Branding matters. Because branding matters.
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Dear friends: It is said that going forward , leadership will be our greatest salvation. And for one to be a great leader, we need to question
our own assumptions. Understand more in this edition. The
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two can definitely tango: human touch with AI/Innovation- we take a look at how to achieve that in this issue. Conversational marketing is the need of the hour for brands now and you can
see that articulated here. We break some myths surrounding Brand Love too in this issue. For brands to inspire trust, consistency is a very strong ammunition. We recommend the
journey to adopt for that. A bit of indulgence in behaviour science is what we engage in when we talk about how to
make complex ideas more accessible. We also wear the lens on post cookie digital marketing in this edition. Emotional intelligence is the new asset class in advertising. Know more
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about it. We have also taken the effort to understand how smart is your marketing machine. There is ample more to
absorb and chew on in this edition and I leave you to do exactly that.
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Until the next, my very best!
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Suresh Dinakaran @ISDGlobalDubai
@Brandknewmag
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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Chief Strategy Director: Rishi Mohan Brand Engagement and Outreach Specialist: Anuva Madan Chief Country Man, India: Rohit Unni Brand Trends and Research Architect: Meeta Pendse Revenue Growth Architect: Ritu Dey Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Performance Marketing Architect: Suresh Babu Technology & Web Enabler: Vyanky Charakpalli Social Media Outreach: Pooja Chhabda SEO Advocate: Santhosh Rakonda Content & PR: Nitin Kumar
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CONTENTS From Facts to Fake News: How Information Gets Distorted What Is Conversational Marketing and Why Do Brands Need It Now? Post-Cookie Digital Marketing Will Be Vibrant and Seamless Savvy Self-Promotion Want to Become a Better Leader? Question Your Assumptions How Smart Is Your Marketing Machine? Agility Scores in the Marketing Game How to Make Complex Ideas More Accessible Integrating not interrupting: can virtual out-of-home ads entice marketers? Brand love? That’s just plain silly The future of loyalty and CRM is a step change, not an evolution The Creator Economy: Let A Million Startups Bloom Winning Online Advertising Tactics in 2021 Why Social Media Should Leave Your Marketing Department—And Where It Should Go Instead Four cases for emotional intelligence in advertising Emphasis on celebrity over authority is blowing up influencer strategy Be consistent to inspire trust Faster, better, human: How innovation winners are using AI without losing the human touch A Six-Step Guide to Conducting a Brand Audit [Infographic] Marketing Growth: How to Optimize Brand and Demand [Infographic] 5 reasons why content marketing is essential in 2021 Book, Line & Sinker
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From Facts to Fake News: How Information Gets Distorted By knowledge.wharton
Remember the old childhood game of telephone? One kid whispers a phrase in another kid’s ear, and it gets passed along until the final child in the chain repeats it out loud. Inevitably, the words change along the way, subject to the cognitive interpretation of the listener. Retelling stories may be harmless amusement on the playground, but new research from Wharton sounds the alarm on the grown-up version by revealing how news can become more biased as it is repeated from person to person. As information travels farther away from its original source, retellers tend to select facts, offer their own interpretations, and lean toward the negative, according to the study titled “The Dynamics of Distortion: How Successive Summarization Alters the Retelling of News.” “This paper started because I was interested initially in understanding how we end up with fake news. But quickly I realized that this project was going to be about something much broader, and I think more interesting, which is how do original news stories become distorted as they’re retold sequentially across people,” Wharton marketing professor Shiri Melumad said in an interview with Wharton Business Daily on SiriusXM. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.) Social Media Amplifies Distortion Melumad co-authored the research along with Wharton marketing professor Robert Meyer and Wharton doctoral candidate Yoon Duk Kim. The scholars analyzed data from 11,000 participants across 10 experiments and concluded that news undergoes a stylistic transformation called “disagreeable personalization” as it is retold. Facts are replaced by opinions as the teller tries to convince the listener of a certain point of view, especially if the teller considers himself more knowledgeable on the topic than his audience. The effect is amplified on social media. Followers don’t always click on shared content to read the original work for themselves, yet they often accept the conclusion or opinion proffered by the person who posted it. Melumad said that finding is both consistent with previous research and “pretty scary” in its implications. “Whether we like it or not, social media has been a platform that allows for this type of retelling at a really broad scale and at a really fast pace,” she noted. The fragmentation of traditional news media into outlets that have outright bias (think Fox News to the right or The New
Yorker to the left), along with the “echo chamber” effect, has worsened the distortion. Many people neither consume information from outside their small circle nor seek out alternative sources. “Unfortunately, what we’re seeing is this increased polarization whereby anyone who’s existing outside of my echo chamber, I’m probably not going to really trust [as a] source of information,” Melumad said. “Again, I think social media is worsening this matter because it’s so easy to just operate within our respective echo chambers.” Another disturbing result the researchers found was the trend toward negativity, even if the original story was positive, and stories tend to become more negative with each reiteration. “The further removed a retelling is from the original source — again, think of the telephone game — the more negative and more opinionated it becomes,” Melumad said. “It’s really hard to turn this effect off, actually.”
“Whether we like it or not, social media has been a platform that allows for this type of retelling at a really broad scale and at a really fast pace.” –Shiri Melumad Nothing but the Truth Clearing the distortion is difficult. Melumad said the responsibility for the unvarnished truth falls on both the teller to convey accurate information and the recipient to be a critical listener and seek out original content. Of course, she added, it would help if content creators would be more mindful of what they produce. “If somehow you can incentivize writers or journalists to do their best to not sensationalize information as much, but rather relay facts in a more objective or dry manner, hopefully this would reduce this bias towards negativity,” she said. Melumad said the research left her reflecting on her own style of communication and making a few changes. Now, when she tells a friend about something she read in the news, for example, she encourages them to read the original article. “I try to qualify my retelling by saying, ‘You know, this is just my opinion on this. You should read this for yourself,’” she said.
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What Is Conversational Marketing and Why Do Brands Need It Now? By Lauren Lee, Head of Product Marketing
Consumers expect brands to listen, and quarantine isolation
are striving to find a balance between leaning into empathetic,
has intensified their desires for meaningful personal
user-centric practices and safeguarding economic stability.
connections
brands.
But the ways in which marketers determine what consumers
Meanwhile, marketers are challenged with recalibrating their
think about brands must change as well. Traditional methods
and
immediate
responses
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strategies and messaging to meet new consumer behaviors and demands without a clear roadmap or precedent. In response to the new reality brought on by Covid-19, brands
such as in-person focus groups are likely on hold for the foreseeable future. Similarly, social listening tools may skew toward the context of current conversations.
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13 As a result, marketers need new tools to help them rapidly and confidently engage consumers and uncover how behaviors and brand perceptions have shifted. Enter: conversational marketing. Let’s break down what conversational marketing is, and how marketers can use it. The benefits of a conversational marketing strategy Conversational marketing is a method that engages consumers in dialogue-driven, personalized experiences at a one-to-one level, while supporting privacy expectations. This enables brands to listen, gain insights and provide value to the user. This unique experience can extend throughout the consumer journey, with deployment across various channels such as digital advertisements, owned and operated sites, a mobile app and more. The biggest difference between conversational marketing and other traditional approaches is that conversational marketing is designed to engage consumers with natural dialog on a human level, enabling brands to connect with them in ways they may never have experienced before. This can make users feel more comfortable, and marketers may be able to gain key consumer insights and understand leads. For many businesses, engaging in these types of conversations with consumers to gain actionable insights requires scalable technologies, such as chatbots or other digital solutions. These tools can be thought of as a new set of ears for marketers and may be embedded in virtually any place brands connect with consumers, whether that’s on websites, mobile apps or interactive advertisements. An effective conversational marketing strategy should be designed to: • Differentiate a brand by leveraging AI tools such as natural language processing to showcase a brand’s voice authentically and create a sense of empathy with users. • Deepen consumer engagement, confidence and loyalty by empowering users to interact directly and on-demand with a brand. • Quantify the impact of marketing campaigns on various parts of business—including sales, product development and the in-store experience—by gathering near real-time consumer feedback. • Optimize future strategies by better evaluating how messages are resonating with an audience. • Improve user satisfaction by delivering a consistent, purposeful experience at each digital touchpoint. For example, consider Behr Paint Company. When the company wanted to drive sales by promoting the Color Finder—a new recommendation tool that streamlines the paint selection process—Behr wasn’t sure where to start. To help distribute its message in a personalized way, the company launched an IBM Watson Advertising Conversations campaign on weather.com to facilitate near real-time dialogue with consumers. The tool offers personalized paint
recommendations to users while gaining insight into color trends based on their responses. These dynamic ad experiences generated over 15,000 conversations with consumers, driving a 17% increase in purchase considerations among the target audience and an 8.5% incremental lift in store foot traffic. The interactions also helped shape future production strategies by giving Behr deeper insight into the types of color choices their customers preferred. Conversational marketing’s impact on the bottom line Conversational marketing can be a great tool for marketers due to its impact on sales and leads. When someone lands on a website, there is an opportunity to engage with them and begin that relationship. Response time must be quick and the answers the AI crafts should be individualized. Not being able to respond in a timely manner can negate the efforts put into a conversational marketing strategy. If a user is looking for answers they aren’t receiving due to an impersonal chatbot or submitting a generic Contact Us form, they’ll leave. That’s why it’s a smart move to implement a real, live chat on a brand’s website. When doing this, marketers need to choose the right technology to leverage the right insights and data for a seamless experience. When Facebook launched Messenger, most people considered it to be a way to message friends and family. Soon, businesses realized they could use Messenger as a direct line of communication with consumers. In fact, Facebook found conversations between users and companies that took place inside Messenger have a 30% better ROI than retargeting ads on the web. By implementing an AI advertising tool on a website, direct lines of communication can be fostered without users having to leave the site. And to achieve these results, brands should seek out experienced, trusted partners to assist in developing and deploying a conversational marketing strategy. IBM Watson Advertising’s Conversations solution is designed to drive deeper engagement, awareness, action and affinity by creating one-to-one connections between brands and consumers at scale and can be deployed on virtually any digital property, acting as a massive virtual focus group for brands. The result is a solution that helps enhance the user experience, drive revenue, and improve future business practices by uncovering valuable insights and emerging trends. Employing a conversational marketing strategy can help strengthen the consumer’s relationship to a brand by fostering a one-on-one connection while making them feel heard and supported. Lauren Lee is focused on driving awareness and adoption of IBM Watson Advertising’s suite of industryleading AI advertising solutions and The Weather Channel’s innovative solution suite, which reaches 300 million global users every month.
Post-Cookie Digital Marketing Will Be Vibrant and Seamless By Julien Hirth, Rémi Lemonnier
Those of us in ad tech didn’t even have to read Google’s announcement about deprecating user tracking to know that cookies and cross-site tracking were a big problem for the industry. Governments around the world have been relentlessly tightening user privacy rules for years. Those rules mean users are now warned about cookies on every website they visit and, if they choose to “accept” the cookies, they are creepily followed around on the Web for weeks after they do so. Accordingly, users seek refuge in browsers and apps that block cookies—along with the ads and monetization those cookies enable. Meanwhile, as a technology, cookies don’t even work very well, engineered as they were for a different purpose than advertising and a different age that couldn’t have imagined the multidevice digital consumer journeys marketers now seek to decipher. Cookies are the cause of massive discrepancies and data loss between systems, as well as headaches for operators and procurement leads, and they are an unreliable and costly signal for marketers. So when Google announced it would finally turn the knife on that frail technology too many digital marketing systems still rely on, they did ad tech a favor (despite causing us a few headaches). Consumer and B2B brands around the world now must
reckon with the fact that the most recognizable technological brand in the world, and a powerhouse behind the most important marketing channels in the world, has declared cross-site tracking unfit for use. Impact on Independent Ad Tech The good news is that the industry is already reacting the way it should have when GDPR and CCPA kicked in. Initiatives both from independent ad tech companies and from Google itself allow for the most essential ad tech use cases to be supported in a privacy-preserving way. But let us be clear: The end of cookies will have a dramatic impact on advertisers’ ROI if they continue to rely on behavioral targeting techniques. Google says it will continue to allow independent ad tech to operate according to their own cookie footprints within Google’s platforms. That might seem like a palliative when you consider how much of independent ad tech works with Google, yet in the wake of the announcement it’s hard to see how a CMO can now defend the choice of working with independent ad tech in light of that tech’s use of cookie technology so privacy-intruding that Google is deprecating its own use.
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Ad tech needs an enabling path. Fortunately, the technology exists to rise above the confusing, contorted, cookie-filled digital ecosystem that has generated such animosity among consumers, content creators, and the brands that pay for it all. Post-Cookie Digital Marketing Needs AI AI is already transforming enterprises around the world, and it’s transforming the marketing technology that those enterprises depend on for growth. In post-cookie digital marketing, AI can harness plentiful, harmless, non-user-specific semantic metadata from content—with no cross-site tracking—to create better alignment between brands and consumers. Powerful AI does not require any consumer interaction at all. And it generates marketing performance and ROI that’s far better than legacy systems, in part because there’s simply more metadata available than there is broken cookie data with which to optimize. Take a simple example: Google recently introduced FLoC, a way to cluster all Chrome users into buckets of several thousands of users whose browsing behavior is “similar,” but without giving any description on how that browser behavior might be categorized (no “soon to be engaged” label). That might seem strange or even useless, considering today’s industry habits, but it is actually the perfect candy for privacyrespecting, AI-based marketing: Instead of overtargeting a restricted group of people, powerful AI is able to learn from
weak, unlabeled signals and get conversions from a much larger set of people, thus skyrocketing campaigns’ ROI. Post-Cookies: Privacy and Better Data Although there is no denying the end of cookies will have a profound impact on the industry, the future of post-cookie digital marketing is bright. In the cookieless world, privacyrespecting, AI-based marketing will be able to learn from broad, unlabeled signals (as with Google Chrome’s FLoC) and generate engagement and sales from a much larger set of people than today. AI will make marketing more effective. AI is already transforming industries, homes, and devices, and it is raising expectations for global brands. AI is also driving step-change performance and scale across addressable paid media channels. Although there is much innovation to come, by all players in the industry, driving ROI will become increasingly dependent on AI solutions that do not rely on personal data or cross-site behavioral analysis. We all have a great opportunity today to grow the category and significance of digital marketing while reducing friction between consumers, brands, and the economic engine of the Web. The future of ad tech and post-cookie digital marketing and the business growth it enables is bright. We have the technology to leave burdensome, intrusive, legacy technology from another age behind. Let’s do that... and not look back.
