BrandKnew June 2017 by Brand Knew

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Dear Friends: The summer is well and truly upon us and our salute, respect and support to the devout and spirited who fast through the Holy Month of Ramadan. As is our norm, this issue packs a lot of punch. Amazon is all set to rewrite the rules of Influencer Marketing and marketers will be keeping a close watch. After three decades or more, the departure of one of marketing’s greatest icons, CMO of Coke, Marcos De Quinto, is attracting a lot of attention. Brands can learn a lot from the feature on Advertising in the Age of Distraction. If ever there was a divided and distorted way of doing PR Management in a Crisis, United Airlines showed us how. There have been a lot of epitaphs written about the death of Broadcast TV but they are not going away in a hurry as Advertisers seem to stick together and buy together. If you want to look at a brand transformation exercise, read this feature on Air Canada’s rebranding exercise. Thought Leadership and building Brand Awareness goes hand in hand. Understand how on the article carried in this issue on the same subject.If Marketers can master the Art of Storytelling, they would be in clover, read more here. Plenty of content to relish and use as evidence. Till the next edition... Best

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Suresh Dinakaran @sureshdinakaran

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suresh@groupisd.com Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Regional Director: Krishna Chugh Country Manager, India: Vinit Chugh Associate: Brand Connect: Hasitha Fernando Creator: Brand Stories: Salindu Sadishan Web Specialist: Prasanta Kumar Sahu Online Support: Mahendra Kumar Behera

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CONTENTS

5 Ways Leveraging Thought Leadership Can Help Build Brand Awareness Advertising in the Age of Distraction Marketing lessons from the world of Physics United Untied: A PR 101 Lesson in Crisis Communications Five Lessons for All Marketers From the Departure of Coke’s CMO How long will TV advertising stick around? Marketers: Master the art of story telling The re branding of an airline What Amazon’s Influencer Marketing Program Means for The Entire Marketing Industry How Facebook’s object-recognition tech could boost marketing How True Advertising Can Save Journalism From Drowning in a Sea of Content How To Rebrand An Unsavory History Meme Marketing: How Brands Are Speaking A New Consumer Language Major Brands Get Hip To Haptics Book, Line & Sinker

5 Ways Leveraging Thought Leadership Can Help Build Brand Awareness THOUGHT LEADERSHIP (AND ESTABLISHING YOURSELF AS A PERSON TO KNOW IN YOUR INDUSTRY) CAN HELP YOU WIN POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS AND BOOST YOUR BUSINESS’S STANDING. By John Rampton

To win their audience over, a business owner has to prove that they know what they are talking about or, even better, have the vision and forethought to provide something new on a particular topic. The audience that gets access to that new information may feel like they have something no competitor has ever offered them, which can make that business owner more valuable in their eyes and worthy of their business. That’s what thought leadership can do as a brand-building strategy for everyone from freelancers and founders to established small-business owners. The inherent value of the insights a business owner shares can translate into brand equity, where an audience applies that value to the product or service that business owner represents. Blogging can be an excellent way to demonstrate thought leadership on a particular topic or industry that, in return, helps shape and instill your brand’s audience. But it’s just one brick in the wall related to establishing your thought leadership. Here are five other ways you could consider building your platform in conjunction with blogging.

1. White Papers and E-Books Previously used strictly for software companies and more technical industries, the white paper is becoming an integral way to illustrate thought leadership in a particular area or business segment. Using a combination of content, research and statistics, you can demonstrate to your audience that you have done

your homework. You can also create surveys and use data to generate new insights into issues that are impacting them in some way.

Seeing and interacting with customers can help you get closer to your audience and bolster that trust factor.

With my business, it could be findings related to cash flow, late payments, payment security, compliance issues, etc. My recommendation is to study what issues concern your target audience and then generate research and findings that show how you understand their problems. You are showcasing that you and your brand have the knowledge and leadership needed to provide potential solutions for them without even having to sell to them through these documents.

2. Syndicated Article Distribution By publishing articles on multiple platforms, you can leverage these syndicated article sites to spread your thought leadership across a much larger audience than the reach of your current blog. Consider taking the time to develop valuable content that is likely to resonate with your audience and follow the guidelines of each site. There are sites where you may have to pay to publish, but it’s a great idea to start out with the freebies and see how far you get. I’ve been able to get thousands

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of views and shares using this tactic, helping to build my thought leadership.

3. Video Marketing A new area I’m currently exploring is leveraging video apps and platforms that are growing in popularity, including Periscope and Facebook Live. These help me share more of my personality than what I can get across in a written blog post. Seeing and interacting with customers can help you get closer to your audience and bolster that trust factor. By using video marketing, I’ve been able to get a better understanding of my audience and address their questions and comments in real time.

4. Panel Participation In 2016, I participated in more panels at conferences than I ever have before, which quickly ramped up more global interest in my thought leadership, company and personal brands. Try to illustrate the value you can add to a panel to help get more of your speaker proposals accepted. For me, these panels align my brand with that of other recognizable brand leaders, enhancing my credibility. I can share my insights in a real-time way as well as gain numerous benefits through participating, including networking and generating new leads.

5. Case Studies In this age of storytelling as a key marketing tactic, case studies have become an excellent thought-leadership tool. For my business, these case studies are focused on specific customers who are willing to share stories about the problems they had and how my company helped them solve them. Having customer testimonials gives your audience other voices that can testify to your brand’s ability to lead them past certain business challenges. A potential customer may read the case study and relate to the scenario outlined, which can help further the engagement process. Case studies can either be content or video-based. Either way, they can be created fairly easily and affordably, and then shared across multiple channels, including social media, your website, blog, newsletters and more. While each tactic can be beneficial for building thought leadership, I recommend starting with one and adding others as you gain traction. It’s too much to take on all of these at once, and it may be good to have access to resources and talent who can help you develop the necessary content for all these thought leadership tactics.

John Rampton Writer, Entrepreneur Media

Advertising in the Age of Distraction By Dr. Carl Marci

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Last Thanksgiving, the food devoured and the dishes cleaned, I distinctly remember sitting down to watch one of the football games, then glancing at my phone for Facebook updates and new email. All at once, an advertising tsunami hit, as if every brand I’d ever encountered was flooding me with messages in anticipation of sales. Clothes and TVs. Mobile devices and kids’ toys. Even those candles I’d bought for my wife a couple months earlier. In that moment, however fleeting, the playing field was clear and the challenges for brands on full display: There may be more ways to reach consumers than ever before, but those consumers are harder to engage than ever before, too. While my experience was in the key early stages of the holiday season, the challenges are not limited to the holidays. Brands are facing the same challenges every day, and the general acceleration of commerce is going to make this a permanent phenomenon. Marketers need to know, more than ever, how to break through the clutter. The proliferation of digital devices, coupled with a deluge of short, “snackable” content, has given consumers greater choice than ever in how and where they consume media. That’s led to more distractions and ever-shrinking attention spans. A couple of pieces of data illustrate the point: 1. We use media more than ever before. Over the last 13 years alone, according to Nielsen research, average time spent using consumer media has increased from 45 to 65 hours per week. That’s a nearly 45% increase. 2. We switch platforms more than ever before. In another study, Digital Natives (born 1990 or later) switched media platforms 27 times per hour, on average—or about every other minute. Those born before 1990 switched 17 times per hour on average—not quite as jumpy, but pretty jumpy nevertheless. The results translate into a 30% decrease in attention span. So, even as brand managers have more opportunity to “meet” consumers, those consumers are busy meeting other brands, too. That means less time for the necessary interaction that leads to a sale. The “attention economy” has left brands battling for consumer engagement in every corner of our lives—from TV and mobile devices to planes, trains, and automobiles. How can marketers know whether their creative was strong enough to beat the rapid succession of advertising and make an emotional connection with the consumer? It was hard enough in the pre-digital age, when surveys were the order of the day, but asking questions of busy consumers isn’t at all enough today. To break through in this complex environment, marketers must have an understanding of how our brains process information in the modern media landscape. In the game of telephone, the correct message is rarely relayed accurately down the line. Picture that same game while everyone has a mobile device in their hands (ironically,

a telephone, but they aren’t using it for that). Our brains, guided by our inherent biases, do not nearly have the ability to consciously process everything that happens around us. Welcome to the province of consumer neuroscience. The human brain has more than 80 billion neurons, each one making between 10,000 to 20,000 connections. It’s a complex machine, one of the most complex in the known universe. The key is to exploit the fact that the brain processes information as it attends to it, and tags the bits it finds emotionally relevant for long-term storage. And what is stored in our memory is most likely to influence our future behavior. That is the consumer neuroscience definition of engagement: attention to something that emotionally impacts you, triggers a new (or reinforces an existing) memory, and influences future behavior. Our emotion system is on all the time. It’s constantly evaluating information and tagging the relevant bits for storage. So it’s our emotion system that helps guide us to approach something that we see has value, run away from things that we don’t value or see as a threat, and ignore just about everything else. The fact that you probably don’t know this (unless you are a neuroscientist) leads us to another critical point: Most of this process occurs below conscious awareness. How do marketers take advantage of this information, considering that most of brain processing is non-conscious? Questions won’t do it: “What were you thinking unconsciously just now?” won’t get you very far. Consumer neuroscience delivers insights that go deeper than asking someone a question or having people fill out a survey or turn a dial. It delivers non-conscious, unbiased, neurobiological-based responses. It uses tools that allow marketers to capture the key ingredients of engagement: attention, emotion and memory activation. As humans, we like to think of ourselves as rational creatures who occasionally act emotionally. But modern neuroscience tells us the opposite is most likely true: We’re emotional creatures who occasionally act rationally. Engaging the modern consumer means learning to create messages that emotionally resonate. As a famous poet once said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Dr. Carl Marci is chief neuroscientist of Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience.

