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07 Dear Friends: Welcome to yet another edition of an action packed BrandKnew edition. If starting a $19 billion dollar brand excites you then the feature on how Whats App was created should do more than enough. Ideo’s CEO articulates his views on how to lead an organization creatively. If you have a brand that can be licensed or franchised into multiple markets, then do read about the 5 Myths about licensing that every CMO should know. As data gets bigger, finer, better and savvier, how it will be advertising’s savior is worth taking a look at. How industry leaders create strong brands reads like a primer for all brands aspiring to be in the top of the heap. Fischer Price has been a legacy brand for a while- understand how it is predicting & reinventing the future in this issue. The battle for eye balls hots up further with Amazon Prime Direct taking on YouTube. Read further here. Loads more to dig into, so enjoy the issue. Happy reading!
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Till next, the very best.
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Suresh Dinakaran @sureshdinakaran
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CONTENTS
How Industry Leaders Create Strong Brands. How More Precise Data Science Will Be Advertising’s Ultimate Savior Ideo’s CEO On How To Lead An Organization Creatively Brandspeak: 5 Myths About Licensing That Every CMO Should Know A Not-So-Elementary Exploration of Brand Insight Finding the Next Billion-dollar Company What TV’s changing landscape means for advertising Marketing tech: changing the way budgets are spent How A Legacy Brand Imagines A New Future: Lessons From Fisher-Price TEDx secrets to success for every speaker Why publishers are teaming up to explore time-based ad selling What Do Consumers Want? Look at Their Selfies Clash of the titanic brands Idea Sex: How New Yorker Cartoonists Generate 500 Ideas a Week Book, Line & Sinker
How Industry Leaders Create Strong Brands. WANT TO DOMINATE YOUR MARKET? PICK A WORD. By Myk Pono
One word can change the direction and outcome of your conversation. Elizabeth Stokoe, a British scientist and Professor of Social Interaction, found in her experiments with mediation services that changing a single word in the question can lead to more positive outcomes.
“Willing” was significantly more effective than other phrasing such as “might you be interested in mediation?” — and it was the only word that achieved a total turnaround from “no” to “yes.” What if the focus on a single world could make the difference between being the market leader and being apart of the rest of the field? According to the Chief Marketing Technologist Blog (Scott Brinker), the marketing ecosystem grew to ~1000 companies in 2014, to ~2000 in 2015, and to ~3500 companies in 2016 (more detailed view). These numbers only cover the marketing ecosystem. Making a buying decision in a busy CRM market can be even more overwhelming, and we are not even discussing the whole sales enablement vertical.
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But, how many marketing or sales enablement companies can you recall of the top of your head? My guess is that only a few of you can name more than a dozen companies in each vertical. What differentiates the market leader from the rest of the field? Why is it easier for us to recall some companies more than others? Market leaders establish a strong position in the mind of the prospect by focusing attention on very small amount of information. Market leaders find a way to own a word. In our overcommunicated society, less is more. This concept of focusing on one word for positioning companies was first brought up by Al Ries in his 1981 classic, “Positioning”. For a very long time, top consumer brands took advantage of this simple positioning method. Yet, unlike consumer brands,
Salesforce owns “CRM.” It is difficult to think of the term Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and not to think of Salesforce. In a conversation, “We need Salesforce” and “We need CRM” can be used interchangeably, and the sentences will not lose any meaning. Over the last 16 years, Salesforce has build an empire which consists of products in many categories but their secret to success is the clear and consistent focus on one word: CRM.
enterprise software companies mostly ignored the laws of branding and positioning, which have accumulated in the last century. Ever since the SaaS business model became widely accepted in the enterprise software world, most of the differentiation between products was around SaaS vs. onpremise, cheap vs. expensive, less features vs. more features, easier to setup vs. harder to use. However, top enterprise software companies are building strong brands and increasing market share by focusing their marketing efforts on controlling and owning one word in the prospects’ minds. Earlier, when I asked you to name a list of companies in the marketing or sales vertical, most of the companies you were able to recall own a word association that makes it easier for you to recall them. Let’s look at a few enterprise software leaders and see what word each of them owns.
Oracle owns “database.” Over a few decades marketing strategies have changed and Oracle got into new markets. They were one of the first established companies to migrate to the cloud applications. There is just one word that drove Oracle’s market domination:database. You think Oracle, database comes to mind and vise versa.
HubSpot owns “inbound.” Marketo owns “marketing automation.” Marketo was not the first company in the marketing automation market. Eloqua was one of the first. However, the brilliant naming and focused marketing allowed Marketo to claim the “marketing automation” term. And what an amazing job founders did with naming — Marke-to — sounds like a combination of “marketing” and “automation” terms.
Very rarely you will find a better example of company inventing the term, popularizing it, and completely dominating it. Claiming a word is hard enough, making up a term and bringing critical masses to use it as the industry standard — almost impossible. Hubspot claimed the word, “inbound,” with a state-of-the-art marketing strategy. They went on a complete content warfare with marketing ecosystem and as a result dominated the “inbound marketing” term and then just “inbound”.
SurveyMonkey owns “survey.” Being one of the first on the market helps you claim the territory. And surely, the name also helps. You’ve heard multiple times when team discusses sending out a survey and doesn’t mention any tool. Everyone assumes SurveyMonkey as default solution. If you don’t name any specific solution for conducting survey, surely it will be SurveyMonkey.
Constant Contact owns “email marketing.” This might not be so obvious but since Constant Contact has been around for a while their consistent focus on email marketing in positioning and messaging allowed them to own email marketing. If you think otherwise, just type “email marketing” in Google search and see what you get as the first search result.
Zendesk owns “customer support.” In a very busy customer support software space, Zendesk stands alone at the top. Zendesk dominates the word, “customer support” , not customer services or customer experience but customer support. When you think of Zendesk you think of a customer support ticketing software. Such focus on the “customer support” phrase makes it easier for Zendesk to keep Desk.com (which is owned by Salesforce) at bay.
Intercom owns “customer communication.” Zendesk and Intercom may compete for the same customers but because of the brilliant positioning job by Intercom they were able to enter the market on the border of a couple of industries. They took some market share from customer support vertical, a little from email marketing, and a little from the pool of companies that help communication with customers (website chats are in this category). You have to admire how well Intercom entered market with clear messaging while merging concepts from three different markets.
Zuora owns “subscription billing.” This is a tougher one. Many will argue about whether Zuora actually owns “subscription billing” since so many competitors are breathing down their neck. However, Zuora was one of the first ones on the market before subscription economy was well-understood term in the industry. Because so many competitors bet on “subscription billing” as well, Zuora’s ownership of this term is not quite as crystal clear as some of our other examples. The reason why it may not be so obvious that Zuora clams “subscription billing” is because many competitors bet on this term as well. Challengers in this industry should pick a differentiated term, for example Chargify can own “secured billing” .
DocuSign owns “e-signatures.” DocuSign is not necessarily the best e-signature product in its category, but thanks to focused positioning and marketing DocuSign means e-signatures. One way to test whether company owns a term is by asking your team member to decide on e-signature software. 9 times out of 10 they will go with an industry standard, a solution that associates with the word the most.
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Twilio own “text messaging API.” Hey, hold on, do they own not just one word but three? Yes, I guess hard core developers can’t keep it too simple. “Text messaging API” is still a simple enough phrase to understand. As a result, everyone knows what Twilio does, and everyone is clear about their positioning. Recently, Twilio started focusing on “communication API” — natural evolution to a more broader term.
A few other examples of well-know companies owning a word in our minds:
Google owns “search.” Facebook owns “social.” Amazon owns “everything store.” AWS owns “cloud.” A few companies are in the process of capturing minds of consumers by owning a word:
Slack is claiming “team messaging.” Zenefits is claiming “all-in-one HR.” Gainsight is claiming “customer success.”
What word does your company own? What do you do if your competitor already claimed the best word in your industry? One way to develop a new word or phrase to own is mix and match. Remember how Intercom was able to position itself in the crossroads of three industries by using “customer communication” phrase. A good example can be found in CRM market; while Salesforce owns CRM term, smaller players claim words that differentiate them from the leader. For example, Pipedrive claims “sales process” oriented CRM; while Pipeliner focuses on the “visual CRM” term. (If the Pipeliner CRM homepage was focused more on “visual CRM” positioning message, it
Stripe owns “payments API.”a Paypal owns “payments” in consumer market. Stripe focused on the business market and developers as primary users. Adding API to payments was enough to dominate their marketplace. It fits very well with overall product strategy.
could help them against competitors). Sidenote to teams at Pipedrive, Pipeliner, and PipelineDeals:
Hey guys, if you are reading this do yourself a favor and re-brand; many customers confuse you. Imagine prospect receiving a first cold call from your SDR, he/she might want to check out your product later …. It was Pipe something… Pipesales? Pipedeals? Pipesaler? Pipedriver? Pipeliner? Pipedrive? Kill me softly! I just wasted so much mental energy, I need a coffee break. Pick a word or phrase that no other company in your space claims. If generic terms are taken, try to mix and match terms from related industries. Dominate a word that describes your competitive attribute. Got yourself a word? Now, start developing content strategy to communicate your market positioning, it will improve your marketing ROI and differentiate you from “me-too” approach to content.