Savvy Self-Promotion by Leslie K. John
We know that success at work depends on being—and being seen as—both competent and likable. You need people to notice your growth and accomplishments while also enjoying your company. But this puts you in a predicament. If you draw attention to the value you’ve created—to ensure that managers and peers recognize it—you risk coming across as a shameless self-promoter. Not to mention the “icky” feeling that many of us get when we self-promote (narcissists excepted). No one likes a braggart—maybe because bragging makes others feel envy, annoyance, or even anger. Numerous studies have shown that a person who brags is seen as (and is often also being) egotistical, insecure, and inconsiderate. At the same time, research indicates, those who talk themselves up are not perceived as any more competent than their humbler counterparts. Self-promotion has actually been associated with worse performance reviews—particularly for women, who are penalized more heavily when they boast. And although certain cultures, including the United States,
are more tolerant of self-promotion than others, the potential downsides to bragging seem to be universal. Trying to hide the fact that you’re boasting doesn’t help. Consider the “humblebrag”—that is, a boast masked by a complaint (“I’m so tired of being the only person the boss trusts”) or by humility (“I can’t believe I got this award!”). In research led by Ovul Sezer of the University of North Carolina, participants rated people who made comments on social media such as “Huh. I seem to have written one of Amazon. com’s top 10 books of the year (so far). Unexpected” as not only less likable but also less competent than people who were more straightforward (“I have written one of Amazon. com’s top 10 books of the year”). So how can you realize the benefits of self-promotion without the backlash? Opportunities to brag without penalty at work are few and far between, so I generally advise people to focus on earning recognition through consistent performance. As my father always told my brothers and me when we were growing up, “The cream will rise to the top.”
Humility is admirable. But if someone requests information or an answer that requires you to reveal positives about yourself, you should oblige. However, cream sometimes needs a little help to rise. And although bragging is by and large socially inappropriate, there are exceptions. My research and that of others points to a few ways to draw attention to your accomplishments without penalty, whether your goal is instrumental (say, to ensure that your contributions aren’t overlooked come bonus time) or emotional (perhaps to get praise and feel valued). Share when asked. Humility is admirable. But if someone requests information or an answer that requires you to reveal positives about yourself, you should oblige. Research indicates that when someone details an accomplishment in response to a direct question, others don’t judge that person as any less agreeable. In fact, in research I conducted with Kate Barasz of ESADE and Michael Norton of HBS, we found that if you’re given an opportunity to brag—for example, by being asked, “What are your greatest strengths?” or “How did you finish that so quickly?”—forgoing it can raise suspicion. We found that not answering or being coy about such questions may cause people to think you’re neither trustworthy nor likable. You might be tempted to induce others to give you such openings for self-promotion—what some call “boomerasking.” But that’s a risky strategy if a conversation partner senses that he or she is being gamed. New research led by Ryan Hauser of Harvard Business School indicates that posing a question not because you want an answer but because you want someone to ask the same of you makes a worse impression than outright bragging. Let questions arise organically, and when you see opportunities to highlight your successes, make the most of them. Share when others are sharing. Have you noticed that when someone shares something personal with you, whether it be a point of pride or a shortcoming, you are often triggered to reciprocate? Indeed, a series of studies some colleagues and I conducted found that when people were told that others had revealed personal information, it prompted them to reciprocate in kind. Moreover, research led by Youngme Moon of HBS indicates that it held true even when people interacted with a computer that displayed “self-promotional” messages, such as that it “rarely gets used to its full potential” or “has a huge hard drive.” The penalty for bragging seems to dissipate when others in the room are engaging in selfpromotion. Similarly, in contexts where people typically share their successes, such as job interviews, it can be beneficial to brag. In one study, researchers followed 106 job seekers, taping their interviews and measuring the extent to which they engaged in self-promotion. Those who took time to outline their strengths, experience, and achievements were more likely to be rated by their interviewers as suitable for the job and of greater interest to the organization than those who didn’t brag as much. (That said, don’t go so far that you forget to engage in other attractive behaviors, such as asking questions—a risk highlighted in research by Dan Cable of London Business School and Virginia Kay of the University of North Carolina.)
You can see this effect play out on LinkedIn, where selfpromotion is rampant, or in offices where doctors, lawyers, and other professionals commonly display their degrees and credentials to show patients or clients that they are in qualified hands. In short, research indicates that in situations where others share too, people can successfully convey their accomplishments without coming across as unlikable, egotistical, or inconsiderate. Find a promoter. Athletes, musicians, and actors hire publicists and agents for good reason. Intermediaries are seen as less self-serving and thus provide an aura of objectivity. The same can be true in business settings. In a series of studies led by Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer, participants tasked with setting a salary for a new employee were given one of two job interview transcripts. In the first, the candidate volunteered statements such as “Anyone who has worked with me would say that I am a natural leader.” In the second, a recruiter did the promoting: “Anyone who has worked with her would say that she is a natural leader.” The candidate who bragged through an intermediary was better liked, seen as more competent, and awarded higher pay than the selfpromotional one. Other research indicates that secondhand bragging is also less likely to elicit negative emotions such as envy and annoyance. The effect is so powerful that even blatant conflicts of interest—for example, if an executive search firm is being paid a percentage of a new hire’s salary—don’t seem to undermine intermediaries’ credibility. Of course, no one brings an agent to a performance review, and it’s rare to have a cheerleading recruiter attend your job interviews. But you can find intermediaries, including peers, bosses, mentors, and sponsors, who will be happy to speak up on your behalf—as long as you are respectful in your solicitation. This is easier than you might think. Research led by Cornell University’s Vanessa Bohns indicates that we tend to underestimate others’ willingness to help by about 50%. Benefits also accrue to the helper. Research on “positive gossip” indicates that people are more highly regarded when they brag about others. That means, of course, that you, too, should praise the accomplishments of others; it’s kind, good for morale, and may prompt reciprocation. One last note: If someone unexpectedly compliments you publicly, resist the instinct to humbly downplay it; a smile or a simple “Thank you” will suffice. Strike a balance. Even when you see a clear opening to highlight your accomplishments, you should be measured about it. Research indicates that when people present a balanced picture of themselves, rather than discussing only successes, they come across as more credible and affable. Those with high status, in particular, should acknowledge failures and foibles as well as achievements, not only because such candor is laudable, but also because it makes them less likely to come across as brash, unlikable, and worthy of envy. This even holds for brands. Research suggests that when marketers point out a minor drawback in an otherwise positive product description (for instance, noting that it “comes in only two colors”), consumer purchase interest actually increases. This strategy works because humans are much more adept at making relative judgments than absolute ones: When negative information is sprinkled into a largely positive narrative, we compare the two, which allows accomplishments to stand out and be more readily accepted. For example, participants in a
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research study led by Alison Wood Brooks of HBS were highly envious of successful (fictional) entrepreneurs except for the one who, after pitching to a group of potential investors, said, “I wasn’t always so successful. I had a lot of trouble getting to where I am now….When I started my company…I failed to demonstrate why potential clients should believe in me and our mission. Many…turned me down.” Taking this research to heart, one colleague went so far as to post a “CV of failures” alongside his accomplishments on his university biography page. My colleagues and I have recently found that managers, in particular, benefit from revealing small weaknesses, because it causes their employees to view them as more authentic, which leads to greater trust and motivation. However, the positive effect accrued only when the weakness was relatively mild (“I am nervous about public speaking”) rather than serious (“I’m so nervous about public speaking that I sometimes start to panic”). Humorous self-deprecation is another way to offset bragging—but again, use it with caution. Recent research suggests that observers take self-deprecating jokes (for example, “Every project I’ve done has been on time and under budget—if you double the estimates!”) at face value. Self-deprecation and bragging seem to be two sides of the same coin. A little helps; too much can hurt. Celebrate the right way. We all want our achievements to be recognized and applauded. It’s a boost to morale and wellbeing. And there are ways to celebrate without coming across as boastful. One is to find a circle of close friends at work and outside it who will cheer your victories as if they were their own. Research shows that telling confidants about your successes can improve those relationships. The reverse is also true: According to Emma Levine of the University of Chicago and colleagues, withholding good news—say, qualifying for the Boston Marathon—from close others harms trust and intimacy: People feel left out.
Solo celebrations work too. Treat yourself to a nice meal, a new dress, or just a relaxing night in with your favorite TV show. In fact, I recommend making time to regularly reflect on your successes. Research suggests that when we accomplish something big—say, landing that promotion— our happiness levels initially increase but soon return to their baseline. Although one shouldn’t rest on one’s laurels, it can be beneficial to get more mileage out of achievements by reminiscing about them. In this spirit, I do two things: First, I keep a “warm, fuzzy” email folder; whenever someone sends me a note of praise, I save it to revisit as a pick-me-up at some future date. Second, every New Year’s Eve my husband and I each write down our 10 best (and 10 worst) moments from the year and share them with each other. (I recommend that you do the bad ones first so as to get more joy from the contrast.) Some of you may struggle to tout your own accomplishments. For others, bragging may come naturally. In either case, the research-backed tactics I’ve described should help you become more effective at promoting yourself at work while proving to be both likable and competent. Knowing how and when to boast—and when to refrain—is one important way to advance your career. One last and crucial point: If you find yourself constantly fighting the urge to brag, ask yourself why you feel the need. Everybody loves praise, but are you overly dependent on it? Not intrinsically motivated enough? Feeling undervalued in your profession? If so, why? The answers to those questions may prompt deeper self-reflection, which could bring you far more personal benefit than self-promotion ever will. Leslie K. John is a Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
Want to Become a Better Leader? Question Your Assumptions By Wharton Staff
When Wharton management professor Adam Grant sat down to write his new book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, he wanted to make the case for why executives should reconsider their approaches to how to manage people in a modern workplace and embrace new ideas, based on systematic evidence. Grant is an internationally recognized thought leader in management and workplace dynamics, best-selling author, and the co-director of Wharton People Analytics. In an Ivy Exec webinar called “Inside the Mind of Professor Adam Grant” sponsored by the Wharton MBA for Executives Program, Grant sat down with Wharton Dean Erika James, an organizational psychologist herself. The two discussed the importance of questioning your assumptions regarding how
to engage and communicate in the workplace, in order to become a more evolved leader. Following are five key takeaways from their discussion: Resistance to new ideas is a common workplace problem. But embracing data-driven approaches can leave you better prepared for the future. “I’ve spent most of my life frustrated that I come into workplaces with systematic evidence, and leaders say things like, ‘Well, that’s not the way we’ve always done it,’ or, ‘That will never work here,’” Grant said. “The big moment for me was winter of 2018. I went to a bunch of Fortune 500 CEOs and unicorn startup founders. I said, ‘Look, we already have good evidence that as long
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21 as people are in the office half the week, you can get more productivity, more satisfaction, higher retention, and no cost to collaboration by letting people work from anywhere the other half of the week,” he said. “But I’d love to try something smaller. Let’s just run a remote Friday experiment, give people one day a week to work from wherever they want. Every single leader I pitched turned me down.” With the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, those same companies have since pivoted to permanent remote work or a hybrid model. “If [they] had rethought [their] resistance in 2018, [they] could have had all of 2018 and 2019 to figure out how to make remote work work, before we were going through a global pandemic,” he added. Don’t be a “logic bully.” Instead, acknowledge your own shortcomings and ask questions to learn about the other person’s perspective. Grant spoke about a personality quirk of his, in which he “doubles down and argues harder” when someone resists his point of view. He said, “I didn’t really realize that that was a mistake until I had a student call me a ‘logic bully.’ I remember I was in the middle of a conversation with a student making a big career decision, and I thought that she was very clearly leaning in one direction, and I was worried that she might have some blind spots, so I gave the most passionate argument I could in the opposite direction. “She pushed back, and I pushed back again. Eventually she said, ‘Adam, you’re a logic bully.’… You just keep bombarding me with data and with facts and with reasons, and I don’t agree, but I don’t feel like I can fight back.’” This tactic isn’t an effective way to communicate because it leaves the other person to defend, to attack, or to withdraw. “Now I like to come into a disagreement, and as soon as I realize that somebody has a different point of view, I acknowledge my own shortcomings…. It invites the other person to commit to openness, too. And then we’re both agreeing to learn something from each other. It completely changes the way that I have debates,” Grant said.