Marketing lessons from the world of Physics

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THE THREE LAWS OF MARKETING (BASED ON NEWTON’S LAWS OF MOTION) By Adam Williams

Several years back, I had the pleasure of watching Dan Cobley’s TED Talk, “What physics taught me about marketing.” In this talk, Cobley illustrates how physics and the scientific method can be applied to marketing principles.

momentum without stopping. Think of marketing operations as a flywheel. Motion is the key to sustaining growth; it takes time to build, but once you have momentum, it is easy to maintain.

As marketer and fan of the great Sir Isaac Newton, Cobley’s talk inspired me to explore how Newton’s Three Laws of Motion could help explain brand growth and marketing success. I adapted these three laws specifically to my experience, and at my agency, we call them our “Three Laws of Marketing.”

FoodMaven, a client with a vision to eliminate food waste, applied significant startup force to a good business model and a great brand. In the past two years, they’ve grown from an idea in a dorm room to 22 employees. With such rapid initial success, it would be easy for the brand to become complacent. Regardless of the effort it has taken to get to this point, FoodMaven’s savvy leaders understand that now is the time to capitalize on its momentum. They are seeking additional funding and doubling their marketing and sales efforts.

The First Law Of Marketing: Apply Force Based on Newton’s formula (force equals mass times acceleration), the first law of marketing is the application of force. How do we apply force? We strike early and strike often, which we call “start fast – fail fast.” Agencies often tend to come up with elaborate campaigns that require months of planning, only to find out that the strategy was wrong in the first place. However, by coming out of the gate strong, we can dive in and begin to move the needle quickly for our clients. In the early days of our company, Magneti worked with a startup that had a great concept: an online marketplace for university students to trade textbooks with each other. Instead of being forced to buy high-priced books at the bookstore, this product gave students a quick, easy and cheap alternative. Given the company’s low initial budget, we had to get our marketing efforts rolling quickly. We skipped the typical long, drawn-out strategy phase in favor of a leaner approach. We hit the ground running and found a major flaw in the initial social media strategy. Most students didn’t engage with the social channels because those channels were primarily used as an escape from studying; anything school-related was not a welcome message. Our discovery was a case of message placement and timing. Because we started early with a strong application of force, we were able to quickly pivot and save the client thousands of dollars. The change of strategy led to our lowest cost per acquisition channel and to this day is one of our greatest wins. We keep our team focused on the “start fast – fail fast” principle, which gives us the nimbleness to change direction.

The Second Law Of Marketing: Once in Motion, Don’t Rest Newton stated that an object remains either in motion or in a state of rest unless acted upon by an outside force. In his classic book Good to Great, Jim Collins describes momentum with his flywheel analogy: Because of its inertia and specifically placed weight, a flywheel can maintain

Many brands have success and then rest on their laurels, but one of the biggest mistakes any brand can make is rest. Growth requires constant motion and consistency. In the business world, I’ve heard momentum described as a “series of successes.” Success begets success. Sustaining momentum isn’t easy; it requires buy-in, consistency and patience. The advice here is simple: Get in motion and stay in motion.

The Third Law Of Marketing: Counteract Opposition Newton tells us that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you are taking action, applying force and sustaining momentum, there will be opposition from forces outside of your control. These forces can range from unexpected competition to PR nightmares to bureaucratic challenges. In any case, resolve is the key to success. I’m often asked what the key to brand success is. I dislike that question, but if forced to answer, I always say: “Be the last one standing.” Building a successful brand is difficult — it requires the resolve to counteract a myriad of opposing forces. All great brands have had to withstand opposition. Remember the Reebok Pump of the late ‘80s? The release of these shoes sent Nike into a tailspin that required an immediate counterattack in the market. This opposition resulted in the invention of the Nike Air series, which was followed by a partnership with legendary NBA player Michael Jordan. Nike did a masterful job of counteracting opposition, and in turn took the organization to unimaginable success. As you prepare to generate an unstoppable marketing machine, remember these laws. Apply force, keep moving and be ready to counteract opposition. Adam Williams is the CEO of Magneti, a brand and digital agency based in the Rocky Mountains.

United Untied: A PR 101 Lesson in Crisis Communications By Melissa Drozdowski

By now, we’ve all seen the shocking viral videos. The rageinducing photos. The fire-and-brimstone calls for a boycott, firings, and someone’s head on a platter—preferably Oscar Munoz’s, if George R.R. Martin has his way (you know it’s bad when the guy that dreamed up the world’s most twisted wedding is outraged by your behavior). Oh, United.

droppingly, astoundingly awful. Take United’s very first (but now deleted) response to Leggingsgate: “UA shall have the right to refuse passengers if they are not properly clothed via our Contract of Carriage.” Say what? And how about this initial response about having a passenger dragged bodily from the plane?

First, there was Leggingsgate. Then came the now-infamous denied-boarding fiasco. That was followed by scorpions on a plane, Grandmagate, and an Animal Farm-style story of a passenger downgrade, proving that, truly, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” And speaking of animals, let’s not forget the bizarre death—and subsequent unsanctioned cremation—of the giant rabbit Simon. Oh, and if that weren’t enough, it appears United has something against weddings and honeymoons, too. United, it seems, can’t stop from shooting itself in its proverbial foot.

These rushed, ill-conceived responses left those of us toiling deep in the trenches of PR and social media, and the general public alike, scratching our collective heads and wondering: “What were you thinking?!”

I’m guessing that shortly after those horrific videos, stories, and memes hit the Web and the crises started to mushroom out of control, Pepsi and Sean Spicer heaved a huge sigh of relief, and United’s PR and social media teams made a run for the nearest bar. And, really, who could blame them? The company’s handling of its tsunami of bad PR has been jaw-

I’m not one to kick anyone when they’re down, but when bad news travels at bullet-train speed and everyone is armed with a camera capable of capturing provocative images and video, United should’ve known better. This no blushing neophyte in the rough-and-tumble world of modern day crisis communications; rather, this is a veteran brand that has endured a turbulent merger and withstood passenger anger over shrinking seat sizes, vanishing amenities, and

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the introduction of an avalanche of new fees. Heck, CEO Munoz was even recognized as Communicator of the Year by venerable trade pub PRWeek, an honor it’s now rethinking.

team to the unfolding drama? Did this employee not know or not have the resources needed, to escalate the situation within the organization? Nobody likes having dinner or the weekend interrupted, but it’s far better to head an impending crisis off at the pass than deal with the carnage afterward.

How did it all go so wrong? It looks as if United has forgotten the PR 101 foundations of managing crisis communications—transparency, responsibility, and the art of the apology. How differently would the dragging incident have unfolded if the airline had simply stepped up and said, “I’m sorry”? It could have prevented the situation from turning as dumpster fire ugly as it did.

Keep those internal lines of communications open, and make sure everyone knows whom to call with an SOS.

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Push the “Pause” button. Once you’re alerted to the situation, don’t wait to get a statement out there. Give yourself some breathing room by publicly acknowledging that you’re aware something happened, but details are still being gathered and you’ll have a more in-depth response shortly. Getting a brief holding statement published will buy you the time needed to get all the important players—PR, Marketing, Legal, IR, HR, Customer Service, and the C-suite—to the table to formulate a strategic response.

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Manage the narrative. When crafting that strategic response, remember these vital words: transparency, responsibility, and empathy. This isn’t the time to shoot from the lip, so choose your words carefully.

When you do offer your mea culpa, make it meaningful. Don’t use weasel words like “re-accommodate,” or shift blame elsewhere (or, worse, blame those wronged), or issue a tone-deaf “sorry not sorry” apology. Take ownership of the mistake, be genuine, empathize with those affected, and give your apology once. Apologizing repeatedly won’t help your case; it’ll just call the authenticity of your previous statements into question.

Do remember to address the problem with your internal audiences, as well. Your frontline employees will be dealing with the fallout, so equip them with the knowledge they need to positively manage day-to-day customer communications. Explain the situation and provide guidance or talking points to help minimize missteps. Remind everyone what can and cannot be shared on social media.

And if you do decide to issue an internal memo about the matter, hear me now: “It. Will. Leak.” Don’t undermine your crisis strategy by penning a memo that refutes your public apology.

I can hear the squawking coming from Legal already. An apology is an admission of guilt! Liability! We must minimize our exposure! Protect the company at all costs! Don’t get me wrong, Legal absolutely needs a seat at the crisis-comms table. Its counsel is required so that Marketing, PR, and Social Media can do their jobs effectively, without landing the organization deeper into hot water. On the flip side, though, Legal must give communications teams room to maneuver. Marketing, PR, and Social Media cannot respond adequately if shackled by mealy-mouthed legalese meant to deflect blame. To truly succeed, a crisis response has to be a joint effort between communications and Legal. Together, both sides of the table can come up with a strong strategy that addresses the situation while protecting brand integrity and value. So, what lessons can we learn from United’s ongoing struggle? I recognize that most companies should—but often don’t— have an emergency communications management strategy or guidelines in place (and properly communicated throughout the organization), so here’s what to do if, like United, you find yourself in the middle of a crisis of monumental proportions: •

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Situational awareness. How can you tell when a problem will spiral into a full-blown crisis? By listening. Whether it’s mining emotional intelligence through social listening tools or something as simple as setting up a Google alert for select keywords and phrases, knowing what’s being said about your brand is critical. And don’t forget your secret weapon: frontline employees. Often the first point of contact, customerfacing employees can provide a wealth of information on real-time developments and sentiment. Make sure they have a way of quickly getting essential information to the right people in your organization, and feel empowered to do so. And that leads to my next recommendation. Educate off-hours personnel and keep your “A Team” on call. Customer service and brand management are 24/7 jobs these days. Several of United’s troubles befell it during off-hours—at night and on weekends—when key personnel weren’t around. The first Leggingsgate response is telling; it was a by-thebook recitation of company policy that merely served to reinforce a negative image of an uncaring corporation. Why didn’t “FS,” the person who signed those initial tweets, alert key stakeholders within United’s communications

*** Crisis communications is not for the faint of heart. But, by remembering your marketing, PR, and social media fundamentals, your organization can weather the storm. Handle the crisis well, and your brand might even win a few brownie points with key audiences. Oh, and by the way? I hear United is looking for a new PR manager.