Myk Pono Entrepreneur | Marketing & Product Growth Consultant
How More Precise Data Science Will Be Advertising’s Ultimate Savior TARGETED, NUANCED MARKETING SPARKS AD SPEND By Mitch Barns
For the past 25 years, advertising’s share of total marketing spending has trended slowly downward. Until recently, that is. Two recent analyses of the marketing of large American advertisers showed that ad spending as a percentage of total marketing outlay increased between 2012 and 2015. The
changes so far are small—a percentage point or two—but that’s not the news here. The news is the direction of the trend: up, not down. Why is this happening? In a word, precision. Supported by more and better data, and evolving technology and tools,
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marketers are able to be more precise with their advertising today than ever before. More precision means less waste— less advertising directed at people who won’t respond. Less waste means a better return on investment. As the ROI of advertising improves, brands allocate a greater portion of their total marketing spend, and a greater portion of their brand’s revenues, to advertising. This is partly a result of the growth in digital, which lends itself to greater precision. Digital advertising in the U.S. has been growing at a rate above 15 percent since 2012 and is expected to continue at that pace. (This isn’t just a U.S. story because the global growth figure for digital over the last few years has been above 20 percent.) But it’s also happening with TV advertising, which is similarly being informed by better analytics than ever before. And because we are still relatively early in the development of analytics and tools to drive more precise advertising capabilities, the trend is likely to continue. Better data, more sophisticated data integration and the growing role of ad tech and marketing clouds will continue to fuel the increase in advertising’s share of total marketing spend and total brand revenue. Today, for instance, it is easier than ever to create a privacyprotected, single-source database that allows advertisers to compare the purchase activity of individuals who have seen the ad with the purchase activity of individuals with a very similar profile but who have not seen the ad. This not only
helps advertisers understand the ROI of their advertising; it also helps them improve the productivity of their future advertising spending. In fact, our own work for our clients suggests that advertisers can typically increase advertising ROI by 15 percent or more by applying what they learn from these types of data analyses. And new marketing cloud capabilities enable advertisers to run complex, powerful analyses on a wide range of information, including their own data, independent measurement and a dizzying array of other third-party sources. Typically, these aren’t static data sets; they are data streams that flow and update continuously. The outputs are used to improve the precision and ROI of advertising. And over time, feedback loops help the system learn and improve. Our own marketing effectiveness practice, which provides services of the kind described here, grew nearly 30 percent in the first quarter of 2016. And we’re not alone. Other firms that provide similar capabilities are also seeing good growth in this area—clear testimony to how advertisers are investing to increase precision. It’s a key reason why advertising’s share of total marketing spending has reversed trend and started to grow again. For some, this reversal in trend might be unexpected. With the growth of time-shifted viewing, subscription video on demand and ad blockers, it’s easier than ever for consumers to avoid advertising. But consumers also realize that advertising helps pay for the content they love, even if they don’t always love the ads. Indeed, according to eMarketer analyst David Hallerman, about 75 percent of viewers would rather see ads and get content for “free” than pay a subscription fee to avoid ads. For TV content alone, ads underwrite about $70 billion of the cost of producing and delivering the content to consumers. Further, ads do more than just help pay for content. By informing consumers of their changing choices, ads also support innovation that is crucial to the growth of brands, the process of competition and the efficient functioning of markets. A market without ads would require higher subscriber fees and would make innovation less efficient and competition less rigorous. That’s no good for consumers. A market with ads that deliver a good return for brands yields benefits not only for those brands, but also for media owners, content producers and—yes—consumers, even if their viewing experience requires an occasional break for advertising. And if the value of the ads in that occasional break grows, then it’s an even greater benefit. Thanks to more and better data driving greater ad precision, that’s exactly what has been happening in recent years, and it’s likely to continue. This story first appeared in the May 16, 2016 issue of Adweek magazine.
Mitch Barns (@MitchBarns) is the CEO of Nielsen. When not measuring global media and retail activity, he can usually be found cycling.
Ideo’s CEO On How To Lead An Organization Creatively CREATIVE LEADERSHIP IS THE ONLY WAY FOR BUSINESSES TO THRIVE IN THE FACE OF RAPID CHANGE, TIM BROWN ARGUES. HERE’S HOW TO MASTER IT. By Diana Budds
It comes as no surprise that Tim Brown, CEO of the design consultancy Ideo, believes that all organizations should be run creatively. This philosophy has brought Ideo success in both developing new products and fostering a global business. The company, which recently sold a minority stake to the Japanese-owned Kyu Collective, has been a pioneering force in design thinking—a methodology of building ideas that many companies have folded into their own repertoire. “The traditional way we’ve thought about leadership— which I would describe as leading from the front, this idea that someone is at the top making all of the decisions—is not the most effective way of unlocking the creativity of an organization, whether it’s a traditional design organization, like an Ideo, or a company that’s trying to be more creative in the future,” he says. “The pace of change, the level of volatility, and the level of disruption across every industry requires that all organizations either constantly evolve, or they get out-competed by someone that’s fitter than they are.” To Brown, successful leadership is like a dance. “It’s about the effective playing of a number of different leadership roles
depending on the moment and the circumstances and having the skill to move between those stances as needs require,” he says. We spoke with Brown about the essential leadership roles needed to run a business creatively in advance of a new course that Ideo U—the design consultancy’s for-profit education program—is offering on the subject.
TO LEAD CREATIVELY, BUSINESSES NEED AN EXPLORER
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While Brown believes that leading from the front—the traditional way a business is run—is essential, he frames that role as an explorer. “There are moments when you as a leader need to point to the horizon and say let’s go explore in that direction, but that’s mostly about asking the question rather than having the answer,” he says. “The most effective way of leading from the front in an organization if you want to be exploratory is to ask the best questions. Sometimes that’s a question about what our purpose is. Why are we here? Sometimes it’s about a particular opportunity. In traditional design terms, it’s about setting the brief.”
GARDENERS ARE ESSENTIAL FOR CULTIVATING A CULTURE OF CREATIVITY Ideo believes that a company “gardener” is one of the most important hires for creating a culture of innovation. While the “explorer” leads from the front, the gardener leads from behind. “It’s about nurturing the conditions in which creativity is most likely to happen,” Brown says. “That’s really about culture, environment, rituals—the sorts of things that give people permission to explore, that encourage open-mindedness, collaboration, experimentation, and risk taking. Those sorts of things that we know are important for creativity.”
Brown believes that many leaders begin to think about company culture and environment when things are already amiss, but the trick is to set the right conditions before a company is broken. “The most effective creative leaders are the ones who think, do I have the right circumstances to make the team successful?” he says. “Have I set them up? Is there something about our culture and this organization that’s getting in the way that I have to compensate for? Do I need to make the conditions and constraints different for this team?”
PLAYER-COACHES LEAD THROUGH EXPERIENCE The process of design thinking involves building up ideas, prototyping them, learning from the prototypes, and feeding
the lessons back into the idea to hone the concept. To do that successfully, Brown believes a third leadership style is important, that of the player-coach. “The best coaches today in sports are often ones that played themselves,” Brown says. “They understand what the players are going through. They can empathize, and we think that’s pretty important.” Brown’s role, and that of the other senior people at Ideo, often falls into this category. It involves advising teams on whether or not they’re asking the right design questions, assessing if they have the right resources to design experiments, and offering feedback on next steps in the cycle of experimentation. “I was speaking with the CEO of a German tech company last summer who believes in this approach, and he said, ‘The interesting thing is I need to know more about my business and our actual products and services today than I ever have in the past,’” Brown says. “It used to be that people would bring me a decision for me to bless, but now I actually have to help them with the thinking, and to help them with the thinking, I actually have to know about stuff.”
REORIENT TO PROJECT-BASED WORK RATHER THAN PROCESS-BASED WORK “Wherever one can shift people from a process mentality to a project mentality can make a huge difference whether those projects are large or small,” Brown says. This strategy encourages creative problem solving and
empowers employees—thereby unlocking more creative potential, Brown argues. “Say you’re running a restaurant and the project, rather than having everyone turn up for their job every day, is how do we make the restaurant a better experience for our customers?” Brown says. “You have a team with a chef, a waiter, and another person could be from front of house and they work together on some ideas. That shift from ‘I do my job’ to participating in a creative project is hugely empowering. We’ve seen it time and time again.” Brown also cites a scenario from his book, Change by Design (HarperBusiness, 2009). While working with the health care organization Kaiser, he enlisted the opinion of nurses and union reps in design-thinking exercises. The employees were dedicated to their work, but felt disempowered because of regulations and management practices. This helped boost engagement and ultimately devise stronger solutions. “It’s not just about your creative and technical people in R&D coming up with the future of the products and services of your company,” Brown says. “It’s how do we make the sales channel more effective? How do we make the customer experience better? There are so many places.” All Photos: courtesy Ideo
Diana Budds is a New York–based writer covering design and the built environment. She’s a staunch defender of Brutalism.