“As soon as I realize that somebody has a different point of view, I acknowledge my own shortcomings…. It invites the other person to commit to openness, too.” –Adam Grant Let go of knowledge and opinions that are no longer serving you well. Grant recalled a time when he had to challenge his assumptions. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Grant said he had strongly resisted Wharton moving to an online teaching environment, believing that the energy of an in-person classroom would be lost. “I just resisted every single form of online education we were doing, but I have completely re-thought that. I had the richest conversations that I’ve ever had in a classroom,
teaching over Zoom,” he said. “For the first time in my career, instead of calling on a random hand that’s up — usually from an extroverted white man by default — I could see what perspectives were coming into the conversation, and then I could choreograph a discussion where people built on each other, where they challenged each other, and there was so much depth and so much inclusion of diverse voices because I was able to see what different people were thinking. I want to bring that back into the live classroom.” Success depends on your ability to make other people successful. That’s why investing time into learning effective leadership skills is so important. Grant said, “One of the things I hear pretty frequently, especially when I work with executive MBA students, is they’re at a point in their careers where they say, ‘I did an undergraduate business degree and I wish I had paid attention to [building leadership skills] earlier.’ And my goal when somebody finishes a class of mine is that they never have that thought again — that they invest in building the leadership skills that are going to be relevant to amplifying their impact.” He added, “No matter how high you climb in your career, you cannot succeed alone. In fact, the higher you climb, the more your success depends on the ability to make other people successful. And if you don’t invest with the same discipline and the same analytical rigor in figuring out what effective leadership skills look like as you did in operations or in finance, then you’re actually limiting your ability to succeed in your career.”
“Every circumstance is different and it requires your own level of emotional intelligence, intellect, and interpersonal savviness to be able to get the best out of the people that you’re working with.”–Erika James Leadership is not a “soft skill.” In fact, it’s one of the hardest things to master. Dean James challenged an assumption she’s frequently heard — that leadership skill sets are “soft skills.” In fact, mastering leadership is hard precisely “because there’s no equation,” she said. “You can’t plug in some numbers and get an answer. Every circumstance is different and it requires your own level of emotional intelligence, intellect, and interpersonal savviness to be able to get the best out of the people that you’re working with.” Grant responded by saying that James’ point was a good example of how to rethink an assumption. “That is brilliant. I have to change now how I talk about this because for years, I have told students, ‘What I am going to do is bring you hard data on soft skills.’ And what you just made me realize is I’m still implicitly endorsing the idea that these skills are soft,” he said. “I think it actually captures in a much more meaningful way, both the importance and the difficulty of practicing the kinds of skills we teach as psychologists…. There’s no more hard data for soft skills. The skills are hard.”
How Smart Is Your Marketing Machine? By Tom Kaneshige
If you haven’t seen the writing on the wall, here’s the gist: AI will have a profound impact on marketing, especially in predicting customer behavior and market shifts and enabling hyper-relevant personalization across channels at scale. It’s best to get ahead of this once-in-a-lifetime marketing disruption before competitors leave you in the dust. “There’s a potentially powerful upside in the application of machine learning in marketing, yet there’s been slow adoption among marketers,” says Jim Lecinski, clinical associate professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and co-author of The AI Marketing Canvas. “Half or less are applying machine learning in any meaningful way.” Through thought-leadership blogs and research, the CMO Council will stay abreast of AI’s emergence and impact on marketing. But if you feel you’re a step behind the AI learning curve, we highly recommend The AI Marketing Canvas to get up to speed. While the book geeks out a bit in the fields of data science and statistics, nodes and networks, it’s chockfull of real-world case studies showing AI in action. Today, we’re highlighting some basic AI concepts as described in The AI Marketing Canvas and our interview with Lecinski. We cannot stress enough that this is just a run-through. If you’re really interested in learning more, you’ll have to read the book. Let’s start with AI in marketing, which is really about using underlying machine learning to make predictions. It’s not about native language processing, robotics and other forms of AI. Machine learning makes predictions based on data, learns from successes and failures, and improves its predictions on the next go-around. Marketers already intuitively predict customer behavior, but machine learning brings speed, scale and accuracy to the process. Here’s how The AI Marketing Canvas defines it: “Machine learning occurs when a data set is loaded into a machine which then processes it by applying one or more computer algorithms to arrive at a series of predictions.” So, for our purposes, AI and machine learning equal predictions. Next up, artificial neural networks. Don’t get scared off by the sci-fi term. This is basically a set of algorithms modeled after the human brain and designed to recognize patterns in data,
such as images, according to The AI Marketing Canvas. It helps marketers cluster and classify data. Not only does this have tremendous marketing potential, it’s already being used to great effect. Just ask Airbnb, which was able to classify images of places to stay — no small feat — and then present photos that would appeal to specific customers based on their profiles and feedback. Machine learning and neural networks often work in concert with deep learning. This is the phase where AI develops its own kind of intuition. The AI Marketing Canvas describes deep learning as the application of machine learning’s neural networks to complex problems, allowing the machine to learn from its mistakes and to assess its own probability of reaching a correct result. A prime example of this is IBM Watson, the machine made famous by beating a couple of Jeopardy!’s greatest champions. According to The AI Marketing Canvas, Watson’s machine learning used algorithms to analyze ways a Jeopardy! question could be interpreted and then searched internal data for plausible answers. Watson used a second set of algorithms — that is, deep learning — to find additional evidence in order to rank these answers and achieve a high level of confidence in the final response. The cornerstone characteristic of AI in marketing is that machine learning trains on the latest data, even real-time data, to constantly improve its answers and predictions. The system isn’t a hard-coded, rules-based program relying solely on historical data to make predictions. This is an important distinction, because historical data isn’t very useful after a black swan event, such as the pandemic, renders past behavior obsolete. “There has been a huge reset on the data applicable for AI for all the brands,” Lecinski says. “This is an opportunity for brands starting their AI journey to catch up. ... But without some guidance, brands will either remain paralyzed and do nothing or aim too high and do too much involving tactics only, which can lead to catastrophic failure.” Tom Kaneshige is the Chief Content Officer at the CMO Council. He creates all forms of digital thought leadership content that helps growth and revenue officers, line of business leaders, and chief marketers succeed in their rapidly evolving roles. You can reach him at tkaneshige@cmocouncil.org
Agility Scores in the Marketing Game By Tom Kaneshige
Can you pivot on a dime, drive to the open lane and score when it counts? No, I’m not talking about Steph Curry or Damian Lillard. Not exactly, anyway. Marketers need to be as speedy and shifty as NBA point guards in today’s fast-paced, dynamic marketing game. Speed and agility scores points with customers, which is why more and more marketers are embracing agile marketing best practices. Agile marketing adoption jumped to 51% last year, up from 41% in 2019, according to a report from AgileSherpas and Forrester Research. Why the sudden rise to agile marketing? The pandemic exposed marketing’s inability to adapt to dramatically changing conditions, as most brands fell woefully short of consumer expectations. But brands with the ability and agility to pivot to digital channels found success amid the chaos, making speed and agility marketing’s winning attributes. First, let’s define agile marketing. This is a critical first step because many marketers don’t have a clue. The AgileSherpasForrester study, for instance, found that the lack of training or knowledge about agile approaches were by far the biggest barriers to adoption. Here’s a good, albeit long, definition from Workfront: “At its core, agile marketing is a tactical marketing approach in which teams identify and focus their collective efforts on high value projects, complete those projects cooperatively, measure their impact, and then continuously and incrementally improve the results over time.” Agile marketing is not an out-of-control or poorly planned scrum hellbent on moving fast no matter the cost. Nor is it a license to change directions on a whim. Another important distinction: Agile marketing is not synonymous with Agile software development. Confusion over the term “agile” leads to miscommunication between marketing and IT when collaborating on projects. For me, agile marketing is marketing’s take on Silicon Valley’s master text, “The Lean Startup” by Eric Reis, published nearly a decade ago. The lean startup prizes speed and agility through a methodology that calls for launching a minimum viable product, learning through testing and data validation, and iterating to achieve better results. Even in worse case scenarios, the lean startup methodology limits risk exposure. The build-measure-learn feedback loop
identifies likely failures, thus enabling the company to fail fast and pivot quickly to a more promising strategy. When applied to marketing, this assumes CMOs have the ability to dynamically reallocate budget on an ongoing basis. Recently, I was chatting with a marketing executive trained and certified in agile marketing management techniques. He explained how most traditional projects follow a sequential “waterfall” method, whereby step one must be completed before tackling step two. In contrast, agile marketing calls for multiple teams to work on related pieces for short, bursty periods at the same time. Then the pieces are brought together and collaboratively iterated on. The end result are projects brought to market faster. According to the AgileSherpas-Forrester study, marketers apply agile marketing to these top five areas: 1. Creative services, content creation and operations 2. Demand and ABM 3. Website 4. Social media 5. Portfolio and product marketing Of course, joining the agile marketing movement isn’t going to be easy. The AgileSherpas-Forrester study cited the following five challenges: 1. Difficulties managing unplanned work 2. People reverting to old approaches 3. Challenges with agile teams interacting with non-agile teams 4. Plans changing too often 5. Difficulties in estimating team capacity and velocity. All of these definitions and challenges shed light on the agile marketing movement. The reason why this management style has caught on, why half of marketers have adopted it, is a dire need for speed and agility in today’s chaotic and unpredictable buyer’s journey. If you’re part of the other half of marketers — that is, if you haven’t yet adopted agile marketing — then you risk falling behind in what has become a drive to the customer, not a lengthy brand-building exercise. The shot clock is ticking.
How to Make Complex Ideas More Accessible By Matt Abrahams
In this podcast episode, we explore techniques for presenting complicated information so your audience can more easily understand. As communicators, we often need to take complex information
Lauren Weinstein: Yes, I see this all the time. I see it
(i.e. financial, technical, or scientific) and make it more
with doctors, scientists, researchers when they need to
understandable for our audience — we’re experts and they
communicate their content to lay audiences, whether it’s
likely aren’t. But having so much knowledge on the topics we
at a conference or they’re seeking funding. I see it a lot in
discuss can often make the job more difficult: we dive in too
business, when engineers have to communicate with product
quickly or use jargon that goes over our audience’s heads.
managers, when marketing teams need to communicate with
Matt Abrahams: Hey, Lauren, how are you doing? Lauren Weinstein: I’m great, glad to be with you here today.
customers, and then also when executives and founders need to communicate their strategy, for example, to their org and get everyone onboard and in alignment. And then also, of course, with startups, they’re constantly
Matt Abrahams: Like me, Lauren is a lecturer at Stanford’s
needing to pitch investors and sell to customers and make
Graduate School of Business. Together, for over five years,
whatever their product or service is more accessible for them.
we’ve co-taught a class on strategic communication. In addition to this work, Lauren runs Resonate Coaching. She also has a very popular TEDx Talk called “Don’t Believe
Matt Abrahams: It sounds like almost everybody has situations
Everything You Think.”
Lauren Weinstein: Yes, across the board.
So, Lauren, as teachers and coaches, we often have to
Matt Abrahams: Yeah, and so in our class, we spend a lot
explain complex ideas so others can understand them. But
of time talking about being in service of the audience rather
lots of other folks also have to take complex technical or
than just focusing on the content. Do you want to share a
scientific information and make it accessible. Can you talk
few of your thoughts about being audience-centric and
about some of the examples you use in class that you’ve seen
what that means and how it affects communicating complex
where people need to do this?
information?
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Lauren Weinstein: Yes, whenever I work with a new client,
And he started sharing his content in a way that the audience
no matter who they are or what their topic is, the first question
could really connect to and relate with.
I always ask is, who is your audience, and what do they care about most?
Then he asked the audience questions. So how many of you, you know someone that’s suffered from Alzheimer’s
And I’ll give you an example of why this matters. In 2001,
or dementia, so again creating more connection with the
Apple and Steve Jobs came out with the original iPod. The
audience to the topic.
engineers were really excited because it was going to be 5 gigabytes of data, so exciting for them, but if they came out with this message to audiences and customers, less exciting. They didn’t know what that means. Is that a lot? So instead, they said, “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Matt Abrahams: I remember that. Lauren Weinstein: Yes, so they spoke in a way that was
And then finally, we came up with an analogy to explain something that was pretty complex. What we came up with was, in our bodies, we have trillions of cells, and each of these cells are like tiny little individual cities. And within these cities, we have factories, which are the mitochondria. And the job of these factories is to take the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat and convert it to energy.
aligned with their audience’s level of knowledge and what
The problem is that, often, our factories face oxidative
they cared about. They cared about how many songs they
damage from toxins and environmental stressors. And this
could fit. And so it’s really important to speak in a way that’s
sets the factory walls on fire. The factory walls are made
aligned with your audience’s level of knowledge, but also in
of this delicate wood and easily set on fire. But that’s okay
terms of what they care about most and translating it to that
because, normally, we have antioxidants. We have a process
extent.
for putting out the fire and rebuilding the factory walls.
Matt Abrahams: Absolutely, and I think that example really
But what happens as we age, for some of us, is we become
highlights how people can fixate on the specific information
less efficient at this process. And so essentially, the fires
rather than thinking about what’s relevant and important to
become much bigger than the firefighters in our body can
their audience. It’s really about what the audience needs.
handle. And so the fires become out of control. The factory
Beyond that audience-centric approach, I’ve also found that people tend to provide more information than is needed to
goes down, and then the entire city goes down. And this is why we see the symptoms of Alzheimer’s, for example.
help their audience really understand what they’re saying.
What he developed is a supplement that’s basically a fire-
It reminds me: I know I’ve shared this with you before. My
proof brick. So it comes in and repairs the factory walls with
mother has this wonderful saying. I’m certain she didn’t
this fire-proof brick and makes it more resistant to damage
create it, but she repeats it all the time with me. Maybe I
so the factory can be saved as well as even, in some cases,
should learn from it.
rebuild itself.
It’s, “Tell me the time. Don’t build me the clock.” We really
It’s really incredible. And my favorite part was, right after his
need to help people get to the bottom line earlier. We have to
talk, his daughter-in-law came up to me, and she said, “For
communicate concisely, especially when we’re dealing with
four years, I had no idea what he did. This is amazing. Thank
complex information.
you so much.”
