient. And that to me is way cool,” says Herd. “If you want to motivate people to be more creative, there’s lots of reach on that. We’re saying you don’t spend any more time or more energy; just do it better.”

So how can you leverage empathy to be more creative? Herd recommends a simple practice. Just spend 30 seconds or a minute thinking about someone else and how they must feel– that can be anyone from the user for your next product, to a relative for whom you need to buy a Christmas gift.

“I think it can actually be pretty quick,” says Herd. “It’s not like you need to sit back and think about this for an hour to get that benefit. Just taking a moment can shift your thinking.”

Building Strong Brands: The Inside Scoop on Branding in the Real World TIM CALKINS’S BLOG DRAWS LESSONS FROM BRAND MISSTEPS AND TRIUMPHS.

By Timothy Calkins

There’s probably even more to learn from the brands that mess up.

From United Airlines forcibly removing a passenger from an overbooked flight to Sea World’s long, slow trickle of negative publicity, Calkins’s much-lauded blog Building Strong Brands is the place to go for insightful takes on brands in the news.

“I hope my blog encourages people to think a bit more deeply about brands, marketing, and communication more broadly,” says Calkins, a clinical professor of marketing at Kellogg.

If you are unfamiliar with his blog, here’s a preview of what you’ve been missing.

A “Pay Your Age” Fiasco By all accounts, Build-A-Bear’s recent “Pay Your Age Day” promotion was an utter disaster. Crowded stores, long lines, and “safety concerns” forced the stuffed-animal retailer to shut down what was intended to be an all-day event by 11 a.m.

Clearly, the day marked a low point for the retailer. After all, no company wants to be associated with crying children. But as Calkins wrote in a recent post, Build-A-Bear’s brand may experience a less obvious—and potentially more insidious— hit for quite some time.

By offering its products at $3 or $5—if even for a day—the

company may have set the expectation that this is all that its product should cost. “Pricing is complicated,” writes Calkins, “especially for items that aren’t easy to compare. What is the right price for a home robot? I have no idea. How about a flying personal drone that can get you to your work? Not a clue.”

So consumers use what a product does cost as a reference.

“For many people, the correct price for an iTunes song is 99 cents, only because that’s where Apple started,” Calkins explains. Now that some people have seen a stuffed narwhal or T-Rex go for a handful of dollars, their willingness to pay could be influenced “for many years to come.”

Freedom for All In another recent post, Calkins explains why he thinks Budweiser’s creatively named new Freedom Reserve Red Lager—“inspired by a recipe that George Washington wrote in his journal in 1757”—is a good idea, though unlikely to be a blockbuster.

Fraction Confusion Or check out this post on Fifth Third Bank’s acquisition of MB Financial Bank. “The move,” writes Calkins, “gives Cincinnati-based Fifth Third an opportunity to do something it should have done a long time ago—drop its ridiculous brand name.”

The uncertainties of judgement

By Andre van Loon

Charlie Ebdy recently wrote a fascinating article: ‘Adapt or Die: The Nature of Brand Strategy’. In it, he criticises Byron Sharp, Les Binet and Peter Field for their search for universal rules to advertising and marketing. I recommend you read it.

It’s a hefty piece, but really worth it.

But that’s not to say I agree with all of it.

In a nutshell, I think Ebdy attacks the right issue, but comes up with a faulty solution.

The problem is simple. Byron Sharp, Les Binet and Peter Field work hard, and with a lot of attention from the industry, at coming up with universal rules to advertising, branding and marketing. In a way, they’re easy targets. Anyone working single-mindedly, and in all seriousness at coming up with universal rules, that work across different cultures, contexts and for different brands and audiences, can be shown examples of creativity and marketing that did a good job, but that didn’t follow their formulas. ‘Gotcha’ examples.

However, their typical response is to dismiss these as exceptions to the rule – one-off wonders – that don’t allow for agencies and brands to put big budgets behind the triedand-tested. And, no doubt, that’s a respectable position to

take. But the uncomfortable truth is that sometimes one-off wonders can become transformative and hugely innovative examples to an entire market or industry. Ford’s automobile, versus faster horses.

You know a great creative execution when you see it, even if it breaks all the rules in the book.

Now, I like reading Sharp, Binet and Field, because they concentrate on establishing ‘how advertising works’, and how brands should market their products. And there’s a lot of value in what they often say: fame works, emotion works, music, celebrities, mass reach, mental and physical availability all work.