Brandspeak:
5 Myths About Licensing That Every CMO Should Know
By Jeff Lotman
Stop me if this sounds familiar. Your CEO is hounding you to stretch your marketing budget. His boss — the board of directors — is getting pressure about cutting costs and boosting revenue. Have you heard this before?
Does it sound too good to be true? Let’s run down the most common objections.
As a chief marketing officer, you know all too well how every dollar you spend is scrutinized. Thankfully, a solution exists. Not only will it add cash value; it’ll also penetrate new markets and… it won’t cost you anything.
I get it: it’s tough to share your name. But licensing doesn’t mean you need to become Pierre Cardin, who had at one time over 900 licensees, including toilet paper, and who seemingly never met a license he couldn’t refuse.
Let me introduce you to the world of licensing. Licensing allows a third party to leverage the equity in your brand to sell noncompeting products. Licensed products conjure up powerful associations that can sway consumers into purchasing what they perceive as an extension of a familiar brand.
As the owner of an intellectual property, you can (and should) exercise complete control — over where your product is sold, how it’s displayed, how it’s priced, and so on. All you need is a skilled agent who can negotiate the right controls and approvals into your agreement.
Myth #1: Licensing Means Losing Control
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Need proof? In 1995, Procter & Gamble allowed its name to be put on a Vicks vaporizer. As you can imagine, the company’s teams of lawyers and marketers protect P&G’s brand with great care. If they can sign a licensing agreement, surely you can too.
Myth #2: Licensing Cheapens Your Brand I too once shared this concern. It’s why Birkin bags are so hard to find, and you don’t see Tiffany Blue (or Tiffany ring settings) at Costco. Elite brands can take years to build, but they can be ruined with one bad association.
airports. Today, Cinnabon generates $1 billion-plus in sales and is closing in on 100 licensed products — cereals, snack bars, beverages including coffee and vodka — with partners such as Pillsbury and Kellogg’s. How did founder Kat Cole and her team accomplish this feat? The answer: methodically, and with great precision. They did extensive consumer research, then product testing, and, finally, relationship building with partners. At each stage, Cinnabon execs posed one overarching question: does this prospective partner truly align with the premium quality and signature ingredients of our famed cinnamon rolls?
Consider the story of Vera Wang; there is no doubt you think of expensive wedding dresses when you hear her name. That’s because the designer is considered the gold standard in high-end bridal wear.
The result: Branding Strategy Insider calls Cinnabon Licensing a “best-in-class model for restaurants.”
Yet, Wang’s products at Kohl’s — ranging from sleepwear to shoes — make up the biggest part of her business. As Business of Fashion puts it, “Wang turned what began as a single bridal boutique into a fashion and lifestyle empire with an overall retail value of over $1 billion.” Best of all, her bridal business has not suffered from her brand expansion into Kohl’s.
This is perhaps the most pernicious myth of all. As an industry, licensing drives more than $230 billion in annual sales for the world’s top brands. If these are small potatoes, then I’m becoming a farmer.
Does licensing dilute the integrity of your name? On the contrary, licensing is the single best way to build your brand — if it’s done right.
Myth #3: Licensing Means Slapping Your Logo on a Koozie When my mother tells people what I do for a living, she says I “slap a logo” on things. That is understandable — she just recently gave up her rotary phone — but it is misleading. The reality is that logo slapping is not what experienced brand professionals do. The best brand extension stays true to the essence of the brand; it is well integrated and seamless. So Ford wine? Probably not — but Ford-branded hand and power tools? Absolutely!
Myth #4: Licensing Isn’t That Lucrative
Consider Caterpillar, best known for its yellow construction vehicles and equipment. Did you know the company’s licensed products generate $2 billion a year in retail sales from the CAT brand? It’s true! Outside of the U.S., Caterpillar is best known for its iconic footwear — everything from sandals to sneakers and steel-toed boots. “Globally, we’re more of a lifestyle brand,” says Mark Jostes, a company program manager. $2.1 billion in retail sales, 50 million products sold, and 100,000 retail outlets — if you aren’t interested in this kind of lucrativeness, I promise your competitors are.
Myth #5: Licensing Is Too Much Work The typical way to gain new customers is by creating a new product. But this road is expensive and time-consuming. Not to mention, it often leads to a dead end. Allowing another company to invest time and resources in a new product or category launch through licensing is a much more riskadverse solution To clarify: licensing is not a silver bullet. A licensed product still needs to be cultivated. A licensee will still need a distribution network, a sales force, and a marketing budget. But these burdens shouldn’t fall on your CMO shoulders. After all, you’ve already carried out the hard work of creating the brand, bringing it to market, and establishing a reputation. Now the trick is finding an experienced partner who will do the heavy lifting — while you collect the royalty checks.
Few brands have mastered this art better than Cinnabon. 15 years ago, this bakery didn’t sell anything outside malls and
Jeff Lotman - Global IconsJeff Lotman is the founder and CEO of Global Icons, an international brand licensing agency based in Los Angeles whose clients include BMW, Fatburger, Ford, and Ironman.
A Not-So-Elementary Exploration of Brand Insight By Theodore Kinni
Martin Lindstrom is the Sherlock Holmes of brand consultants. Even as he walks you through the cases in his new book, Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends (St. Martin’s Press, 2016), you can’t help but marvel at his powers of observation and deduction.
Happily, Lindstrom is willing to offer us a guide for building a brand. “Until recently, I never considered what I did for a living as a repeatable methodology,” he admits. “But over the past few years, nearly half a dozen companies have asked if I could distill my methods into a training program.”
Befitting a Holmesian adventure, the first case in Small Data begins with a mysterious call. The interpreter for a Moscowbased entrepreneur is on the line. “The businessman wanted to launch a new business in Russia with the goal of generating at least a billion dollars a year,” Lindstrom writes. “When I asked the obvious question — what was the business? — I was told it was up to me.” Most people receiving such calls would think they were about to be scammed. But for Lindstrom, a self-described “forensic investigator of emotional DNA” with a global reputation, this was an exciting lead.
Lindstrom outlines the result — the 7C Manifesto — in the final pages of the book. The Cs are collecting, clues, connecting, correlation, causation, compensation, and concept — and each represents a step in the process that Lindstrom follows. He also offers some useful advice for completing each step: In collecting, for instance, remove the internal filters that block your ability to observe clearly. When Pepsi asked Lindstrom to improve the public perception of his favorite soda, he eagerly accepted the assignment. But
“Martin Lindstrom is the Sherlock Holmes of brand consultants.”
Soon after, the investigator, accompanied by two Watsons, is on his way to Russia aboard a private jet chartered by the entrepreneur. They spend a few days in Moscow and then fly 4,000 miles to Krasnoyarsk, a city in Siberia with a population of one million. And here, in the frozen steppes, Lindstrom takes the pulse of the Russian people and tries to identify the billion-dollar business opportunity harbored in their collective psyche. He does this by mimicking anthropologists. Lindstrom notices that the locals upholster the inside of their apartment doors, that they lack mirrors, that the men stow their toothbrushes bristles-down and the women bristles up, and, most tellingly, that “every refrigerator seemed to have an extravagantly large collection of magnets.” To Lindstrom, this last clue was evidence that Russian parents doted on their young children. And he ultimately recommended that the entrepreneur launch Mamagazin.ru, an online community and e-commerce site aimed at Russian mothers and their children. Mamagazin.ru was a success, Lindstrom reports, until sanctions on imports forced it to close and retrench in 2015. “The Case of the Refrigerator Magnets” is one of the seven tales in the book showcasing Lindstrom’s methods. Each is fascinating, but each also drives home a lesson that may or may not be intentional: It’s hard, perhaps impossible, for the average marketer to do what Lindstrom does. Lindstrom strikes those of us who blunder through life as supernaturally sensitive and observant. When he comes across seemingly minute and irrelevant details (like whose clothes are hung where in a bedroom closet), his antennae begin to quiver. He also has decades of assignments under his belt, and each has contributed to a portfolio of insights that he can apply elsewhere. For instance, the sense of community Lindstrom discovered in Siberia informed his recommendations for redesigning a chain of grocery stores in the Southeastern U.S.
he also stopped drinking it. “Pepsi — its taste, its bubbles, its cans, its bottles, its advertising — was just too familiar,” he explains. “I had no distance from the brand, no frame of reference about desire, or craving, my own or other people’s. I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t get inspired. I couldn’t do my job.” Even with the helpful advice, I doubt that many of us could ever be able to do what Lindstrom does. There is some magic to his work, and some genius, and a lifetime of devotion to understanding how people’s emotions become intertwined with brands. But then, not being able to do what Sherlock Holmes can do has never stopped admiring readers from following his adventures with delight and astonishment. Why should it not be the same with Martin Lindstrom?