I think, with this idea of being audience-centric and concise,
Matt Abrahams: Wow. I love the notion of connecting
we can really get into some of the specific tools that folks can
before going into the complexity, helping the audience relate
use to help make their complex information more accessible.
to and understand, and there’s an emotional connection that
Can you share with me an example of someone you’ve worked with who did a really good job explaining something complex to get us started looking at these particular tools people use? Lauren Weinstein: Yes, happy to. I worked with a TED speaker a while back. His talk was about a treatment that
happens. So the taking a poll, the telling a personal story, what a great way to prepare the audience for the complex information. And the leveraging of that extended analogy really helps the audience to take the perspective of the overall information and see how those fire-proof bricks can really help.
he developed for age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s
Are there other techniques that you’ve noticed beyond
and dementia. When he first came to me, his first draft
personal story, beyond connecting first in analogies that have
talked a lot about mitochondria and prokaryotic cells and
worked for clients or students that you’ve had?
cell membranes, which was really exciting for him and other scientists. But speaking to a lay audience, a TED audience, it was a bit too technical for them and less engaging.
Lauren Weinstein: Yeah, so I’ll share two with you. One is called chunking. And so a lot of times, we’ll have 10 different things that we want to communicate. And so recently, I was
So first, we had him start with a story. So he told the story of
working with this speaker. He was a coach for a lot of different
his father who had Alzheimer’s disease and what it was like
sports teams, and he’s known for helping turn them around.
to see that decline. He established a personal connection.
And so he’d go to losing teams, and over a year or two, he’d
brandknewmag.com
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make them winning teams. And so he started taking what he did on the fields into the business arena. And now he’ll speak to companies and share what they can also do to have higher performing teams.
bacon and eggs breakfast, a hamburger and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings combined.” Matt Abrahams: Wow. Lauren Weinstein: And so now people are outraged. Now
And when we first started working together, it was, “Here
New York Times, CNN, ABC, everybody’s talking about this.
are the 10 things you should do,” which is a lot. It’s a
Movie popcorn sales plummet, and the industry is forced to
bit overwhelming. And so generally, in speaking and
change their ingredients.
communication, we have the rule of three. Audiences are pretty good at digesting three discrete buckets of things. And so what we came up with is a framework that was, step number one, you want to get your team into alignment. You want to get them all on the same page, heading toward the same North Star, and get buy-in from them. Then step two, you want to have certain processes in place. And so we talked about celebrating small wins, and he had a number of other processes that are crucial. And then step three had to do with resilience. So what do you
But just by making it relatable, that made all the difference. Just with a few short words, it was a complete game changer. Matt Abrahams: I absolutely agree with that last point about really making data relatable and contextualizing it, helping people frame and understand it. I worked with a senior-level banking executive, and he was explaining how much money went through his bank globally every day. And the number was astronomical. My bank account will never see a number that large.
do in the face of setbacks? How do you recover from those?
It was too large to really comprehend. And I asked him to
And so by having alignment, process, and resilience, he was
bright, did some quick calculations, and he said, “You know,
able to make it a lot more easily digestible for this audience.
it’s roughly 25 percent of the world’s money.” So taking that
Matt Abrahams: I think that idea of chunking is really,
huge number and putting it into that perspective really helped
help me figure out a way to contextualize it. And he was very
really powerful. In fact, I just worked with somebody in a very
people to understand.
similar vein, where there surprisingly were 10 ideas, and we
And your point that you shared about the popcorn also again
were able to cluster them together in terms of psychological, technological, and ethical. And really thinking about how you can chunk similar ideas
really drives home any type of analogy or comparison really helps. You know in our class, we do that quick activity where we ask our students within three minutes to come up with a
together can be helpful. I often use an analogy to explain
way to explain how you shuffle a deck of cards.
that. When you bake, for example, you often take the dry
The goal is to interleaf and intermix the cards. How would
ingredients and the wet ingredients. You do your work with them, and then you combine them together. That’s that notion of chunking. You said there was another strategy that you’ve seen used well.
you explain that to somebody who’s never learned how to do it, and you can’t use a YouTube video to do that? As you know, we’ve heard really creative ways to do it. And some of the most creative are the analogies students come up with. We’ve heard things like it’s like going through a
Lauren Weinstein: Yes, a great book called Made to Stick
flipbook with both hands and pushing the pages together. It’s
written by a colleague of ours, Chip Heath, as you know, and
like a zipper or gears interleafing, really interesting ways of
the example he uses which I love has to do with making data
helping people to visualize and understand the information.
more relatable.
Lauren Weinstein: Another one I’ll mention that I love is
The Center for Interest in the Public Health, at one point,
I worked with a client. He’s a researcher who was talking
they realized that movie popcorn had 30 grams of saturated
about the purification of natural gas. And he talked about
fat. And they were outraged, and, “This is incredible. We’re
cryonic distillation, and it was very technical.
going to tell the public, and they’re not going to believe it. They’re going to stop eating movie popcorn.”
And so instead, we came up with the current process is basically like a sponge that absorbs all the materials we don’t
So they came out with this message, and as you might guess,
want to be in the natural gas. But this process is very energy
nobody cared because it didn’t mean very well. Thirty grams,
intensive because we need to do something to basically clear
is that a lot? I guess it’s bad. How bad? They needed to make
out the sponge so that it can continue to keep reabsorbing
it more relatable.
the material.
And so they went back. They hired some folks. And now they
And so instead, what we’ve developed is something more akin
came out with, “Movie popcorn has more saturated fat than a
to a coffee filter or a Brita filter. The impurities fall through,
but we retain everything else that we need. He went from
things like chunking information together, using analogies,
something very technical to sponge and Brita filter, which is
making data relatable and contextualizing it, and begin by
much more accessible for a lay audience.
really understanding your audience, and what’s the most
Matt Abrahams: You know, Lauren, one of the things I
important things that you need to communicate?
really love about working with you is, not only are you an
And finally, connect first. Relate to the audience. Use emotion
expert on communication, but I just learn so much from you.
to get things started, and that will help you as you go through
I’ve learned about mitochondria and sponge – wow, it’s
your complex information.
fascinating. Lauren Weinstein: Yeah, science. Matt Abrahams: Most of the people I work with actually embrace these ideas that we’ve discussed today because they really want to get their point across, and they’ve just struggled with trying to figure out, how do I make it accessible without getting too deep or simplifying it too much.
Thank you so much for taking time to chat with me about this, Lauren. And before we go, I always like to ask three questions of everybody who helps with this podcast. You mind if I give you our top three questions? Lauren Weinstein: Go for it. Matt Abrahams: All right. So number one, if you were to capture the best communication advice you’ve ever received
Lauren Weinstein: To your point of getting people onboard,
as a five- to seven-word presentation slide title, what would
so understanding how important it is to be in service of your
that advice be?
audience and what your audience cares about, one of my favorite stories comes out of Texas.
Lauren Weinstein: It would be, Connect, then lead. For everyone listening, there’s actually a great article in Harvard
So in the 1980s, Texas had a huge littering problem. They
Business Review with the same title. We use it as the foundation
were spending millions of dollars trying to convince people
for our course, and I use it for a lot of my workshops.
not to litter, cleaning up litter. Nothing was working. So they decided, “We’re going to come up with a marketing campaign. And so for anyone who remembers Smokey the Bear, they came out with Woodsy the Owl. And it was a picture of a cute little owl, and Woodsy said, “Give a hoot. Don’t pollute.” And they said, “This is going to be great. People are going to see this cute little owl. They’re going to stop littering.” So
But this idea you have to connect with the audience first, you have to tap into what they care about, make your message relatable, and then you can take them where you want them to go. But that connection first is crucial. Matt Abrahams: Absolutely, and we certainly talked about that earlier. Let me ask you question number two. Who is a communicator that you really admire and why?
they came out with Woodsy. And to their surprise, littering
Lauren Weinstein: I love Brene Brown. Again, for anyone
actually went up. People started littering more after Woodsy
listening, she has an amazing special on Netflix right now
came out.
called Call to Courage. But she does so many of the things
And so they said, “Clearly, we don’t understand our audience. Who is our audience?” It turned out to be men between the ages of 18 and 35. And they were these kind of macho men with a lot of Texas state pride. And so they said, “How do we appeal to this audience?” So they went back, and then eventually, they came out with, “Don’t mess with Texas.” And over the course of four years, they ended up saving millions of dollars. And littering went down 80%, which is completely unheard of in these types of interventions. But I always share with clients, if you get the right message to the right audience, that’s a game changer, right? This was four words. And just those four words was able to change everything for them. So by understanding your audience, their ethos, what they care about, you’re able to make your message, whatever it is, more relevant, connecting, and important for them.
that we teach in our class that I share with my clients in terms of storytelling, making content accessible and relatable. Her style is just so natural, authentic, very conversational, beautiful delivery, just very engaging to watch. So I think she’s a great role model for anyone who is trying to up their communication game. Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. She’s very, very impressive. And number three, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? Lauren Weinstein: I would say it’s asking you the following three questions, which is, who is my audience, what is my message, and then how can I bring that message to life through stories and analogies? Matt Abrahams: Wonderful. I absolutely agree that that recipe leads to great success. Well, Lauren, it’s been a pleasure to chat with you in this modality. I know we work together a lot in a bunch of different ways. Thank you for sharing your insight on how to make complex information
Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. Very, very powerful example.
more accessible. And I hope that everybody is taking away
So in reflection, I think we’re taking away some very specific
some very specific tools that can help you in any situation
skills that people can use to make complex technical and
when you have some really complex information that you
scientific information more accessible. We’re talking about
need to get across to your audiences.
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Integrating not interrupting: can virtual out-of-home ads entice marketers? By John Mccarthy
Could in-game advertising one day rival Facebook’s scale? Ad pioneers, enabled by programmatic tech, believe targeted ads and branded integrations delivered natively into 3 billion gamers’ favorite worlds could bring about a new era of economic prosperity and fund the birth of a metaverse. As part of our deep dive into all things gaming, The Drum talks to the very execs laying these virtual foundations. Mobile gamers are all-too-familiar with interruptions such as immersion-breaking ads flanking short sessions in freemium titles. Some opt to watch rewarded ads (view for lives), some stump up cash to block them, and others inevitably ditch the game for good. For better or worse, advertisers are now
integrating ads into other gaming worlds. For years, ad execs fantasized about placing real-world ads into fully-realized gaming worlds such as Grand Theft Auto. With programmatic buying platforms reaching maturity,
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now anything can be inventory, be it an in-game billboard, a bus stop, a bin shed, a mural, a generic shopfront or even a power-up. They may resemble billboard ads – albeit sometimes wrapped up in cartoonish visuals – but they are bought digitally and can be targeted on a one-to-one basis, Minority Report-style, unlike real out-of-home (OOH). This inventory, sometimes called virtual OOH or out-of-world, is still young, but top brands are using these opportunities to be placed in gaming worlds and top ad networks are assembling teams capable of buying the media. So, let’s meet the people laying the groundwork. The long-term vision In the past few years, Admix has received $10m in funding to do just that. Samuel Huber, the in-play ad platform’s founder and chief executive, says: “It’s a big opportunity. There are billions of people gaming every day who most brands are completely neglecting. That’s almost another Facebook.” Gaming is a few levels away from being a comparative media channel, Huber admits. But there’s a lot of motivation to drive it. He laments the current “terrible user experience” of interruptive ads in mobile gaming: “It was a necessary evil.” But now, with a team of 50, he’s building a full-stack to connect publisher inventory with advertiser demand, has adopted IAB formats and is measuring impact through Integral Ad Science. It’s shy of the finished product, but some 300 brands currently trust it. Available to them are in-game banners and videos. Huber likens these to gateway ads – they’re what marketers are used to buying, but they’re not realizing in-game’s potential. “It’s just a way to get the brands to start understanding gaming, but it isn’t really our long-term vision – every media channel eventually develops formats that are native to the channel So, his vision? Imagine a footwear brand’s gaming team programmatically buying footwear power-ups across a stable of sports games. The branded asset gets applied to the player character and shows a product benefit by giving them a power boost. On a cool character, this is virtual influencer marketing. The shoes may even be seamlessly shoppable too, adding a performance element to the campaign. Further complicating the media buy, imagine this is a popular esports title then broadcast to thousands of viewers – there’s added value on these buys, what the world of TV may call ‘waste’. And as the space is maturing, brand safety discussions could soon determine the profitability of select genres. That shoe company may not want to fuel murderous sprees in Grand Theft Auto, or have its billboard serve as a backdrop to one. Huber says violent shooters are already seeing lower CPMs on the marketplace. To avoid this, he imagines video game scenes could be ranked for brand safety rather than pegging a whole title as mature and depriving it of that demand – especially in mobile where sessions are short and proximity to violence less likely as a result. These conversations are still young. As are Huber’s ambitions. Gaming’s not the end game as he builds “a business model for 3D worlds” and the metaverse. There’s virtual reality, training, manufacturing and education purposes implications
for its 3D ad products too. Cheat codes Alex Ginn, director of sales at Adverty, talks of creating a “seamless world between brands and people”, but talks up the need for data that would do for ad effectiveness what cheat codes do for the players. Adverty offers in-menu and in-play ads – both self-explanatory – but Ginn talks up the need for a strong bedrock of data and insight. If the ad placement is not relevant, surely it is still interruptive? He says: “Contextual sensitivity is critical for in-game ads and this is a big problem within digital advertising. It’s important to focus on experiences rather than simply trying to shift products, to think of your brand, what it stands for and what it can offer. Interruptive ads spark backlash wherever they are placed. The aim, as with all advertising, is to feel natural and to provide a non-obtrusive experience that is entertaining or informative – or both.” Adverty’s research (conducted with Dentsu) found that ingame ads offered a 31% more positive user experience compared to web display advertising. There were various more benefits with well-delivered ads. A YouGov study from The Drum found a fifth of people had bought a product they saw in a gaming ad. And many were happy to view ads to access games for free. Ginn cites a 2020 campaign working with media agency the7star to promote a new Twenty One Pilots album. OOHstyle creative was distributed on FPS Critical Ops to target young male rockers. Ginn says: “Using our AI technology, we only billed impressions guaranteed to have been viewed entirely, removing all risk from the campaign.” While possibilities exist throughout gaming, he believes mobile is where the real action is. “Programmatic represents the only path forward into a sustainable in-game ad business. Mobile is mainstream and represents a land-grab opportunity for brands”. Gameception So is there a sleeping Facebook waiting to be awakened in gaming? Can these separate games scale up? Well, that’s already happening to an extent. Samuel Drozdov is chief executive and co-founder at Bloxbiz, an ad platform that lets developers deliver ads in hugely successful games network Roblox. An open gaming ecosystem with an estimated 202 million users, Roblox’s blocky kid-friendly stable of community-built games focus on “unstructured play”. Drozdov was inspired to bring some of Fornite’s gaming integration magic into this untapped market. “I previously worked at Facebook designing analytic tools for advertisers, and as a gamer, at the intersection of all those interests, I was thinking about how to help brands create a presence in virtual worlds.” Bloxbiz was founded to meet that need. Its in-game ads reach more than 15 million players every month across more than 50 games, bringing in brands via partnership with adtech
platform Venatus. Drozdov admits: “We’ve got really lucky on timing. Roblox and in-game advertising have reached a point where a company like Bloxbiz can be profitable. “People are starting to understand that games are not just games anymore but social networks with immersive experiences – and then it’s a smaller leap to advertising in these spaces. ” For Roblox, built on a bedrock of creators, there are branded content opportunities. Perhaps a prominent designer could build a branded experience like KFC’s Animal Crossing island. Maybe these experiences are more self-selective than targeted using wells of data, particularly with gaming being such a child-friendly medium. There are restrictions in what tracking and data collection can be implemented here. Drozdov says: “We do not collect personal information about players, which is unique compared to the majority of other ad platforms out there.” In most scenarios, this would be pitched as a negative, but here he’s looking to drive effectiveness without these added difficulties to navigate. More broadly in the market, “the in-game adtech stack
is still not up to par with the traditional adtech stack, but brands should be early adopters and take advantage of the opportunities for a high share of voice before everyone is fighting to reach the same audience”. Right now, Bloxbiz is running a campaign for DreamWork’s Spirit Untamed. t’s clear that the approaches differ and some firms will be bigger winners than others. Gaming as a media platform is still being formed – some marketers will be happy to know they’re pushing a family film in Roblox, which is played by some 1.5 million kids in the UK, while others will demand dossiers of attribution reports from their partners. Maybe together these titles won’t offer the scale of a Facebook, but it’s a clear opportunity to add value to the recreation of billions. Like tackling a tricky dungeon or harrowing boss rush, games marketers will need to adopt an inventory of tools and tactics to seize the day. I’m a reporter and presenter, into tech, sport, gaming and great ideas. Breaking news is my game although I love looking into the weird trends in marketing and advertising. I drink tea.