But I also think they have to be taken with a pinch of salt; valuable voices that don’t own the entire truth. At heart, I feel their drive to universality is an overreach. Their overreliance on empiricism as a method means they review what has worked in the past, all the while dismissing what didn’t work as impossibilities, irrelevancies, mistakes.

What has worked before will work again; here’s the empirical evidence, times a thousand.

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Ebdy sees all this, and attacks it head on: …the basic ambition…to create universal rules, a skeleton key of a solution capable of unlocking any business challenge, regardless of context – is, and always will be, impossible…different companies have different challenges…there is no universal outcome even if universal theories are applied.

Essentially, what Ebdy does is to reprioritise context and particularity over universality. There are rules, he doesn’t dispute that, but they have to be thought through and applied – or disregarded – when working on specific brands, alive in different cultures. Rules are there to be broken; whatever works now should be more important than adhering to historical success.

I like that; it seems to me a good mindset for anyone working in creativity.

But Ebdy goes on to attempt to replace universal rules with, well, another set of rules. And, although it’s welcome, as a new thing to think about, I don’t think the theory on which he bases it is very useful.

Ebdy grounds his alternative approach in what he calls “four adaptive variables” to which brands should adhere – FEAR, in short: Food (the customers brands need to acquire); Environment (the effects of culture, competition and technology); Advantage (the strength of the business); Risk (hunger for growth).

Ebdy comes to these four variables through a reading of Darwin. In his conception, brands are animal-like entities that survive or die in a wild environment of intense competition.

The world of business, branding, advertising and marketing boils down to who can adapt to win. Of course, that’s a description of a world many will recognise.

And yet.

Survival of the fittest; the triumph of the strong; adapt or die. I find it difficult to fully believe in socio-cultural theories which take Darwin as their North Star. Darwin talked about the natural world, and of course you can translate theoretical notions beyond the field they originated in. But I just don’t think you can usefully translate ‘adapt or die’ as a principle to human creativity and productivity.

Sometimes survival of the fittest describes what goes on pretty well; other times, it misses the values of humour, enjoyment, kindness and empathy – let alone altruism. Businesses, brands and consumers live by – and may even profit from – those aspects too.

In effect, what Ebdy proposes is to override the coldly clinical approach of empiricism and rule-making with a more spontaneous, attuned approach of Darwinism and adaptive principles.

Use them or lose them: what works is what keeps you alive.

The winner takes all.

I enjoy reading Sharp, Binet, Field, Ebdy – and a host of others – about how advertising and marketing should work.

But I also disagree, quite often, with what they say, and with the philosophical foundations on which they build their arguments. For example, I’m suspicious of empiricism: it looks backwards and construes commonalities and formulas out of what’s happened, dismissing outliers and the unexpected (at worst, at least).

And I don’t fully buy Darwinism as it’s so often applied.

Darwin wrote some 160 years ago, and a lot of his theories have been worked on by his later followers and students.

Natural selection and adaptation have been modified since their original conception, to become more nuanced. There is more at play than adaptation in the survival of species, not least pure chance and, in human societies, psychological factors. This, I feel, is lost in Ebdy’s interpretation; taking Darwin at face value, and not taking account of the later modifications to his thinking.

Surely, even Darwin wouldn’t be ‘Darwin’, today.

The drive to finding all-encompassing solutions can detract from a set of people trying to make good work, bouncing ideas off each other, never minding the theory or contexts they came from. It can be immensely helpful for one of the group to have read Sharp, Binet, Field, Ebdy – or someone else altogether – but it can also be the intern or grad straight out of Uni who comes up with the insight that unlocks everything.

For me, structure and theory need to sit with impatience and inspiration.

In the end, the best thing I have read about advertising comes from Stephen King, writing in 1975.

There are danger signals here and there of marketing people trying to return to simplistic, universal advertising research solutions. They feel…that over the last 10 years there has been a lot of talk, but little progress; and that, in today’s tensions, it may be better to grab something that’s simple and solid and comprehensible, rather than face the uncertainties of judgement…I don’t think we should try to produce advertisements or evaluate their effect without having some theory of how they are meant to work. At the same time, I don’t think we will ever solve the ‘how advertising works’ problem.

(From: Stephen King, ‘Practical Progress from a Theory of Advertisements’, Admap, October 1975.)

I like “the uncertainties of judgement”. It’s a great way to think about the task of trying to make creativity work.

It’s never a done deal. It certainly wouldn’t be much fun if it was.