Theodore Kinni is a contributing editor of strategy+business. He also blogs at Reading, Writing re: Management.
Finding the Next Billion-dollar Company By William P. Barnett
WANT TO SPOT A UNICORN? LOOK FOR THE HORSE RUNNING AGAINST THE HERD. Last month I lectured to three very different groups: some top executives of a large American manufacturing firm, a roomful of Russians, and several thousand Chinese entrepreneurs in Shanghai. Very different groups, very different topics. But one question was asked in every venue: “What business is the next ‘unicorn’?” If you can read, then by now you are tired of hearing about unicorns, a trope that refers to startups valued at $1 billion or more. Most pundits talk about them only after they are valuable, but anybody can look in the rearview mirror. What my audiences worldwide want to know is how to see them coming. First, let’s get something straight: Statistics tells us that amazing exceptions will happen, every now and then, at random. In fact, amazing exceptions will even come in bunches every now and then at random, in the same way that my music player will randomly serve up three straight Steely Dan songs in a row. Call them what you want — black swans, unicorns, whatever. These unusual exceptions happen at random. But with unicorn businesses, there is a pattern we can see in advance. This pattern won’t tell you who is the next unicorn, however. It will instead tell you where not to look.
Let me explain. Research shows Want to find the that waves of exuberance about businesses tend to be biased. Since next unicorn? Listen we’re all looking to each other to find the next new thing, once a market to where the buzz space starts trending, it’s bound to is coming from and get hyped beyond its real potential; that’s what the “hype cycle” is all run the other way. about. All that buzz makes it much easier to start companies in a -Bill Barnett hyped space. Ironically, this makes it so that many of the least competitive firms are the ones that herd into the hot markets where everyone wants to invest. Want to find the next unicorn? Listen to where the buzz is coming from and run the other way. I can’t tell you who will be the next unicorn, but I can tell you it will come from where we least expect it. This idea is systematically researched in my paper with Professor Elizabeth Pontikes. Image: iStock/graffoto8 Bill Barnett is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Business Leadership, Strategy, and Organizations at Stanford GSB, and blogs regularly.
A scene from the Netflix series “House of Cards,” which can be streamed without commercials. Credit Netflix
What TV’s changing landscape means for advertising WHEN TV ADS GO SUBLIMINAL WITH A VENGEANCE, WE’LL BE TO BLAME By Jim Rutenberg
For decades the annual television industry ritual known as the upfronts has gone the same way. Thousands of advertising and television executives trudge between New York’s great cultural centers — Carnegie Hall, Radio City Music Hall, Lincoln Center — where network executives screen premieres of their hottest new shows (“24: Legacy” on Fox! “Designated Survivor” on ABC!); trot out their biggest stars (Jennifer Lopez! Kerry Washington!), and disclose which programs will go where on the prime-time schedules being set for the fall. After successive nights of upscale hedonism — steaks at Peter Luger, mango chili martinis at Tao and Nicki Minaj at Terminal 5 — the ad people and the TV people get down to the real business of cutting deals for the 30-second spots that run during prime time’s commercial breaks. But when the whole shebang kicks off in earnest on Monday morning, there will be an underlying sense of seasickness because of the inexorable, existential question that now faces television this time of year: How long can it go on like this? This queasiness was your doing. Maybe it was when you flipped your television input over to your Apple TV last night to watch the commercial-free “House
of Cards” on Netflix, or when you perused the recorded version of “Saturday Night Live” after work on Monday and fast-forwarded through every real ad. Maybe you forgot TV altogether and watched YouTube instead. When you started using all the new technology to watch shows on your own terms, and to stop viewing commercials, you threw into question the modus operandi of a roughly $70 billion industry that has been remarkably stable for decades. The billions give television the room to maintain business as usual in the middle of this change-tsunami in a way that, say, newspapers can’t. But some sort of reckoning seems inevitable. In the not-too-long run, network television could come to look nothing like it does today. Maybe you will be surfing apps instead of channels, as the Apple chief executive Tim Cook predicts, skipping between shows that don’t have commercial breaks or hard-and-fast 30- and 60-minute time limits. That would have big consequences for those who have stuff to sell and who still view television ads as the best way to do it — and equally big consequences for traditional television’s gatekeepers. In the short term, as in this coming week of television
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brinkmanship, bets on where it will all end up, and how much of a reckoning is already upon us, will drive the negotiations for what could be more than $9 billion in advance advertising purchases for the coming fall season. The opening move came from Magna Global, one of the biggest ad-buying firms in the world, which told The Wall Street Journal two weeks ago that it was shifting $250 million of its clients’ ad dollars to YouTube from traditional television.
stare at the other devices, Mr. Poltrack said. Nielsen data does show that those between the ages of 18 and 49 skip fewer than half the ads in recorded shows (42 percent). But two different sets of Nielsen data I saw also showed their overall commercial viewing down by 8 or 11 percent this television season, depending on how you slice it, compared with last year.
That’s a fraction of the many billions Magna spends on television every year for clients that include Coca-Cola and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. But it was a large enough diversion of television dollars to digital media to be of real symbolic importance. Magna pointed to declines in old-fashioned television viewing among those between the ages of 18 and 49, who are important to advertisers.
Those numbers cause people like Joe Marchese, the executive leading the Fox Networks Group’s effort to develop new approaches to advertising (such as offering audiences an option to view one interactive ad at the start of a show in exchange for no more advertising interruptions thereafter), to declare, as he did to me last week, “The social contract is broken with the consumer — they don’t want to watch the ads.”
“What we are trying to do is signal to the market that it is not business as usual,” David Cohen, the United States president of Magna Global, told me last week. “Consumers have over the past several years been migrating away from linear television, and we need to acknowledge that.”
And it explains the sense of urgency I found on the 51st floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza on Thursday morning, where NBCUniversal’s chairwoman of advertising sales, Linda Yaccarino, was overseeing the final touches on NBCUniversal’s upfront presentation.
Network television executives saw the announcement as something else: a savvy negotiating ploy just as the upfronts were to begin. They could point to motive.
Ms. Yaccarino was planning the biggest change in decades to the way NBC does its presentation. Instead of walking advertisers through NBC’s nightly schedule in isolation, it will focus instead on which combinations of shows on NBC, NBC’s sister cable networks, and cable on-demand systems like that of its parent, Comcast, will reach particular audiences. (It will throw in options from its investment partners BuzzFeed and Vox Media, too.)
For all the talk like mine in this column about the future of television advertising, in the here and now industry executives and analysts expect ad rates to spike in the coming upfront deals for the first time in several years. David F. Poltrack, CBS’s chief research officer, says this is partly because advertisers went too far last year. Enthralled with digital advertising, they committed to less commercial time in the upfronts. Disappointing retail sales in 2015 followed. Economists pointed to factors like rising health care costs and stagnant wages. But Mr. Poltrack said the advertising pullback had a role, too. Advertisers seemed to agree, at least in part, especially amid debate about the true reach of digital media. (As American Express told Advertising Age last month, it found that the effect of one day of broadcast advertising was equal to that of two weeks of digital.) And over the ensuing months advertisers jumped back into television to find higher prices than they would have paid had they spent more to begin with. Mr. Poltrack said it augurs a strong upfront, driven by a fundamental lesson: “If less people see your advertising, you will sell less things.” Still, there’s the question of who will actually “see your advertising,” given that it’s now easier than ever to tune that advertising out. Television executives like Mr. Poltrack are spending a whole lot of time studying that. Some findings are counterintuitive. For instance, Mr. Poltrack said, two-thirds of viewers watch with a second screen either in their hands or on their lap. Yet those screens can be so distracting that their users forget to fast-forward past the ads in recorded shows. It turns out viewers are overwhelmingly absorbing the messages coming from the TV even as they
“You will not hear ‘Monday night at 8; Tuesday at 9,’” she said. “You’re going to see our content presented the way audiences seek it out and consume it.” She is operating under the assumption that today’s robust commercial breaks will not be around in their current form much longer. “I tell my whole team, ‘We’re hanging on to them by our fingernails,’” she said. That’s why NBC announced last month that it would remove about 30 percent of the commercial time from “Saturday Night Live” next season. It will seek to make the money back by giving advertisers occasional opportunities to sponsor bits based on whatever it is they’re selling. If it’s done right (and one assumes the “S.N.L.” producer Lorne Michaels will accept no less) the audience won’t even notice the sponsorship, which could come as a spoof based on the advertiser’s product. And that’s where it comes back to us — and I say “us” because I, too, prefer my television ad-free. With the exception of shows on public television or subscription services like Netflix and HBO, commercials pay for the shows we like. If we cut that off, we push television executives into new levels of subliminal trickery. Maybe we’ll decide that’s a fair trade. A version of this article appears in print on page B1 of the New York edition (MAY) with the headline: Advertising’s Revolution Will Be Televised.