Brand love? That’s just plain silly By David Penn
Accepted truths in advertising continue to shift, with ideas of brand love currently dismissed as the preserve of an old order – Conquest’s David Penn considers whether we might be throwing the importance of irrationality out with the misplaced idea of love.
Dennet? If you haven’t, it might surprise you that these 3 gentlemen were frequently quoted in marketing and market research conferences during the noughties. This was at the height of the ‘brain science revolution’ which so challenged the prevailing view of the consumer mind and how it works.
Ever heard of Antonio Damasio? Joseph Le Doux? Daniel
For decades prior to this, marketing theory had been
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37 dominated by the view that customers take a conscious, rational path to purchase decisions – weighing up the benefits on offer and choosing brands accordingly. Typical of this was the mid-20th century AIDA model ( AwarenessInterest- Decision-Action), which proposed a linear relationship between advertising impact and eventual action. Basically, it was all about delivering a persuasive message, creating interest… then, stand back and BOOM!! If only life were that simple... Brain science challenged this view by shifting the focus back onto the mysteries of the unconscious and the emotional. But this was not Freud’s unconscious – a repository of our repressed memories – but rather the part of the brain where (emotional) things happen that are simply not accessible to our conscious minds. Here are 3 ideas which caught our imagination back then: 1. Daniel Dennet’s notion of parallel processing of information in the brain, at high and low attention levels, created the possibility that we can learn about brands unconsciously or at very low levels of conscious awareness. 2. Damasio’s assertion of the primacy of emotion (affect) over conscious, rational thought. This more or less turned the cause and effect of AIDA on its head, because instead of decision-making being a purely conscious rational process, it suggested that feeling and thinking happen simultaneously and, moreover, that when emotion and cognition come into conflict, emotions generally win. 3. Joseph Le Doux’s claim that the direct link between thalamus and amygdala enables the brain to react emotionally, prior to conscious awareness of stimuli, creating the possibility that emotional information (about brands or advertising) might be processed before we become aware of it. So, why, a decade on, is relatively little attention given to these ideas? Two of these writers (Damasio and Dennet) wrote from a philosophical as well as a scientific perspective and their work is not always an easy read. They wanted to overturn one of the most famous statements in all of modern philosophy, Descartes’s “Cogito ergo sum,” “I think, therefore I am”. This is regarded as the essence of “dualism,” the notion that the mind is something distinct from the brain and the body. This is also known as the “ghost in the machine” fallacy, the belief that there is a ghostly “self” somewhere inside the brain that interprets and directs its operations. Neuroscientists will tell you that there is not even any one place in the brain where consciousness or the ‘self’ is located; that it is merely an illusion created by a medley of neurological systems acting in concert. As Dennet told us, there is no “Cartesian Theatre”, where our ghostly ‘self’ sits pulling the levers. Not surprising then that, after reading that, Tom Wolfe wrote a famous essay called Sorry But Your Soul Just Died. Fascinating stuff, but what has it got to do with marketing? Well, it pretty much pulls the rug from underneath
‘persuasion models’ like AIDA, because it demolishes their premise that we always think first, then feel, before acting (Think- Feel -Do), rather than Feel -Do-Think, as Damasio suggested.44 Because, from the Feel-Do-Think perspective: Thought is not separate from our brain and body, but a product of it. Our emotional (physiological) self therefore exerts consistent unconscious influence over our conscious rational self. It follows that, if we only measure conscious rational response to brands and marketing campaigns, we are missing a least half the story. Yet, a decade or more on, although I see research agencies and clients paying lip service to the idea of ‘emotional brand building’ (mainly due to the excellent work of Binet & Field), I don’t see much evidence of a concerted attempt to consistently measure emotional response to brands or advertising. Why? One reason of course is status quo bias. As Harvard business professor Gerald Zaltman pointed out, almost 20 years ago (in How Customers Think), marketers tend to default to the rational/persuasion model because it’s easier to think that way and to design marketing campaigns that way. Likewise, it’s easier for market researchers to use the same old (rational) measures they’ve been using for 50 years rather than think up some new ones. There’s also the problem of time frame. As Binet & Field demonstrate, brand building (via emotional strategies) takes time and doesn’t provide a quick fix, unlike shortterm (rational) sales activation strategies. Which is why they advocate a mix of both approaches, although with the majority of marketing spend going towards building the brand over time. But I believe that the biggest problem is that the word ‘emotion’ has been tainted with too many sentimental, romantic associations. I’ve heard CMOs dismiss the whole notion of ‘brand love’ as a nonsense, and it may surprise you that I actually have some sympathy with that view. Of course, people don’t love brands in the same way they love family or friends – that would be plain silly. But what people do have is a non-rational disposition towards certain brands. Now, if that were not true, Coke would not outsell Pepsi, and Apple would not be the meta-brand it has become. ‘Brand love’ is therefore not a literal reality, but more of a metaphor describing the strange non-rational attraction or unconscious ‘pull’ that certain brands exert over potential customers. Discovering that relationship, as well as measuring and nurturing it should surely be the prime purpose of brand marketing. Why? Because without it, you don’t have a brand, you merely have a collection of rational beliefs or prejudices which can easily be attacked or disproved by a competitor. Not so, if you have built up the unconscious and non-rational network of associations that constitute a brand. Try telling a Coke drinker that Pepsi tastes better, even if the ‘Pepsi Challenge’ proves it to be ‘true’! Or, harder still, try persuading an Apple user to switch brands.
The future of loyalty and CRM is a step change, not an evolution By Shiona McDougall
What’s the future of loyalty? How we answer the question depends on a number of factors. Where are we starting from? How far into the future are we looking? What effort are you prepared to go to? What do you mean by loyalty? Everyone has a different context, so everyone gets a different response. Imagine that – an individually tailored response to your exact needs in the moment… Why you should be asking what the future of loyalty is for your brand Economists largely agree that we’re heading into a postCOVID “K-shaped” economy. Some businesses will be on a steep upwards trajectory, others a slippery downward slope. What is likely to separate the winners and the losers will be their ability to pivot at speed. Continuing to do things the way we used to, or even a bit better, isn’t a viable option anymore. The pre-Covid ‘fat’ (yes, really) that meant businesses got away with ‘business as usual’ just isn’t there anymore. Vast departments of people churning out well-meaning but ultimately uninspiring, and therefore ineffectual, communications can’t be commercially justified with single-digit response rates any longer. CRM and loyalty practitioners therefore must step up and be the innovators and agitators for change. CRM and loyalty practitioners must show the way to leverage the data and tech capabilities that largely exist un-tapped in their businesses already. CRM and loyalty practitioners must get creative and imagine bigger possibilities than a 0.1% increase in already dismal levels of engagement! Marketers have to examine what ‘business-as-usual’ we can stop doing in order to create the future we know to be achievable. That’s going to mean three things: a shift from data collection to data generosity; a change of gear from push communications to pull preference management; a transition from an army of busy fools to an unstoppable force of centaur marketeers.
The future of loyalty is data generosity that inspires business change. Loyalty or CRM ‘departments’ need to change. They don’t own the customer – nobody does. They don’t own the customer experience – everybody does. But they do have their hands on real-time, real-customer insights that can make the different between average experiences and spectacular ones. Creating loyal repeat customers is the job of every single person in an organisation but most businesses operate in siloes and fail to act cohesively. Job #1 in loyalty and CRM has to therefore be: surfacing stories from the data that can inspire an entire organisation to rally around what the customer needs. Modern CRM and loyalty practitioners therefore must become more generous with their insight and more inspirational in their storytelling. That means organising and operationalising the data differently. From complex one-off analytics and segmentation projects of old to new, always-on customer dashboards that allow a whole business to see into the lives of customers and act accordingly. It also means organising outputs differently. From push email factories to more relevant omni-channel multi-touch experiences driven by data. The future of loyalty is pull, not push In a volatile commercial landscape such as the one we’re in now, a phenomenon called “creative destruction” occurs more frequently. Businesses face a burning platform that forces them to innovate (or be replaced by another innovator). In this environment, a points-based loyalty programme built to collect data in the hope it can be leveraged at some point in the future seems about as strategically sound as a wing and a prayer. Standalone programmes that create liability
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holding and rely on vast teams of people to manage the administration and push out emails may be soon confined to history. The innovations that are gaining traction right now are recurring revenue models like membership and subscription programmes. These drive progressive incremental value in line with progressive data collection and enhancement and lock in preference through a combination of heuristic levers and triggered automation. Amazon realised this some time ago and not only operates the most successful loyalty programme in the world but convinces customers globally to pay for the privilege of belonging to their Prime programme. Their pioneering approach to both data management and modern loyalty is why they’re even one of our “most loved” brands as well as one of our most successful. CRM and loyalty practitioners need to think like entrepreneurs and be prepared to invent the “relationship commerce” programmes that lean into the data and tech possibilities of today. Subscriptions and memberships that have active, pull relationships and recurring revenue models attached would appear to be the best bet. The future of loyalty is human and machine It doesn’t suffice to appoint a handful of geeky data folks and drop a couple of million on some martech – no matter what those excellent martech salespeople tell you. Most businesses already have enough data and technology to keep a NASA scientist happy. Just like humans supposedly only use 10% of our brains, very few businesses are actually realising the potential in that data and technology they’ve already invested in over the last decade. The problem is the finite resources that exist to create the content that feeds the machine. An army of additional traditional marketing professionals still wouldn’t be enough. AI is only part of the answer, because AI needs a partner in crime: people who can co-create with the technology.
A few smart marketing departments are training these “centaur marketeers” to work hand in hand with AI. They push the AI to learn and improve. They create generous ideas that can be evolved, enhanced and executed by the machine. And they ensure that repeatable tasks are handled by automation, so their job is to focus on the future. This requires new skills and new ways of working and thinking. Only when you work in this way can you handle the tsunami of data that can supercharge the possibilities – personality data, haptic device data, DNA data and more. “The future is already here. It is just unevenly distributed.” This classic quote by William Gibson, the visionary scifi novelist and sociologist is a good starting point for understanding how CRM and Loyalty are likely to evolve in 2021 and beyond. Pioneering brands are already prepared for the post-covid economy and are training centaur marketeers, building entirely new business models, leveraging the data that exists in their organisation and banning the BAU. While all this requires some new skills, good CRM and Loyalty practitioners have most of the resources they need to take steps towards the future. The biggest barrier is a fear change itself. But if we assume that change is coming for us, then there is very little to lose. RAPP predicts that anyone still doing push notifications, points programmes or scheduled email blasts by the end of 2021 will already be well on the way to oblivion. Brands that elevate their CRM expertise out of the basement, into the boardroom are the ones that will thrive and evolve to become the superbrands of the future. Over 20 years experience of delivering insight-based strategic marketing plans to influence a diverse range of consumer and B2B audiences
The Creator Economy: Let A Million Startups Bloom By Gabe Weisert
The Creator Economy is booming. Empowered with publishing platforms and recurring revenue streams, thousands of people are striking out on their own as paid creators. This isn’t just about well-known journalists leaving established brands anymore. Today, anyone can become a media company. As The New York Times says in an article titled “Why We’re Freaking Out About Substack”:
industry is rife with both dynamics.