Andre van Loon is Research & Insight Director at We Are Social

Senior business leaders lack confidence in building brands

By WARC staff

Despite the evidence that brand building helps create value over the long term, new research indicates that over half of business leaders – including 30% of senior-level marketers – rate their knowledge of brand building as average to very poor.

That’s according to the Board-Brand Rift, a new report conducted by the Financial Times in partnership with the Institute Of Practitioners In Advertising (IPA) and based on a global survey of more than 500 FT readers, 43% of whom were C-level executives.

drivers of those objectives.

For example, over half of business leaders ranked social media as one of the most effective channels for brand building – coming second only to word-of-mouth – when the evidence places it bottom of the list.

Leaders also expressed a desire for better measurement of the commercial impact of brands and claimed that this shortcoming is the primary reason for what has become an imbalanced approach to marketing investment .

This found that less than a third of organisations use ‘brand health’ metrics, which report on factors such as salience, distinctiveness and favourability, at board level.

“Our aim with this research was to get inside businesses and understand the real driving forces behind the recent changes in marketing investment,” said David Buttle, Global Marketing Director, Commercial for the Financial Times.

Alongside that, there is a widespread misalignment between the marketing tactics perceived by senior leaders to be most effective at building brands and those which are proven to be

“The data uncovered a worrying lack of confidence in brand management, both within and beyond the marketing department,” he added.

Dadvertising: How marketers are using brand images to appeal to millennial dads

By Giulianno Lopez

Dads smoking cigars. Dads tossing around the old pigskin with their sons. Dads grinning in an easy chair with the newspaper and a snifter of brandy. What do these brand images all have in common?

None of them resonate with millennial dads.

These are the stereotypes of the past: the bumbling, disengaged patriarch whose primary contribution to the family is a paycheck. Because so many of today’s households have both parents working, today’s dads get involved in everything to share the responsibility with their partners. They’re just as likely to pack the kids’ lunches or do the dishes as they are to play catch with the kids.

As a result, brands need to adjust their messaging to reflect this new reality. The oldest of the millennials are turning 38 this year and are having children of their own; they’re no longer kids themselves but a powerful purchasing force. And they don’t like pandering.

They describe themselves differently Millennial dads are the first ones to tell you how fatherhood has changed since they were little. They describe themselves as “loving.” More men willingly go grocery shopping. They’re relatively confident in their parenting skills and spend more time with their kids. Even more importantly, they see themselves as fathers first: 57% of them see parenting as a key part of their identity.

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Brands are shifting their approach Savvy marketers are updating their own brand images to reflect this shift. On Getty Images, the most downloaded dad-related image in 2017 was of a father baking with his daughter. When marketers are choosing these pictures,

are no images of sweeping piles of dirt under the rugs or burning dinner. This hits home for dads who are relatively confident in their parenting skills and actively take over household chores.

Removing Stereotypes Millennial dads aren’t afraid to show emotion, and over half of them want to be a good example for their kids. Savvy marketers are using images of dads who are sensitive and caring to resonate with them, such as, the dad who comforts his son or daughter after a breakup.

Put simply, fatherhood has changed, and marketers are changing their images to reflect it. Millennial dads are active, engaged with their kids’ lives, and share equal responsibility with their partners.

They’re bloggers, too, so marketers that try to stuff them into the “bumbling bad dad” stereotype box risk their wrath and a boatload of bad publicity.

they’re actively acknowledging how dads nowadays are changing fatherhood by being more hands-on in a child’s life—and how family units have evolved as a result.

As you prepare your own “Dadvertising,” update your own brand images to show Dad having a tea party with his daughter and her dolls, or having heart-to-hearts with his son. Today’s dads are very different from their own fathers and grandfathers, and marketing to them needs to reflect their new ways of parenting.

Family-First Images One of the images that marketers are using today is that of the father who puts his family first. These images range from the dad who helps his kids pull off silly pranks to the single father who works hard and encourages his kids in any way he can. Brands can tap into these images to target millennial dads who describe themselves as loving or playful.

Adopting New Roles Marketers are also using images of dads in more active roles. Some will even show them doing chores that many wouldn’t normally associate with them, such as cooking and cleaning. But what’s changed is that these images show dads doing these things well; there

Giulianno Lopez, Content Marketing Manager, Adroll

Four things every young (and not so young!) planner needs to be doing more of…

By Mike Teasdale

“At 01:50 GMT on December 1, 1975, every telephone in the world started to ring.”

So wrote Arthur C. Clarke in Dial F for Frankenstein in 1961.

He was painting a picture of the future in which telephones in people’s homes across the globe begin to talk to each other in a network, creating an artificial mind that causes chaos.