Jim Rutenberg Media Columnist, NYT, and contributor to NYT Mag
Marketing tech: changing the way budgets are spent AS TECHNOLOGY RECASTS MARKETING BUDGETS, HAS BELLWETHER BECOME OUTDATED AND DO WE NEED A MEASURE THAT ACCURATELY REFLECT CLIENTS’ INVESTMENTS, SIMON JAMES ASKS. By Simon James
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This month, the first quarter 2016 IPA Bellwether Report described a 14th successive upward revision of marketing budgets – a record run in the 16-year history of this industry measure. But like the swan that appears serene on the surface, something more turbulent is occurring out of sight.
solutions, there are many hidden costs in terms of systems integration, data engineering and analytics to consider before implementation. Claiming technology works out of the box is akin to saying Lego works out of the box; until you integrate the pieces, you won’t see any value.
Since the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the subsequent economic adjustment in 2009, advertising expenditure has only recorded one quarter of negative growth – a tiny blip on an otherwise rosy picture. Mobile advertising growth is driving digital advertising growth, which, in turn, is driving advertising growth. TV spend continues to rise despite several premature obituaries. Traditional media owners have been through an accelerated Darwinian metamorphosis into digital media owners, and a select few native digital media owners have scaled and consolidated their way into positions of oligopolistic power.
Business transformation for a digital world has become a priority for CMOs. This is another call on a CMO’s marketing budget – with experience and marketing technology often numbers one and two on the prioritisation roadmap. Typically, transformation business cases are justified against improved media efficiencies, duplicated agency service fees and a roster review – the very budgets covered by the Bellwether Report. This tension, if not existential, will continue to imperil agency/ client relationships as clients seek transformative change. Today’s integrated agency is not merely through- the-line but front to back through the business, from communications to experience and technology.
Technology is driving a change in media consumption location, if not format. Fuelled by significant reductions in production costs and vastly improved targeting, personalisation and accountability, media budgets gravitate to where the audience is. Remarkably, the industry has shrugged off any need to adapt formats to this newly digitised world. Thirty-second video spots, classifieds and press ads can all be viewed in their digital incarnations today on YouTube, Google and Facebook. Ad-blockers, the Occupy movement of the advertising industry, are a protest vote against the twin crimes of digital advertising: experience-breaking ad formats with their slow load speeds, hidden close buttons, interstitials and popunders; and the amount your monthly data allowance is sucked up by invisible trading of your online data among exchanges in the background as you browse. So ad-blockers improve site load speed and save you money – I can’t see that catching on at all. Increasingly, chief marketing officers are investing in marketing technology. Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey 2015 suggests 33 per cent of marketing budgets are spent on technology, 17 per cent on experience and 7 per cent on innovation. With only 43 per cent of budgets left for advertising and promotions, this indicates that more is spent on technology than digital advertising. Any CMO who claims to own their brand today owns both the communications and the customer experience. Both are now becoming increasingly reliant on technology. Managing customers and prospects across an entire user journey requires a level of customer focus, co-ordination and integration – so what was once a retail silo, a call-centre silo and an e-commerce team now become one. Technology is the enabler but, despite the growth of cloud and software
Transformation doesn’t mean a quick lick of paint. In order to step-change the customer experience, CMOs have unparalleled influence to change internal business processes and organisational structures as the customer champion. It is no surprise that so many user-experience professionals are upgrading their job titles to “service design” on LinkedIn – currently 8,000 in my network. Crucially for CMOs, the impact of investment in experience and technology on long-term business value is less understood than it is for marketing communications. Measuring technology ROI often ends once the business case has been signed off. If the CMO has a wider accountability remit, comparisons on the likely payback must be made between investment options across communications, experience and technology to optimise performance. In order to better represent the world of the CMO and, hence, the health of the marketing industry, long-term studies such as the Bellwether Report should cover not just communications but experience and technology. It should probe clients’ investments and commitment to innovation. It should help us understand how investments in experience and technology can be compared with those in communications, or whether money is flowing from or to communications. Technology is not just changing consumer behaviour, it is changing the composition of marketing budgets. Communications now represent the minority and a report that focuses exclusively on the minority is going to miss these fundamental industry shifts. Simon James is the vice-president, global lead, data and analytics, at SapientNitro
How A Legacy Brand Imagines A New Future: Lessons From Fisher-Price PRO TIP: AVOID SCIENCE FICTION. By Kevin Young
How does an established company imagine a new future? That was the question Fisher-Price wanted to answer when it approached our design consultancy Continuum recently. The 85-year-old children’s product company noticed enormous shifts in the market, from ubiquitous data to inexpensive sensors, and wanted to write itself into this increasingly digital narrative. Immediately. But how? What kind of story would the company need to tell itself, its customers, and its future customers? What would it retain from the past? And how might Fisher-Price best present this vision? These are issues any company wrestling with an uncertain future should confront. Based on our work with Fisher-Price, we came up with three steps a brand should follow to craft a vision that is both forward-thinking and realistic.
1. USE A BACKCASTING MODEL It’s not surprising that companies struggle to introduce innovative new products and services. Especially for established brands, there are very real organizational and business model structures in place that can make breakthrough innovation challenging—and risky. A way to overcome these challenges is to use a strategic planning model called backcasting. Backcasting allows you to analyze consumer values alongside trends in business, culture, and technology to establish an ambitious—yet pragmatic—vision for the future. Once you have this vision, you can then backcast a pipeline of near- and long-term products and services that adhere to your vision.
2. AVOID SCIENCE FICTION When taking a backcasting approach, it’s important to avoid setting a vision that is overly ambitious (or too modest). An overly ambitious vision can be compelling, but it can also be regarded as science fiction: a distant reality that is so far into the future that it’s not useful for planning a business. To avoid crafting an unrealistic vision of the future, start by understanding your target customer—today and in the future. For instance, to remain relevant to future generations of consumers, Fisher-Price set out to understand the values of
parents. Deep human values around parenting don’t expire, so whether we create experiences for parents 15 years ago or 15 years in the future, people will continue to seek close emotional connections with their children and raise them to be strong, resilient young adults. Getting to know your customers in this way is crucial to avoid a potentially dystopian or unemotional vision of the future. You also need to look beyond inhouse staffers to find experts in the fields most relevant to your initiative. For Fisher-Price, experts included technology innovators, child psychologists, and trend researchers. And you’ll want to do more than interview these experts. You’ll want to partner with them so they remain closely affiliated with your initiative, and continue to provide insights and credibility.
3. TELL A GOOD STORY People are naturally wired to retain information told through good stories. So think about the most compelling way to communicate your story. It sounds obvious, I know. But telling a story can be more challenging than it seems. You have to know what message you want to send, then plot a narrative that conveys that message as clearly as possible. In the case of Fisher-Price, we had to communicate a vision that was both futuristic and relatable. So we settled on a short video of a family interacting with technology in everyday scenarios (when a newborn stirs in her bassinet, say, or when a parent measures how much her child has grown). The trick was to make these seemingly futuristic interactions seem perfectly commonplace. Other ways to engage audiences and communicate a vision might be building a physical space, creating a microsite, or hosting a series of events. Whatever medium you choose, keep in mind two things: First, pick a message, and be consistent with it. Second, take as much care sharing your vision internally as you do outside your company walls. A principal with Continuum, Kevin Young is passionate about design. He understands that design is a powerful tool in tapping into the sensorial and subconscious triggers that make people fall in love with the products theyuse. Since joining Continuum in 1997, Kevin has been the manager for many successful and award-winning projects, including the Hundred Dollar Laptop.
By Stephanie Scotti
There’s something extraordinary about TED. This nonprofit foundation has touched millions around the world with inspirational talks, spreading ideas that invite listeners to see the world in a new or different way. Chances are, you’ve been deeply affected by at least one TED talk. Try to imagine what it’s like to actually participate in a TEDx event. I was recently honored to serve on the Speaker Selection Committee and be a speaker coach for a TEDx event in Raleigh, NC. This experience gave rise to some lessons and tips worth spreading.
TED-inspired tips to enhance your next presentation 1. Have an idea worth spreading Whenever you step up to speak, take the time to develop a compelling core message — the one simple phrase or sentence that captures the essence of your presentation. My TEDx experience renewed my admiration for the brilliance and elegance of a simply stated core message. The most important thing you can do as a speaker is to develop your point of view, your idea worth spreading. Here are some stand-out examples from TEDxRaleigh that are clear, simple, action-oriented and easy to share: • NO stands for “New Opportunity” • Choose hope and dream again • Create an experience Dr. Kevin Snyder, TEDxRaleigh curator, said, “Whether it’s designing a talk for a TEDx event, a workshop or a keynote presentation, it is essential to have a core message that inspires others to do something.” Pro tip: Preparing to speak at an industry event, product launch, or even a quarterly financial update? You’ll maximize your impact and stand out from the crowd when you invest the time to develop a clear and memorable idea worth spreading. To learn more about how to develop your core message, read this post: “One Thing You Must do to be Successful When You Speak.”