“This new ability of individuals to make a living directly from their audiences isn’t just transforming journalism. It’s also been the case for adult performers on OnlyFans, musicians on Patreon, B-list celebrities on Cameo. In Hollywood, too, power has migrated toward talent, whether it’s marquee showrunners or actors. This power shift is a major headache for big institutions, from The New York Times to record labels. And Silicon Valley investors, eager to disrupt and angry at their portrayal in big media, have been gleefully backing it. Substack embodies this cultural shift, but it’s riding the wave, not creating it.”
“As we get our legs underneath us, we plan to use Sidechannel as a home base for all sorts of collaborations,” says founder Casey Newton. “We’ll host audio chats using Discord’s new Clubhouse-like features; we’ll spin up little podcasts; we’ll invite authors in to host temporary channels about their new books; and we’ll bring in other independent reporters to contribute their expertise and grow their own communities.”
All of this new activity is prompting some media outlets to call content creators the new start-ups. Creators with recurring revenue, such as paid subscriptions or established ad streams, can even get advances on their future earnings. Pipe, for example, is a marketplace where companies can sell their customer subscription contracts for up-front financing. And many VC firms are now backing portfolios of content creators. “We say ‘you’re a young creator. Maybe you have a couple of YouTube channels — you have a following. … We will buy 5% of everything you do for the next 10 to 30 years,’” says Slow Ventures partner Sam Lessin, whose VC firm has carved out $20 million from its latest fund to back creators, tells Axios. Take the newsletters space, which has been recently dominated by Substack but is growing and diversifying in all sorts of interesting ways. As Marc Andreesen once famously put it, there are two ways to make money in business: one is to bundle, the other is to unbundle. Today the newsletter
As the competition heats up, creators are forming new collectives in order to pool resources and create differentiated offerings. Sidechannel, a brand new tech media venture currently comprised of just eight writers, recently hosted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on its own discord server.
Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the only tech leader to take notice. All the major social media platforms are rolling out monetization programs for individual creators. Facebook is rolling out a newsletter product, and Twitter launched one last January. Instead of chasing page clicks for fleeting advertising dollars, there’s a new incentive at work: build and maintain a dedicated audience through compelling content. Josh Sternberg’s excellent media newsletter The Media Nut neatly captures the broader context for this shift: “As legacy publications transitioned to digital they got caught in the whirlwind of the ‘disruption model’ of the whizbang websites that, backed by venture capital money, didn’t have a circulation department because they didn’t have a print product to circulate. Instead, they ballooned web traffic as a proxy for paying eyeballs and tried to get an industry to build up ad rates to coincide with that rise. Look at all this potential money we could charge advertisers by saying ‘scale’ and ‘reach’ over and over. This was a fool’s errand, as we now know. Higher traffic doesn’t equate to more money.” In short, the Subscription Economy is helping creators ditch quantity for quality. And we’re all benefiting as a result.
Top brands come to SCAD seeking new ideas, inventions, and business strategies for a changing world. SCADpro delivers. Tap into our talent bank. scad.edu/scadpro
Winning Online Advertising Tactics in 2021 By Anton Liaskovskyi
In the uncertain times of a continuing pandemic and the unfolding economic recession, sustaining customers’ trust and loyalty to a brand is quite a challenging task. However, 2021 brings just as many opportunities to marketers to hit the right level of branding, enough to drive their customers’ engagement. Putting connections over reach & purpose over revenue In worrying times, more than ever, people are expecting brands to not only deliver a top-notch product and/or service, but also demonstrate sufficient levels of involvement and sympathy towards social and humanitarian causes. In plain words, consumers are eager to invest in brands, who in turn are willing to invest in their society’s well-being. Namely, from what we’ve already seen in 2021, taking a counterprogramming strategy for this year’s SuperBowl, i.e. investing a brand’s advertising budget into COVID-19 vaccination awareness campaigns instead of running conventional commercials has been quite a blast. More importantly, given how decisively winning this tactic potentially is for the brand’s image, we can expect top-tier businesses to take somewhat a similar approach to their advertising campaigns, scheduled for the upcoming Olympics in Tokyo this summer. Taking advantage of first- and second-party data The fact is, while a thorough analysis of advertisers’ firstparty data (e.g. from the CRM) remains a total Must, it’s rarely sufficient for scaling customer behavior analysis and improving predictions. In this respect, while the online advertising industry is still struggling to come up with a one-for-all alternative to soonto-deprecate third-party cookies, 2021 is, perhaps, the best time to re-evaluate the brand’s opportunities on how to access customer data in a more direct, yet privacy-safe environment.
Namely, the most efficient way to do so could imply obtaining access to niche-specific second-party data, partnering with premium publishers of editorial content, e.g. in the news segment. The logic is simple: since news publishers have been suffering most from the blacklisting practices during 2020, they have put greater effort into the development of sophisticated first-data platforms to provide wider contextual targeting capabilities to their Demand partners.And now’s the time to leverage these. Embracing video storytelling on CTV / OTT devices Video advertising on CTV / OTT devices, quite predictably, will remain the hottest niche in digital advertising in 2021, simply because people are continuously streaming a whole lot of video content, and they want to watch even more of it, especially on AVOD platforms. However, as hot as CTV advertising has been over the past few years, brands haven’t had access either to granular targeting, or precise analytics in the niche until now, being basically investing in the overall customer reach, rather than their target audience engagement. Well, this will hopefully change in 2021, given the joint industry effort, recently put into practice. Namely, one of the highly-anticipated novelties is the IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement SDK for CTV (currently in development), which should help streamline video ad viewability verification and measurement in the niche. We’re not yet sure whether it will bring enough granularity to attribution in CTV advertising or not, but the expectations are definitely high.
Anton Liaskovskyi, CEO of AdPlayer.Pro, tech enthusiast
Why Social Media Should Leave Your Marketing Department— And Where It Should Go Instead By Aaron Templer
Before becoming a pre-eminent customer experience thought leader and expert, Augie Ray was a leader in social media marketing and customer experience insights for brands, such as American Express and Prudential. Frustrated by what he thought was Marketing’s persistent belief in social media as an effective marketing tool whereas evidence indicated the opposite, in a 2014 blog post he invoked Upton Sinclair for help in understanding why: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Marketers have biases. Strong ones. Sinclair’s aphorism and Augie’s recognition about social media marketing are still true today. In 2021, things need to change.
analyzed 50+ reports and studies published on social media
For various reasons, my marketing firm rarely offers social media services anymore. That decision was well supported by recent research: I’m working on a book that deals with social media marketing, so I’ve waded through more than my share of social media marketing data in the past year.
updates to each of the studies cited in Augie Ray’s previously
Julia Roth, director of marketing and communications at the University of Colorado Law School, and I collected and
marketing, and I interviewed people involved in some of the case studies we uncovered. We also attempted to find cited post (“What if Everything You Know About Social Media Marketing Is Wrong?”). We discovered four significant implications for social media marketing going into 2021. 1. Marketers (still) don’t do data very well
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45 You’ve probably heard some version of this before: 67% of executive marketers can’t quantitatively measure the impact of their social media marketing, according to the 2020 Duke/ Deloitte/American Marketing Association CMO Survey. That percentage balloons to as high as 77% in some B2B sectors.
promotions, conversions, and sales funnel thinking, and we build the technical chops to be effective at that. Customer care requires something entirely different, and organizations using social media successfully in their customer care functions know that.
At the same time, marketers are planning to increase their social media marketing spend. That’s a huge disconnect.
McKenzie Eakin built Xbox’s record- and ground-breaking customer service team, “The Elite Tweet Fleet,” as well as a 1,000+ member Ambassador Chat program composed of Xbox users who provide peer-to-peer support.
2. Let’s face it—organic social media marketing rarely works Avinash Kaushik, one of the most respected analytics thought and practice leaders online, urges brands to stop organic social media marketing posthaste. “Kill all the organic social media activity by your company,” he writes. “All of it.” Let me point out a study that jumps out from my own research. “The Value of a Facebook Fan: Does ‘Liking’ Influence Consumer Behavior?” (a 2017 study published in the Journal of Marketing Research), found strong evidence that consumers like brands they already have a fondness for on social media, and that “the mere act of ‘liking’ a brand has no positive first order effect on consumer attitudes or purchases.” Social media engagement is a consequence, not a cause, of brand affinity. In fact, two meta-analyses suggest that, “if anything, its effect is detrimental.” 3. To build online social groups, unlearn marketing Rob Siefker, senior director of customer loyalty for Zappos, told me he doesn’t look for social media-savvy talent when hiring customer care experts to manage his company’s social accounts—because “everyone knows how to use social media.” Instead, he looks for people who know what “going above and beyond looks like, because how can you give it if you don’t know it?” Community-builder and researcher Nichole Kelly, who built a social community of over a million people for a debtrelief organization, told me she’s spent a career asking and training people to “unlearn marketing” for the purposes of building online communities. Marketers are driven by conversions. Social groups are driven by community. Knowing the difference is crucial (more on that, next). 4. Move social media out of Marketing and into Customer Care Marketers need to come to terms with a tough reality: The most thriving social media communities with a marketing bent tend to be built within three narrow contexts. Customer care-focused social media activities, on the other hand, are thriving in all kinds of places. Using social media in customer care stands in contrast to social media marketing because it’s about community, not conversion. Critically, community-building isn’t a marketing function. Marketers’ training and conditioning forces us into
She told me she didn’t even have a Twitter account when she started the project, and she didn’t hire social media experts. She instead looked for people with a passion for Xbox so they’d have a deeper understanding of the problems its users were experiencing. Members of the team therefore acted passionately in solving users’ problems, which resulted in authenticity online. One powerful case study illustrates how British Telecom, the United Kingdom’s largest broadband, landline, and mobile provider, funneled resources into its social media customer service channels and lowered the cost of its customer service operations by the equivalent of $2.6 million a year. As marketers, our 2021 charge should be to move past our biases and shift social media investments into customer care. Consider two studies: A SproutSocial content marketing report claiming a 146% rise over three years in social messages requiring brand responses, but brands’ response rate actually decreasing over the same timeframe (they respond to only 1 in 10 messages, on average), and a Smartinsights report finding that 80% of companies saying they deliver exceptional social media customer service, but only 8% of their customers agreeing with that assessment. Social media is a valuable tool for businesses willing to use it in their customer care functions because the social mind is wired to interact in a flat and collaborative way, not in a salesperson/marketer-to-customer relationship. *** Market research and digital marketing agency Good Growth spent a few months in 2017 researching social media marketing for its fourth annual digital marketing growth book. Quite a bit of our research crossed paths with its researchers’; they concluded that “investment in social media [marketing] continues to be a triumph of hope over hard evidence of commercial return.... There remains a lack of clarity regarding the commercial outcome from the investment.” Marketers, let’s raise a glass and say “cheers” together: Goodbye to hopeful thinking, and hello to clarity. I’m a first-time author and 20+ year marketing leader with a music problem. I’m the Founder + CXO of a fullservice brand and marketing firm, Three Over Four, and an on-and-off adjunct professor. I’m a percussionist in various projects around Denver. Some call me the Gora Dhol Wallah.
Four cases for emotional intelligence in advertising By David Penn
David Penn dives into the role of emotion in building and sustaining brands in a world that believes itself all too rational. About a decade ago, I published a blog questioning the “emotional intelligence” of the marketing and MR community. At the time, I sensed a reticence among many of its members to put forward arguments that might convince a sceptical marketing director to invest more in the emotional aspects of his brand. Have things changed or improved? Well, the rational persuasion models (such as AIDA, Attention > Interest > Desire > Action) might not be explicitly accepted nowadays, but I’m struck by the capacity of many marketers to ‘default’ to a rational explanation of how brands and communications work. Perhaps, as Gerry Zaltman suggested in 2003 (How Customers Think), it’s just easier to think that way, because such models fit with our inner (linear) narrative of how advertising works. Yet models like AIDA don’t explain much at all – at least not for most contemporary campaigns. So, what arguments might convince a sceptical marketer to become more emotionally intelligent about his brand and advertising? Look at the (neuro) science. Some of you probably recall those early noughties conference presentations where someone (usually from a start-up neurometrics company) would declaim that “More has been learned about the brain in the last TEN years than in the previous HUNDRED. Nay, THOUSAND. Nay, MILLION…”. It’s a cliché, but like most clichés, it contains a lot of truth. The ability to look into the brain (particularly via fMRI) produced huge advances in our understanding of brain processes, and what emerged was a picture of a vast, hitherto unknown neural hinterland where many decisions are made unreflectively, unconsciously and, yes, emotionally. Our affective self acts independently of our conscious self, sending the latter messages which it turns into feelings. Whilst we’re not at the mercy of our emotions, we can’t turn them off – it’s physiologically impossible – which means that every time we have an affective response to an ad, a brand or a product, we’ll most likely feel something about it, involuntarily and unconsciously. Look at BE. Do any of us behave rationally? We’d like to think so, but behavioural economists such as Daniel Kahneman know otherwise. It’s not that we’re irrational (in the normal sense of the word) it’s just that we’re almost incapable of consistently rational decision making - there are just too
many heuristics, biases and emotions that get in the way. Years ago, when “Homo economicus” roamed the Earth, we used to think the best way to encourage rational decision making was to provide perfect knowledge – thereby allowing people to choose between alternatives based on the best available data. Yet even governments and regulatory bodies (for example, in financial services) now accept the folly of that premise, arguing that customers have to be protected from their own predilection for non-rational behaviour. Look at contemporary marketing and advertising. How many ads do you see nowadays that are made to a ‘rational persuasion model? We’ve become familiar with advertising that doesn’t tell us much (or sometimes anything) about the product, yet many MR companies still evaluate it using a model developed in the 50s and 60s, when the world was emerging from an era of scarcity, and technology was bringing new and differentiated products to market at a rapid rate. Nowadays many markets are so mature that product differentiation in the classic sense is no longer a viable option. How do you differentiate a beer or a mobile phone network? The answer: build bonds and affinities through emotional engagement. Finally, look at the (business) evidence. In 2007, Binet and Field (in their book Marketing in the Era of Accountability) assessed 880 UK case studies from the IPA’s rigorous effectiveness awards scheme, concluding that, “communications models that use emotional appeal are more likely to yield strong business results than rationally based models (information and persuasion)”. They also went on to draw the startling conclusion that current conventional advertising pre-testing (which is often based on a rational persuasion model) may even reduce effectiveness. And in 2013, they published The Long & the Short of it, which showed that the optimal allocation of marketing spend is 40% sales activation (rational persuasion) and 60% (emotional) brand building. Note: they’re not saying abandon rational persuasion, but rather use it as part of an overall strategy that gives priority (at least in budgetary terms) to long-term brand building. All of which seems to add up to a compelling argument, yet the fact remains that we need much more evidence of the Binet & Field variety if the sceptics of this world (and their shareholders) are to be finally won over. David Penn is MD of award winning agency Conquest, based in London’s Kensington. The company is one of the UK’s leading independent researchers, boasting ongoing clients such as Heinz, Pizza Hut, L’Oreal, Pernod-Ricard, KFC and eBay.