Melissa Drozdowski is social media director at strategic communications company Interprose, where she helps clients make better social communications choices daily.

Five Lessons for All Marketers From the Departure of Coke’s CMO By Sam Melnick

Coca-Cola has decided to eliminate the position of CMO in its organization. Former CMO Marcos de Quinto is off to retirement after nearly four decades with the company; instead of replacing him, Coke has created a chief growth officer role to lead both its customer and its commercial teams. The CGO role will be held by Francisco Crespo, and it was created, according to Coca-Cola, as part of a restructuring, to turn the company into a “growth-oriented and consumercentered” organization. Although Coke hasn’t explicitly blamed its former CMO for falling revenues (global sales fell from $48 billion in 2012 to $44.3 billion in 2016), we can surmise that the management shakeup was in part driven by declining revenues. Here’s what all marketers can learn from this shakeup.

1. Now is not the time to get comfortable Coke isn’t the only example of an organization looking to put Marketing on the chopping block. Some 30% of CEOs might fire their CMO in 2017, according to Forrester Research, for lacking the skills necessary to pull off digital business transformation. The average tenure of CMOs in the US is now 4.1 years—half the average tenure of CEOs, and the shortest in the C-suite. What’s more, CMOs are first in the firing line if business growth targets are not met (followed closely by chief sales officers and chief strategy officers), an Accenture Strategy Study found.

financial results, according to Debbie Qaqish of the Pedowitz Group. Our own research at Allocadia found that only 21% of companies are able to fully measure Marketing’s contribution to revenue. And that is the crux of the problem: If CMOs cannot translate the role of Marketing into the only language that truly matters to the business—money and growth—we marketers cannot expect job security, respect, control, or confidence.

3. You’re tasked with changing the perception of your role As part of our ongoing work with marketing performance management, we are seeing across-the-board echoes the decision-making at Coke: Marketers are working to change the perception of their departments as cost-centers, to advance a perception of Marketing as growth-driver instead. This is a new charter for CMOs, and it has the potential to help them earn a more strategic role within the company to make boarder, more disruptive decisions. But, to meet the demands of this charter, marketers must bridge the visibility gap between the activity they’re generating and the returns they’re driving. In many ways, it’s a matter of understanding both the “R” and the “I” of ROI: CMOs must be stewards of their investment and speak with confidence on the impact each dollar has—or could have. In short, they must run Marketing like a business.

4. It’s time to run the business of marketing

2. Your investments are under greater scrutiny

The ability to operate a marketing department with a business owner’s mindset can save a CMO from fading into futility. In fact, I’m willing to bet it’s this shift that will save the profession as a whole.

There is a glimmer of hope in the midst of this turmoil: Marketing budgets are on the rise, up for three consecutive years, and climbing to up to 12% of company revenue, Gartner found. That budget, however, within the context of today’s business pressures, signifies a large amount of trust in marketing leadership to drive tangible business results.

A strict discipline is required behind the scenes within a marketing organization—behind the campaign, the creative, and the customer-facing tactics. This discipline focuses on a clear line of sight into all marketing investments, a unified approach to marketing planning, and tight, accurate, actionable measurements.

Full 80% of all B2B marketers are now tasked with driving revenue, yet barely one-third can demonstrate any credible

Without this discipline, and with too much focus on execution, Marketing becomes decentralized and disjointed, rendering

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it ineffective and leading it toward the chopping block. Allison Snow, senior analyst at Forrester, describes the road ahead in her report titled “ Measuring Isn’t Managing: The New Rules of Marketing Performance Orchestration.” She writes: “B2B marketers who don’t opt in to revenue relevance will continue to build plans on ‘what we did last year’ rather than what has consistently demonstrated value to core, defined, and agreed-upon business targets.”

Revenue operations is used to evaluate the impact of Marketing and Sales, in turn enabling a CMO to understand ROI and translate the story of performance in terms of business results. When a CMO is equipped to run the business of marketing, that CMO can make confident investment decisions that drive growth—the ultimate responsibility of every CMO. Coca Cola is no exception.

5. Marketing operations has never been as important as it is now Today, in this new context, CMOs are more dependent than ever before on critical members of their teams: those tasked with marketing operations and revenue operations. The practice of managing budgets, tracking investments, and tying activity back to revenue is one of process, data, and technology. This highly strategic role falls squarely onto a marketing operations practitioner who is in close alignment with Marketing leadership, and focuses on three distinct areas: a go-to-market plan, investment management, and targets. Each of the three functions must be aligned across the revenue teams, as well as up and down the rest of the organization: 1. Go-to-market plan: What are our goals, and what will we do to accomplish them? 2. Investment management: How are we going to spend our money to reach the goals set out in our plan? 3. Targets: What results must we drive (and measure) to assure we are on track to beat market expectations?

Sam Melnick is VP of marketing at Allocadia, provider of marketing performance software.

How long will TV advertising stick around? AS VIEWERS DRIFT ONLINE, ADVERTISERS HOLD FAST TO BROADCAST TV By John Koblin and Sapna Maheshwari

TV ratings are collapsing. Media stocks are falling. Cord cutting is accelerating. There has been no shortage of bad headlines for television networks over the last few months, as investors grow concerned over dropping viewership and as people increasingly find new ways to entertain themselves. Yet while audience attention has drifted toward platforms like Netflix, Facebook and YouTube, there is one group of stubborn holdouts who are not ready to give up on broadcast television: advertisers. This week, as ad buyers cram into New York institutions like Radio City Music Hall and Carnegie Hall to watch the broadcast networks talk up a new TV season, they will again prepare to spend as much as $9 billion to be a part of it. Though the market may be cooling this year, a significant drop is not expected.

conglomerate WPP. But isn’t buying a 30-second spot on television a little, well, out of date? As a media analyst at Pivotal Research, Brian Wieser, put it, advertising on TV is “as archaic as water flowing through pipes.” “You could set up a drone to take water from a reservoir and use fascinating technology and cutting-edge approaches to deliver it, but there’s a good reason we use these systems,” he said.

A reasonable person might ask how, in 2017, is that remotely possible?

In interviews, ad buyers and television executives pointed to a variety of reasons that advertisers remain attracted to ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS. Ratings aside, television still reaches more people and provides a reliable way for an ad to be seen on a full screen with sound. There is a limited amount of inventory, in contrast to the endless reach of the web, and marketers know rates will spike if they wait to buy airtime.

“It will continue to move forward this way as long as it works,” said Lyle Schwartz, the president of investment for North America at GroupM, the ad buying arm of the advertising

It also does not hurt that Facebook and YouTube have had trouble in recent months with ads showing up next to objectionable content.

The scene outside NBC’s upfront showcase at Radio City Music Hall in Midtown Manhattan last year. Credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

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“Sales directors at the networks are going to say, ‘We have premium content that is professionally produced, and it’s been vetted and won’t be an issue for your brand to be associated with it,’” said Brad Adgate, a veteran media analyst. “With Google and Facebook, you’ve seen stuff where they’ve had to say that they have to do a better job.” Still, there are serious questions about how sustainable all of this is. Trend lines certainly suggest things could go in the other direction. Networks are having trouble showing how many people are watching their content across a wide variety of platforms, audiences are growing accustomed to platforms where they can watch shows without commercials, and marketers are eager to find better ways to target potential customers. And at present, broadcast television is holding an edge thanks to an older audience. The median age for scripted TV’s No. 1 show, “The Big Bang Theory,” and one of its top reality shows, “The Voice,” is 55. Among 18- to 49-year-olds, ratings in broadcast television fell by 11 percent this season. “If you just look at where the business is going, we’re in a transitional phase now where to a large degree, boomers are keeping television as we define it today afloat,” said Kevin Reilly, the chief creative officer of Turner Entertainment. Advertisers are aware that this may not last forever. GroupM predicted that digital platforms would be taking a growing share of new advertising dollars. Still, even though digital players are surging, television remains the established elder statesman for advertisers. GroupM noted that television accounted for 42 percent of advertising investments last year, compared with 31 percent for digital. The sophistication of Google’s and Facebook’s ability to target ads is no small matter, though, and TV networks have been scrambling to find ways to compete in that arena. Digital companies are capable of targeting audiences so narrow that they can pinpoint, say, Idaho residents in longdistance relationships who are contemplating buying a minivan. (Facebook’s ads manager says that description matches 3,100 people.) As attractive as that slicing and dicing can be, television appears to have an advantage in terms of the actual commercial time it can offer marketers. “It’s great if I can target someone I know is a truck driver who searched for the word ‘truck’ who visited my site a lot, but where do I get them to watch my ad?” asked Joe Marchese, the newly named head of ad sales for Fox Networks Group. “Who’s going to make him or her watch it?” And television still offers an enormous audience. “The number of minutes we show commercials is way more than YouTube or Facebook on a video basis — many multiples more,” Mr. Marchese said. Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategist for the Publicis Groupe, one of the world’s largest advertising companies, said the millions who saw commercials on a hit show like “This Is Us” could also be more valuable.