2. Make your story our story Alan Hoffler, public-speaking coach and author of “Presentation Sin,” shares this advice, “The secret to speaking success is to turn ‘your’ story into ‘our’ story.” That translates as helping the audience to identify with what you’re saying so your message will be a catalyst for action. Easier said than done? Here are a few strategies to help listeners connect with your message: Deliver with openness and vulnerability to build trust Include everyday examples that people can relate to Ask listeners a rhetorical question that encourages them to reflect on their lives
Michael Penny, an Afghanistan war veteran, spoke at TEDxRaleigh about the improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, that wreaked havoc and destruction. He made a lasting connection with the audience when he asked, “What’s the IED in your life?” That simple question encouraged listeners to think about how Michael’s story and his message could influence their own lives. Pro tip: Know your audience! That makes it easier to choose relevant examples that help your listeners make the connection between your message and their situation. To learn more about how to develop your story read this post: “Science Backs the Importance of Storytelling.”
3. Connect, don’t perform An authentic and memorable presentation takes time to develop and prepare. It requires a significant commitment to writing, rewriting, and rehearsing. As you rehearse, don’t forget to consider where to stand, how to move and what to wear. However, when it comes time to take the stage, keep it real: Talk to the audience as if you are talking to a good friend over a beer, and let the real you come through. Like the TEDx Raleigh speakers, being authentic builds rapport, establishes trust, and creates a lasting impression. Pro tip: A successful presentation is not about getting everything perfect. It’s about being prepared, wanting to connect, and sharing openly with others. To learn more about authentic presentation styles: “Presentation Preparation: The Red Zone.” Whenever you step up to speak, you have an opportunity to make a difference. Whether it is introducing a new engagement team at a client kick-off meeting, a keynote address at an industry event, or speaking at an analyst meeting, what you say and how you say it influences the outcome. The next time you are asked to speak, use these tips to make sure your ideas are worth spreading and carry the power to create change. Stephanie Scotti is a strategic communication adviser specializing in high-stake presentations. She has 25-plus years experience of coaching experience and eight years teaching presentation skills for Duke University. She has provided presentation coaching to over 3,000 individuals in professional practices, Fortune 500 companies, high-level government officials and international business executives.
Why publishers are teaming up to explore time-based ad selling By Lucinda Southern
The trend of selling ads based on time, rather than clickthrough rate, is gaining momentum among publishers: More than two dozen of them, including Dow Jones and The Telegraph, have teamed up to actively explore trading in this way. The strategy is meant to combat the wider problem of viewable ads. Approximately half of online ads sold are never viewed, causing massive waste in advertiser budgets. According to analytics company Moat, only 56 percent of ads on desktop are classified as in view; this drops to 45 percent on mobile. Rather than forcing advertisers to create bigger, flashier and more interruptive ads, publishers are charging for the ad only if it caught the reader’s attention. “We’re seeing over 25 publishers explore selling on time and attention,” said Aniq Rahman, president at Moat, during a panel at the 614 Group’s Brand Safety Summit held in London. “That may be over cost per second or cost per hour, rather than clicks. Attention is the scarce resource marketers are trying to value; we’re figuring how to measure it.” As part of trying to figure out how to measure attention, some 20 publishers participate in regular calls to collaborate and learn from each other. Most of the learning comes from the Financial Times, which has had some of the earliest success with time-based selling. Cost-per-hour now represents 12 percent of the impressions the FT has served (up from 7 percent last September) across approximately 31 campaigns for clients like BP and Microsoft, which only paid for the ad if it was viewed for five seconds or longer. The Economist has also adopted the approach. In February, Ashwin Shridar, global head of digital products revenue at The Economist, told Digiday about the results of its first campaign traded in this way. It’s now onto its third, billing for display ad impressions that get over five seconds of “active” reader view time, including scrolling up and down a page,
using a mouse or typing on a keyboard. “Our research shows that the advertisers who buy exclusively on viewability end up getting less time with our audience,” said Shridar. “We share the research and insights that we have with our advertisers and ask them to make an informed choice between buying on viewability or trading on attention. More often than not, they opt for the latter.” The FT and the Economist both have a hybrid ad and subscription model, and run more brand building campaigns, making them particularly attractive to marketers. “We’re seeing it chime particularly among CMOs,” Rahman told Digiday. “Marketers of luxury brands are particularly interested; no one buys a luxury watch or handbag by clicking on an ad.” But in order to get people to stick around longer, the creative needs to be compelling, they say. “When we talk about agencies, we’re talking mainly about media agencies,” said Rahman. “But there’s a bigger role for the creative agencies to play because the creative is so important in capturing the attention of the reader.” Creatives with more access to the data from media agencies on how well time-based sales have performed will, in theory, be able to make more informed decisions. The problem, however, is that creative agencies still see online ads as less important than TV, said Jim Freeman, group sales and trading director at The Telegraph Group. “They need to give more of a shit about online, and their clients need to insist on that,” he said.
Lucinda Southern, UK Senior Writer/Reporter
What Do Consumers Want? Look at Their Selfies By Courtney Rubin
Allison Shragal, 28, of Chicago, isn’t a model, or Internet famous — she’s an administrative assistant for a general contracting company. But almost every day companies pay her to snap photos of herself engaging in routine activities — brushing her teeth, eating breakfast, cleaning the bathroom. If Ms. Shragal takes enough selfies with her smartphone and uploads them to a special app, she has “an extra $20 to go get my nails done,” she said.
Her seemingly mundane images, when combined with thousands of others, contain insights that companies like Crest are eager to mine. They are using a Chicago-based company called Pay Your Selfie to gather those insights and present them in reports on consumer behavior that are meant to go where focus groups and surveys cannot. Among the tidbits that Crest, owned by Procter & Gamble, learned from its recent monthlong quest for selfies: There’s a huge spike in brushing from 4 to 6 p.m., probably tied to
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a desire for happy-hour fresh breath. That knowledge could be useful when Crest decides which times of the day to start future social media campaigns. Users of the app receive anywhere from 20 cents to $1 for each “task” completed — in Crest’s case, a snapshot taken “while brushing your teeth with your favorite Crest product.” Users can’t double-dip; the app allows only one selfie per task. The selfies are a good way for companies to obtain information that people can’t or don’t articulate in focus groups or other traditional research methods, said Ravi Dhar, director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management. For example, they could lead to an understanding of which rituals go along with certain types of consumption, he said. Pay Your Selfie, which has been in business since last September, doesn’t require participants to have followers on a site like Instagram. In fact, users don’t have to share their images publicly at all (although they can). That makes it different from a company like Popular Pays, which offers Instagrammers the chance to post about brands like Nike in exchange for giveaways or cash. The option of privacy suggests a greater possibility for authenticity, said Aparna Labroo, a professor of marketing at the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management. “If the task comes up when a person is naturally engaging in a relevant activity and it’s minimally intrusive to take a selfie, they might actually capture some authentic moments.” About 11 percent of the men in the Crest photos were shirtless, a level of comfort the brand rarely sees when it uses other tools in its research arsenal, said Kris Parlett, a senior communications manager for P.&G. Oral Care. Other research methods include recruiting volunteers to record videos of their oral care routine in their bathrooms or to brush their teeth in “insight suites,” mocked-up home bathrooms with mirrors that allow analysts to observe them. “It’s not data you could get through Nielsen,” said Michelle Smyth, a founder of Pay Your Selfie, referring to the barechested photos. “It’s one-of-a-kind research.” Companies set a target number of selfies to be collected, in the thousands or tens of thousands, and give Pay Your Selfie at least $2 per usable image, a portion of which goes to the selfie taker. A computer scans the photos to make sure that there’s a face and that the shot isn’t too dark. App users, who must provide some basic biographical data like age and city, receive payment only for “validated” photos, and can cash out at $20. Eight Pay Your Selfie employees pore over the photos to produce reports on their findings. The results are eye-opening, said Alex Blair, who owns four franchises of Freshii, a Toronto-based chain of healthy fastfood outlets. It has sponsored two tasks on Pay Your Selfie.
our consumers are into quinoa and kale and bean sprouts,” Mr. Blair said. “But some of these photos were so far from that wavelength, it’s really helping us kind of realign with the mass market.” Mr. Blair said the selfies could be used to help determine whether stores should focus more on smoothies or prepackaged snacks. (The selfies leaned toward the latter.) The images also might identify neighborhoods to place new stores in, based on whether people are in their offices (suggesting a financial district opening might be a good bet) or on the couch at home in their exercise clothes. One problem with traditional consumer research is the gap between what people say they do (or would like to think they do) and what they actually do. Selfies would seem to have the same problem, as anyone who’s ever posed for one and decided it was too embarrassing or revealing to share knows. But Ms. Shragal, for one, says she’s become so accustomed to the app that she doesn’t scrutinize the photos. “In the beginning I focused on trying to do a cool picture,” said Ms. Shragal, who used to make aesthetic adjustments like wiping the toothpaste off her mouth before taking the Crest image. “But after doing it for so many months, I kind of just focus on doing the task correctly and getting it done.” Often tasks don’t require owning or buying a company’s product. But Lakeshore Beverage, a Chicago distributor, asked users to snap a selfie with a Goose Island 312 ale, and learned which stores people visited to buy the beer. “It was interesting to us because the user base on the app is a little more general than the beer-specific buyer that we target through our marketing,” said Matt Tanaka, who was until recently Lakeshore’s head of digital marketing. “It helps us when we’re talking to retailers where people took a lot of selfies to say these places are top of mind.” (In the case of 312, the places were Target and Walgreens.) Pay Your Selfie would not reveal how many clients it has worked with. The company also conducts its own research — partly as a way to attract new business. “What are you eating for breakfast?” was a recent task it asked its users to complete. For millennials, top choices were Pop-Tarts and Froot Loops, the photos showed. (Pay Your Selfie’s founders said they later had a meeting with a “major cereal brand.”) Even tasks not sponsored by individual companies “are a fast and powerful way to share what seems uninteresting information to consumers but critical information to marketers,” said Jean McLaren, president of Marc USA, an advertising agency whose clients include Rite Aid. She said she was considering working with Pay Your Selfie. Ms. McLaren said she liked the idea of recreating a person’s pantry by stringing together multiple seemingly random selfies from the same users — a cheaper, faster way to get information that once could be obtained only through lengthy in-home interviews.