Imagine that, eh?

Now imagine a centaur Planner: part wo/man & part machine, both working in perfect harmony. A human Planner paired with an AI chatbot designed to learn and know us. But as we shape the bot, it of course shapes us…

We might not be quite there yet but it’s already happening to a degree. We automate the simplest Planning tasks to save

time (like proof reading and deck writing) and we use insight bots to trawl the internet and social media to spot patterns we cannot.

The point is, change is happening at a rate of knots. I could fill this column just by listing examples of change in our industry. But I will restrict myself to the big themes and the things every Planner needs to be doing more of as a result.

1. Changing competitive landscape. Be it the evolving holding company model, or the rise of cagencies and in-housing, or the threat of being disintermediated by platforms… it’s never been more competitive for ad agencies.

2. Changing nature of creativity. Are you for culture or

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conversion? Long run or short run? Insights or data? Ideas or platforms? Humans or AI? Of course, it’s not either/or, but and. Trying to achieve that stretch is causing agencies to contort themselves in excruciating ways.

nowadays it doesn’t have to be exclusively tied to a creative product. Increasingly, clients want us to advise on marketing and brand solutions in several different formats such as innovation and NPD.

3. Changing advertising model. Thanks to the internet and social media and mobile technology, we’ve now got active and empowered consumers who want dialogue with brands across multiple platforms and moments in the day. And they want it personalized, or not at all.

If you’re a Planner today you need to be thinking about how you can migrate upstream more, even if your agency is not trying to do so.

4. Changing economic model. We are moving from a production-driven economy to a service-driven one, from a bricks & mortar retail environment to DTC. Consumers are becoming continuous users as we move from ownership to subscription. This has huge implications for brands, especially in a post-voice and post-AI world.

As an industry, why do we continue to sell our time rather than price ourselves according to the value we provide?

Management consultancies are more skilled than us at modelling future outcomes and charging accordingly.

Given all that change, it’s hardly surprising that Planning is also changing. Our discipline is still about being a catalyst for creativity by getting inside people’s heads but the context in which we do this is so different that we must adapt how we do it. I counsel all Planners to ensure they are doing more of the following…

More outdoor planning Planning is a practical discipline not an academic exercise.

It’s a contact sport, one that requires contact with real people. People that are nothing like the ones who work in ad agencies.

The numbers don’t lie: 80% of UK ad agency folk live in London while 87% of the UK population do not; 95% of UK ad agency folk are under 50 when 48% of UK consumer expenditure comes from those over 50.

UK Planners need to get out more, to meet real people outside London. They need to embrace the darkness and messiness of real people’s lives. Only in that contact do the rich insights and human truths lie.

More upstream planning Planning has always been a servant of creativity, but

More Outcome Planning

As Planners, we must look forwards more than backwards.

Most planners can explain how a campaign works but how many of us can put together a predictive case for growth?

How many of us really understand modelling?

More Beta Planning Action now drives thinking. Everything is now an experiment where we can conduct real world A/B testing. As a result, we have moved from Think, then Act to Test & Learn. Planners now need to spend more time hustling as well as engaging in deep thought.

And Planners trained to find a uniting truth now need to understand consumers at a more disaggregated level.

Modern creative briefs need to encompass more messages across a matrix of audience segments.

Are you up for more Outdoor Planning, more Upstream Planning, more Outcome Planning, and more Beta Planning?

I hope so, because the alternative is not pretty. Unless you are a bot.

Mike Teasdale is a strategic problem solver. He is Director at Left-Handed Planning Ltd and provides consulting, writing, mentoring, and facilitating services. His background is in ad land, with 28 years of experience as a strategist in agencies like BBH, BBDO and Lowe.

Book,

&

Line

Sinker

Subscription Marketing: Strategies for Nurturing Customers in a World of Churn Kindle Edition

Brand Leadership: Building Assets In an Information Economy

By Anne Janzer

For the first time, Aaker and coauthor Erich Joachimsthaler describe how the emerging paradigm of strategic brand leadership is replacing the classic, tactically oriented brand management system pioneered by Procter & Gamble. This fundamental shift involves nothing less than a revolution in organizational structure, systems, and culture -- as the authors demonstrate with hundreds of case studies from companies such as Polo Ralph Lauren, Virgin Airlines, Adidas, GE, Marriott, IBM, McDonald’s...

Subscription Marketing offers creative marketing strategies for sustaining the customer relationships that build long-term success. This book is a practical guide for marketers, start-up executives, customer success management professionals, and executives of establishing businesses adopting or transitioning to a subscription-based model.