“If you basically put that same advertising, say a million dollars, within Facebook and Google, the reality of it is that people are going to see those things in a very splintered fashion,” he said. The so-called upfront season offers advertisers a chance to buy the bulk of their ads before marquee shows return in September. This creates a level of competition that advertisers cannot help but participate in. It also fosters a power dynamic that probably sounds foreign to a generation of consumers who tend to see automatically placed ads on YouTube content that could have been made a day earlier by anyone. “What the networks do say is: ‘Great, I’m going to invite all my potential clients and clients to a room at the same time on the same day where I’m going to show my shows that I may or may not actually put up this fall and may not keep for two episodes,” said Dave Morgan, the founder and chief executive of Simulmedia, which works with advertisers on targeted TV ads. “‘And I’m going to make you sit next to your competitors and basically say here’s the price of it, and if you don’t pay this price now, it’s going to cost you 30 percent more in six months.’” Mass marketers aiming to drive people to, say, their stores or car dealerships rely on long-held TV plans to align with their product launches, and pulling out could be both expensive and risky. “The reason it’s priced high and reason you have to buy in advance is because your competitors might buy it out,” Mr. Morgan continued. It’s like the Cold War but for brands, he said, adding, “If they have a bunch of missiles, you need a bunch more missiles.” And so, for a week in mid-May, the networks still have the upper hand. John Koblin is a media reporter for The New York Times, covering the television industry. He reports on the companies and personalities behind the scripted TV boom, as well as the networks that broadcast the news. Prior to joining The Times, he covered media at The New York Observer, Women’s Wear Daily and Deadspin.

Sapna Maheshwari is a business reporter covering advertising for The New York Times.

Marketers: Master the art of story telling WANT TO NETWORK LIKE A PRO? GET YOUR STORY STRAIGHT By Craig Wortmann

As an executive at any rung of the career ladder, you are going to meet people—lots of people. It may be at a conference, an event, or socially, but regardless of the context, you will have to talk about who you are, what you do, and why others should care.

period,” says Wortmann. Yet, many people never take the time to compose the answer to this fundamental question. A clear, concise, and compelling response helps people connect to you and your motivations. “Why not take an opportunity to say something interesting?”

Like any good businessperson, you are conditioned to network. But are you prepared?

Instead of simply stating your profession—“I’m an accountant”—add a short tag line or pitch. When Wortmann launched his most recent company, his movie trailer became, “I run a firm called Sales Engine. We help companies build and tune their sales engine.” In two sentences, he was able to give the name of the company, his position, and the purpose of the business.

According to Craig Wortmann, a clinical professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School and author of the book What’s Your Story?, convincing potential colleagues that you would be a great collaborator and a trustworthy partner means getting your story straight. Based on more than 20 years of experience in sales and entrepreneurship, Wortmann offers tips on how to turn any professional situation into an opportunity simply by being prepared for networking conversations.

Prepare Your Movie Trailer The first question many people ask upon meeting is: “What do you do?” While most of us have answered the question a million times, we have not necessarily considered the valuable storytelling real estate the question provides. “It’s the most common question you get asked in your life,

This “movie trailer of you,” as Wortmann calls it, is a handy tool for initial discussions with potential clients or investors. It is helpful also to tweak your trailer for different contexts. If you are an educational consultant, you may have a social version—for times you do not want to talk shop— and a slightly more nitty-gritty version for networking at an education conference. “It’s not really about the length of your response, but its context. For example, the Superintendent of Detroit Public Schools is going to have a different level of understanding— and interest in—certain details.”

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Tell the Right Story, at the Right Time, for the Right Reasons Wortmann identifies four types of stories all business leaders should have on hand: success stories, failure stories, funny stories, and stories of legends. These tales need to be crisp, he says, and when told at the right time, can show character, reveal your ability as a leader, or demonstrate your drive. “Storytelling is a discipline of capturing the stories, distilling them down to make them good for business, and then producing them at the right moment,” says Wortmann.

“Storytelling is a discipline of capturing the stories, distilling them down to make them good for business, and then producing them at the right moment.”

Choosing the best story for a given situation, however, is less intuitive than it seems. If you are in an interview with a potential client, you might tell a story of failure instead of one of success. “By doing this, you show that you’re humble, that you’re a learner, and that you’re good to work with.”

On the other hand, success stories may come in handy once you’ve landed a client, but while you are still winning over their trust. As you are onboarding the client, sharing how you helped another client through that same process can reinforce their sense of confidence. And other stories have other purposes. Wortmann knows a CEO who tells a particular “funny failure” story to reinforce the importance of asking good questions. The CEO relates how he once spent an entire summer cultivating a giant, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity through a contact at a global consumer-packaged-goods company. On their fourteenth phone call, he grew impatient. When he finally asked his contact when her company would be signing the contract, she informed him that she was an intern. “She thanked him for all she had learned that summer,” Wortmann says. “It turned out she wasn’t a prospect at all. She was a college student. But he never asked her.”

“Gear Up” to Network More Effectively “At any networking opportunity, there are likely five people you meet who could help you build your business,” says Wortmann. “It’s your job to seek them out, give disciplined answers, and move on if they can’t help you accomplish your goals.” Moving in and out of conversations effectively and efficiently takes practice and planning. Wortmann suggests envisioning any conversation as having four forward gears—and a reverse gear. In first gear, make small talk while being prepared to reverse course. This can be done by mentioning what a great event it is and that there are a lot of people you look forward to meeting. This brief mention builds in an “exit door” to your conversation.

In second gear, exchange information about what you do— this is the perfect place to play your movie trailer. Shifting into third, you give a little more information about your work, but be careful not to fall into the common trap of talking a lot just because you are familiar with the subject. Remember: less is more. Fourth gear is where you dig deeper to determine if the person you are talking to is right for your business, a person who can help you, or a person you might be able to help. Ask how they think about some of your central concerns. Their answers may show how you could benefit from working together. At any of these points, if you find that the person you are talking to is perfectly pleasant, but not a fit for your business, shift into reverse by delicately reminding them that you are here to see a lot of people—the reverse gear you established earlier—thanking them, shaking hands, and moving on. “People are hesitant to do that because it makes them feel like they’re being gruff, transactional, or harsh,” Wortmann says. “I suggest it’s the exact opposite. It saves everyone time.”

Ask Unexpected Questions There is a lot to learn from asking questions that people do not expect, questions that “get behind someone’s eyes,” as Wortmann puts it. If you are prepared, your questions can get people to reflect, analyze, and share their true feelings. Design questions with an eye on issues and solutions that may arise in the future. Asking what three big changes someone would make this year if they could, for example, has the potential to show you how much vision the person has. “These questions have to come from your natural curiosity,” Wortmann says. “I should authentically care how a successful businessperson would respond to questions such as, “What would happen if your company fails? What would it feel like? What would you say to people?”” It helps to keep some things in mind when asking such substantial questions, however. For one, you need to earn the right to ask. A question that may make sense fifteen minutes into a conversation—“What do you want your life to be like?”—may sound creepy just ten seconds in. Another suggestion? Preface tough questions with a warning along the lines of, “Let me ask you a bigger-picture question…” or “This may be a bit off-vector, but…” . These signal to people that a big question is coming, softening the blow. Finally, keep in mind that some of your questions may land flat. After all, not everyone expects to be challenged by someone they have just met. But, says Wortmann, that’s okay. “Take risks. This is so much better than being Mr. Vanilla at a networking event.”

Craig Wortmann, Clinical Professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship

The re branding of an airline AN INSIDE LOOK INTO AIR CANADA’S TRANSFORMATION. By Richard Morgan

Look up and you’ll know: Air Canada is in the black. Black bellies are part of its bold, sharp brand-wide redesign by Winkreative, one both granular (the most gorgeous route map in the biz) and grand (its iconic 1962 rondelle is back). The shop, headed by Tyler Brûlé, has become something of an airline agency. Having renovated Bombardier, Porter Airlines, André Balazs’ StndAIR, and Swiss International Airlines, Winkreative is currently tackling Air Canada and its 300-plus fleet of aircraft as Canada’s flag carrier celebrates its 80th anniversary. We spoke with Maurus Fraser, their creative director, about what goes into redesigning an airline. What stands out immediately about the Air Canada redesign is the unexpected stark black component. Can you talk about how that came into the mix and how you decided to get out of the red and white colors that Air Canada has been in for a long time?

The opportunity that we saw was to really celebrate the rondelle. Air Canada had a mark designed in 1963 by Hans Kleefeld, the famous Canadian graphic designer, and they had this icon which companies would die for, and they’ve had this for so long. To not have that on the tail of the plane kind of felt like a missed opportunity. Maple leaves are quite used in Canada—you get a maple leaf in the middle of the golden arches of the McDonald’s. They put them on many things. How did you pick the black color? We had several versions of black: How black is black? Is it cold black? Is it warm black? When we were looking at the tones that we could use on the plane we had to work with Boeing, with the Boeing colors and they’ve got quite a small palette. Well, they’ve got sort of a wide palette, but it’s limited when you’re in certain color ranges. There was this jet black, which was just perfect for what we wanted.

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Black is heavy on the eye, but it’s also literally heavy in an engineering standpoint. In an industry that wants lightness, weightlessness, was that a tough decision to make? Black is a pigment and actually it’s not heavier than a white, as long as you have an opaque color painted on a plane. You could argue that maybe black absorbs a little bit more heat,

but even in those circumstances the aircraft has been designed so powerfully, like most vehicles, that they’re designed to handle these kinds of heats and it doesn’t necessarily get absorbed that much. So we’ve been assured that it’s no heavier in all practicality. There’s a slight metallic fleck that gives it a pearlescent effect, which is actually slightly heavy and going to the clean, just the clean white, not overlaying too many colors, does actually make it much more efficient. So you’re right. This is at the forefront of all the airlines minds, when the paint’s being painted the engineers are testing the depth of the paint; it can’t be painted at too much depth and the use of black on planes is incredibly rare. You don’t see it. There’s Air New Zealand, and there’s a great airline in Japan called StarFlyer, which is very cool, using black. But no one’s really been using it in this way that we’re doing. It’s interesting that you mention New Zealand because they just did that flag redesign attempt that kind of went nowhere, but they had that Maori fern design. This black, white and red combination palette can be very tribal; it’s the same sort of color palette that you see on a lot of Pacific Northwest, British Columbia, totem poles.