In one, the company asked participants to provide selfies with “healthy on-the-go” snacks. For some people that meant Snickers candy bars.
“It’s like automated voyeurism,” she said.
“We focus on organics and cool new macronutrients, and
at Their Selfies.
A version of this article appears in print on May 8, 2016, on page BU4 of the New York edition with the headline: What Do Consumers Want? Look
Clash of the titanic brands AMAZON TAKES ON YOUTUBE WITH LAUNCH OF AMAZON VIDEO DIRECT By Sarah Perez
Amazon unveiled its own plans to compete in the usergenerated video market with the launch of a new service called Amazon Video Direct in a surprise announcement this morning. This service, explains the company, allows creators to upload their own videos to Amazon’s Prime Video and generate royalties based on the hours streamed.
According to Variety, Amazon will pay partners 50 percent of the retail price for digital purchases, rentals and subscription fees. If creators distribute on Prime Video, they will earn royalties of 15 cents per hour streamed in the U.S. and 6 cents in other territories, their report indicates. (This is capped at $75,000 per year).
Creators have several options to monetize their videos, including making them available to rent or own, or they can make them free and ad-supported. The videos can also be packaged together and offered as an add-on subscription to Amazon Prime Video. Add-on subscriptions are available through the Streaming Partners Program, and are intended for larger-scale video providers.
Along with the debut of AVD, as the new service is called for short, Amazon is also launching AVD Stars. A unique promotion designed to kick-start this new video platform, the AVD Stars program gives creators a share of $1 million per month based on customer engagement with their title.
The new program will likely appeal to creators given Amazon’s scale. This self-serve platform reaches the company’s “tens of millions” of Prime members, Amazon notes. Many of these customers are already engaged with Amazon Prime Video, as they use this Netflix-like service to watch Amazon’s free TV shows and movies, including both popular network TV and Hollywood films, as well as Amazon’s own original content. In addition, Amazon says that creators will have control over where their videos can be streamed. For now, that means they can be streamed in countries where Amazon Video is available – the U.S., Germany, Austria, United Kingdom and Japan. These videos can be played back anywhere Amazon Video works, as well, which includes mobile phones and tablets (Fire, iOS and Android), desktop, game consoles, connected TV platforms, and Fire TV. Like other video sites, creators will also have access to metrics to see how their videos are performing. This system, at launch, includes the ability to track number of minutes a title was streamed, projected revenue, payment history, and number of subscribers. This allows the creators to make changes based on their metrics, says Amazon. “It’s an amazing time to be a content creator,” said Jim Freeman, Vice President of Amazon Video, in a statement about the launch. “There are more options for distribution than ever before and with Amazon Video Direct, for the first time, there’s a self-service option for video providers to get their content into a premium streaming subscription service. We’re excited to make it even easier for content creators to find an audience, and for that audience to find great content.”
Amazon says it will distribute a monthly bonus to creators from the $1 million monthly fund, based on the Top 100 AVD titles in Prime Video. This is on top of any other revenue earned. All creators and providers who use AVD will automatically be enrolled. The program launches today and the $1 million monthly fund will make its first bonus distributions based on streaming activity from June 1st to June 30th. Amazon’s announcement noted some of the early names it has signed up to participate in the new program, including Conde Nast Entertainment, HowStuffWorks, Samuel Goldwyn Films, The Guardian, Mashable, Mattel, StyleHaul, Kin Community, Jash, Business Insider, Machinima, TYT Network, Baby Einstein, CJ Entertainment America, Xive TV, Synergetic Distribution, Kino Nation, Journeyman Pictures, and Pro Guitar Lessons. As you can tell by the selection, Amazon is targeting larger video creators and MCNs (multi-channel networks), as opposed to the everyday, mainstream users who use YouTube to upload personal videos. That makes the service competitive with something like Vimeo, as well, especially given the options to rent or sell videos. The launch follows Amazon’s recent debut of standalone subscriptions,which target non-Prime members at a cost of $8.99 per month. Sarah currently works as a writer for TechCrunch, after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to becoming a professional blogger, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software.
Idea Sex: How New Yorker Cartoonists Generate 500 Ideas a Week THE TRICK IS TO NOT WAIT FOR THE MOMENTS OF INSPIRATION, BUT TO BE WORKING AND LET THOSE MOMENTS HAPPEN WHILE YOU’RE WORKING. By Matt McCue
Every Tuesday the 50 or so freelance cartoonists for the “New Yorker” submit their weekly batch of drawings for publication consideration. Some email them in and others travel to the magazine’s office at One World Trade Center to personally hand in physical copies. But all of the cartoonists have one thing in common: They’re facing terrible odds of success.
week after week? Ahead of the new film Very Semi-Serious, New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff and a handful of contributors share how they dream humorous concepts, even when they don’t feel particularly funny.
Each cartoonist submits up to 10 sketches, so there can be 500 entries competing for approximately 12 spots in the magazine. “On a good week, you might sell one of your batch of 10,” says cartoonist Matt Diffee. “That is 90 percent rejection.”
Bob Mankoff describes the cartoon idea generation process as “idea sex.”
This is the same problem every creative faces—on steroids: tight deadlines, a crazy competitive environment, a discerning audience, and uncertain pay. If a cartoonist fails to impress, he will miss out on a high three- to low four-figure payday. So why do they do it? And how do they generate their ideas
How to Come up with a Good Idea
“Ideas breed ideas,” he says. “The classic technique is by putting things together that don’t go together,” he says. He begins riffing, offering a potential cartoon setting: heaven. It has clouds, a gate, and Saint Peter. It’s a place people want to get into, but it’s hard to get into. Maybe Mankoff will do heaven as a nightclub with a bouncer? “Or heaven has barbed wire on top to keep out the undocumented angels,” continues Mankoff. “Or there is an easy pass lane into heaven and people are flying through.”
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“IDEAS BREED IDEAS.”
I feel about everything. I pretty much go through life joking, not just in cartooning.”
“That’s the basic creative process,” he says. “You float out, What if?”
Rethink the Rejects
Mankoff sold his first cartoon to the New Yorker in 1977, became the magazine’s cartoon editor in 1997 and has written his own how-to book for cartoonists, The Naked Cartoonist. He’s always amazed by the people who tell him they have a single great cartoon idea. One idea is never enough, and it’s rarely good. “The way you get good ideas is to get a lot of ideas,” says Mankoff.
For Carolita Johnson, a rejected cartoon isn’t a dead cartoon. “I would say that 80 percent of what I’ve sold, I’ve submitted more than once,” she says. “I waited on something I liked and tried it again.” She keeps an ongoing list of half-baked ideas near her unsold cartoons and continuously tries to come up with matches. “I might have a cartoon that I thought looked good at the time, but now looks stupid,” she says. “But let’s try a new drawing and maybe something will come to me.”
Failure is important to the creative process, notes Mankoff. “You learn so much more when you’re doing something wrong and are willing to get that feedback than when you are doing something right,” he explains. “It also teaches you how to be resilient, because you’re going to need that in a competitive, creative enterprise.”
A rejected cartoon isn’t a dead cartoon. In addition to contributing to the New Yorker, Johnson works three different jobs as an illustrator and storyteller. The time crunch motivates her to work fast. “After my drawing started to get better, I decided to stop wasting my time doing roughs and started drawing all of my cartoons on resume paper so they’re ready for sale,” she says. She typically begins with a caption and builds the images around it. Johnson can finish a cartoon in 30 to 60 minutes, though she can’t always guarantee it will be funny. “I have sold cartoons that I don’t even know why they are funny,” she says. Take the image below. Johnson considered it too morbid. “It’s almost an unconscious thought that I put on paper,” she says. “Something that you don’t say, but sometimes think.” The New Yorker bought it, which emphasizes an important point about creativity and comedy. Being clever is as important as being funny. “It’s about insight rather than searching for a laugh,” says Johnson.