Emphasis on celebrity over authority is blowing up influencer strategy By Mark Schaefer
I’ve recently done a few experiments in influencer marketing that exposed an important shift in how we must view and assess content creators. In fact, today I will contend that there is a significant new dynamic changing the very fundamental nature of influencer strategy.
This is what makes them so powerful. Creators are committed to their passions and people know, love, and respect them for it. If you own a startup and you want to borrow a powerful audience, there is no better way to achieve rapid awareness than collaborating with top creators in your field.
Let’s start at the beginning and think about what influencer strategy has been, and then examine what it is becoming.
Finally, there is the advocate. An advocate has a smaller audience, perhaps in the thousands, but they can really sell stuff. They live to tell their family and friends about their exciting new finds. They love to shop and unbox and if they find something cool and new they can’t wait to tell others about it.
Three types of influencers If you study influencer marketing as I do, you can boil influencers down to three strategic tiers. Some people say there are 12 or even 15 types of influencers, but I think that is unnecessarily complicated. There are really three types that explain how the influencer strategy works. At the very top, there are celebrities — entertainers, athletes, media stars. This is how it all started. Arguably the first influencer was silent film star Charlie Chaplin, who peddled chocolate, clothing, and cigarettes. influencer strategy Today, this tradition is carried on by entertainers of every kind. In fact, it’s more popular than ever. George Clooney sells Nespresso. Kate Blanchett sells perfume. Shaquille O’Neil sells … well, everything. influencer strategyWorking with a celebrity is pay for play. But if you want to align your brand with a certain image, this can be a very powerful way to sell stuff as long as the celebrity doesn’t do something stupid and ruin it for everybody. The second kind of influencer is the creator. These are selfmade influencers who stand out through their commitment to content — blogs, podcasts, and yes, even TikTok videos. These influencers are more accessible and traditionally have connected to a specific audience like tech, fashion, food, or sports.
That’s the most simple view of the influencer world. But now it gets interesting … The new breed I was recently learning about a new TikTok star. She’s a sophomore in college who loves making fun dance videos. She’s pretty and talented. Now that she has 4 million followers, she’s under a lot of pressure to create even more and better content. The big brand money is starting to come in. She’s thinking about dropping out of college to focus 100 percent on TikTok videos. In one video, she looked at the camera and said, “What should I do today? I’m running out of ideas.” Is she a creator? I suppose so … at least she started that way. But with 4 million followers and her growing role as a popular entertainer, she is now a celebrity. A self-made celebrity. This is significant. Think about how remarkable this is. She didn’t need an agent, a Hollywood contract, or a record deal. She basically willed her way into stardom with her great TikTok dances. I think that is awesome. And it also points at how influencer marketing is being reshaped.
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The developmental league I recently did an experiment with micro-influencers. As I immersed myself in this world, I realized that most of these folks weren’t just posting content to get a free package of cookies or a sample of earth-friendly detergent. They are working hard to make it to the A List. They aren’t just creators. They’re in the Celebrity Minor Leagues. In Major League Baseball, there is a developmental league for young players. It normally takes 3-4 years for a 19-year-old player to make it to “The Show.” It occurs to me the same thing is happening in the influencer space. Young people are watching the Big League Celebrities and patiently improving their skills to get a sponsorship contract. In baseball, very few players are good enough to make it into the Big Leagues. Similarly, very few content creators are good enough entertainers (let’s call it what it is) to make it as a celebrity influencer. A recent study showed 75 percent of UK teens want to be an influencer as their career. My guess is, 74.9 percent of them are going to be disappointed.
A true authority on a subject would attract engagement naturally because a new idea or product would provoke discussion from interested and supportive fans. But this won’t happen if you’re merely posing. So … you’ll have to drive engagement and make your numbers in a different way. And, maybe, an unethical way. Researchers at NYU have identified hundreds of groups of Instagram users, some with thousands of members, that systematically exchange likes and comments in order to game the service’s algorithms and boost visibility. In the process, they also trained machine learning agents to identify whether a post has been juiced in this way. Engagement pods straddle the line between real and fake engagement, making them tricky to detect or take action against. And while they used to be a niche threat (and still are compared with fake account and bot activity), the practice is growing in volume and efficacy.
Changing dynamics of influencer strategy
Going back to my sports analogy, this is like taking a performance-enhancing drug to make you seem better than you are. And, whether you are an athlete or an influencer, it’s not sustainable.
What does this mean to you and your marketing?
The fracture in the field
The dynamics of influencer strategy are fragmenting in an interesting new way.
influencer strategy
Five years ago, a creator was somebody who (generally) was a passionate expert. They loved learning about new ideas, products, and services and sharing them with their audiences … who trusted them for this very reason. Becoming a “professional influencer” was not really on the table.
From the beginning, there have always been gamed accounts in the influencer world. But the dramatic new emphasis on celebrity over authority signals a permanent shift in how we must view and measure content creators.
But we’re in a new world, and making huge money from content on Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, or TikTok is a career aspiration for millions of young creators. The new reality is that today, creators (generally) aren’t experts or trusted resources. They’re celebrities in training.
Hype House photo from the New York Times
With big money forging celebrities instead of authorities, we will probably see fewer experts and more entertainers in this generation. Undoubtedly, the big influencer money will pressure more young people into making poor decisions to fake numbers that will hurt them in the long term.
When I did a recent experiment with “micro-influencers” and looked at the resulting content they posted, I realized that these young stars didn’t focus on the story or the product as a brand would wish. They focused on themselves. They’re entertainers in the minor leagues, dreaming of the big time. They’re primping, posing, and performing, not authentically promoting or advocating. I was underwhelmed.
Brands simply must look beyond the audience and engagement numbers. Vetting talent will be much harder. There has to be a focus on advocacy and meaningful engagement.
Ultimately, this is going to throw influencer marketing strategy out of whack.
The emphasis on celebrity over authority will create great new opportunities for anybody teaching young people to sing, dance, act, play instruments, and create content in their own tiny Hollywood productions.
Implications for influencer strategy I want to emphasize that I am painting with a broad stroke today. Of course there are still legitimate creators who are experts and influencers, and there always will be. But influence strategy is going to be an order of magnitude harder for brands when most influencers aren’t building their authority, they’re under enormous pressure to build their celebrity. One of the things I observed in my experiment was the common use of “engagement pods.” To gain celebrity status, influencers are normally being judged by engagement.
The trend toward celebrity is also an opportunity for some brands looking for a cost-effective way to align with an “image” instead of “thought leadership.”
The hype house trend will spread as celebrities-in-training collaborate on content with other rising stars. Eventually every major city in the world with have influencers living and working together in a hype environment. How do you gracefully age out of a hype house? What’s next? More change to come. There will still be rising demand for young people who actually establish themselves as true authorities in topical fields such as health, tech, automotive, and sports, for example.
Be consistent to inspire trust By Denise Lee Yohn
To get employees and customers to trust us, we need to be consistent in what we do individually as leaders and in what our organizations do as a whole. Our people are always watching us, and they’re taking their cues from us. So, we need to communicate and act consistently. Learn how leadership principles can form a solid foundation for consistent leadership. And customers form opinions of our company from every little thing we do. A single small deviation by each person in our organization can produce thousands of disconnects which make our brand unclear and confusing. So, we need to make sure everyone in our organization interprets and reinforces our brand appropriately and consistently. (Consider using a Brand Touchpoint Wheel.) Everything matters. Everything communicates. This video shows how to ensure consistency across all interactions and touch points. As business leaders, we need the trust of employees and customers – and right now, we’re not doing a great job at either. According to data analytics and brand consulting company Kantar Group, only 38% of consumers trust companies’ advertising. And, according to Edelman, the PR firm, over a quarter of employees (28%) say they don’t trust their employer. In a previous video, I explained how brand authenticity can help build trust. Being consistent also inspires trust -consistent in what we personally do as leaders and consistent in what our organizations do. We must recognize that everything communicates, and we must be consistent across all interactions and touch points. As individuals, we need to be consistent in our communication. We should communicate the same messages to everyone day in and day out. We may get tired of saying the same thing over and over again, but studies have shown repetition and consistency are critical to comprehension and traction. We also need to be consistent in our behaviors – always rolemodeling the attitudes and behaviors of our desired culture. We shouldn’t say one thing and do something different – nor should we act one way with our peers or bosses and another way with our employees. And in a hybrid environment, we need to treat people fairly and consistently whether we’re in person or working virtually.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t be creative or personal. We absolutely should flex our style to be appropriate for the situation we’re in or the person we’re interacting with. But our leadership should always be grounded in a consistent set of values and we should make sure our expectations and goals are clear and well-established. This is particularly important during times of crisis or change like now. Not knowing what is expected of them adds unnecessary stress to what our employees are already feeling, and the confusion caused by inconsistent direction wastes time and resources which are already in short supply. At the organizational level, consistency is just as important, especially since there are so many different ways that customers come into contact with us now. And every touch point represents an opportunity to make a “deposit” in our brand equity -- thus leaving a positive, differentiating, and valuable impression -- or to make a “withdrawal” from our equity with a disappointing, unmemorable or inappropriate experience. And generally speaking, the big things we claim about ourselves in advertising or PR have far less impact than all the little things we do, or fail to do, in other touch points. So, all touch points must be aligned and deliver a consistent experience for our customers. We do this by ensuring that everyone in our organization understands their impact on the customer – even those in back-office functions. Just think about how the invoice and payment process can influence whether or not a customer thinks we’re easy to do business with. Or, if we operate out of a retail location, what our parking lots and restrooms say about our company’s attention to detail and care for customers. Everything everyone in our organization does must interpret and reinforce our brand values appropriately and consistently. Being consistent is about sweating the small stuff at the individual and the corporate level. No detail is too small to overlook. And when we are consistent, we produce clarity, which increases people’s confidence in us and, ultimately, it inspires their trust. She is an author and brand expert who has become an in-demand keynote speaker, inspiring business leaders around the world to improve their brands. Her keynote presentations have captivated international audiences at conferences including the Consumer Electronics Show, The Art of Marketing, among others.
The problem with advertising these days is that it is too focused on sales. For an ad like this one to be considered successful, it has to first get your attention and then provide you with something so amazing — like a set of features or unique selling points or a solid promise — that you’ll put down the magazine you are reading and rush to the store to purchase the product. To help increase the chances of this happening, some ads include a “call to action” feature, which is a gimmick so ridiculously
unbelievable — like buy one and get 197 free — that you don’t have any choice but to put down the magazine you are reading and rush to the store to purchase the product. Good thing that this ad for Oatgurt* isn’t like all those modern ads. It’s only interested in providing you with an oversized cute visual of the package, an overpromising headline, a totally nonsensical call to action button and an asterisk with a side note to tell you what the product actually is.
*As a side note, Oatgurt is not yogurt, because yogurt is made with dairy and has no oats, while Oatgurt is made with oats and has no dairy.