We’ve definitely been looking at those influences, especially when you look at the nose mask that we’ve designed. We looked at, and studied the shapes of, an indigenous bird, a common loon, that has a red eye. The nose mask is a symbol of confidence and the use of black is charming because it has a bit of personality celebrating the cockpit. The pilot is a key part of this experience and nobody today really celebrates the cockpit and the pilot.

An airline redesign is not just object design or industrial design. It’s also fashion, interior decoration, and architecture. How did you address that breadth? One of the things we were careful of is rondelle fever. You shouldn’t have rondelles everywhere. It’s scaling things down. Sometimes, you can get to a point where you have a successful symbol and you use it on everything. Then before you know it, you’ve got 10 of them on one application and you’re just scratching your head. Did Winkreative have an all hands on deck approach? Or did you bring in any extra staff? We directed a team based in Canada called Mosaic for the launch event. When it comes to illustration, we’ve been working with a Japanese illustrator. Working alongside our designers and art directors, we have a team of art buyers that help us find illustrators, photographers, film makers, and animators. When we’re working on identities, we’re very careful that we don’t want things to be repetitive. If we’re working with one collaborator on one project, it’s not necessarily the best person to be working with on another.

Did you have lessons that you brought over from being in the airline redesign business, lessons you didn’t realize you had learned until you were unconsciously, subconsciously applying them to the Air Canada project? Yes. When we were designing Swiss International Airlines In 2002, there was a lot of experimentation happening in airline design. British Airways was doing all these different art techniques from different countries. It was very exciting from a design perspective. From a branding perspective, however, it was too much of a compromise for British Airways, because they had planes flying through air that people didn’t ultimately recognize were from British Airways. When an entity like Air Canada acts as an unofficial ambassador for how their country is perceived around the world, how do you take that responsibility and apply it to tastefully redesigning something like the seat pocket sick bags? We’re still in the process of working on those pieces, but there’s a series of elements that we’re working on for the brand where we exaggerate a little bit of that character and charm. One of my favorite redesigns is the worldwide flight path map on that red graphing paper. It’s very clean, linear, with a circuit board kind of look. Very 70s or 80s, in a good way. How’d that happen? It goes back to the golden age of travel and the things that inspired us when we go on a plane. Everything was so sharp. All the touchpoints were so well designed. When you look at most airlines, their route maps, it’s a photograph or some sort of image of the world. And then there’s these huge kind of lines that always overlap, and you can’t tell which line is

going where. You know its gotten to a point where airlines don’t care. We drew Air Canada’s route map in-house, probably spending far too much time pouring over each of those routes and angles. It’s a strong moment and opportunity for an airline to communicate to their customers. The moment you get to the pages in the in-flight magazines and you see the route map, that’s when you’re inspired to go somewhere and realize how convenient and simple it is to go there. Air Canada is really enabling you to do that. Your design will reach a wide range of people, from those traveling to Canada for the first time to the road warriors for whom the plane has become as familiar as an office cubicle. What impact do you hope the design has across the spectrum of flyers? To ultimately improve people’s lives. That’s an ambition that I think most designers share. If design can make your everyday life just that much bit better, then why not right? There are some design similarities to Delta’s new branding. To what degree is that coincidental, or was Winkreative inspired by things Delta did? Delta is a very different design and not something that influenced our work. Our use of red, white and black, the introduction of the mask, placing the rondelle back on the tail— after 24 years—and the distinctive rondelle on the belly, are not something we have seen before. Richard Morgan has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York , The New York Daily News, The New York Post, and The New York Observer. He lives in New York and is the author of Born in Bedlam.

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What Amazon’s Influencer Marketing Program Means for The Entire Marketing Industry DESPITE A QUIET ENTRANCE, AMAZON’S FORAY INTO INFLUENCER MARKETING SENT SHOCK WAVES ACROSS THE ENTIRE MARKETING INDUSTRY THIS PAST MONTH. By Shazir Mucklai

Many experts consider this a game changer for the space and a powerful signal that the influencer marketing industry is here to stay. Others note that Amazon’s program might not be all it’s cracked up to be. Over the past two years, online marketers have witnessed an influencer marketing explosion. Google acquired FameBit to scale their influencer marketing services, Twitter acquired Niche to produce more internal branded content, and most recently Adobe’s launch of the Adobe Fleek influencer marketplace. Influencer marketing platforms like NeoReach are now processing multi-million dollar campaigns for the world’s largest brands. Even Facebook is getting into the space with their recent announcement of branded content tools for creators along with revenue share for live streamers. In 2015, AdWeek reported that Influencer Marketing is The Next Big Thing. Since then, it has lived up to the hype and

became the fastest growing channel in digital marketing. It’s logical that an internet giant like Amazon would want to make their presence known and capitalize on the growth. This is especially true since their business is heavily dependent on affiliate marketing revenue generated from blogger and marketers.

So what is Amazon’s program all about? According to Amazon, “the Amazon Influencer Program is exclusively designed for social media influencers with large followings and a high frequency of posts with shoppable content. An intuitive vanity URL makes it easy for customers to find, browse and buy the products introduced to them through social media influencers. The program allows influencers to earn fees for purchases they drive through their social media platforms.”

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While this may provide some extra revenue for influencers, many influencers don’t necessarily see this is as a game changer for the industry.

an improved version of its current affiliate system. If anything, it’s a clear sign the industry is maturing and we are excited to see how they will help push the space forward.”

“It’s cool that Amazon wants to get involved with influencer marketing, but affiliate programs have been around for a long time and this isn’t really a game changer,” says YouTube Star, Toddy Smithy, who has amassed over a million followers across his various channels.

To get the perspective of major spenders on influencer marketing, we also reached out to Ryan Faber, CEO of award-winning growth marketing agency FlatIron Collective. Ryan and his team have managed over $100M in digital marketing spend for major brands.

What’s interesting, though, is that this serves as a signal that Amazon wants to enter the influencer marketing space.

“The reason Amazon quietly released their influencer program is because it’s just a light modification of their existing affiliate program. Just change ‘affiliate’ to the more on-trend ‘influencer’, add an ‘exclusive’ application process and layer in the option to use vanity URLs alongside an enhanced buying experience. Same house, new paint” said

Silicon Valley startups are known for being on the forefront of technology, but they always run the risk of a bigger company overtaking their initial market leads. What do these influencer marketing startups have to say about this?

One self-service influencer marketing platform, NeoReach, has established a reputation in the industry for orchestrating large influencer events and campaigns. NeoReach was behind the influencer flash mob in NYC, the official VidCon influencer party, and major campaigns like Demolition Ranch’s viral exploding tank video. While their software manages 7-figure campaigns for brands like NBC, Walmart, and Microsoft, we wondered if Amazon’s launch in the space would impact their business. When asked if they feel that Amazon is competitive to them, NeoReach CEO, Jesse Leimgruber said “Not at all. Amazon is a $400 billion dollar company, so we are obviously going to keep an eye on their developments, but they really are not competitive with us. We provide a self-service solution for companies who want to run their own influencer campaigns, whereas Amazon’s influencer program focuses on providing

Ryan Faber, who went on note that “influencers with any substantial following will not see this as a replacement to their existing brand deal flow. Nothing to see here folks.” In many ways, it is the next logical step after seeing the success of their affiliate network. But the fact that they’ve dialed into an opportunity with influencers confirms the already widespread speculations: people buy from referrals and recommendation. In today’s media landscape, it’s the influencers that are the ones driving brand growth, purchasing decisions, and the backbone of an entirely new marketing category that’s here to stay. Shazir Mucklai is an angel investor and adviser in disruptive startups. He is a financier and specializes in options, IPOs, derivatives, and Greek analysis. Mucklai currently runs a six-figure PR firm helping startups commercialize their products and launch their ideas. He also writes for numerous publications, including the Huffington Post and USA Today. All of this while still attending college at the University of Texas at Dallas. Featured Image Credit: Getty Images

How Facebook’s objectrecognition tech could boost marketing WHAT FACEBOOK’S AR PUSH MEANS FOR THE FUTURE OF COMMERCE AND THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER By Jessica Goodfellow

After months of quietly shifting its suite of apps to focus on the camera, Facebook has laid out its ambitions to take the augmented reality (AR) baton from Snapchat and lay claim to the medium. But what does this push mean for marketers and the future of commerce, and as Facebook plays with the morphing of reality, where will it draw the line? When Mark Zuckerberg pitched what he claims will be the first mainstream augmented reality platform at the annual F8 conference, the industry heard a war cry. In the space of just an hour, when Zuckerberg announced that

AR was Facebook’s next big venture and showed audiences it had the engineering platform in place to deliver on this goal, augmented reality was catapulted from niche to mainstream. One only needs to trace the trajectory of Facebook Live from the moment Zuckerberg announced it as a key focus at the same conference last year to its mass uptake in the months that followed to see the scope the entrepreneur has planned for his own Pokemon Go-inspired AR platform. Facebook users saw Live as a way to broadcast their own lives, while brands and advertisers jumped at the opportunity