One of Mankoff’s early submissions that didn’t make the magazine’s pages. Used with permissiom from Bob Mankoff. ©BobMankoff
Mankoff submitted “thousands” of cartoons to the New Yorker before it bought his first one. The rejections forced him to think differently about his approach. “At the beginning, I was trying to do jokes in the vein of established cartoonists and the New Yorker was looking for people with their own voice,” he says. By virtue of doing so many reps, Mankoff developed his unique style. Given the high rejection rate, why do people pitch cartoons to the New Yorker? “It’s a calling for people because you actually see the world as skewed,” says Mankoff. “That is how
©Carolita Johnson/The New Yorker Magazine/cartoonbank.com
Competing against the top illustrators in the country for one of the coveted spots in the New Yorker’s pages doesn’t phase Johnson. One might not believe her, were it not for her past experience. “I used to be a model and I had to hand my photos over to people who would smirk back at me,” she says. “Do I think handing in cartoons is hard? Try handing yourself in. I can live with rejected cartoons.”
Grind Your Way into a Creative Zone
working,” he says.
The New Yorker doesn’t have assignment themes, so the cartoonists are able to tickle any whimsy. That kind of freedom doesn’t mean ideas flow more fluidly. “About 95 percent of the time, I’m stuck,” says Matt Diffee. “The idea being blocked is the norm.” To get the juices flowing, he begins his weekly two-hour idea brainstorming sessions with a full pot of coffee and a blank sheet of paper. “As I empty the coffee, I fill up the paper,” he says.
Diffee’s cartoons are driven by words and ideas that mix surprising elements in a common context—the images come last. To loosen up his concepts, he uses word associations. Diffee’s favorite published New Yorker cartoon (below) began with him wanting to do something on the concept of writer’s block. “I wrote those words down and then thought ‘writer’s block and tackle.’ You could have a bunch of football players trying to block, but that was too wacky for me,” says Diffee. “Or it could be like a horse rider. Rider’s block? That didn’t work.”
The idea being blocked is the norm.
He cycled through 40 different concepts over a couple of years. At one point, he began adding words in front of writer’s block—ad writer’s block, business writer’s block— and that led to skywriter’s block. “As soon as I unlocked those words, I knew the drawing had to be an airplane circling in the sky,” he says. Each week Diffee generates about 150 concepts that he whittles down to 10 that he is “okay with putting my name on.” “Most of my ideas don’t fully satisfy me,” he admits. “If I have a batch of 10, there will be two that I’m really fond of, two that I’m slightly embarrassed of, and the six in the middle will be fine.” He estimates his success rate over the past 16 years is three percent, but he has parlayed the rejections into a book collection of cartoons that were too dumb, dark, or naughty for The New Yorker. “We’ve [New Yorker cartoonists] always wanted to make money off the rejects, and people have tried different schemes as groups and individuals, but apart from the books we haven’t figured out a good way,” he says. “New Yorker is still the best gig in town, so the best bet is to try to sell them there eventually.”
How about you? What ways do you create ideas on tight deadlines? ©MatthewDiffee/The New Yorker Magazine/cartoonbank.com
In some ways the ship product every “The trick is to not to be working and
process is clinical because he has to week, regardless of if he feels inspired. wait for the moments of inspiration, but let those moments happen while you’re
Matt McCue is the senior writer for 99U. Previously, he contributed to Fast Company, Fortune and ESPN The Magazine. He lives in New York City, but he is willing to travel long distances for a good meal.
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Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All
Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work
By Tom Kelley , David Kelley
By Nigel Cross Design thinking is the core creative process for any designer; this book explores and explains this apparently mysterious “design ability.” Focusing on what designers do when they design, Design Thinking is structured around a series of in-depth case studies of outstanding and expert designers at work, interwoven with overviews and analyses. The range covered reflects the breadth ...
In an incredibly entertaining and inspiring narrative that draws on countless stories from their work at IDEO, the Stanford d.school, and with many of the world’s top companies, David and Tom Kelley identify the principles and strategies that will allow us to tap into our creative potential in our work lives, and in our personal lives, and allow us to innovate in terms of how we approach and solve problems.
The Brand Flip: Why customers now run companies and how to profit from it (Voices That Matter)
The Art of Client Service: The Classic Guide, Updated for Today’s Marketers and Advertisers
By Marty Neumeier
By Robert Solomon , Ian Schafer (Foreword)
Best-selling brand expert Marty Neumeier shows you how to make the leap from a company-driven past to the consumer-driven future. You’ll learn how to flip your brand from offering products to offering meaning, from value protection to value creation, from cost-based pricing to relationship pricing, from market segments to brand tribes, and from customer satisfaction to customer empowerment.
A practical guide for providing exceptional client service Most advertising and marketing people would claim great client service is an elusive, ephemeral pursuit, not easily characterized by a precise skill set or inventory of responsibilities; this book and its author argue otherwise, claiming there are definable, actionable methods to the role...
What Great Brands Do. The Seven Brand-Building Principles That Separate the Best From the Rest
Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profit-Hungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies
By Denise Lee Yohn
By Michael Farmer, Kevin Roberts (Foreword)
As a general rule, I’m not always sure that small businesses benefit from studying the branding strategies of the behemoths. That being said, this particular book makes a real effort to present those strategies in a way that can be applied in more typical business and branding scenarios.
This book is documented in detail by Michael Farmer, who has been working in the industry for the past 25 years. Farmer, who was formerly a Director of Bain & Company, provides a gripping analysis of advertising agencies and their deteriorating situation. He describes the key trends that have weakened agencies...
Aaker on Branding: 20 Principles That Drive Success
Global Brand Power: Leveraging Branding for Long-Term Growth (Wharton Executive Essentials)
By David Aaker “Aaker on Branding” presents in a compact form the twenty essential principles of branding that will lead to the creation of strong brands. Culled from the six David Aaker brand books and related publications, these principles provide the broad understanding of brands, brand strategy, brand portfolios, and brand building that all business, marketing, and brand strategists should know.
By Barbara E. Kahn In Global Brand Power, Kahn brings brand management into the 21st century, addressing how branding contributes to the purchase process and how to position a strong global brand, from identifying the appropriate competitive set, offering a sustainable differential advantage, and targeting the right strategic segment.
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Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage (Wharton Executive Essentials) By Peter Fader Upending some of our most fundamental beliefs, renowned behavioral data expert Peter Fader, Co-Director of The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, helps businesses radically rethink how they relate to customers. He provides insights to help you revamp your performance metrics, product development, customer relationship ...
Web Copy That Sells: The Revolutionary Formula for Creating Killer Copy That Grabs Their Attention and Compels Them to Buy By Maria Veloso With the rise of social networks, “Twitterized” attention spans, and new forms of video content, the techniques that worked in crafting attentiongrabbing, clickable, and actionable online copy a few years ago are simply not as effective today.
Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands By Marty Neumeier
Driving Customer Equity : How Customer Lifetime Value is Reshaping Corporate Strategy By Roland Rust , Valarie Zeithaml , Katherine Lemon The authors’ Customer Equity Framework yields powerful insights that will help any business increase the value of its customer base. Rust, Zeithaml, and Lemon introduce the three drivers of customer equity -- Value Equity, Brand Equity, and Retention Equity -- and explain in clear, nontechnical language how managers can base their strategies on one or a combination of these drivers.
How to Write a Good Advertisement By Victor O. Schwab How to Write a Good Advertisement gets you quickly up to speed with examples of powerful profitable headlines (with explanations of why those headlines work so well), and quick lesson reviews that help you turn what you’ve read into skills you own. Schwab provides us shortcuts without sacrificing long-term understanding. Fifty years after publication this book is still the standard bearer, sought after by a new generation of copy-writers and businesspeople. Read it, apply it, and watch your sales soar.
Tested Advertising Methods (5th Edition) (Prentice Hall Business Classics)
“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. The author argues that in an extremely cluttered marketplace, traditional differentiation is no longer enough— today companies need “radical differentiation” to create lasting value for their shareholders and customers.
By Caples, Hahn
The Global Brand CEO: Building The Ultimate Marketing Machine
Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration
By Marc de Swaan Arons , Frank van den Driest Today almost every marketer works on or competes against a global brand. Think about it; only ten years ago things were very different. The Global Brand CEO is the first book to specifically focus on what it takes to win in global marketing. Building on over 20 years of practical experience, and having worked with the leaders of many of the world s most successful global brands...
The fifth edition of this work on how to create successful advertising features new coverage on small businesses with limited revenues, non-profit advertising, as well as techniques of headlines, illustrations and layouts. There is also new information useful to smaller businesses.
By by Scott Doorley, Scott Witthoft, Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, David Kelley (Foreword) Make Space is a new and dynamic resource for activating creativity, communication and innovation across institutions, corporations, teams, and schools alike. Filled with tips and instructions that can be approached from a wide variety of angles, Make Space is a ready resource for empowering anyone to take control of an environment.