What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand-Building Principles that Separate the Best from the Rest

By Denise Lee Yohn

By David A. Aaker, Erich Joachimsthaler

Ask: The Counterintuitive Online Method to Discover Exactly What Your Customers Want to Buy...

Create a Mass of Raving Fans...

It’s tempting to believe that brands like Apple, Nike, and Zappos achieved their iconic statuses because of serendipity, an unattainable magic formula, or even the genius of a single visionary leader. However, these companies all adopted specific approaches and principles that transformed their ordinary brands into industry leaders.

By Ryan Levesque

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

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

By Rick Webb 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.

Archetypes in Branding: A Toolkit for Creatives and Strategists

By Margaret Hartwell, Joshua C. Chen Archetypes in Branding: A Toolkit for Creatives and Strategists offers a highly participatory approach to brand development. Combined with a companion deck of sixty original archetype cards, this kit will give you a practical tool to: Reveal your brand’s motivations, how it moves in the world, what its trigger points are and why it attracts certain customers.

Forge relationships with the myriad stakeholders that affect your business...

Ask is based on the compelling premise that you should NEVER have to guess what your prospects and customers are thinking. The Ask Formula revealed in this book has been used to help build multi-million dollar businesses in 23 different industries, generating over $100 million dollars in sales in the process.

By Gregory Diehl In Brand Identity Breakthrough, you and your small business will learn how to develop a strong brand identity by combining your personality and values with the functionality of your products, becoming an irreplaceable brand and company.

Sticky Branding: 12.5 Principles to Stand Out, Attract Customers, and Grow an Incredible Brand

By Jeremy Miller Based on a decade of research into what makes companies successful, Sticky Branding is your branding playbook. It provides ideas, stories, and exercises that will make your company stand out, attract customers, and grow into an incredible brand. Sticky Branding’s 12.5 guiding principles are drawn from hundreds of interviews with CEOs

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The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader: How to Succeed by Building Customer and Company Value Kindle Edition

By Thomas Barta, Patrick Barwise

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company’s Future - and What to Do About It Kindle Edition

The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader, by former McKinsey Partner Thomas Barta and senior London Business School professor Patrick Barwise, is the first research-based leadership book for marketers in the 21st century. Based on the largest ever research study of its kind, with detailed data on over 8,600 leaders in more...

By Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

Top of Mind: Use Content to Unleash Your Influence and Engage Those Who Matter To You

The Story Engine: An entrepreneur’s guide to conte Kindle Edition

By John Hall It’s the winning approach John Hall used to build Influence & Co. into one of “America’s Most Promising Companies,” according to Forbes. In this step-by-step guide, he shows you how to use content to keep your brand front and center in the minds of decision makers who matter.

Friction: Passion Brands in the Age of Disruption

By Jeff Rosenblum, Jordan Berg

Tzuo shows how to use subscriptions to build lucrative, ongoing one-on-one relationships with your customers. This may require reinventing substantial parts of your company, from your accounting practices to your entire IT architecture, but the payoff can be enormous.

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.

Content marketing is one of the most affordable and powerful digital marketing tools available to tell your story at scale.

The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry Kindle Edition

Friction argues that brands don’t simply need clever messages or new, shiny technologies. They need a fundamental change in strategy. Friction provides a system for embracing transparency, engaging audiences, creating evangelists, and unleashing unprecedented growth. The authors of Friction have worked on some of the industry’s most innovative assignments for the world’s most successful brands.

By John Warrillow

Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You Kindle Edition

What Customers Crave: How to Create Relevant and Memorable Experiences at Every Touchpoint Kindle Edition

By John Warrillow, Bo Burlingham (Foreword) According to John Warrillow, the number one mistake entrepreneurs make is to build a business that relies too heavily on them. Thus, when the time comes to sell, buyers aren’t confident that the company-even if it’s profitable-can stand on its own. To illustrate this, Warrillow introduces us to a fictional small business owner named Alex who is struggling to sell his advertising agency.

According to John Warrillow, this emerging subscription economy offers huge opportunities to companies that know how to turn customers into subscribers. Automatic customers are the key to increasing cash flow, igniting growth, and boosting the value of your company.

By Nicholas J. Webb Think you know your customers? You better be more assured than just thinking you do, because your success depends on it! The best companies in the world first research exhaustively what their customers desire, and then they deliver it in memorable and deeply human experiences-resulting in success previously believed to be unachievable.