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to accumulate staggeringly large audiences for comparatively small capital cost. Facebook’s AR push is expected to be met with similar intrigue. That’s because the platform has built an engineering infrastructure that has allowed it to spin out tools and applications and deploy them at extraordinary speed “in a way we don’t think we have seen before”, says Rob Norman, global chief digital officer at GroupM. “There is absolutely no doubt that AR is of significant opportunity to brands and marketers,” adds Matthew Knight, head of strategic innovation at Carat. “The examples at F8 paint a picture of the world being interactive and shoppable - and every brand manager must be falling out of their seat to think about how they can leverage this sort of technology.” Commerce giants such as Amazon and Alibaba have been tipped as the main victims of this AR disruption. Norman has said before there are few obstacles to Amazon’s growth. But he tipped distributed ecommerce on Facebook and Google, that offer creative shoppable formats such as chatbots, VR experiences and AR changing rooms, coupled with scale, as the likely end to Amazon’s hold on the commerce industry. “It is easy to look down the track at this and see how both AR and eventually VR will become disruptive in commerce on Facebook. The one big disruption we thought about in terms of the Amazon and Alibaba ecosystems was retargeting disruption in a direct Facebook commerce environment,” says Norman. The key thing for brands experimenting with new ways to access consumers in these fledgling environments is to create content that “users can actually benefit from”, says Norman, or risk extinguishing the appeal of the technology as quickly as it spread. The same can be said about marketing in-chat applications such as Messenger, voice applications like Alexa and Google Home, and in VR environments. All intimate user experiences that require bespoke marketing. “Consumers will be open to marketing content [in AR] provided it adds value to them in some way. That might be through better information such as travel data, it might be by enhancing an experience such as a sports event, or it might be a simple sales offer,” says James Watson, global client director at Imagination. For marketers it doesn’t matter if it is Facebook, Google, Tencent or Alibaba leading the charge; it is all about who can offer the most scale and ease of use to the consumer. Facebook has spent years easing its users into accepting more advertising by dressing it up as content tailored to their needs. “What Facebook has done is set up in the consumer’s mind the relationship between the ad unit and the content unit,” says Norman. “Facebook constantly optimises the ad load for each user to look at what their tolerance is. I think they have very cleverly managed to separate the commercial space and the consumer space…Over time we may see a very significant creative tipping point coming out of this,” Norman adds.

Facebook has its arch rival Snapchat to thank for this. Advertisers are unwittingly better prepared for this push into AR as they might have been for other innovations because thanks to Snapchat’s innovations through sponsored lenses and geofilters. Recognising it can’t lead the AR charge on its own, Zuckerberg has invited its community of developers to build AR-based apps to work with its Camera Effects platform. However, like it has had to do with previous products, the business will need to answer accusations of it taking more from its contributors than it gives back to them amid growing tension between the platform and its contributors. Channel 4 told The Drum earlier this year that for the 2 billion video views it amassed on the platform last year, Facebook paid the broadcaster a “tiny, minuscule amount of money” in return. Meanwhile the Guardian’s former editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger accused Facebook of sucking up nearly $27m of the Guardian’s digital advertising revenue in 2015. Beneath the veil of altruism the real reason for Zuckerberg’s AR developments can be traced back to his overall vision for Facebook to be ubiquitous to how people communicate. It’s the reason why Facebook is fighting Google to provide unreachable populations in areas across Africa and Asia with free internet access, and why Zuckerberg suggested the idea to F8 audiences that many physical products like TVs and smartphones can be replaced by virtual ones. “Ultimately, for these companies the technology is certainly about improving the experience for their users, but it is also about getting consumers more engaged with their services and learning more about them so the companies offering services are better able to monetise the information they have about their users,” says Ben Wood, Chief of research at CCS Insight. The question is where Facebook draws the line when it comes to marketers stretching and morphing reality in order to push products to users. “There are valid reasons why you might want to identify individuals or do analysis on a sales display or particular objects to get additional information – but equally some users might find the concept of Facebook analysing the spaces around them and extracting information based on the images, objects and people it detects a little disconcerting,” suggests Wood. Regulation bodies and governments are always playing catch-up with new tech until something bad enough happens - like hate speech on social media, and brand misplacement on dodgy videos - that rules are implemented. The onus, therefore, lies once more in the hands of the creator to act as an editor to the way AR unfolds. Jessica Goodfellow The Drum’s media reporter covering everything from publishing, TV, social media, radio and technology.

How True Advertising Can Save Journalism From Drowning in a Sea of Content THE SITUATION LOOKS BAD FOR JOURNALS AND JOURNALISM, BUT THERE IS A SIMPLE SOLUTION. By Doc Searls

Journalism is in a world of hurt because it has been marginalized by a new business model that requires maximizing “content” instead. That model is called adtech. We can see adtech’s effects in The New York Times’ In New Jersey, Only a Few Media Watchdogs Are Left, by David Chen. His prime example is the Newark Star-Ledger, “which almost halved its newsroom eight years ago,” and “has mutated into a digital media company requiring most reporters to

reach an ever-increasing quota of page views as part of their compensation.” That quota is to attract adtech placements. While adtech is called advertising and looks like advertising, it’s actually a breed of direct marketing, which is a cousin of spam and descended from what we still call junk mail.

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Like junk mail, adtech is driven by data, intrusively personal, looking for success in tiny-percentage responses, and oblivious to harms it causes, which include wanton and unwelcome surveillance, annoying the shit out of people and filling the world with crap. But adtech is far worse, because it also funds hyper-partisan news flows, including vast rivers of fake news, much of it from pop-up publishers that are as fake as the clickbait they maximize. Without adtech, fake news would be quarantined to the digital equivalent of supermarket tabloids. Here’s one way to tell the difference between real advertising and adtech: • Real advertising wants to be in a publication because it values the publication’s journalism and readership. • Adtech wants to push ads at readers anywhere it can find them. Here’s one way to tell the difference between journalism and content: • Journalism has ethics. • Content has volume. Another: • Journalism is supported by advertising and subscriptions. • Content is supported by adtech. Companies advertising in the old publishing world were flattered to appear in publications like the Star-Ledger. They were also considered sponsors of those publications. Companies advertising in the new publishing world are drunk on digital and want to maximize the “big data” they acquire. And there are thousands of bartenders to help with that. As I wrote in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff, in the new publishing world “Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.” That’s also why, to operate in publishing’s new alien-built economy, journalists need to meet that “ever-increasing quota of page views.” Better to “generate content” than to do the best journalism we can, the proposition goes. It’s still a losing one. See, adtech doesn’t care about journalism, because its economy incentives maximizing the sum of content in the world, so it has as many places as possible to chase followed eyeballs with ads. Case in point, from @WaltMossberg:

About a week after our launch, I was seated at a dinner next to a major advertising executive. He complimented me on our new site’s quality and on that of a predecessor site we had created and run, AllThingsD.com. I asked him if that meant he’d be placing ads on our fledgling site. He said yes,

he’d do that for a little while. And then, after the cookies he placed on Recode helped him to track our desirable audience around the web, his agency would begin removing the ads and placing them on cheaper sites our readers also happened to visit. In other words, our quality journalism was, to him, nothing more than a lead generator for targetrich readers, and would ultimately benefit sites that might care less about quality. If Recode insisted on real ads, rather than coming to depend on surveillance-based adtech, its advertisers would have valued the publication, and not just the eyeballs of its readers, wherever it could find them. Walt concludes,

It’s no easy task to either make money online as a publisher or to advertise your product in a world where attention is so fleeting and divided. But the current system of ad-supported web content isn’t working for readers and viewers. It needs to be reset. The ad business is too brain-snatched to do that reset alone. It needs help from readers and brave publishers willing to stop participating in the adtech game. As I explain in How customers can debug business with one line of code (hashtag: #NoStalking), each of us can come to publishers with a simple term that says “Just show me ads not based on tracking me.” In other words, “Give us real advertising. We can live with that.” #NoStalking is not only in the works at Customer Commons, but saying yes to it will be an ideal move by companies wishing to obey the General Data Protection Regulation (aka GDPR), which will start punishing stalking severely, starting in 2018. While the GDPR will blow up adtech as we’ve known it, #NoStalking will save real advertising, and the best of adsupported publishing along with it, because it will bring economic incentives back into alignment with journalism. We had that in the old ad-and-subscription supported world of offline journalism, and we can get it back in the new world of online journalism. As I explain in Why #NoStalking is a good deal for publishers,

Individuals issuing the offer get guilt-free use of the goods they come to the publisher for, and the publisher gets to stay in business — and improve that business by running advertising that is actually valued by its recipients. So, if you want to save journalism, the best of publishing and civil discourse that depends on both, bring back real advertising and cure the cancer of adtech. Doc Searls Author of The Intention Economy, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, Fellow of CITS at UCSB, alumnus Fellow of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard.

How To Rebrand An Unsavory History FORMER NIKE DESIGNER D’WAYNE EDWARDS SAYS BRUCE LEE HAS IMPACTED HIS CAREER AND DESIGN. By Meg Miller

If ever there were a place for a scandal to play out, the darkened and discreet hotel room is it. Seedy hotels are probable spots for misconduct, obviously—but so are glamorous, distinguished hotels that host high-profile figures prone to high-profile screw-ups. For a prominent hotel, being the backdrop of a public scandal is forever an unavoidable possibility. But how damaging to a hotel’s business is being swept up in a controversy it inadvertently hosted? By just providing the backdrop to a scandal, hotels are in the unique position of being able to capitalize on it without it seeming outright

tasteless. Can a hotel’s unsavory history actually become its biggest branding asset? The answer, according to Roberto Sablayrolles of the real estate and design firm Streetsense, is a resounding yes. Sablayrolles specializes in the experiential design of restaurants and hotels, so I called him up to ask how hotels handle controversial histories in their design and branding, starting with the Watergate—the hotel complex so defined by political scandal that its name has since become a suffix synonymous with public disgrace (see: Pizzagate, Bridgegate, Deflategate). Sablayrolles’s treated the break-in like a

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wearing uniforms designed by Mad Men costume designer Janie Bryant hand over key cards that affirm there is “No need to break in.” Pencils placed alongside a pad on the room desk read “I stole this from the Watergate Hotel.” For those really paying attention, the customer service phone number (1-844-617-1972) includes the break-in date, and the hotel’s typewriter-style typeface was inspired by the 1970s-era legal documents used during Nixon’s Senate hearings. “I knew we needed to address the scandal, but I certainly didn’t want it to be the only focal point because the hotel is—

branding gift. “I have to tell you this, if we had the chance to do [the Watergate branding] it would have been great because there is already a great story there,” he tells me. Streetsense didn’t do the branding—Watergate developer Euro Capital did—but Sablayrolles says that any strong history that a hotel can use as its branding is an asset, especially one with as much name recognition as Watergate. “If you already have a story that’s controversial, there is a lot of opportunity for branding,” he says. In the Watergate’s case the flubbed burglary of the Democratic National Convention headquarters, located inside the complex, and subsequent cover-up by Nixon’s administration made the hotel an attraction even immediately afterward. According to the Washington Post, the scandal boosted business in the 1970s, and it continued to be used as a prominent spot for those in the Reagan administration in the 1980s. When the hotel closed down in 2007 it was because of building decline and changing ownership, not the bumbling burglary over 30 years prior. Last June the Watergate reopened under new ownership with a $200-million renovation. In the press, the hotel branding took a backseat to the gilded, retro-chic interiors spearheaded by the British-Israeli designer Ron Arad. But the cleverest elements of the communication design are the ones that allude slyly to the scandal. Upon arrival, hotel attendants

and was—so much more glamorous than that,” says Rakel Cohen, who co-owns the hotel with her husband, Jacques Cohen, and led the hotel’s rebrand. The details Cohen included—she also points out that the front-desk hold music is a 1972 speech Nixon made to address Vietnam—are so subtle they feel like inside jokes, where the punchline is something everyone with the slightest knowledge of American history is in on. In the same vein as the maxim “good design is invisible,” incorporating controversy takes a nuanced touch and a blending in with the overall design vision (in the Watergate’s case, an homage to its glamorous ’70s heyday). The fact that these references are so small they are totally missable is most

of why they work. “If you explode a theme way too much it becomes over-theatrical,” says Sablayrolles. “That’s not clear branding. I like to say, when you have to tell the joke more than once, it’s not funny.” The Watergate isn’t the only hotel that has been successful at spinning a big political scandal to its advantage. The website for the Cliveden House, a private estate-turned-luxury hotel in Buckinghamshire, U.K., boasts a history of “unapologetic debauchery” (which echoes the copy on the Watergate website promising “unapologetic luxury.”) The main piece of history the Cliveden House is not sorry for? The Profumo Affair, a 1961 political scandal that started with an affair between John Profumo, the secretary of state for war at the time, and 19-year-old model Christine Keeler and ended with the resignation not only of Profumo but also of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Profumo and Keeler began their relationship after meeting by the pool at a Cliveden estate party, where Keeler was swimming in the nude. These days, the secluded pool is now a spa area, and the hotel’s copy is replete with mentions of decadence and intrigue. “Cliveden absolutely embraces its scandalous history,” says managing director Andrew Stembridge. “It is indeed the hotel’s past that defines the property today, making it one of the most historically renowned hotels in the world.” He points out that political scandal stretches even further back than Profumo, all the way to 350 years to when

the Cliveden House was first built. In 1666, the second duke of Buckingham had the house built as a gift to his mistress, the countess of Shrewsbury. Advertisers and designers have long known that sex and scandal sell, and clever hotel branding can play that up. As Sablayrolles puts it, the clever details can provide what he calls “Instagrammable moments,” but they have to be rooted in a more compelling overarching story. With hotels, there’s

a fine line between sexy and seedy—it takes a historical foothold and a nuanced approach to come off as the former.

Meg Miller is an assistant editor at Co.Design covering art, technology, and design.

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Meme Marketing: How Brands Are Speaking A New Consumer Language By James McCrae

Believe it or not, memes have been around much longer than Instagram. An anthropological concept coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, memes originally represented the idea of “going viral” within a biological system or society. The imitation of a survival-enhancing gene could be considered a primitive biological meme. So could the popularization of a catchy melody or a political movement such as democracy. According to Dawkins, memes are “an idea, behaviour, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” Memes are ideas that are imitated because they strike a common chord and increase the likelihood of evolutionary survival. Before it became the world’s biggest religion, Christianity was a meme. Today, so is Grumpy Cat.

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With the rise of the internet and social media, the idea of memes themselves has become a meme, and new viral content appears in our news feeds every morning. The internet meme is defined as any fad, joke or memorable piece of content that spreads virally across the web, usually in the form of short videos or photography accompanied by a clever caption. In our age of fragmented media and personalized algorithms, internet memes (from “Dancing Baby” to “Hide Yo’ Kids, Hide Yo’ Wife” to the “Harlem Shake”) are redefining the communal experience, especially among millennials. Naturally, when this many people are paying attention, brands want in on the action.

Why Marketers Are Jumping On The Meme Bandwagon The average person spends over 100 minutes per day on social media. Our worlds are largely informed by the jokes, references and commentary made by the friends and influencers we follow. Memes are native to the language of social media. And when we spend hours consuming absurdist humor and ridiculous YouTube videos, let’s be honest, it’s a total buzzkill to see brand-sponsored advertisements crashing the party. That’s why brands are getting smarter about the content they publish on social media. They know that the only way to elicit a better reaction than an eye roll is to give their audiences an experience tailored for social media. That means less overt promotions and more of the humorous “internet conversations” that millennials are already having. When diving into the world of meme marketing, brands have two options: piggyback on an existing meme or attempt to create a new meme from scratch.

Piggybacking On Existing Memes New memes appear on social media every day. Some are only a flash in the pan and die out before bedtime. Others stick around for several months or even years. Taking a trending meme and applying it to a brand or product can be a fast way to resonate with your audience. On the downside, copying existing memes can appear lazy and unoriginal. And when a brand gets behind the wrong meme, their message could be outdated by the time an ad reaches their customers. Gucci recently launched a series of Instagram ads that reimagined popular memes featuring its watch collection. The campaign included high-end photography and custom illustrations, but was met with a lukewarm reception. Another example is from the group chat application HipChat, which launched a meme-inspired billboard in San Francisco. According to the brand’s blog, “The response far exceeded our expectations and continues to pay off today.” Unlike Gucci, which is an established luxury brand flirting with memes in between luxury campaigns, the HipChat billboard was well received because the brand was an upstart trying to disrupt an established market. Edgy humor is more authentic

when brands can claim a truly disruptive message.

Creating New Memes Starting a meme from scratch is more difficult but has a bigger upside. This is the modern equivalent to creating a viral catchphrase that seeps into the cultural vocabulary (remember “Where’s the Beef?”). This approach requires creativity and outside-the-box thinking, but when it clicks, the meme can become adopted by the public and take on a life of its own. The genius of Dos Equis’ popular campaign around “The Most Interesting Man in the World” was the tagline formula. “I don’t always x, but when I do, I y” could be applied to an infinite number of scenarios. This helped the campaign gain traction outside of the advertising world. When rapper Drake released his 2016 hit “Hotline Bling,” he filmed himself doing awkward dance moves in front of colored backgrounds, enabling fans to superimpose his silly dancing onto an endless array of environments. The song was already a viral hit, but the “memeification” of the music video took it to another level.

Five Guidelines For Meme Marketing Rules of thumb to make your brand go from Crying Jordan to Success Kid in no time: 1. Speak the language. Hire people who are native speakers of memes and social media. Your audience can spot inauthenticity a mile away, and there’s nothing more uncool than a brand that tries too hard to be cool. 2. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Memes work because they are silly and ridiculous. Show your brand’s human side by proving you aren’t afraid to have fun. 3. Be comfortable knowing that not everybody will understand. It’s about targeting the niche group who gets it. 4. Increase shareability. Don’t forget to use relevant hashtags, engage your audience with questions and prompt them to tag friends. 5. Be timely. Meme culture changes fast, and is influenced by everything from current events, sports, politics, celebrity gossip and the latest viral YouTube video. Pay attention to the cultural temperature and strike while the iron is hot. Whether you want to get in on the action of an already popular meme or create your own viral sensation, meme marketing is a fun, topical way to harness the power of social media.

James McCrae, Strategy Director at Blue Fountain Media and author of Sh#t Your Ego Says.

Major Brands Get Hip To Haptics By Todd Wasserman

A recent video ad for Arby’s showed pro golfer Andrew “Beef” Johnson on the green and pitching the ball into an Arby’s cup. The ad itself was fairly ordinary except for this: If you saw it on an Android phone, you could not only watch and hear Johnson but feel his footsteps as well. This type of so-called haptic technology, which transmits vibrations, has been used in gaming for decades. Now marketers, including Stolichnaya Vodka, BMW, Royal Caribbean, and Truvia, are starting to apply haptics to their ads as well. So far the results are encouraging. Adding haptics boosted the happiness and excitement levels consumers felt by 7% and 8%, respectively. The ads also raised brand perception by 6%, according to a study by IPG Media Lab, Magna, and Immersion. Others have claimed success with haptics, too. Mobile phone maker Hauwei said its ads using haptic technology were 10 times more effective than its standard ads. Of course, the novelty factor might be at play. But as IoT devices begin to become more of a standard feature of the landscape, more marketers could start tapping haptics to boost their campaigns.

A Haptic History Haptic is to touch as optics are to sight. Broadly speaking, braille is considered a haptic technology. Its use in computing goes back to 1976, when the Sega video game Moto-Cross featured haptic feedback that simulated the feel of a motorcycle. The feature was a success, and other video-game makers later included haptics in their games as well. Such games used a component called an actuator, which vibrates to appeal to our sense of touch. Later, most cell phones (not to mention pagers) used the feature as an alternative to audible notifications. With the introduction of touchscreens, phones started to offer more of a palette of experiences. By 2010, Samsung, LG, Nokia, and Research in Motion (now BlackBerry) were offering haptic feedback. At the time, the range of haptic feedback was

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pretty limited, but the technology has been progressing. In particular, the Apple Watch simulates the feeling of a rubber band snapping back when a user exits the limit of a field. The iPhone 7 also offers a range of sensations. Changing the date or time on an iPhone 7, for instance, mimics the feel of a mechanical wheel. A game called Alto’s Adventure simulates the feeling of sliding on ice. A handful of other iOS games also feature haptic effects. Google Play also has a section of “Games You Can Feel” for Android. In addition, the trackpad on the MacBook Pro re-creates the experience of touching a button when there actually is none. Similarly, the trackpad could mimic other textures as well, including holes, bumps, and indentations.

Haptic Ads It was just a matter of time before someone decided to apply haptics to ads. For example, Immersion, a 24-year-old firm that has applied haptics to medical equipment and gaming, has been experimenting with advertising since 2015. Chris Ullrich, VP of user experience and analytics at Immersion, said the first ad using haptic technology was a teaser for Showtime’s Homeland’s Season 4 series premiere in 2015. That ad featured a haptic simulation of a bomb explosion. The click-through rate for that ad was five times the industry average. Another ad that year Immersion worked on for Stolichnaya Vodka let consumers simulate the feel of a cocktail being made in their hands. So far, Immersion doesn’t have much competition. Though competing firms Hap2u and Ultrahaptics also create haptic experiences, neither has so far offered them for advertising. In its 10K filing from last year, Immersion warned that partners and customers could develop “their own haptic solutions.” (At this writing, Immersion’s TouchSense ads were available only for Android phones because the company is in the midst of litigation with Apple. Ullrich said there’s no technical barrier to running haptic ads on Apple devices.) More recently, a study by IPG and Magna found that Immersion’s TouchSense ads performed better than standard video ads. In particular, there was a 62% increase in feelings of connection to brands. Some 38% of respondents said they felt excited after viewing an ad with haptics versus 30% for those who saw an ad without haptics. Haptic ads also made viewers 7% happier.

Of course, the novelty factor could be influencing those results. Banner ads were once novel, but now no one clicks them. “Whenever you have something different, it gets people’s attention and those companies tend to get a good response,” said Laura Ries, president of branding consultancy Ries & Ries. “It’s possible there may be some of that,” Ullrich said. Ullrich pointed to a parallel in gaming. “When Rumble [a game featuring haptic technology] came out in 1998, you could argue the same thing–do games really need this? And what we have seen is that it has been adopted in numerous game experiences because it does add meaningful value.” That said, Ullrich warned advertisers not to overdo it. “You can run the risk of a backlash,” he said. “Our research has indicated that there’s a preferred level of density for haptic effects where it’s a meaningful impact but isn’t annoying or causing user frustration.” Unlike audio or visual effects, haptics need to be “discreet,” he added. Shepherd Laughlin, director of trend forecasting for J. Walter Thompson Worldwide, said haptics are potentially a “powerful tool for digital storytelling,” but “so few people have tried these devices that it’s too early to say if this will work in advertising or have any staying power.”

Beyond Phones As virtual reality, touchscreens, and wearable technology, such as Google’s Project Jacquard with Levi’s, become more common, brands will have more opportunities to use haptics. For instance, realtor Halstead Properties is using haptics as part of a VR experience. Consumers who try it can feel what it’s like to turn a door knob or touch closets and faucets at a home they’re checking out.

In this new environment, a brand could also create a haptic identity that’s the tactile equivalent of the Nike swoosh or Intel’s jingle. Imagine, for instance, if a brand was known for a touch sensation that evoked putting your finger in sand or one that simulated the ripples in a pool of water. “Why not?” Ries said. “Brands have owned certain hues of colors and sounds. There’s no reason why a certain vibration couldn’t be connected to a brand.” Hayes Roth, principal with HA Roth Consulting, agreed. “Over time, a few brands will figure out how to use it without being creepy,” he said. “It could add a new dimension to the brand experience.” Marketers are already using haptics to differentiate their designs. Toyota has demonstrated an in-car touchscreen that responds to the driver’s touch with a slight haptic bump. A system from Bosch also simulates the feel of pressing buttons and activating clicks. Some Cadillacs’ seats also rumble to notify drivers of an impending collision. At the moment, Immersion has no plans for bringing haptic marketing to IoT. “The applications are interesting,” Ullrich said. “But we’re really focused on the short term on working with our partners [on IoT devices.]” While touch may never be on equal footing with visual or optic brand elements, it might be another alternative, along with scent, that can help brands differentiate themselves in a post-mobile world where consumer attention spans grow ever-shorter. As Ries noted, it takes the brand some time to read a logo, but “for stimuli like visual, smell, and touch, it goes directly to the brain. Without even thinking about it, you get a reaction.”

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How to Write an Inspired Creative Brief By Howard Ibach

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

One of the most important documents in the creative process is the creative brief. It gives the creative department its marching orders, telling them where to start digging for great ideas. Filled with examples of powerful and effective creative briefs, and written in a laid-back but very informative way, this is essential reading for everyone in the communications industry.

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By Charles Duhigg In The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize–winning business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. Distilling vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives that take us from the boardrooms of P&G to sidelines of the NFL to the front lines of the civil rights movement...

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable By Seth Godin What if you see a black and white cow after only ever seeing brown cows? It stands out. But what happens when you keep seeing more and more black and white cows? What stands out then? It would take a purple cow. That’s the basic premise of Godin’s seminal book on transforming your business, and your advertising, into something remarkable. Stand out, be amazing, or blend in and go unnoticed.

Tested Advertising Methods (5th Edition) (Prentice Hall Business Classics) By Caples, Hahn 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.

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

By David Ogilvy David Ogilvy was an advertising legend. His legacy lives on through the many branches of the Ogilvy network, and his books. Ogilvy On Advertising is considered an advertising bible, filled with indispensible knowledge and candid thoughts from a man who once said “it isn’t creative unless it sells.” Although decades old now, the principles within the book are as relevant as ever, and you’re doing yourself a severe injustice if you have not read it from cover to cover.

The Adweek Copywriting Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Powerful Advertising and Marketing Copy from One of America’s Top Copywriters By Joseph Sugarman Great copy is the heart and soul of the advertising business. In this practical guide, legendary copywriter Joe Sugarman provides proven guidelines and expert advice on what it takes to write copy that will entice, motivate, and move customers to buy.

Triggers By Joseph Sugarman Dramatically increase your ability to sell by learning how to control the mind of your prospect using 30 powerful psychological triggers to motivate, influence and persuade. Discover the one secret very few sales professionals know, yet it doubled response to a simple offer. Discover how to make your prospects feel so guilty that they can’t help but buy from you. Discover how to take an impossible situation and turn it around to your advantage through a simple sales technique. Buy this book now to improve every aspect of your selling and marketing skills.

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Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions

How to Write a Good Advertisement

By Carmen Simon

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.

Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Carmen Simon, PhD, reveals how to avoid the hazards of random recall and deliver just the right amount of content. No more redundant meetings, rambling e-mails, or anemic presentations. In Impossible to Ignore, she shows you how to execute a proven three-step plan for persuasion

Productivity for Creative People: How to Get Creative Work Done in an “Always on” World Kindle Edition

By Victor O. Schwab

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World By Cal Newport

Productivity for Creative People, is a collection of insights, tips, and techniques to help you carve out time for your most important work - while managing your other commitments. All the solutions he shares have been tested with real people in real situations.

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy.

The Business Idea Factory: A World-Class System for Creating Successful Business Ideas Kindle Edition

Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences on Social Media Kindle Edition

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By Andrii Sedniev

By Dan Gingiss, Jay Baer (Foreword)

This book is an effective and easy-to-use system for creating successful business ideas. It is based on 10 years of research into idea-generation techniques used by the world’s best scientists, artists, CEOs, entrepreneurs and innovators. The book is entertaining to read, has plenty of stories and offers bits of wisdom necessary to increase the quantity and quality of ideas that you create multiple times.

Social media has changed customer service forever. Dan Gingiss has interviewed dozens of business leaders on his podcast, Focus on Customer Service. From those conversations and his own real-world experience at multiple Fortune 300 companies, Gingiss has developed a series of best practices called “8 Steps to Winning at Social Customer Care.”

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Methods of Persuasion: How to Use Psychology to Influence Human Behavior Kindle Edition

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Using principles from cognitive psychology, Nick Kolenda developed a unique way to influence people’s thoughts. He developed a “mind reading” stage show depicting that phenomenon, and his demonstrations have been seen by over a million people across the globe. Methods of Persuasion reveals that secret for the first time. You’ll learn how to use those principles to influence people’s thoughts in your own life.

Have you ever found yourself lost in the endless possibilities of 21st-century marketing? Or are you ever confused about how to market towards the millennial generation? Maybe you’ve even heard about Snapchat and would like to know more about how to use this powerful tool to boost sales. Well if that’s the case then this book is for you!

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