Faster, better, human: How innovation winners are using AI without losing the human touch By Simon Levitt, Imagination
No one will have been surprised to see Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a solution across a number of marketing campaigns in 2020. By using AI, brands can communicate hypertargeted, personalised content at scale and improve customer experiences. Similarly, adding emotion to marketing campaigns is not new. Creative agencies know that engaging audiences with content that has emotional resonance will mean they are more likely to engage, remember, buy and share. According to Pringle and Field, in their book ‘Brand Immortality’, brand campaigns with purely emotional content see larger profit gains than campaigns with purely rational content strategies, in fact almost twice as much. What our award-winners in the Effective Use of Technology category have done is combine the scale and intelligence of AI services with human intelligence to create empathic experiences that help people. This combination of technology, interwoven with social marketing or utility marketing, elevates
the experience, giving it a new dimension or reason to exist. Pantene: BrA.I.ds of Strength A great example of marketing that helps people comes from one of our winners, Pantene, and its Israel-based team. Pantene wanted to encourage women to take part in hair donations for cancer sufferers who experience hair loss. It used a combination of AI and Instagram to identify women with long hair. Length was of vital importance as only people with hair longer than 30 centimetres were eligible to donate. This meant it could intelligently target the people who could help most. Pantene has been doing this without new technologies for eight years. However, it is now able to supercharge its efforts by adopting AI. Fenistil: CheckDerm, powered by AI Creating a service that helps to solve a problem was also the
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on a daily basis. The digitisation of customer experience
approach taken by Fenistil, a leading antihistamine brand in Russia. Fenistil worked with dermatologists and programmers to create a neural network, a series of algorithms that combine to recognise underlying relationships in data sets ‘simulating’ a human brain. This resulted in a service that helps people by diagnosing skin problems and making recommendations on the best treatment. After uploading a photo this could be done with 90% accuracy in just a few minutes. Why do this? Fenistil is most commonly used for mosquito bites, but the application of it is much wider. This service helped people easily recognise their skin complaint and then showed them how Fenistil can help them. This type of utility marketing is perfect for AI because it helps people quickly at scale. P/S: The Adventure With King Leo and Friends Artificial Intelligence is a broad field with many different subcategories. As well as machine learning and computer vision, another application of AI is chatbots. Increasingly sophisticated, they can now use natural language processing techniques that take interactions beyond the standard scripted response to an advanced, intelligent dialogue system – including name recognition and sentiment analysis. Toothbrush brand P/S showed how a chatbot can be combined with other technologies like AR to create a rich experience that helps kids and parents. The chatbot, which used Facebook Messenger, captured details to create a ‘Brushing Adventure’. This combined with an AR experience where the characters teach kids brushing techniques and encourage them to brush
According to the McKinsey Global Survey on the impact of COVID-19, the digitisation of customer experiences and digital transformation within organisations has accelerated rapidly. The average share of customer experience interactions that are digital is up 22% globally. Over the past year we have all had a learning curve but been surprised at how quickly we have adapted to new ways of living and working. Post-pandemic (fingers crossed, we’re getting there) retailers are thinking about bricks and mortar services again, but with a much stronger online presence. The opportunity and the challenge will be to combine the digital and physical customer experiences. There is an opportunity to use AI to learn and predict customer behaviour patterns, enhancing the entire customer journey. Competing for your customers’ attention in a crowded space means that you are spending a significant proportion of your annual marketing budget to shout the loudest. Instead, ‘marketing that helps people’ creates a utility that goes beyond trying to obviously sell products. For a successful marketing strategy AI can not only help you scale but also intelligently target the right people. You not only need to understand what data you have available to you, you need to invest time and gain insights to how that data can be most valuable. By keeping the human side, your campaign isn’t only a rational one that can scale but one that has meaning for your audience, adding real value for your customers, helping them live better lives. Simon is a Creative Technology Director who consistently drives forward ground-breaking digital projects that are changing the nature of consumer experiences across the globe. He has 15 years of experience working for clients such as Mastercard, the Science Museum, Sony, Canon and Ford.
A Six-Step Guide to Conducting a Brand Audit [Infographic] By Ayaz Nanji
A brand audit is an in-depth examination of your brand to identify what you’re doing well, spot areas for improvement, and assess your position in the market compared with your competitors. So, how exactly do you conduct one? A recent infographic (below) from Superside explores the basics in a six-step guide. The piece looks at the core pillars of a successful brand audit and covers what to do after completing the process.
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Ayaz Nanji is a digital strategist and a co-founder of ICW Media, a marketing agency specializing in content and social media services for tech firms. He is also a research writer for MarketingProfs. He has worked for Google/YouTube, the Travel Channel, AOL, and the New York Times
Marketing Growth: How to Optimize Brand and Demand [Infographic] By Ayaz Nanji
When looking to drive growth marketers typically focus on demand marketing. However, research covered in a recent report from LinkedIn Marketing Solutions finds that a more balanced investment between brand and demand marketing can be highly effective.
report for growing your business with brand and demand
An infographic (below) explores five key principles from the
brand marketing along with demand marketing.
Check out the infographic for the details:
marketing. The piece also looks at three big benefits of investing in
What if food packaging were carbon-neutral?
Go nature. Go carton. Food packaging plays a critical role in getting food safely to consumers around the world. But it can also cause problems for the planet. What if all food packaging came from plant-based materials and didn’t impact the climate? At Tetra Pak, we already have paper-based carton packages with reduced climate impact. But we won’t stop there. Our aim is to create cartons made solely from plant-based materials that are fully renewable, fully recyclable and carbon-neutral. It’s all part of our journey to deliver the world’s most sustainable food package. Learn more at gonature.tetrapak.com
Science is resilient. It can overcome diseases, create cures, and, yes, even beat pandemics. It has the methodology and the rigor to withstand even the most arduous scrutiny. It keeps asking questions and, until there’s a breakthrough, it isn’t done. That’s why, when the world needs answers, we turn to science. Because in the end, Science will win.
Breakthroughs that change patients’ lives Learn more at www.pfizer.com
5 reasons why content marketing is essential in 2021 By Meg Riley
The Content Marketing Institute describes content marketing as a “strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable consumer action.” Traditional, hit-the-pavement, marketing isn’t going to work these days and word-of-mouth marketing takes too long. For the best results, in a reasonable timeframe, digital marketing with great content is the most effective way for a company to meet its business goals. All audiences love wellcrafted content and will work with a business that develops and promotes it. The benefits of content marketing are boundless, as content can be used in a variety of different ways on many different platforms. Why should businesses be using content marketing in their marketing strategy? • Content is best promoted on social, where there are just over 3 billion social media users. • 86% of B2C marketers have proven content marketing is a key strategy. • Year-over-year growth in unique site traffic is 7.8x higher for content marketing leaders over their competition. • Content marketing is an opportunity to showcase a business’ talent and its team’s skill set. Content pulls the audience in and encourages them to reach out to a company for more information on their product or service. An online user goes through all the stages of the customer funnel before making a purchasing decision.
Content marketing allows a business to reach a user during any stage of the buying process. 2021 is the Year of Connection A lot changed for us in 2020. We crave virtual connection, as that is often all the connection we can achieve while practicing safe distancing. To achieve that, online users are looking for content featuring real people to educate and interact with us. One of the ways businesses can educate and interact is through webcasting or livestreaming via social media. This is as simple as using a phone or laptop and logging into Facebook, Instagram or YouTube Live to broadcast a webinar, Q&A session, product giveaway or other business announcement. All webinars can also be edited and uploaded to YouTube for video marketing content. Like webcasting, video marketing has seen a rise (by fourfold) in the last year. Watching videos helps users feel connected to the performer or content creator. By allowing the audience to get to know a team, it allows a company to increase their business leads. The audience will become more interactive A recent trend among websites now is audience interaction. Interactive websites allow visitors to change the screen with a click of a button. Refreshed content on a site that users can interact with will be vital for user experienced and increased web traffic. For a successful website with increased on-site conversions, businesses must adapt to the changing needs of the consumer or user. If the audience wants to interact, build a website that allows them to do just that. Examples include quizzes, forms, animated pictures
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and videos, personalized product suggestions or chat boxes and customized product specs.
search ranking in organic search results, leading to more web traffic.
Content encourages users to make quicker decisions
How? Consistent updates to a website and social media platforms with content improves page position in organic search, putting a site further up in search results. Moreover, content allows for more opportunity to rank for more keywords, which also improves position in search ranking. The more relevant keywords used on a webpage, the more users will go to that page and stay on the website. When Google or other search engines identify that, the search engine will feed the website more frequently to common search users, understanding that the particular webpage is valuable.
Depending on a business’ sales cycle, the sales team might not want to wait months to complete a conversion. To encourage a quicker decision from the consumer, content is key. Well-developed content establishes trust among the audience and builds a positive brand reputation. For example, case studies showcasing previous successes with customers or clients and testimonials boasting about a company and its service(s) drive quicker decisions in the customer journey. If a user understands that the business is a leading provider and often drives success, they will likely mull over their choice in less time, trusting they’re making the right decision. Generates leads and increases conversions Another reason content is essential: Proven results. • 61% of US online consumers made a purchase after reading a recommendations on a blog • 72% of businesses say video has improved their conversion rate Basically, content generates leads and increases on-site conversions. Content, such as blogs or videos, can be tracked and the results and ROI are visibly proven backed by data. Improves organic search ranking Creating content and adding it to the website improves
In conclusion, to improve ranking and increase conversions, it’s a best practice to give the audience what they want and pummel the competition that won’t put as much thought or action into building out content. Keep in mind, to understand how well a content strategy is performing, regular tracking and reporting is required. By tracking web traffic increases or decreases, popular web pages and scroll or click activity, the business can understand what users want more of and what they ignore on the site. This data can help refine a content strategy for better performance. A robust and successful content marketing strategy uses organic search, digital advertising and social media to amplify quality content. Regardless of who creates your content, the benefits are consistent: increased brand awareness, deeper audience engagement, increased conversions on-site and higher brand loyalty from your constituents.
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Building Brand Experiences: A Practical Guide to Retaining Brand Relevance By Dr Darren Coleman Retaining brand relevance is fundamental to organizational success, and an increasing challenge that high-level marketing professionals now face. In the past, many have responded with product or price-based competition, yet this can only propel a brand so far when it comes to retaining long-term relevance.
Sinker Brand Storytelling: Put Customers at the Heart of Your Brand Story By Miri Rodriguez Despite understanding essential storytelling techniques, brands continue to explain how their product or service can help the customer, rather than showcasing how the customer’s life has changed as a result of them.
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change)
The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI
By Clayton M. Christensen A Wall Street Journal and Businessweek bestseller. Named by Fast Company as one of the most influential leadership books in its Leadership Hall of Fame. An innovation classic. From Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos, Clay Christensen’s work continues to underpin today’s most innovative leaders and organizations.
Business: Small Business and Entrepreneurship category WINNER: BookAuthority Best New Book to Read in 2020 - Social Media Marketing category FINALIST: Business Book Awards 2020 - International Business Book category Social networks are the new norm and traditional marketing is failing in today’s digital, always-on culture.
ZAG: The 1 Strategy of HighPerformance Brands Paperback
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE
by Marty Neumeier
By Carlos Gil
By Phil Knight
“When everybody zigs, zag,” says Marty Neumeier in this fresh view of brand strategy. ZAG follows the ultra-clear “whiteboard overview” style of the author’s first book, THE BRAND GAP, but drills deeper into the question of how brands can harness the power of differentiation.
In 1962, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed $50 from his father and created a company with a simple mission: import highquality, low-cost athletic shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the boot of his Plymouth, Knight grossed $8000 in his first year. Today, Nike’s annual sales top $30 billion.
One Million Followers, Updated Edition: How I Built a Massive Social Following in 30 Days
Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World
By Brendan Kane
Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World, by out of the box thinker Brendan Kane, breaks down the most effective strategies to generate new opportunities, innovate and scale your business, and create a compelling brand— both online and off—so you can thrive in the new micro-attention world in which we live.
This means that the question for anyone who wants to gain mass exposure for their transformative content, business, or brand or connect with audiences around the globe is no longer if they should use social media but how to best take advantage of the numerous different platforms and beat the algorithms.
By Brendan Kane
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Brand New: The Shape of Brands to Come Paperback – April 22, 2014 By Wally Olins Are corporations here to maximize profits and grow, or to help society, or both? With the rapid rise of new markets in India, China, Brazil, and elsewhere, will new global brands emerge based around local cultural strengths and heritage? If so, what will this mean for the traditional dominance of brands based on Western cultural norms?
Building Distinctive Brand Assets Hardcover – Illustrated, May 16, 2018 by Jenni Romaniuk Building Distinctive Brand Assets is for anyone with a brand logo, font or colour scheme, and is essential reading for those who have wondered if (or have been told) it’s time for a change. Readers will learn how to set up a long-term strategy to build a strong brand identity, metrics and management systems in order to build and protect a brand’s Distinctive Assets.
Simplicity: The Appeal of Minimalism in Graphic Design Paperback – November 3, 2020 By Wang Shaoqiang Minimalism emphasizes extreme simplicity of form. By reducing the number of graphic elements, the strength of each element is enhanced.the Nordic and Japanese design schools are the most outstanding representatives of this trend, which is being embraced by more and more graphic designers in their creative fields, be it branding, editorial, communication and packaging.
Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy Hardcover – March 4, 2013
by Phil P. Barden He shares the latest research on the motivations behind consumers’ choices and what happens in the human brain as buyers make their decisions. He deciphers the ‘secret codes’ of products, services and brands to explain why people buy them. And finally he shows how to apply this knowledge in day to day marketing to great effect by dramatically improving key factors such as relevance, differentiation and credibility.
The Halo Effect: . . . and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers By Phil Rosenzweig With two new chapters and a new preface, the award-winning book The Halo Effect continues to unmask the delusions found in the corporate world and provides a sharp understanding of what drives business success and failure.
Complex Presents: Sneaker of the Year: The Best Since ‘85 Hardcover – Illustrated, October 20, 2020 By Inc. Complex Media In 1985, Nike released Michael Jordan’s first sneaker, the Air Jordan 1, and sneaker culture was born. Now thousands of people wait in line at Supreme, and companies throw millions of dollars at LeBron James to keep him in their marketing plans.
Badass: Making Users Awesome Paperback – March 3, 2015
Sprint (How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days)
By Kathy Sierra
By Jake Knapp
The design and layout of this book play a key role in conveying the author’s message. When creating the ebooks, we’ve tried to keep the look and feel of the print edition, but this means that not all e-reading devices will support the files.
Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution?