Branding matters. Because branding matters.
Published by 03.22#112
brandknew.groupisd.com brandknewmag.com
Dear friends Spring has given us a precursor of what is to come and the bright sunny days are just around the corner. Hopefully the pall and gloom caused by the war in Ukraine will come to a halt sooner than later. Prayers! We haven’t held back at all in this edition. It’s power packed as ever. We talk about Metaverse and the marketing opportunities that arrive with it. For all the hype and hoopla surrounding AI, one thing is certain: it will never replace human creativity. We engage in a conversation on Brand Voice and how it can lead to success. Nike has been killing it with its designs over the 5 decades or so, and we take a deep dive into the how and why. For all the agency custodians, we talk about what CMOs look for in an ad agency. In this edition, we also reflect on some macro and micro trends that will permeate adland in the months to come. Dreamtech is the next frontier and we debate whether advertisers are going to infiltrate our dreams. Some things don’t change and the key to creating and sustaining brilliant brands hasn’t changed- we talk about it in this issue. Optimization is highly sought after and resorted to but it comes with the danger of over optimizing to death. Understand more on that in this issue. There is ample more to soak in and understand and I leave you to do just that. Till the next, my very best!
10 14
16 18 20 22 24
26 28 Suresh Dinakaran @ISDGlobalDubai
@Brandknewmag
linkd.in/1dsjYaW
isdbranding
bit.ly/1h95tgO
isdglobaldubai
suresh@groupisd.com
34 36 38 42 44 46
Brand Knew is published by
Brand Consultancy | Advertising | PR | Publishing Digital Media | Film Academy For Advertising Enquiries: engage@groupisd.com or call + 050 6254340 All Copyright of the content in this issue rests fully & comprehensively with the respective contributors and/or media platforms at all times, as the case may be.
www.brandknew.groupisd.com www.groupisd.com
Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Chief Strategy Director: Rishi Mohan Business Performance Director: Sunil Vasudevan Brand Engagement and Outreach Specialist: Anuva Madan Chief Country Man, India: Rohit Unni Brand Trends and Research Architect: Meeta Pendse Revenue Growth Architect: Ritu Dey Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Performance Marketing Architect: Suresh Babu Technology & Web Enabler: Vyanky Charakpalli Social Media Outreach: Pooja Chhabda SEO Advocate: Santhosh Rakonda Content & PR: Nitin Kumar
48 50 54 56 58 62
CONTENTS
Are advertisers going to infiltrate our dreams? 3 reasons why AI will never match human creativity Effective Storytelling Can Inspire Positive Action for People and Planet ADVerbatim: Some micro and macro outlooks We Don’t Talk About Bruno…What Can Brands Learn From Encanto? Nike’s designs are still killing it after 50 years. This tiny detail reveals how Brand voice: 3 steps to success Why the key to creating and sustaining brilliant brands hasn’t changed In conversation: The CEO moment Sustainability or Spin? Why Straight Facts Matter Most The Bland D2C Trap: How to Avoid “Optimizing to Death” Marketing in the Metaverse: challenges and opportunities Food Trends Driven By ‘Collective Convergence’—Why That Matters Ad tech comes under the microscope as marketers evolve their media mix The Next Frontier of the Mobile App Ecosystem Try these practices to increase your self-regulation Why ‘ workcations ‘ have become popular Lauren Weinberg Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Square What Do CMOs Actually Want in an Agency? The rise of Canva, the $40 billion design juggernaut Book, Line & Sinker
Last year, Molson Coors, the esteemed purveyor of watereddown frat-party beer, ran a jarring ‘experiment.’
and researchers to better understand advertisers’ efforts to infiltrate our dreams.
In a discreet building in downtown Los Angeles, 18 subjects were instructed to watch a strange video featuring a synthladen soundtrack and natural imagery interspersed with glimpses of Coors Light cans.
The manipulation of dreams
The participants were then asked to drift off to sleep while listening to an 8-hour soundtrack featuring audio from the video. Coors’ stated goal was science-fiction worthy: The company wanted to “shape and compel [the] subconscious” into dreaming about beer. Shockingly, it seemed to work. Around 30% of the participants reported that Coors products made an appearance in their dreams. The average person is exposed to up to 10k ads per day. They’re peppered along roadway billboards and bus stops. They’re squeezed into podcasts, newspaper folds, and mailboxes. They pop up by the dozen on websites, and plague social media feeds like some kind of fungal disease. Ads have infiltrated every facet of our lives. And now, researchers say our last remaining respite — the dreamscape — is under siege. The Hustle spoke to half a dozen leading sleep scientists
Humans have long attempted to orchestrate their dream content. As far back as 1350 BCE, Ancient Egyptians would draw on their hands prior to nodding off, in a bid to summon nocturnal wisdom from deities. Over the centuries, cultures enlisted a plethora of similar techniques, from fasting to consuming spicy foods. Today, dreams — and sleep, for that matter — are still a largely unexplored and mysterious terrain. But Robert Stickgold, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who has studied dreams for decades, says that in the last 20 years, brain activity technologies have enabled us to gain a better understanding of dreams. “All night long, your brain is reprocessing memories from the previous day, connecting them with other memories, sifting through the residue to decide which ones to keep, and stabilizing them.” “Our dreams,” he says, “are literally creating who we are.” Now, here’s where things get a bit Inception-worthy. Academic work has suggested that external stimuli like smells, lights, and sounds can be enlisted to alter the
brandknewmag.com
11
Are advertisers going to infiltrate our dreams? By Zachary Crockett
content of our dreams.
•
Augment our creativity
In a 2000 study, for instance, Stickgold and his Harvard colleagues had subjects play 7 hours of Tetris over 3 days, and found that 60% reported dreaming about the game. In subsequent work, he found that even people with amnesia who had no recollection of playing Tetris had the dreams.
•
Help us learn
•
Combat addiction
Researchers broadly call this practice “Targeted Dream Incubation” (TDI), and in simplified terms it typically works like so: 1. An association is formed during waking — say a pairing of sounds and visuals, or scents.
There is some evidence to back this up. A 2014 study found that introducing a blended smell of rotten eggs and cigarette smoke during sleep reduced smokers’ cigarette consumption by ~30% over the course of the following week. But lately, something has been plaguing Haar.
2. When someone is drifting off into hypnagogia (the state between wakefulness and sleep), and the sound or scent is introduced, it triggering related dreams.
“On one hand, dream manipulation is gaining acceptance and has all these great applications,” he said in a recent interview. “And on the other hand, it’s, ‘Oh shit, the advertisers are coming.’”
Adam Haar, a Ph.D. student at MIT, recently worked with a team to develop a wearable device that mechanizes this process.
The best case, adds Haar, is that dream intervention will deepen people’s relationship with their dreams. The worst case is that it will cheapen it.
The sensor-equipped glove detects when someone has drifted off into a hypnagogic state, then repeatedly plays a prerecorded audio cue — usually a single word. In one experiment, participants who were prompted with the word “tree” reported dreaming about trees 67% of the time.
“I think it’s going to be a bit of a battle,” he says. “And I think that battle has already started.”
Haar says dream intervention has a variety of potentially positive applications. It could be used to: •
Alleviate psychiatric conditions like depression and PTSD
Nefarious actors In early 2021, Bobbi Gould, a Los Angeles-based travel writer, says she came across a vague ad on Craigslist from a “big brand looking for willing sleepers.” She’d always been interested in dreams, and the gig paid $1k. So she and her boyfriend decided to sign up.
A few days later, she says she found herself in an old warehouse with 17 other people, hooked up to an EEG machine, surrounded by Molson Coors marketers. Gould was told to watch the Coors video — complete with hypnotic waterfalls, lush green landscapes, and flashes of Coors products — then doze off to an audio recording of sounds from the video. Over the next 8 hours, she had a variety of “weird Coors dreams.” “I had one where I was on a pogo stick jumping around with Coors products,” she tells The Hustle. “In another one, I was on a plane dropping Coors cans on people and they were cheering for me.” At the end of the ordeal Gould was roped into a focus group to discuss the experience. “We all felt like lab rats,” she says. “They were trying to implant Coors into our brains. It just didn’t really sit right.” Coors isn’t the only big brand looking into dreams as potential ad space: •
Microsoft has explored ways to make pro gamers dream of their favorite Xbox video games.
•
Sony’s PlayStation has advertised a new game on the premise that it induces dreams about Tetris.
•
Burger King rolled out a Halloween-themed burger in 2018 that it claimed was “clinically proven” to induce nightmares.
•
Several large airlines have reached out to Haar for help with commercially driven dream-incubation projects.
Marketers have quietly been studying the viability of using dreams to alter our purchasing behaviors. And in a recent survey run by The American Marketing Association-New York, 77% of marketers said they had plans to use technology to influence dreams within the next 3 years. Sleep researchers don’t want to wait for that to happen. Last summer, Stickgold, Haar, and nearly 40 other scientists signed an open letter warning that, without action, dreams could soon become “a playground for corporate advertisers.” What might that nightmare look like? Stickgold says that advertisers could, in theory, use smart speakers — 126m of which are now installed in US homes — to market products to us in our sleep. Many say that the technology to do this is nearly there. Google’s Nest Hub, for instance, can measure your breathing during sleep and detect your coughs and snores. “When you’re awake, you have a whole collection of filters and mechanisms to evaluate information and filter out ads,” says Stickgold. “Your sleeping brain can’t do that. It assumes that whatever is activated during sleep is being activated internally, not by outside forces.” Kathleen Esfahany, an undergraduate researcher who works with Haar at MIT, fears that “addictions and other
problems that exist in the real world could just be worsened” by advertisers. More nefariously, this could be done without us even realizing it. Sara Mednick, a sleep researcher and professor of cognitive science at UC Irvine who co-signed the letter, is particularly concerned about the privacy implications of dream ad incubation. “Our dreams are our last sacred space,” she says. “We’re super vulnerable during our sleep and we may not even know we’re being exposed to these techniques.” Deirdre Barrett, a Harvard professor and renowned dream expert whom Coors consulted with for its video, sympathizes with the fears raised by her colleagues but feels that some of the fears are overblown. “My read of the scientific literature is that there is scant evidence to suggest that sleep- or dream-related advertisements would be nearly as effective as ones presented to a wide-awake consumer,” she says. Tore Nielsen, the director of the Dream and Nightmare Lab at the Université de Montréal, shares this opinion. “I don’t think it is very realistic at all for advertisers to manipulate our dream content — especially not against someone’s will,” he says. “New tech is showing some signs of progress, but we are nowhere near having a ‘problem’ with ‘unconscious mind control,’ in my opinion.” Ad experts have also pointed out that tracking viewability metrics — a key component of any successful ad campaign — would be virtually impossible in the dreamscape. “You can’t track whether someone clicked on a dream ad or signed up for a dream email service,” writes tech journalist Shoshana Wodinsky, “or even if they actually comprehended what the hell they were looking at in the first place.” And even if the dystopian future of dream ads does come to fruition, critics say current regulations already shield consumers from manipulation. Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” in commerce, including advertising that a reasonable consumer wouldn’t recognize to be an ad. Barrett thinks that language is broad enough to cover emerging “markets” like dreams. Regardless, advertisers seem to be doing just fine without directly intruding on our dreams. A recent survey by a luxury mattress company found that 7 in 10 people have had a dream about a brand as a result of interacting with regular ads, or using a product in daily life. And more than half of them said those dreams made them want to interact with those brands even more. If you’re worried about a potential ad dystopia, take a look around. We’re already living in one. I’m a writer based in San Francisco. My work — a mix of narrative-driven reporting, visuals, and data analysis — explores the extraordinary in the ordinary. I’m particularly interested in the process of invention, strange obsessions, and the microeconomics of subcultures.
3 reasons why AI will never match human creativity By Katharine Schwab
Neural networks–a common type of artificial intelligence– are infiltrating every aspect of our lives, powering the internet-connected devices in our homes, the algorithms that dictate what we see online, and even the computational systems in our cars. But according to an article published in the peer-reviewed journal Big Data & Society by Anton Oleinik, a sociology professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, there’s one crucial area where neural networks do not outperform humans: creativity. Researchers have projected that automation may claim 800 million jobs around the world by 2030. Others suggest that as many as half of American jobs may be under threat from automation. But amid all the handwringing about robots taking people’s jobs, Oleinik’s analysis is further evidence that AI will likely only replace repetitive tasks that humans aren’t particularly skilled at to begin with. Even as AI creeps into creative fields, it is still only doing the work of recommending ideas to a human designer, who is spared some of his or her job’s mindlessness but still makes the final call about what a website or app will look like. So why are neural nets so bad at being creative? Neural networks are machine learning algorithms composed of layers of calculations that excel at ingesting vast amounts
of data and finding every pattern within them. They fundamentally rely on statistical regression–which means that while they’re good at identifying patterns, they fail miserably to anticipate when a pattern will change, let alone connect one pattern to an unrelated pattern, a crucial ingredient in creativity. “Scholars in science and technology studies consider the capacity to trace linkages between heterogeneous and previously unconnected elements as a distinctive human social activity,” Oleinik writes. Unfortunately, creativity would be impossible without radical predictions, something regression analysis will never be able to do. Second, because all patterns appear to be meaningful to an algorithm based purely on how prevalent they are in the data, neural networks fail to distinguish between which patterns are meaningful and which aren’t–an additional foundational element of creativity. Computers may come up with novel ideas, but they may not be valuable ideas because value is a collective agreement, dictated by groups of people. Finally, because neural networks do not understand, let alone incorporate, outside context, they are unable to make adjustments based on social norms and interactions beyond
groupisd.com
15
the realm of their specific purpose and data set. In other words, they lack social intelligence, which is important for creativity since, “innovations are often embedded in social connections and relationships,” Oleinik says. For instance, an algorithm that is analyzing patterns among corporate leaders may well conclude that being male is an essential element of being a leader–something that is based on a history of bias and is socially agreed upon to be false. As a result, he thinks that because neural networks are inferior to humans when it comes to identifying and interpreting symbols, acting socially, and making predictions, he doubts that neural net-powered artificial creativity will ever be able to match human creativity. “Creativity is hardly possible without one’s capacity to think metaphorically, to coordinate proactively and to make predictions that go beyond simple extrapolation,” Oleinik argues. However, that doesn’t mean that neural nets aren’t excellent mimickers of creativity. “In the words of a sociologist,” Oleinik writes, “a robot powered by neural networks may be a good [a]ctor, i.e. someone who closely follows the script, but not a [s]ubject, i.e. someone who meaningfully changes and rewrites the imposed rules.” For instance, a neural net would be excellent at studying all of Picasso’s paintings and producing a new work that copies the famed artist’s style. In fact, many contemporary artists have played with neural networks in exactly this way, creating new portraits that look like they could have been painted by an old master but are in fact computergenerated. But what a neural net may never be able to do is look at Picasso’s paintings and respond to them in a way that
meaningfully adds to the artistic conversation by generating new patterns. The neural net itself can never be in dialogue with the artistic past without a human there to give it intent– it is only a shallow imitator, devoid of true meaning. As prominent AI artist Mario Klingemann pointed out when his first AI artwork was up for auction, he is the artist, not the computer. Ultimately, neural nets are not designed for creativity. Instead, they are designed for a world with clean, precise data. Oleinik points out that in a neural net’s ideal world, you remove data’s messiness–messiness that often comes from the unpredictability of human creativity. Take, for example, the optimal situation in which to create self-driving cars: roads where everybody, be they human or machine, follows the rules to a T, where there is no randomness whatsoever and everything is entirely predictable. Relinquishing human freedom on the road might be a trade-off that we’re willing to accept if it means that there are no more traffic accidents, but Oleinik points out that a broader scheme to reduce human predictability is not only Orwellian; it would have to stamp out creativity altogether to function. It’s clear that for the time being, creativity will remain squarely the domain of humans. And perhaps, given neural nets’ inability to make creative inferences, interpret meaning, or understand social context, it should stay that way. Katharine Schwab is a contributing writer at Co.Design based in New York. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Seattle Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Effective Storytelling Can Inspire Positive Action for People and Planet By Kristen Tetrick
Marketers are the co-creators of our societal narrative, and a brand’s messaging has the ability to drive culture change. Never before has the power of the stories we tell held such importance or latent opportunity. Our lives are shaped by a variety of narratives. As early as childhood, storytelling is used to spark our imagination while simultaneously teaching us both lessons from the past and possible options for our future. In today’s society, we find a mix of narratives influencing our culture — where inspirational leadership is needed to unite the masses; this is where brands can step in. Marketers are not just guardians of a brand, they’re the cocreators of our societal narrative; and a brand’s messaging has the ability to drive culture change. Brands are storytellers, helping move culture and consumers forward on the journey towards sustainable living. Never before has the power of the stories we tell held such importance or latent opportunity. Evaluating the impact of a story can be a subjective practice, unless there is the ability to measure its effectiveness. The marketing industry has many tools to measure all kinds of brand lift and sales potential from advertisements; but until now, there has been no shared industry tool to measure whether an ad can get people to take action on purposedriven initiatives, or how that communication may benefit the brand itself. Sustainable Brands™, in collaboration with the Corporate Partners of the SB Brands for Good initiative — including Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, Visa and Nestlé — has developed a tool to answer this need, which is available for all brands across all industries to use. The Ad Sustainability Awareness Platform (ASAP) measures an ad’s ability to drive consumer action against the Nine Most Impactful Sustainable Behaviors, as well as its impact on overall brand favorability. Through proprietary research, these nine specific behaviors have been identified as the most impactful behaviors that brands and consumers can take together to create positive change and drive a culture of sustainable living. Learnings from the ASAP tool, paired with top tips from renowned brand and creative leaders, reveal how effective storytelling can be created through video ad messaging in a way that communicates with authenticity, credibility and relevance — allowing brands to drive positive behavior change while increasing brand favorability. It is time for brands to move beyond simply trying to change people’s attitudes and instead focus on enabling sustainable
changes in their behavior. SB Brands for Good research shows that one of the primary hurdles to living a more sustainable life is simply not knowing where to start. This is a huge opportunity for brands to become leaders in this space through inspiration and education on ways people can come together and take action. For example, when creating any communication, whether a one-off ad or a fully integrated campaign, including a strong call to action (CTA) is the best way to move from a place of advocacy to driving consumer action. Ads tested through the ASAP tool show that even ads with a weak CTA outperform those with none. These same ads consistently scored above the norm on the ‘Brand Favorability’ metric, as well. This suggests that consumers are receptive to learning and ultimately adopting new behaviors, and they favor the brands that are taking the lead in showing them how. Society is led by the public narratives that move us. Brands that lead the way and offer tangible ways for consumers to live more sustainably win a competitive advantage; and research shows that consumers are more eager than ever to learn about brands’ sustainability initiatives and support the brands that are doing the most good for people and the planet. Together, brands can create a collective impact that drives society toward a sustainable future by developing impactful video ad messaging. Excellence in Execution series The SB Brands for Good Excellence in Execution series is a collection of playbooks for creating breakthrough creative work across a range of marketing areas, including a list of best practices and a library of inspirational examples that drive action on the Nine Sustainable Behaviors. These guides have been co-created by the Corporate Partners of the SB Brands for Good initiative who share their best-in-class case studies and thoughtful insight on what they have found to be optimal creative solutions for their marketing strategies. Visit sbbrandsforgood.com/excellence-in-execution to learn more about this playbook series; or contact Brands for Good to learn more about joining the world’s leading brands unleashing the power of their brand influence to drive consumer behavior change at scale.
Courtney & Stephanie 6RFLDOɥ\ DQG (QWUHSUHQLVWD 0HGLD
Brand Builders
Role Models
Courtney Spritzer and Stephanie Cartin were pioneers when they started their social media business in 2011. Not just because the medium was relatively new, but also because they were one of the few women-owned startups in the industry. That’s why, today, they use their social media savvy to build a support network that inspires female entrepreneurs of all ages. And with Mastercard’s Digital Doors program, these Citi Small Business clients can further amplify their digital presence. So businesses like Courtney & Stephanie’s can thrive in the digital world while they’re busy impacting the real world. Because their business is much more than the services they provide. /HDUQ KRZ 0DVWHUFDUG® LV SUHSDULQJ ORFDO EXVLQHVVHV OLNH 6RFLDOɥ\ DQG (QWUHSUHQLVWD 0HGLD IRU WKH GLJLWDO DJH DW PDVWHUFDUG XV FLWLVPDOOEXVLQHVV
Together, let's Start Something Priceless®
k &LWLJURXS ,QF &LWL &LWL DQG $UF 'HVLJQ DQG RWKHU PDUNV XVHG KHUHLQ DUH VHUYLFH PDUNV RI &LWLJURXS ,QF RU LWV DɸOLDWHV XVHG DQG UHJLVWHUHG WKURXJKRXW WKH ZRUOG Mastercard® DQG 3ULFHOHVV DUH UHJLVWHUHG WUDGHPDUNV DQG 6WDUW 6RPHWKLQJ 3ULFHOHVV DQG WKH FLUFOHV GHVLJQ DUH WUDGHPDUNV RI 0DVWHUFDUG ,QWHUQDWLRQDO ,QFRUSRUDWHG k 0DVWHUFDUG $OO ULJKWV UHVHUYHG
VRFLDOɥ\Q\ FRP
ADVerbatim: Some micro and macro outlooks By Suresh Dinakaran
The caption of this article is a bit of soft pedaling. I am quite uncomfortable with the word ‘ trends ‘ because it is in more ways than one camouflaging what is called ‘ herd mentality ‘ which leads to the inevitable SOS(Sea of Sameness). And in an increasingly commoditized world, you may be birds of the same feather, but..flocking together ?? Amidst the tempest of pandemic driven uncertainty and disorientation, here’s a crystal ball gaze at some obvious and not so obvious landscapes that the advertising industry could be witness to in the coming months. - The biggest boycott in history to continue- I am referring to ad blocking- with over 600 million devices in its universe and growing, the wake up alarm has long been sounded for brands, agencies and advertisers. According to Hootsuite, the UAE has close to 40% of ad blocking( countries like Indonesia, India are at over 50%). Research states that one of the primary reasons for ad blocking is too many ads that are irrelevant, annoying and have nothing to do with creativity. Creativity is future proof and the sooner brand guardians get re-sensitized to that, in a pull and engage scenario(as against the widely practised push and control), the better. - Unless something dramatic happens, online programmatic advertising is writing its own obituary. Advertisers are being abused blind by adtech ferrets. Research from Media Post concludes that out of the US$200 billion global spend, 70% of advertising dollars spent on online programmatic advertising never touch a human being. In effect, $140 billion disappears in “ad fees, fraud, non-viewable impressions, non-brand-safe placements, and unknown allocations” (by “unknown allocations” you can read “shit that no one can figure out”). - The pandemic brought first-time advertisers to many platforms, especially OOH and DOOH, 2022 will be no different. New categories like Fintech, NFTs, Crypto
(with their supporting companies), and Online/E Sports, Wellbeing, EdTech, FoodTech categories will continue to flourish. After the dash for Expo 2020 attention, big opportunities will come to the fore for advertisers courtesy the FIFA World Cup in Qatar. - Advertisers and marketers will need to be as nimble as consumers. The pandemic not only accelerated omnichannel retail but also created hybrid behaviours beyond how we shop. From a mix of virtual and in-person fitness to IRL experiences with digital extensions, how we work, play and live is fluid and consumers expect brands to keep up with the rapid pace. For marketers, that means mapping every consumer touchpoint and applying a collection of insights - location, identity, cross-device, in-person, in-stream, etc. - to creative concepts that earn consumers’ attention while respecting privacy. The agility of marketers to behave as nimbly as consumers will translate into brand loyalty in a rapidly growing hybrid world. - A largely ignored, under served imperative will come to the fore for marketers and advertisers- Building company culture: The industry never had attrition rates as high as it had in 2021, and we’ve never had as many remote employees either. The Great Resignation continues unabated. Last year, the better organisations focused on retention and put a hyper-focus on recognition. Without in-person interactivity, you have to be so deliberate about your culture, especially during remote work. In the coming times, brands and businesses will put a lot of focus on how they create a culture of retention, diversity and recognition. Creativity will have to make a serious comeback. - For better or for (commerce)verse- Last year we saw a continued acceleration of social with ecommerce and sowing of the seeds of ‘ community commerce ‘ glued together by community, creators, shopping and entertainment like never before. In 2022, we’ll see social commerce give way to the “commerceverse” as people begin to move from
brandknewmag.com
19
entertainment to purchase. And as consumers look to build out their environment with virtual goods and experiences, brands will have the opportunity to connect with consumers in a surround-sound way. - Agency In-Housing: The in-housing trend at brands will not go away, but it is in reverse — to a point. Turns out, it’s too expensive, too complicated and too political for many brands to do at any real scale. Especially when so many businesses are trying to wrangle costs, not inflate them, during a global economic downturn. The pandemic’s knock on the economy forced many marketers to live hand-tomouth and the flexibility offered by agencies proved to be critical to survival. - Artificial Intelligence will find a greater say in services like copywriting and content generation- especially with tools like GPT 3(Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) -an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. It helps instantly generate high quality copy for Email, Ads, Websites, Listings, Blogs & More. Save Time And Money Writing Clever, Original Content And End Writer’s Block Forever is the pitch. - One should have heeded this as a premonition- sometime back the Meaningful Brands study conducted by Havas told us that most people would not care if 74% of all brands disappeared for good. How can brands bridge the gap between apathy and action, particularly with that allimportant millennial audience – the biggest generation and the leaders of tomorrow as we collectively take responsibility for getting closer to the UN SDG(Sustainable Development Goals).If we want to change the world, we all have to be involved. All people, of all ages, every brand, no exceptions. Bridging that gap means recognising that brands can be citizens too, with a responsibility to promote, share, create exposure and help to make change. Most importantly, brands can help people to connect to a political process that will make an impact on the world they live in – and that their children will inherit – to act as citizens themselves and not simply as consumers. That is a brand’s role as a citizen – to help consumers be citizens too. To quote Woody Allen, “ 80% of success is just showing up “. There is no better time to create a bright future. - Playing it by ear: While our eyes may be ‘maxxed’ after more than a year of relentless screen time, our ears have bandwidth. Our ears are more reliable curators, opting for human connection and unscripted conversations that podcasts and radio provide. A recent WARC Lion’s Intelligence study showed consumers now spend a third of their media time with audio, but most brands spend less than 10% of their media budget with audio. There is no question brands need to right-size their audio investment. But, getting beyond the spreadsheet and learning how to create a real human conversation with the consumer is the secret to winning with audio. Here’s to more conversations about how brands can get heard and get growth with audio in 2022.
- This is how the cookie crumbles: The impending demise of third-party cookies has drastically altered the digital advertising world while simultaneously highlighting how vital first-party data is and will be into the future. For now, first-party and third-party data will continue to exist, and advertisers can maximise this opportunity to run various experiments to ensure they are ready for when third-party cookies are no longer a source of targeting data. Brands that embrace first-party data, contextual advertising, and other third-party data alternatives today will be the industry leaders tomorrow. - RIP to RFP? : The RFP(Request for Proposal) bandwagon indulged in by enterprises from agencies to extract the cheapest possible price for their services. This comes with scant regard to competence, expertise, empirical evidence and worse who contributes the original idea which is now happily being sacrificed at the ‘ cheapest pricing altar ‘. And we are all aware that ‘ insider trading ‘ is not just restricted to the stock market. Time to cremate this archaic, merit agnostic practice. - Measurement will be back as the next frontier in 2022 — fueled by the unprecedented rise of CTV, the uncertain future of cookies and identity transactions in digital, and the disruption of Nielsen ratings. As we build for an everinterconnected digital future, the ‘measurement reset’ is an opportunity to build the relationships between consumers, content creators, publishers and their advertising partners. - Meta will emerge as part of brand experience and communication conversations and NFTs(Non Fungible Tokens) will begin to come into the brand ecosphere but we are still some time away from these becoming right, front and centre. I remain conscious of brevity and hence would come to a halt here though there are quite a few more that I would have liked to list as we telescope into the emerging future of the advertising and marketing industry. Maybe in a separate piece. Suresh Dinakaran is the Chief Storyteller at ISD Global, a brand strategy & creative ideations entity based out of Dubai and Managing Editor, BrandKnew. With over two decades of insights, expertise and experience in building and growing brands across multiple geographies and media platforms.
We Don’t Talk About Bruno…What Can Brands Learn From Encanto? By BJ Bruno
Because I have small children, I have seen The Walt Disney Company movie Encanto about 37 million times. And this experience has made me wonder: does every brand have a Bruno? We Don’t Talk About Bruno – What’s That About? A quick summary for those who haven’t seen the movie. Encanto is about a family that has magical gifts. Bruno’s gift was the ability to see the future, which sounds fantastic, but most of his predictions were negative. His family began to believe his predictions caused the bad outcomes, and after one especially notable conflict, Bruno left. Ever since, the family’s most famous song says, we don’t talk about Bruno.
Bruno could be an employee speaking up about working conditions and pay rates. Bruno could be a manager pointing out that changes need to be made because the in-store experience is suffering. Bruno could be in leadership, taking a stand and telling the others the organization isn’t going in the right direction. In the movie, it becomes clear that Bruno’s predictions weren’t causing the events that happened. He merely spotted the clues of impending events ahead of time and did his best to let people know. But it was easier for the family to become angry with what they were hearing and stop talking about Bruno.
In every group, each person has a role to play. Bruno’s role was that of the truth-teller: the person who, genuinely out of a sincere desire to help, says things other people don’t want to hear. These people are often dismissed from the conversation, brushed off, as Bruno was, as the crazy uncle no one listens to.
This dynamic plays out in every human setting, including within our organizations. Perhaps you can think of times within your career when you’ve seen someone who’s been acting as a truth-teller phased out of the organization or otherwise disregarded. This is a thing that happens, but it doesn’t need to be that way.
Who Is Your Bruno?
As part of our ongoing conversation about trust, we need to reach a point where brands trust themselves enough to be able to listen to the Brunos of the world without shutting them out. We have to trust that the people in good faith relationships with us – our customers, our communities, our employees, team, and leadership – tell us things we don’t want to hear because they want us to do better.
What does that mean for a brand? Who is your organization’s Bruno? Who don’t you talk about? Bruno could be a customer, quick to write harsh reviews pointing out even the smallest flaw. Bruno could be an activist, loudly demanding your company conduct itself in a way they see as more humane, ethical, or otherwise correct.
We don’t talk about Bruno, but we have to if we want to grow.
Science is resilient. It can overcome diseases, create cures, and, yes, even beat pandemics. It has the methodology and the rigor to withstand even the most arduous scrutiny. It keeps asking questions and, until there’s a breakthrough, it isn’t done. That’s why, when the world needs answers, we turn to science. Because in the end, Science will win.
Breakthroughs that change patients’ lives Learn more at www.pfizer.com
Nike’s designs are still killing it after 50 years. This tiny detail reveals how By Chip Heath Matt Abrahams
Nike turns 50 this year, but its designs have never looked better. The other night, upon reading a blurb buried deep inside one of Nike’s countless shoe descriptions, I got a taste as to why. What could have been a throwaway bit of copywriting revealed that Nike is completely overthinking its designs—in the best way possible. As Hypebeast recently put it, the company is already having a “huge year,” full of experimental, genre-bending releases. And it’s only February. The truth is that Nike’s taste quotient has been dependably high for a few years now—ranging from its sustainable Space Hippies to its easy-on Go Flyeases—and with perfect timing, to boot. Sneakers are the democratized art of our era, and you don’t need to shell out thousands of dollars on limited edition drops resold on StockX to take part. Starting at around $75 (on sale), you can buy an awesome, maximalist sculpture that you can wear. Peruse Nike’s retail page at any given moment, and it’s impossible to not fall in love with something, like: LeBrons that harken back to Jordan infrareds from the ’90s. A textileheavy trail runner that I might describe as a reverse-leopard print. Cleats that resemble the hot purple flames from high temperature combustion. A mixed-material high top, chockfull of interior design patterns of the ’80s. Sunny trail runners that you’ll want to suck on like a Lemonhead. Are any of these shoes my taste? At least for a few fleeting moments,
yes. I can appreciate their statements as individual objects, each offering its own little design universe to explore. (I also recognize Nike’s strategy: Throw enough variety at the wall, and something will resonate with me enough that I’ll eventually buy it. And, hopefully, ditto with all of you.) This embarrassment of riches isn’t the mere result of Nike being a $31 billion company and the world’s largest shoe producer. Because designing things this compelling, at scale, is hard. Apple built its empire by executing a handful of products exceedingly well, while dialing back on the expression of its physical designs, to fit quietly anywhere in your life. Nike’s design language is, by contrast, varied and expressive. Sure, Nike organizes a cross-product, seasonal color direction for its products; and at the Tokyo Games, you may have noticed its “rawdacious” color strategy that had futuristic neons clashing with naturally colored, sustainable materials. Still, Nike ships countless new SKUs every year, full of different materials and technologies. Quite simply, Nike designs a lot of products, very differently, and very well. How does Nike do it? You can point to its major investments, like the new LeBron James Innovation Center, the world’s most technologically advanced research facility where designers work alongside scientists. There you can see, as I did last year, how Nike validates colorways in a room that can simulate everything from daylight to your office’s soul-
groupisd.com
23
sucking fluorescent-bulb lighting, and asking consumers to grade how a particular shade of white looks in each context. But it was actually on Nike’s own retail site that I got a clearer answer. Far at the bottom of its page for the Nike Air Zoom SuperRep 2 Next Nature HIIT trainers—a model that actually came out last September—Nike shares the “color story” behind the product. Until then, I’d never realized these stories were even on Nike’s site, albeit buried deep, deep below prices, photos, and descriptions. Of the nine different variants of this particular shoe—nine!— this singular “coconut milk” version contrasts earth tones with a neon orange. On paper, that might seem like an arresting mix . . . a few calming, natural colors mashed up with one so alarming as to burn sunspots into your corneas! Yet, the juxtaposition works, and furthermore, it comes with a poignant description of why the colors are presented on this shoe as they are. “[T]he colorway, which infuses warm neutrals and pinks with emergency orange, is a nod to nature’s peril while putting it in context. The orange references the state of alarm the earth is in, while the mellow colors dial it back to a calmer tone. The colors tell their own story, as if to say, Yes. Mother Earth is facing a problem. But we can tackle it together.” Now, look, I get that you might read this “color story” with
a groan. Maybe on a bad day I would, too. But designers do sincerely think like this! They are constantly overthinking, in fact, to imbue whatever they make with vast amounts of intent. In this case, Nike’s designers were building a colorway for a new, more sustainable cross trainer—the SuperRep 2— and they were hunting for the right mix of colors to enhance that statement . . . and sure, probably ride the neutral-color shoe trend while they were at it. What Nike designers were creating was not merely a narrative ascribed to an object at random, but something of a self-aware shoe that recognizes its own footprint (no pun intended). You might argue that it’s at least a little hypocritical for any apparel company to sell products while making a case for the environment, or that the most ecologically friendly new shoe to buy is, well, no shoe at all. These are perfectly fair takes, and I have no rebuttal. Still, when I find myself wondering, “Why is Nike design so good right now?” or “How does Nike perpetually make products that feel like they’re from two or three years in the future?” The answer is right there in this little description. Mark Wilson Is A Senior Writer At Fast Company Who Has Written About Design, Technology, And Culture For Almost 15 Years. His Work Has Appeared At Gizmodo, Kotaku, Popmech, Popsci, Esquire, American Photo And Lucky Peach. He Also Started Philanthroper.com, A Simple Way To Give Back Every Day.
Brand voice: 3 steps to success By Ambreen Ali
The most memorable brands, from Apple to Geico, are ones that have a clear and consistent brand voice. When consumers see an ad from such a brand, they instantly recognize the company behind it. These brands have successfully created a unified brand identity. Brands must communicate clearly with their audiences. What’s your brand’s personality? Do you know? Discover three ways to develop your brand’s voice.
targeting, and the ways they communicate. Another idea is to review existing pieces of content that have resonated with audiences to see how the message was conveyed. When all else fails, try to define what the voice is not – not too serious or not too flippant, for example. “Figuring out what you don’t want your brand voice to be is a critical step in choosing the right voice for your brand,” Forsey writes.
“Your company’s tone of voice represents your brand personality and values,” explains Eugenia Verbina at Semrush Blog. “It describes how we want to communicate to our audience, rather than what.”
Document the voice.
Consistent branding drives an average 23% uptick in revenue, Semrush surveys reveal. Consistent communications build connection and trust with the target audience, while improving brand recognition. It helps convey sincerity and legitimacy. “The voice at the heart of the brand is one of the most effective tools a brand can use for targeting its desired consumer demographics,” Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, CEO of Hawthorne Advertising, tells CMS Wire. “This brand personality is what gives consumers the ability to become familiar with and connect with the brand.” Build brand voice Yet developing a distinct brand personality can be challenging, especially in an era when there are so many channels of communication and everything is available online. It’s not just marketers who dictate a brand’s voice anymore. From sales to human resources, every department in a company must understand and follow the brand’s identity to ensure the messages they are conveying reflect it. This means all collateral from slide decks to job announcements. Here are three steps to developing a brand voice that lines up with company values and creates a unified and consistent public presence: Define brand voice. A company’s mission and value statement are a good place to start when thinking about brand voice, Caroline Forsey writes at HubSpot. Forsey also says information about the target audience is essential Consider the generation you are
To ensure that the entire company is effectively communicating with the same brand voice, it’s critical to have a clear document that explains the brand voice – what it is and what it isn’t. Offer key characteristics of the voice, as well as examples of how those characteristics can play out in content. For example, an authoritative brand voice may translate into content that offers best practices and advice. In developing this document, the content creation team should consider themselves similar to a film director who must lead entire teams to create a unified message, Robert Rose writes at Content Marketing Institute. “The content team’s purpose must be more than to create great assets,” he notes. “It must also enable every other part of the business to do the same.” Plan routine reviews. Brand identity is not a one-and-done decision. Ensuring consistency requires constant monitoring and reevaluation. “Language evolves and the words you used five years ago might not be en vogue today,” notes Jenn Chen at Sprout Social. Chen recommends scheduling annual reviews and reconsidering brand voice during major brand overhauls. Chen also says events that reshape the company’s overall marketing strategy can also be an ideal time to evaluate brand voice. Failing to have a consistent brand voice can result in what Julie Guest, CEO and chief marketing strategist at digital marketing firm Bolder&Louder, calls “Frankenstein marketing.” “There is no consistent brand voice, no consistent brand message across each marketing platform,” Guest explained to CMS Wire. “Instead, the campaigns and messages are bolted together, which at best creates mistrust. At worst, it can result in customers jumping ship to the competition.”
ADVANCE TOMORROW’S MISSION As a key partner in government innovation, we blend unparalleled mission understanding with emerging technology to help our clients modernize their organizations and integrate, innovate, and dominate at speed. See our ideas in action at BoozAllen.com.
Why the key to creating and sustaining brilliant brands hasn’t changed By Kevin Chesters
What does it take to create and sustain brilliant brands today? The short answer is that it takes what it took yesterday, and what it will take tomorrow.
There is a temptation, when something new happens (a new platform, a new technology, a new trend, a new societal event), to think that it suddenly resets the clock on absolutely everything you’ve ever done, said, read or learnt. But if one takes a step back from the hype, vested interest, panic or spin, it becomes obvious that, fundamentally, humans don’t change. The brilliant work done recently by Harry Guild and Dean Matthewson from BBH Labs shows that, at the top-level, consumer attitudes don’t change that much over time – about anything. Even the most rudimentary study of human behavior from an evolutionary psychology point of view shows that the base drivers of all behavior – threat or reward – haven’t changed since we were ploughing the savannah with the arse-bone of a giraffe. NFTs and metaverses. Replace it with Second Life and QR codes. Replace that with mobile and WAP. Replace that with the world wide web and Friendster. Replace that with CDs and MTV. Video and television. Radio and the telegraph. The printing press and… smelting iron. Basically, the human story is one of developments in new technologies and our ability to adapt to them and assimilate them. The basics of marketing don’t change. It’s tempting to think there is a get-rich-quick scheme or a shortcut to marketing success if one just signs up to one more webinar or buys that bottle of digital snake-oil from the bloke who has a vested interest in flogging it to you. But success in marketing is like
success in all things – the basics are simple and if you do them you are more likely to succeed. Despite all the ads for slimming pills or miracle teas, nothing can ever replace the right amount of exercise and decent diet. Eat less, move more. It’s the same for advertisers and marketers. The key to success today? Understand your customer or potential customer. Understand the category dynamics and drivers. Understand the cultural context you are operating in. Develop a differentiated point-of-view. Most importantly, find a compelling and creatively brilliant way to bring that to life – and the right place/way to do that in terms of engagement strategy, whether paid or not. It’s not that complicated. There are simple methods for developing all the above. Come and talk to me if you want help in how to do it – I have a lot of experience and some brilliant partners! Now I’m not saying that technology is not having or going to have a huge impact on how we engage with customers and how they engage with our brands. It will. The web did. Mobile did. Television did. Radio did. But it doesn’t change the fundamentals of great marketing. From Jesus to Victor Kiam, the basics of understanding how to reach an audience and engage them will never change. Also, like the arrival of an unexpected guest at a dinner party, a new technology tends to cause a bit of a flutter immediately. But then it becomes a matter of assimilation rather than
brandknewmag.com
27
replacement. It is how it works alongside tried and trusted methods, not about annihilating them like some apocalyptic tech-based mega virus. And change has happened many times before, even in my career window. In 1997 I was made part of a four-person committee at Ogilvy called the ’Work the Web Committee’ to convince the network that the internet was going to catch on. It was in response, largely, to a speech that some higherup had given from the New York office about how the world wide web was largely a flash in the pan and wouldn’t impact what the agency was doing day-to-day (LOL). As with NFTs, metaverses and the like, at the time we had every client under the sun asking us what impact it would make on their world. But fundamentally, the successful brands were still the ones that did the basics right. Customer. Category. Culture. Comms. It didn’t change absolutely everything, in the same way storytelling hasn’t really changed whether it is delivered via voice, books, the wireless or Oculus. Tom Standage wrote an amazing book in 1999 called The Victorian Internet. It contrasts all the language and opinions being published on the impact of the world wide web in the late 90s with the language used around the development of the electric telegraph in the mid 19th century. It was identical. People from NYC moaning that their work/life balance had been interrupted by “that damned telegraph from London”. Short message codes in morse like GA (go ahead) and SFD (stop for dinner) were all there, like with SMS or hashtags. It
was even described in a contemporary article as “a web of ideas”. I’m not sneering. I wouldn’t be so arrogant. Technology changes things, for good and bad. The internet has had a huge and lasting impact in how we interact with brands and each other. The mobile had a huge impact. Social media has had a huge impact. But so did television. So has every major technological or communications innovation since the wheel. The temptation – especially if one wants to get a few columns or stage bookings – is to loudly proclaim that future of this means the immediate death of that. But the data shows that this just isn’t true. One must be mindful and vigilant always about the potential impact of technological developments on how we engage with our consumers, or how they engage with us. But don’t succumb to the temptation to violently panic and pivot. The fundamental truth remains the same as it ever was. Be good. Have a great product. Take the time to understand your customer, category and culture. Then work with specialists to understand how to bring that to life in the most interesting and impactful way possible. There are no shortcuts. And if you believe there are, I’ve a bridge (or a platform) to sell you. Kevin is co-founder and strategy partner at Harbour Collective. His career has seen him lead strategy departments in agencies and client side, including Wieden & Kennedy, Ogilvy and BT.
In conversation: The CEO moment By Carolyn Dewar
Corporate leaders are changing how they do their jobs in ways that may permanently transform the CEO role. The COVID-19 crisis has put CEOs and the organizations they lead under great pressure. At the same time, it has provided a once-in-a-generation opportunity for chief executives to evolve the nature and impact of their role. The authors of a McKinsey Quarterly article, “The CEO moment: Leadership for a new era,” describe the shifts that top-performing CEOs have taken in how they lead—changes that have the potential to permanently transform the CEO role. Carolyn Dewar coleads our CEO Excellence work, and Monica Murarka is a senior expert and leader also of the Firm’s CEO Excellence work. Kurt Strovink is the leader of McKinsey’s global insurance sector and has led Firm initiatives for CEOs across industries. This is an edited transcript of a two-part episode of the Inside the Strategy Room podcast. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts. Sean Brown: Kurt, can you tell us what spurred your research into this topic? Kurt Strovink: We saw that the pandemic presented CEOs with a number of unique challenges. On the one hand, they have to care for employees and make decisions in record time. At the same time, they have to think about the evolution
of their businesses after the crisis—phases we call “return” and “reimagine” as opposed to just “respond.” CEOs are being called upon to act differently with their people and society as a whole, which entails a broader emotional and human dimension. These challenges also bring opportunities. There are many enduring aspects of CEO leadership, but we see the role changing in four particular ways. While these changes have been brought on by the crisis, they may become lasting shifts that govern a different way of leading. Sean Brown: Carolyn, in your work with CEOs, how do you see them adapting their mindsets and practices to the current environment? Carolyn Dewar: One of the things we have noticed in talking with CEOs is that their organizations’ productivity level is tenfold what it was before the crisis, if not more. CEOs are not only thinking ten times faster and bigger and bolder but moving their organizations to achieve extraordinary things that would have been considered impossible in that timeframe before. I think of a conversation I had with a
hospital CEO. Last year, the hospital did 38 telehealth visits a week. During the pandemic that number jumped to 5,000. Or think about companies that almost overnight converted their factory lines to making hand sanitizer. In normal times, such shifts would take months, if not years, and involve a lot of planning, capability building, strategic questions, and resource allocations. So, the question we ask ourselves is, what can we learn from that? Recognizing that this time has come with corresponding strain on organizations in some cases, what bold moves or practices have CEOs been able to implement that they could carry forward sustainably? Our research shows that CEOs who make bold moves achieve significantly higher performance, both as CEOs and the performance of the companies they lead. What would it look like for CEOs to maintain that level of boldness in their thinking and ability to bring their organizations along? The barriers to that boldness and speed were thought to be technical. We see now that much has to do with the mindset of what is possible. That’s the first shift we see, and it’s quite exciting. Sean Brown: What are some practical ways in which CEOs can not only push themselves but their organizations to achieve these higher aspirations without burning themselves or their employees out? Carolyn Dewar: Of course, during crises people run on adrenaline, and that is not sustainable. But recent months have challenged some of the assumptions about how fast we can move. Maybe we can do things without all the preceding conversations we thought were necessary. Maybe we can use trial and error and experiments as we go. Maybe we can collaborate with others in dynamic ways to accelerate progress. Some of those new muscles are not about working harder or faster but in different ways that may be surprisingly valuable. Kurt Strovink: I would add that we see a number of opportunities to institutionalize these productivity bumps, primarily by creating a set of sustainable, enduring models for how top teams operate, and for the speed of decision making and resource allocation. CEOs are also locking in the time savings from less commuting that remote work or hybrid work models present, and directing these towards higher return activities in their companies. The central idea here is that CEOs should think about the markers of what it means to really commit and choose—to zero base how work gets done. Such measures can be durable and create dividends of time. Thinking through sustainability will require more attention by CEOs—renewed focus on their employee value propositions, their long term recruiting, the onboarding of new people, and how people can continuously learn. Sean Brown: Given that so much of work today is remote, how do CEOs ensure there is enough internal collaboration and consultation around decisions? Kurt Strovink: That’s an important point. CEOs are finding that collaboration and having brainstorming sessions around the water cooler, as one CEO described it, has been difficult to replicate in remote work. Those leaning in are using technology to create real interactions and engagement
as opposed to one-way broadcasts. They are launching strategic discussion about how their businesses will change and tasking senior people to think about that in addition to delivering the here and now. They are also experimenting with agile ways of working. A lot of agile forms are moving to technology-based models and achieving very strong gains (even relative to in-person formats, which was unexpected).
Formal CEO networks are meeting much more frequently, engaging on important topics and being incredibly vulnerable with one another in ways we have not seen before. Carolyn Dewar Sean Brown: This higher pace of productivity and change creates challenges and added stress for workers, particularly parents of young children. How are CEOs and their executive teams addressing that? Carolyn Dewar: As a parent of young kids myself, I understand this well. I have some clients who are asking, “What if we move to a remote workforce indefinitely? What if that becomes our new model, not because of the pandemic but because it is something we choose?” And they are being very careful to not assume that the productivity of today will continue. There are people living under extraordinary strain, without childcare, managing health issues, and looking after elderly relatives. Are there lessons from this period that could serve us well in a more stable time? The separate and equally important question is, how can CEOs and leadership teams best support all their employees? Because everyone’s circumstances are different. The overriding message I am hearing from CEOs is the importance of showing their own humanity. CEOs need to understand their employees’ challenges and care for them. They need to think of their people both as an extraordinary asset and as part of their community. Kurt Strovink: You are exactly right. CEOs are being called on to play almost ministerial roles, to be emotionally relevant and available for their employees. We sometimes see a trifecta of difficulties where you have dual working parents, kids under the age of 12, and an apartment in an urban setting. CEOs need to role-model balance and a new equilibrium of work and life. When they don’t, we do see challenges with the organizations’ ability to sustain new ways of working. One CEO described this time as being “boundaryless.” It’s as if you are swimming in an ocean without land in sight: you feel like you are working so hard to get your bearings, but it’s still difficult. It is important to put some markers between work and life outside work. Sean Brown: That’s a great transition to the second shift that CEOs are making. Monica, do you want to take us through it? Monica Murarka: The third shift is the idea of elevating “to be” to the same level as “to do.” What that means practically is
groupisd.com
31
that CEOs are making a conscious, deliberate choice to bring more of themselves into the workplace. They are choosing how they show up and recalibrating how they expect their leaders and employees to act. In a normal environment, the types of skills often valued in CEOs are business leadership, developing strategy, building a culture. In this environment, a key aspect of the role is maintaining morale and helping people handle uncertainty. So how are CEOs doing this? They are showing up with more of their humanity, as Carolyn said. Employees now see CEOs in their homes on videoconferences or walking their dogs. They are dressing more casually in some instances. Interestingly, the benefits are showing up in things like employee engagement scores. We have seen CEOs start to move toward meeting with their top teams daily and holding more video town halls. They are connecting more, both internally and externally. They are also forging stronger, more cohesive, motivated workforces. In the age now of videoconferencing, a lot more CEOs are available and focused. One CEO told us that he used to multitask quite frequently on video calls, but he realized that he wasn’t bringing his best self to the conversation and he owed it to the others to be fully present. We also see CEOs moving from being captains to stewards. That means showing more vulnerability and empathy, making decisions in accordance with both their own and the company’s values, and stepping out in front to be the living embodiments of those values. People expect CEOs to be transparent, to have a grip on the situation but be reasonable about what they know and don’t know, and we see a lot of CEOs stepping up to that. Being is different from doing, and right now you need both. A lot of that comes down to authenticity, and tapping into and bringing forward who you are as a person: being centered; managing triggers; and exhibiting calm, bounded optimism. Sean Brown: Can you elaborate on this notion of cultivating a sense of being? You talked about CEOs’ sharing more about their personal situations. How can the CEO help keep people connected to one another, and how do they stay connected to the organization? Monica Murarka: We have worked with a number of CEOs who are transitioning into their roles during this time. If you are an externally hired CEO, that is incredibly challenging. Typically, you do road shows, you meet people on the front line but all that is now difficult. We see a lot of creative adaptations, such as around-the-world tours by videoconference that let them get to know different parts of the operation. One CEO we interviewed said it beautifully: “In my daily top team meetings, I ask, ‘Who is having challenges? Who are the people I should personally reach out to at any level in the organization?’” There is a call to action to have a finger on the pulse of the organization. How do employees feel? Where do connections need to happen? It requires a concerted effort and many CEOs are fortifying their communication teams to help.
The second part is team connectivity, whether it’s peer-topeer, or managers and employees. It’s important to have both scheduled and informal times, such as virtual happy hours. And many employees say they feel quite embraced. They have more access to leadership through more frequent video conversations with CEOs and top team leaders.
CEOs are moving from being captains to stewards: showing more vulnerability, empathy, making decisions in accordance with both their own and the company’s values, and stepping out in front to be the living embodiments of those values. Monica Murarka Carolyn Dewar: Something else we are starting to hear about is the development culture. If virtual work continues, how do we make sure that leaders are carving out time to give coaching and feedback? We are through the initial sprint of the crisis. How do we make sure people’s development continues and they feel supported? Kurt Strovink: It is also critical to recast the employee value proposition in this environment, and that often links to the customer experience. Several companies are trying to influence customer experience through their interactions with employees. The focus on corporate purpose is on the rise in a substantial way, as well as on talent diversity. That requires CEOs to connect with their emotional side, not just the intellectual side. Sean Brown: This, again, provides a good segue to the next shift you see CEOs making. Kurt? Kurt Strovink: The third shift is embracing stakeholder capitalism, which means moving beyond the shareholder as the sole consideration for CEOs and their boards. While shareholders are of course important, and a reliance and focus on them needs to be maintained, there is an increasing focus on employees, suppliers, customers, and society at large. We see some evidence in our CEO interviews and CEO counseling that this has the potential to become a permanent shift. CEOs seem to be split on whether it will continue this way or snap back to being more shareholder capitalism driven, but many think that this is the best opportunity to make a more permanent change towards considering a broader base of constituencies. Carolyn Dewar: Clearly, during COVID-19 there has been extraordinary pressure to balance the different stakeholder groups. The immediate business need, the need to protect employees, customers, consumers, society, the environment— all those things had to be juggled in real time. Many CEOs feel a sense of personal purpose around trying to advance these topics, and see it as a part of their role as CEO. I
think measurement is a key piece. CEOs and others will respond to what they know they are being held accountable for. In some cases, the markets or society are holding the companies accountable. I’m thinking about some of the big investors that not only have environmentally-oriented funds, but ones focused on social purpose and broader stakeholder interests. That will apply pressure on CEOs and their organizations. Some are already very purpose-driven, and they are increasingly vocal about the broader set of measures of success they want to see. Positive peer pressure could be extraordinarily helpful here. Monica Murarka: To add to that, I see two realities today. There are companies still struggling for survival and focused very operationally, but another set is facing a choice of how to react that may greatly affect their brands and consumers’ perceptions of them. Our research shows that millennials care about company purpose and having meaning in the company, so what companies choose to do and stand for at this time will be seen as evidence of their purpose, values, mission, and strategy. Sean Brown: That brings us to the fourth and final shift. Carolyn, could you explain it? Carolyn Dewar: The fourth shift is about CEOs harnessing the power of their peer networks. At certain CEO roundtables and forums, leaders have been markedly more present and engaged during this period. Formal networks of CEOs are meeting much more frequently, engaging on important topics, and being incredibly vulnerable with one another in ways we have not seen before. Those conversations between CEOs are no longer, “Let me show you how I have everything under control.” That humanity we talked about is showing up here as well. CEOs know that other chief executives can understand what it’s like to be in their shoes. They are sharing much more openly about questions they are struggling with that none of them faced before, and they are trying to navigate them together. There are two particular elements we think will endure. One is learning from analogous companies and their CEOs. People have realized they have much to learn from organizations in other industries or at different stages of growth but facing similar challenges. The other piece is CEOs coming together to solve joint problems that can only be solved by acting together on behalf of society. That could be retraining workers in a sector that has fundamentally shifted or working together on broader vertical industry pivots. Kurt Strovink: We have long believed that ideas from other industries can be powerful catalysts for innovation. And the uptake in CEOs’ desire to learn has been substantial during this period. They are saying, “I don’t want to learn from somebody who was a CEO in a different era. What I find more helpful is learning from people who are facing the same situation I am from different vantage points now.” A number of the CEO forums we host as a firm have seen requests for triple the frequency of meetings. These executive networks have a potential to endure and to create learning organizations whose perimeters are more porous.
We think about CEOs as calibrators-
in-chief. They are the ones in the organization who have to assess the extent, speed, and materiality of their company’s response to the changing external world. This is indeed an essential part of the CEO role for the company as a whole. Kurt Strovink Sean Brown: Many of the shifts you have described are substantial enough to merit the attention of the boards of directors. How much are CEOs collaborating with their boards on these issues?
Kurt Strovink: They are doing so frequently. The management teams are increasingly not just updating boards at arm’s length but involving them in core problems. We see that across industries. The cycle time of board interactions has doubled or even tripled in some cases. Secondly, we see a lot more focus on questions of succession, interestingly. The crisis has made companies more mindful of sustainability and boards are participating in that dynamic. We also see CEOs exposing next-generation talent to the boards through formal and informal processes. Overall, this period has more closely connected many boards and management teams. Sean Brown: When you think about the four shifts together, what do they mean broadly for the future of the CEO role? Kurt Strovink: We sometimes think about CEOs as calibratorsin-chief. They are the ones in the organization who have to assess the extent, speed, and materiality of their company’s response to the changing external world. This is indeed an essential part of the CEO role for the company as a whole. The CEO has to calibrate and decide, “Are we doing enough? Are we doing it fast enough? Are we doing it imaginatively enough?” Leaders who are thinking this way typically move faster than others and unlock additional value, and not just financial value. We talk about this as a CEO moment—a moment for individual CEOs to change their role, partly because this calibrator-in-chief role has never been more important. We are excited about the possibility that, if a number of CEOs make these shifts, it could add up to not just a moment but a movement to advance the role of CEO within society. The CEO role is a domain that should be studied in its own right, much like you would study talent management or digital and analytics. Monica Murarka: A lot of this comes down to how a CEO individually chooses to spend their time and show up in ways that they potentially hadn’t thought about before. Where one CEO puts their effort, it impacts not only their organization but also society at large. Carolyn Dewar: This is an unfreezing moment. So much is in flux, and the invitation for the generation of CEOs right now is to take advantage of this moment to reform our view of leadership and the CEO role.
Sustainability or Spin? Why Straight Facts Matter Most By Philippa Cross And Hannah Zimmerman
As demand for better brands continues to increase, we can expect an exponential increase in two things: ‘green’ brand claims and the level of public scrutiny. Before your brand team loses time, money and precious brand equity, check out this summary of resources to help you stay the course. Brands all too often bombard consumers with claims that imply their products are sustainable. The coffee cup with a green leaf says “Compostable!” but fails to mention it will only compost under specific and rare conditions. Your favorite coffee shop eliminating plastic straws in favor of a lid is actually using more plastic. And your favorite plantbased milk inflates its greenhouse gas credentials over dairy alternatives. Consumers are . . . confused, and with good cause. 66 percent of consumers tell us it’s hard to know if brands are acting in sustainable ways. And a study by the UK’s Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) found up to 40 percent of green claims found online are misleading. As consumer demand for purpose-led brands increases year after year, you can expect an exponential increase in two things: the volume of ‘green’ brand claims and the level of public scrutiny. In the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority is challenging brands on green claims; even sustainable brand faves such as Oatly and Innocent are being called out for their inability to substantiate green claims with data to back up environmental assertions. The end result? Pulling ad campaigns. In the US, California recently passed legislation that puts more scrutiny on environmental claims — and more specifically, restricts recyclability claims for packaging by 2024. This new law cracks down on use of the recycling symbol or compostability claims on packaging where state recycling infrastructure does not exist. Because of the size of the California consumer market, these new rules will become the new standard for the US — which means that aforementioned coffee cup will need to drop the claim on compostability or prove through certification that facilities exist to compost it. Before your brand team loses time, money and precious brand equity, check out this summary of resources to help you stay the course. Green claims guides As governments around the world crack down on greenwashing claims, we have found the following guides on environmental claims helpful as we guide our own client brands in making fair and legal claims. UK CMA The UK government’s green guides — updated in
2021 — cover key principles and give examples of sample cases. FTC Green Guides The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has a Green Claims Guides for US businesses. It updated the latest version in 2021 and will review again this year. Packaging claims Consumers say recycling is consistently one of the top sustainable behaviors they engage in regularly, which stands to reason as it’s a problem we all face in our daily lives. The overriding principle for recycling claims is this: Make them clear and true. If your packaging says it’s recyclable, biodegradable or compostable, there should be a high probability that it can and is being recycled. A good resource for developing both more sustainable packaging and accurate packaging claims is the Sustainable Packaging Coalition. Check the resource section for a range of guides on everything from more recycled content to recycling facilities mapped across the US. Net-zero claims Claims of ambitions to get to zero emissions by 2030, 2040 or 2050 have exploded in recent years. As we sit in the midst of a climate emergency, this is exactly what is needed. But not all claims are created equal. Many net-zero claims are vague on details as to how exactly a company plans to get to zero emissions — whether that’s through reduction in emissions or a reliance on carbon offsets. Get Net Zero Right is a toolkit from the UN’s Race to Zero program for how to set credible commitments. Key principles include whether the company is already taking action on near-term targets, transparency on progress and the role offsets play in delivery of the goal. Reputation + trust Ultimately, building brand loyalty and love is about trust. And it’s hard to trust someone who plays fast and loose with the facts or fails to back up their statements with proof. Today’s marketers walk a fine line between snappy copy, good design and sustainable credentials. In the Purpose Advantage 2.0, we devote an entire chapter to how to tell your brand story in an authentic, transparent way — because in today’s market, your reputation is everything. As Warren Buffett said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”
The Bland D2C Trap: How to Avoid “Optimizing to Death” By Emma Tavernor
Among the infinite variety offered by the internet, many have noticed a certain homogeneity in the ways brands present themselves: the same colors, the same fonts, the same promises. Richard Carroll, managing consultant at Frog (part of Capgemini Invent), gives five rules to help you avoid falling into the trap of what he calls ‘bland building.’ Technology has enabled brands to reach customers through highly personalized messaging, delivered through advanced advertising techniques. But this evolution, combined with pandemic-driven digital acceleration and direct-to-consumer (D2C) marketing, has created a new beast: the ‘bland.’ What is a ‘bland’? They are predominantly D2C/digitalfirst businesses that don’t believe in brand building, instead putting their faith in product benefits, organic growth and performance marketing. They’re prevalent in social commerce in the form of buy-now-pay-later providers, fashion subscription boxes, supplements and ‘insert-whatever-I-lastsearched.’ They all feature galleries of clean, chic imagery, showcasing 20 or 30-somethings finding joy in the product. All will proudly display their ethical credentials or make lofty promises around their purpose. All are stylized by a sansserif font logo. Strangely, it’s difficult to specifically recall any of them.
It’s not just startups. Established businesses are increasingly leaning on these techniques to drive optimization and ROI. The techniques aren’t wrong, but when overused, or used in isolation, they decrease overall advertising effectiveness and ultimately will lead businesses to ruin. These businesses are optimizing themselves to death. To be successful, these techniques must be accompanied by long-term, distinctive brand building. Be distinct, not different To avoid becoming a bland you need to be distinct and avoid the same mistakes many of those businesses in your social feed are making today. Whether you’re creating advertising or designing experiences, everything your brand does should have its own style and be recognizable as yours. Achieve that by following these five core principles. 1. Develop a distinct brand narrative Brands should articulate why a business, product or service exists and why people should buy it. Conveying these reasons through effective storytelling builds an emotional connection. To set your brand apart, reinventing the narrative around your business can fundamentally change how it’s perceived. Nowhere is this more successful than at Red Bull. There are plenty of energy drinks out there, but Red Bull has changed the narrative to be about high performance, focus and
brandknewmag.com
37
accomplishment (not an expensive, funny-tasting drink that comes in a tiny can). 2. Use what you already have To stand out from the crowd, you don’t need to change your value proposition or completely overhaul your product offering. Look at your history to understand what is unique – your founders, location, heritage, identity and existing customer perceptions. The AA did this brilliantly in 2018, refocusing on brand building in a campaign that used its long-established identity to deliver commercial results. Don’t ignore your history – study it and use it. 3. Being distinct starts in the foundations Build foundational principles that consistently communicate your brand distinctively. Enshrine them, value them and, most importantly, protect them (policing if you must). Discipline around your foundations is one of the greatest strengths any brand can have. That means making business decisions that uphold what your brand stands for, and not focusing on a quick dollar. 4. Human-centered design How are your brands, products and experiences used and enjoyed – and what are the wider consequences? Design has often focused on usability and making experiences
frictionless, but this can have unexpected ramifications. Facebook set out to connect us but now divides us through misinformation; Airbnb set out to disrupt the hotel market but increased rent prices for locals. This presents a challenge to create sustainable brands, products and experiences for society. 5. Simplify brand operations Large or decentralized organizations can struggle to tell a consistent brand narrative. What starts as distinct becomes inconsistent and ineffective the further it gets from the brand team. By simplifying the brand system, organization and processes (supported with technology and data), it becomes easier to communicate the brand at scale. Form follows emotion Simply put, brand and design must connect to people’s emotions to serve their real needs and not be purely productor utility-focused. This guided our recent work with Lego, where we built a distinctive online design system that brings the physical joy of play to Lego.com, making the digital experience work harder as a brand-building asset. What can we learn from this? In crowded categories where every business is ‘user-focused,’ the result can be bland, functional and interchangeable experiences. In these situations, it’s even more important to create a distinct brand and stand out.
Marketing in the Metaverse: challenges and opportunities By Billy Loizou
The metaverse is coming, but when it comes to marketing in this ‘brave new virtual world’ — are we ready? Billy Loizou explores. Chris Wylie, the Cambridge Analytical whistleblower that spurred a massive overhaul of privacy practices and legislation across the globe and author of Mindfuck: Cambridge Analytica and “The Plot to Break America” recently spoke with Cheetah Digital’s CMO Richard Jones about the metaverse, marketing and the future of privacy. According to Wylie, the answer to the above question is a resounding no. In fact, it might be best to start pumping the breaks on the metaverse now before it infiltrates our daily
lives. Likening the metaverse to a physical entity like a skyscraper or an airplane, Wylie paints a picture of how digital worlds should be architected with so-called fire exits or other protections. It should have a building code of sorts, protecting its users. It should protect their privacy, and, importantly, their mental health. The metaverse is thought to be built to allow humans to freely roam around. However, the reality is, it could be designed to
present its users with a particular narrative that slants their reality instead. “It’s something that we as citizens, not just as marketers, need to consider. Us, our children, and their children’s children will get deeper into a digital society,” Jones says. “We need to ask questions — “Is there a need for a regulatory body or some layer of societal protections?” — as the metaverse rolls out and touches all aspects of our lives.” Constructing a new privacy framework There are more safety regulations for a toaster in a kitchen than there are for a platform that touches a billion people. Wylie says, it’s time for change. The best way to realise that change is to start at the source. “A big part of the issue is that we are not framing the conversation around those who are responsible. The engineers and architects. The things that are causing harm are the products of architecture and engineering,” says Wylie. “When you look at how we relate other products of technology and other products of engineering whether that’s in aerospace, civil engineering, pharmaceuticals, etc; there are safety standards. There are inspections. We need to start scrutinising the technological constructions on the internet to ensure that there are regulatory frameworks in place to create a safer environment.” Personalising experiences in the metaverse Today, many use smart devices for tracking health statistics, communicating with loved ones, and entertainment. Wylie predicts that in the coming decades, these smart devices will have a stronger hold on users. Smart devices may become the only way that they can interact with modern society. “Imagine 10 or 20 years from now where the internet evolves into the metaverse. You can’t participate in society without entering this augmented reality. And then imagine an institution like Fox News taking over people’s reality. Not just what they watch on TV, but literally, what they see,” he says. Even more, Wylie questions what happens when people begin personalising their experiences to suit their preferences. For example, racists could eliminate people of colour from their view. Or people could create a society where they walk down the street and no longer see homeless people. They no longer see larger societal problems. “What happens to a society when we no longer fully understand what’s happening around us, and the only people who do are those in charge of augmenting it,” he asks. “That’s a really important question, and it’s not far-fetched.” At Face(book) value Despite Facebook’s, now called Meta, attention-grabbing algorithms that encourage one-sided views and fuel disinformation, marketers continue to pump large sums of money into its platform every year. But is it worth it? Are marketers correct to believe that Facebook’s data is as valuable as they think it is? According to Wylie, absolutely. “From a purely functional
standpoint, yes. It’s incredibly valuable data,” he admits. However, marketers using that data to create personalised adverts isn’t the problem. The problem is a bit more involved than that. “There’s a difference between personalised advertising and creating an entire ecosystem using that logic,” Wylie points out. “When you look at the news feed that Facebook and other social media platforms provide to users, it extends this logic that originated for advertising, showing content that is relevant to you. “It’s not just the basic things that make your ads more efficient, and also less annoying for the people receiving them. It extends to, ‘You should only see things that engage you the most, full stop, in all information that you consume,’ to the point where the only information that you consume is the thing that usually makes you really angry because that’s what’s going to make you click on stuff. And that’s different from marketing.” Doing the right thing Wiley offers support to marketers and advertisers as they navigate a tech-enabled society. Don’t trust a wolf in sheep’s clothing, is Wiley’s advice. “The tool that you’re using, that you love so much, is probably one of your biggest threats. While advertisers cringe at the idea of regulations that limit what they’re allowed to do, in the long run, regulations might be beneficial for the viability of the industry,” he says. “Don’t get dragged down by bad practices within an industry that is behaving badly. There is a substantial loss of trust in platforms like Facebook because it continuously doesn’t listen to consumers. It doesn’t respect consumers. Siding yourself with that industry could backfire in the long run.” Wiley advises asking yourself these two questions as a simple rule of thumb when considering privacy and the misuse of data in advertising: If you’re using personal data, would you be comfortable asking a random person on the street the questions to create that database? Would somebody reasonably expect to have their data used in that way? If the answer is yes to both, then it’s probably OK. In summary, metaverse or not, it really doesn’t matter where you engage your customers. The reality is zero-party data, loyalty, and thinking through the value exchange of how you engage with a customer are all vital components. They are all going to be important as the metaverse rolls out, and we move into this new era of privacy. I am a creative-minded Business Leader, Technologist, Design Thinker, Marketer, Blogger, Speaker, and Writer. I have had the luxury of consulting with some of Asia Pacifics leading brands
Top brands come to SCAD seeking new ideas, inventions, and business strategies for a changing world. SCADpro delivers. Tap into our talent bank. scad.edu/scadpro
Food Trends Driven By ‘Collective Convergence’—Why That Matters ByJon Springer
McKinney’s Justin Davis discusses the agency’s annual food trend forecast, saying aroma-based marketing, metaverse promotions, and packaging you can eat will play a role in a world awakened to global crises Quick-service restaurants that brand by smell, food promotions in the metaverse, packaging you can eat, and meals from abundant sea vegetation. Those are among a platterful of predictions with relevance for brands in the food industry and beyond included in the newly published Food Trends report from McKinney.
their behalf and on the behalf of their communities. Big issues like resource scarcity and global climate change and racial justice are becoming tangible to more and more communities and felt more deeply, and these are things that every company will have to reconcile in their culture and how they bring their products to market.”
These trends—which may not show up in the mainstream for several years—are connected by what McKinney calls “collective convergence.” The concept ties evolving consumer sentiment over issues like supply chain challenges, economic justice, and the labor shortage Americans have been affected by during the pandemic to actions they take when shopping for food or ordering at a restaurant, said Justin Davis, group strategy director of the media and creative agency, speaking on this week’s episode of Ad Age’s Marketer’s Brief podcast.
Because food occupies such a prominent role in culture, its marketers have traditionally done a good job in finding “bold ways” to confront cultural frontiers, and in doing so, provide other industries the opportunity to learn. “Whether you’re an aerospace brand, or a CPG company selling a food, how you think about NFTs and experiential marketing, you can learn a lot from how food is experimenting in that space,” Davis said.
“Collective convergence is a powerful force in the food and beverage space, but it applies to all categories,” Davis said. “People are looking at companies to do better on
Jon Springer is a Senior Reporter for Ad Age, covering food and CPG marketing. He formerly covered the food retail industry for Winsight and Supermarket News, and is a former sports and features writer for The Cecil Whig, a daily newspaper in Elkton, Md.
Ad tech comes under the microscope as marketers evolve their media mix By Ronan Shields
Marketers are attempting to take back control of their online advertising operations facing growing challenges, including increasing pressure from procurement departments requiring them to demonstrate just how their ad dollars are generating new business. It’s not just procurement pressure, marketers need to be more socially responsible with how online advertising budgets are distributed and audience data is sourced, a requirement that demands a better understanding of what in-housing means. And as brands continue to migrate their media spend from offline to online channels — U.S. digital ad spend soared 38% to top $210 billion last year — marketers are turning that spotlight on ad tech.
Although, as many are finding out, full transparency will be a hard-earned prize. EMarketer predicts that 91% of the $270 billion digital ad market will be executed programmatically next year. Ahead of this, the Association of National Advertisers is auditing the “mind-numbingly complex” sector, the results of which are due later this year. That audit, and characterization, could evoke memories of similar studies such as the 2016 K2 Intelligence report that noted a “pervasive” culture of undisclosed kickbacks (among other grievances) in the agency landscape. This seemed to be reiterated more recently in a 2020 study commissioned by ISBA, the U.K. trade body
groupisd.com
45
promoting advertisers’ interests, which collaborated with the Association of Online Publishers. The report found an “unknown delta” whereby auditors could not account for 15% of programmatic buys. Rising tide of ‘semi-in-housing’ Long before ISBA’s “unknown delta” study was published in 2020, marketers have been striving for greater transparency on how their media budgets are put to work. For 83% of professionals managing their marketing that meant either “mostly in-house” or “completely in-house,” according to Digiday Research in 2020. Brands that have made such a move include a glossary of household names such as JP Morgan Chase, Marriott, and Nestlé not to mention big-spending CPG giant Procter & Gamble after execs cited the ability to better control cost and transparency. Sources tend to avoid speaking on such decisions, citing sensitivities around contract negotiations. Although several industry insiders told Digiday how many marketers, particularly those promoting brands that were built on legacy media such as magazines or linear TV, opt for a hybrid model when it comes to digital. One source from a CPG brand’s marketing team said, “Everyone thinks about in-housing as a binary decision… and that you have no relationship with media agencies and you hire dozens of people and everything is in-house but this is just one of the options.” They went on to add, “I still think there will be situations where you need to outsource certain things to somebody else but the piece where advertisers can work is to make sure they have the right control on what other people are doing.” A separate source from within one of the ad industry’s major holding companies told Digiday most marketers who want to in-house elements of their online media buying are taking rudimentary steps. “We’re still seeing in-housing as a big thing for pretty much every major advertiser in the industry… but in many cases, it’s ‘semi-in-housing’ like when they get their own contract set-up.” Oftentimes, this process involves simply taking ownership of contracts with ad tech vendors then tasking their media agencies to activate campaigns. For instance, the CPG source recounted how their media buying team has direct relationships with two independent demand-side platforms. From here, the CPG’s media team can log in to the DSP at the time as the agencies it works with in order to keep abreast of ad campaign developments. “I think there is a trend on taking ownership of technology choices which will go beyond just the DSP, it will touch every element of the supply chain,” added the source. “We decide the technology partners and then from that, we just recommend to market who the preferred partners are.” Complexity imposes limitations However, even with more direct relationships with the ad tech ecosystem, in-house marketing teams are also tasked with getting to grips with the complexity of the sector where inconsistent billing methodologies and undisclosed practices abound. For instance, recently unredacted papers in the antitrust
case led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton allege that Google conspired with Facebook to manipulate online ad auctions in a project nicknamed “Project Bernanke” demonstrate the complexity of the task. Google denies these charges. Brands’ in-house marketing teams also have to toil with how independent ad tech companies — many of which position themselves as more transparent than their powerful Big Tech rivals — similarly employ complex billing structures. This was recently underlined, in a report by Adalytics Research which found that take rates among ad tech vendors can vary wildly and that, in some cases, only 2% of what an advertiser pays for an ad slot is actually pocketed by a publisher. The holding company source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Digiday that once the scale of the task ahead of them becomes clear, some advertisers that fully in-house their programmatic media-buying later reverse their decision. “I’ve seen one or two cases where clients inhouse only to flip it right back out again because once they get down to the workload and cost, they quickly realize this is not where they want to be,” added the source. As good as it gets? In the wake of its 2020 report, ISBA formed a task force along with the AOP, IAB U.K., and IPA, a trade body representing media agencies, and published a series of recommendations to help members conduct their own financial audits of their programmatic buys in February 2022. Among those recommendations was an “audit permission letter” detailing an agreed list of data points auditors can use to track ad impressions along the supply chain plus which parties are allowed to access them. Among the 21 data points recommended for audit are IDs for advertisers, their specific campaigns, publisher URLs, timestamps detailing when an impression was served plus disclosures of the fees from ad tech vendors and data providers. Currently, the task force is working alongside PricewaterhouseCoopers — the auditors behind both the ANA and ISBA studies — to prepare a “test and learn study” of the guidelines’ efficacy. Although a source with knowledge of the developments, told Digiday key insights such as “common user and transaction IDs” were excluded from recommended data points by concerned parties that cited privacy as cause for their ommission. “The types of information you want to see in the audit log were negotiated out of the contract,” said the source who requested anonymity. The source went on to claim the privacy argument ignores the distinctions regulators draw between personal data being linked to deterministic identity versus pseudonymized IDs. “I said that if you really want third-party auditing then you need this data so that a neutral can compare buy-side and sell-side using these common keys,” added the source, “but the polite feedback I got was, ‘We tried, but Big Tech will never go for it, this is as good as we’re gonna get.’” PwC is on course to publish the results of its ongoing transparency study, which will interrogate the intricacies of both Big Tech and independent ad tech, at the ANA’s Masters of Marketing conference in October 2022.
The Next Frontier of the Mobile App Ecosystem By Matt Tubergen
If there is one thing we’ve all learned over the past two years, it’s to de-emphasize predictions, especially in times of uncertainty. What we can count on is the advancement in mobile technology to continue on its current trajectory, if not faster.
System Intelligence (née Device Personalization Services), with personalized recommendations and cross-native-app copy/paste. With Android’s open ecosystem of technology, we will likely see faster development and more use cases as the year unfolds.
Just as the shift to e-commerce was accelerated by the change in consumer demand and behavior associated with the pandemic, we’re going to see shifts in how consumers engage with their smartphones — and we’ll witness the different ways that technology further enables that engagement.
We’re going to expand our industry definition of ad inventory
Here are the five mobile marketing-related developments I see happening in 2022, no matter what is going on with the economy, politics, or any of the other highly fluctuating variables we’ve all gotten used to. Our phones will be truly smart — and not just apps It’s now well known that we don’t read the same news or see the same promoted content or ads. Every person’s Facebook feed is unique, depending not just on who they are friends with but their expressed political beliefs, demographic blueprint, and how they engage with the content in their feed. And it’s not just Facebook. Every app is “smart” in this way. The BBC app has better recommendations for me than my phone does. This is all going to change in the coming year. The focus will shift from apps and websites to making our phones smarter and applying that level of machine learning and AI to the experience of the entire phone. With iOS 15, Apple is going this way; on-device intelligence can recognize and copy text from the camera, for instance, and create personalized song suggestions in photos. Android has also been introducing these types of features with Android
As phones get smarter, something else is going to happen: We’re going to start seeing opportunities to serve relevant sponsored recommendations and advertising content in those “blue ocean” spaces like the home screen. Now before everyone panics about getting ads on their home screen, let me be upfront and say that of course, it has to be done in the right way. We must add value to users, not degrade their experience. Fortunately, thanks to targeting technology that allows for highly custom messages, users can get recommendations for content and services that they are likely to actually use and value. And we can leverage native features that allow for integrated ads to be embedded within actions (e.g., swipe left, right) and on previously ignored spaces, such as the lock screen, home screen, notifications, and widgets. In this way, we’re adding value to all in the mobile ecosystem, driving revenue, and offering up opportunities for app developers and other advertisers to reach new customers. This is better than trying to cram an ad experience into a 320×550 space within a mobile app – which, incidentally, may never even be seen because 77% of users never use an app after three days of downloading it. Many people don’t even download apps; they only use what comes with their phone. OEMs and carriers will play a greater role;
brandknewmag.com
47
embedded technologies will take center stage With consumers spending 85% of their time using native applications, and only a handful of apps that they have downloaded themselves, preloads will become more critical. Preloaded apps aren’t viewed as a third-party piece of software jostling for position in a busy marketplace. Rather, they are seen as an essential part of the device they are hosted on, with explicit purpose and function. Preloaded apps deliver the kind of credibility that drives better user engagement, giving developers and marketers the chance to present their apps in a trusted environment. The time is right for carriers and OEMs to play a larger role in the mobile ad ecosystem. Virgin Mobile, Sprint, AT&T and even Amazon have toyed with the idea of subsidizing phone and plan costs with the revenue from targeted ads, and even with new privacy legislation in place, it comes down to consumer choice. And we’ve seen evidence in other areas where consumers opt for ads in exchange for value, such as the $10/month option for HBO Max vs. $15/ month ad-free. Data will get more local and create utility through speed Over the last five years, edge networking has become an essential part of IT infrastructure. And as more IoT and consumer devices (like our smartphones!) flood networks, there will be even more need for distributed computing, where data storage and computing are brought closer to the point of need and away from centralized data centers. With lower latency and reduced bandwidth/transmission costs, this enables our devices to work faster, stronger, and better. Beacons, for instance, have been around for nearly a
decade, but like QR codes, they were slow to catch on. (And look what happened with those!) I think that beacons and other forms of locally connected, edge-networked data will take on new life in 2022, as marketers continue to extend integrated campaigns and reach consumers at the point of sale. Giant leaps forward in video ad technology and attribution Speaking of speed, as 5G adoption reaches more than one-third of global smartphone volume, those faster data speeds and lower latency connections don’t just bring with them new use cases like VR and connected homes. Mobile video was projected to constitute 80% of mobile web traffic by 2022, and I see that as not just in-app video streaming but also within the mobile web (AMP video and web XR niches) as well. Ad spend in these areas will also increase as marketers see results from their creative campaigns, but also as mobile video attribution continues to improve – unlike in CTV, where it is still lacking. Additionally, we will likely see a connection between linear TV campaigns and mobile in new, creative ways, like the Yelp commercial that instructs viewers to shake their phone. By leveraging native features of the phone to enhance (and track!) the CTAs of TV spots, we can make the billions of dollars spent on linear TV now fully attributable. In conclusion, 2022 is going to be a year filled with excitement about new technologies and devices with a push towards privacy, control, and decentralization of both form and function. One thing is certain, mobile is here to stay – but it’s still in the early days. I, for one, am looking forward to the next explosive wave of technologies tied to the device in our pockets.
Try these practices to increase your self-regulation By Marlene Chism
Strong emotions can derail even the most stable leader, given the right timing and circumstances. When we feel we’re at the mercy of our rage, anger or resentment, we react swiftly, only to have regrets later. We stay on the hamster wheel of anger, reaction and regret, promising to do better next time.
feel the urge to react it’s because your emotional brain (the amygdala in your limbic system) overrides your thinking brain (your pre-frontal cortex), where good decisions are made.
The problem isn’t our emotions. The problem is mismanagement. Emotional triggers hijack decisionmaking, increasing the probability of unnecessary conflict. The key to changing this self-destructive pattern is selfregulation.
Become aware of your triggers
Self-regulation isn’t about suppressing, avoiding or appeasing. Self-regulation is part of the “inner game” of leadership that helps you shift from automatic reaction to intentional response. Below are two practices to help you achieve self-regulation — emotional integrity and cognitive restructuring. Emotional integrity There are distinctions between emotional awareness, emotional intelligence and emotional integrity. Emotional awareness is being aware of how emotional energy processes through your body. Emotional intelligence is the capacity to be aware of, control and express emotions and handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and with empathy. What makes emotional integrity distinct from emotional awareness and emotional intelligence is intentional transparency. This is the ability (and willingness) to let others know about what’s going on inside of you without blaming and without lashing out, as well as the courage to finish a conversation you wanted to avoid. Here are three steps to help you practice emotional integrity. 1. Take ownership of your experience. This means you can’t blame someone else for your anger, resentment or rage. 2. Face your dark side. Tell the truth about what you feel. Just because you feel something doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Anger is just an experience. You don’t have to act out. 3. Represent yourself. It’s OK to say, “I’m feeling angry” or “I’m too upset to discuss this right now.” Owning your experience without blaming others puts you back in charge. Cognitive restructuring Each time you give in to your triggers, you create more neuro connections that keeps the behavior alive. When you
You aren’t a prisoner of your emotions. There’s a way to change your wiring: it’s called cognitive restructuring. What makes you angry? Whether it’s a certain person, a situation or someone’s behavior, the ability to identify your triggers is the first step to consciously change your response in the future. Feel but don’t act This is difficult, because you have created habits that help you release the pressure, such as interrupting, discounting, yelling, or stonewalling. Notice your desire to revert to the comfortable behavior but, instead, pause. Do not take any action. Instead, do the courageous work of feeling. Notice your bodily sensations. Does your neck get hot? Do your palms sweat. Does your stomach feel upset? What happens next? Resist the urge to release pressure. There’s a refractory period for your pre-frontal cortex to take over, so give it some time and let the feelings dissipate. Create a plan It’s easier to change behavior if you already have a plan for what to do instead of reverting to your trigger response. For example, if you tend to get triggered when Kim surprises you with unwanted information, take a breath. Then, instead of reacting, you tell Kim you’d like to meet with them next Thursday at 2 p.m. Rather than firing off a terse email in all caps, wait until the next day to send the email. When you’re back in charge and feel grounded, leave all emotion out of the email, instead focusing on facts and action items. Learning to self-regulate is challenging but rewarding. You’ll know your practices are working for you when you no longer get triggered by the same situations or people. In addition, others will notice a change in you. Three times lately, someone has either thanked me for my patience or told me how patient I am. As one who has struggled most of my life with impatience, it’s great to know that I’m not at the mercy of my old behaviors, and neither are you. Self-regulation is the path to your future self. You can transform your life and leadership with emotional integrity and cognitive restructuring.
Why ‘ workcations ‘ have become popular By Bryan Lufkin
We’ve been taught to keep work and play apart. Yet more of us are still taking workcations, years into the pandemic – and reaping the benefits. The trend could be here to stay. “After working from home for over a year, I needed a change in atmosphere,” says Vedika Bhaia, a Kolkatabased marketing entrepreneur and content creator. Last summer, she and a friend went on a 15-day backpacking trip through India’s Parvati Valley, trekking between hostels, exploring the natural environment and paragliding – all while balancing a full workload on a laptop. Though she was used to working remotely, Bhaia says the ‘work-from-anywhere’ mentality created by the pandemic pushed her to take a trip that combined work and leisure. “I knew travelling would do wonders for my mental health and help me overcome the creative block I was having,” she says.
say they plan to extend a work trip into a leisure one, or vice versa, in 2022. Workcations may seem counter-intuitive – after all, better awareness of work-related mental health stressors has left us more conscious than ever of the importance of maintaining boundaries between our professional and personal lives. Yet experts argue that the adaptability we’ve developed during the pandemic has positioned us well to enjoy a break that combines work and play. And given the benefits workers see in them – like more chances to explore new places while fulfilling our day-to-day obligations – workcations look likely to become a permanent practice lasting well beyond the pandemic.
Bhaia is not alone; ‘workcations’ are becoming entrenched in many nations. Workcations combine work and vacation – booking a mountain cabin for a week while working a fulltime job remotely, for example – and became popular early in the pandemic, as many knowledge workers fled cramped apartments during lockdowns. Workcations are an evolution of ‘bleisure’: travel that combines business trips with leisure trips; think of the familiar practice of hanging around a city for an extra weekend after a conference, or tacking on some PTO days while you’re away on a business trip.
‘Recharged and re-enthused’
Now, in the third year of the pandemic, even as Covid cases fall globally, there’s no sign of workcations slowing down as companies continue to offer remote work policies. Last year, a whopping 85% of 3,000 Indian workers said in a poll that they took a workcation in 2021. Over a quarter of Canadian workers say they want to take one this year; in a global study of eight countries, 65% of 5,500 respondents
What’s different now is that far more people can dip their toe into bleisure and workcations. Even if you don’t travel for business (and few of us are; business travel plummeted during the pandemic and isn’t expected to make a full recovery until 2024, partially due to companies avoiding health risks for employees), the fact that remote and flexible work is so much more entrenched means that people
Before Covid-19, some white-collar workers were already taking advantage of bleisure travel. “I’m actually all for bleisure. I think it’s awesome. It gives people a chance to experience things they might not normally get a chance to experience,” says Martha Maznevski, professor of organisational behaviour at Western University, Canada. She regularly adds extra days to business trips, combining travel and relaxation with networking or developmental activities, like a cooking or language class.
groupisd.com
51
who used to spend all their time at their desks now have more scope to explore other options while fulfilling their professional responsibilities.
to recharge their mental and emotional batteries, while exploring new places also scored highly as a motivating factor.
I think after the past two years, we can switch from one thing to the next very effectively – Rachel Fu
‘We’ve all been trained to switch’
Andy Drane, a senior equity partner at an Edinburghbased corporate and communications law firm, said he “wouldn’t have considered [a workcation] possible” before the pandemic. “Colleagues, clients and intermediaries would have expected me to be in the office 24/7 or visiting their places of work.” Now, he says, that’s been turned on its head. “The business has proven itself to be much more flexible than I’d anticipated.” Drane went on a workcation last month to England’s Lake District. He was there to care for elderly family members but was also able to enjoy the location as he worked remotely. “I was able to have some downtime in a glorious environment and also to fit into a different pattern of days; taking longer over lunch, breaking earlier and cooking dinner for family, taking them on a couple of day trips,” he says. “I certainly came back recharged and re-enthused.” Research released last month by a US travel services company suggest Drane’s experience is common. In a survey of 1,000 people who had taken a workcation, more than four-fifths of them felt the trip had boosted their productivity and creativity, and helped them cope with work-related stress. More than two-thirds said the purpose had been
The apparent popularity of workcations may seem at odds with the deeply entrenched idea that we should keep work and play apart – and carefully ringfence time for each. After all, attempts by companies to bring ‘fun’ into the office – think ping pong tables, foosball, bean bags – have long been dismissed as gimmicky. But the key attraction with workcations is that workers are capitalising on newfound flexibility to combine work and play in a way that’s meaningful to them. Maznevski and other experts see bleisure and workcations as an example of work-life integration, a concept they suggest is more realistic than striving for ‘work-life balance’, where work and play are positioned in competition. Opting to work from a cabin for a week means you’re deciding how, where and when you want to incorporate your leisure time into your work, rather than trying to keep the two realms separate. Maznevski points out that for centuries people lived and worked out of the home; only recently have we “been able to even conceive of something called ‘balancing’ those things”. Workcations, she suggests, could be our way of recognising “there are elements of work and life that integrate with each other”. Of course, there may well be some people who prefer to commit fully to either work or play, rather than combine the two activities. Rachel Fu, professor of tourism, hospitality and event management at the University of Florida, US,
says that whether people enjoy the workcation experience will depend on “a variety of individual personalities and behavioural choices”; some may feel they are only on holiday if they are totally unplugged from work, for example. But Fu suspects that many white-collar workers have developed the skills needed to pull off workcations during the pandemic. “Our behaviours have been forced to change,” she says. “Home is school, home is where we work. We have all been trained to switch: ‘OK, now we have a Zoom meeting’. I think after the past two years, we can switch from one thing to the next very effectively.” That doesn’t mean that workcations should replace actual holidays, however. People need time away from work; workcations should complement paid time off, rather than serving as a substitute – otherwise, risk of work-related stress and burnout could increase. An Expedia survey released in February showed that while 78% of Americans aim to feel ‘unproductive’ during holiday, half bring their laptops and 41% dial into Zoom calls. Many are not happy about it: 61% of respondents said they didn’t consider trips which combined work and play to be proper holidays. This suggests that many people still value work-free vacations, but struggle to pull them off. Workcations also raise equity issues, even after the pandemic further recedes; not everyone can work remotely or afford a week in rented accommodation. Increased workcations or bleisure “could actually create more of a divide in organisations between people who have locationspecific jobs, and people who don’t”, warns Maznevski. But she says the trend could also give people opportunities they might otherwise not get; whether that’s adding an extra day to a business trip to explore a city you never imagined visiting or boosting mental wellbeing through a week in a natural environment even though you’ve used all your paid holiday allocation. Manage your expectations Given the level of interest from workers now accustomed
to staying productive in multiple environments, workcations look like a practice that’s here to stay. “As long as you deliver, many companies don’t care [where you’re working from],” says Fu. Accommodating workers will be in companies’ interests; it’s already clear that flexibility will be key to worker retention moving forwards, especially as the new generation of workers, in particular, value the ability to work from anywhere. According to a January 2022 survey conducted by Kayak and YouGov, 38% of Canadian Gen Z workers plan to take a workcation in 2022, Kayak tells BBC Worklife; a higher percentage than older cohorts. Both Bhaia and Drane are planning on taking more workcations. In fact, Bhaia has already been on another 20-day workcation and has a new one planned for March. She points out that would-be workcationers need to go into their trip with realistic ambitions. “You can’t go into a workcation expecting the rest and relaxation you get from a regular getaway,” she says. “Expect to be busy if you want to explore your surroundings while managing work at the same time.” She recommends planning ahead, taking longer stays to accommodate enough time for both work and play, and if you’re going with travelling partners, pick people who have the same goals as you. “Vacationers and workcationers don’t mix,” she cautions. Drane says he used to think that the professional and the personal should be kept separate. But when changes to how we worked during the pandemic allowed him to combine doing his job with spending important time with his family in a rural environment, he became a workcation believer. “The beauty for me of the workcation,” he says, was that he was able to fulfil professional duties “whilst allowing me to spend meaningful time with my family”. He’s booked his next workcation back to the Lake District for October, and says both he and his staff will continue to benefit from this new flexibility. “In the past, people often had to wait until retirement to do the things they’d dreamed of,” he says. “That’s no longer necessarily true, and I plan to take advantage of that.”
LAUREN WEINBERG Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Square By CMO Council
Lauren Weinberg is an experienced and goal-oriented marketing executive with over 20 years of experience. She’s an expert in finding insights in data and using them to drive strategic marketing plans that fuel revenue growth. She is currently the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Square, driving marketing and comms strategy globally, which includes investment decisions, optimization of marketing channels, brand strategy, analytics, marketing technology, creative execution and communications. What past experiences have best prepared you for the role of Global Head of Marketing and Communications? I joined Square in 2017 originally focused on growth, and now am the Global Head of Marketing and Communications. My role includes reaching businesses across markets by putting relevant, helpful, and actionable information and solutions in front of them that will help them start, run, and grow their business. My background is in journalism and one of my early career experiences was as a media analyst for Nielsen. There, I wrote reports about specific industry trends and focused on research and analytics. During this time, I honed my storytelling skills and understood how to break down the data and tell compelling stories that leverage insights and ultimately inform strategies, something that is core to my role today. Many CMOs don’t want to be bogged down in the weeds of marketing technology. My background in measurement, analytics, and marketing technology has been a critical part of my success. Without great measurement and strong foundational tools, it’s challenging to be a well-informed
and data-driven marketer. Being accountable for the results of marketing is critical to a CMOs success and I love this part of my job. Attribution and measurement methodologies constantly need to evolve and my background in this area has helped me better direct the team, especially as we’ve expanded into more markets. I call this the guts and plumbing of marketing. Many marketing leaders dislike this side of the business, but I love it. I also served as Yahoo’s Vice President of Marketing Strategy and Insights, where I oversaw media planning and buying, brand and marketing effectiveness research, consumer analytics, and industry research. At Yahoo, I worked on the B2B and consumer side of the business. The transition from B2B to consumer marketing was one of the most critical moments in my career. Yahoo’s B2B marketing was at the enterprise level and I have found that my role at Square sits uniquely in between traditional B2B and consumer. The experiences that I had in both of these areas have greatly informed how I approach marketing strategies for Square. What has been your biggest accomplishment in the last 12 months? In 2021, Square launched in Ireland and France, bringing omnichannel solutions to more businesses across the globe. With this, Square was faced with opportunities and challenges in each market, all with the goal of becoming a trusted and valued partner to businesses in these regions. Building a global brand doesn’t just happen overnight and requires careful planning and execution, all while managing many moving parts. When entering a new market, brand awareness is at its lowest point, so Square needed to start from scratch in order to build the right tone that was
brandknewmag.com
55 unique to each region. Each global market also means new standards and expectations, along with testing and trying new tactics and channels to see what resonates. I’m so proud of every team across Square for the incredible work that went into launching in these markets. And I’m even more excited for everything to come! What market shifts and trends are impacting customer and competitive dynamics in your industry? With COVID-19 still impacting businesses, merchants of every size continue to need omnichannel solutions that better enable them to operate, no matter the current climate. At the beginning of the pandemic, we saw a huge shift in businesses adopting online operations simply so they could stay open. Now, we see these same sellers seeing the value of adopting more software that better enables them to operate. This might be a small business leaning on selling through social media or a large, enterprise customer using Customer Relationship Management software (CRM). Another shift heavily impacting businesses everywhere is the current labor shortage. Managing employee schedules and shifts can be incredibly difficult and time consuming. On the other hand, this also causes stress for employees when it’s unclear to them when they’ll be working, all while worrying about what their next paycheck will look like. It’s vital for businesses to have the option to use shift scheduling and team management software that provides visibility and accessibility to both sides. We’ve seen considerable changes in consumer preferences since the onset of COVID-19, and we also understand that these preferences are different across markets. Consumers in Japan have different shopping and purchasing habits than those in Australia, and so on. Across the board, consumers want options in how and where they shop, and it’s vital that the customer experience remains top of mind. Offering convenience and customization will be key to stay competitive so that consumers’ needs and expectations are met. Which digital marketing innovations are most enabling your go-to-market process, customer value creation, and campaign effectiveness? Over the years, we’ve learned that to fully leverage a MarTech stack, customer data and marketing tools need to be seamlessly integrated. This requires data to be treated like a product with a well thought out design to lower the cost of integration. It also requires a holistic strategy for what tools to buy, build, and integrate with. In a year where the landscape is vastly changing, it’s important to focus on learning and staying on top of trends across markets. New tools that unlock new capabilities are always emerging. Marketing requires investment in both software and data engineers, data scientists, analysts, and so on. The right data and metrics are foundational and will prove if your approach worked. Beyond our MarTech stack, we’re leaning into hypertargeted advertising that better enables us to reach groups like Gen-Z and Millenials. For example, Square partnered with Small Biz Live, a philanthropic musical celebration
that rallied for COVID-19 support for SMBs and the Black SMB community, with the event being live streamed on TikTok. This enabled us to reach Gen-Z and Millennials, while also building trust so that we’re viewed as a partner to businesses. Last year, we stood up a new team that was focused on creative optimization across all of our digital channels. We’ll continue investing in this area, which enables us to have evergreen creative experiments running. In 2021, average media costs increased on large platforms. We’ve been able to maintain media efficiencies while scaling our investment which we largely attribute to creative optimization. We’re also continuing to experiment with influencers. Consumers look to influencers to better understand what brands to trust, especially larger businesses who lean on trusted experts in their field as a way to validate credibility. We intend to continue partnering with micro influencers for their highly engaged, loyal audiences, while also tapping into some well known industry experts. Last year, we ran a campaign targeting beauty merchants that leveraged micro influencers like Kahh Spence and Felicia Leatherwood since we know this industry utilizes them in forming opinions. This year, we’ll invest more in influencer marketing and we’re excited to see what the possibilities are in generating awareness this way. What challenges do you face in the coming year and how do you expect to adapt and change? The pandemic still isn’t over and businesses continue to need solutions and resources that will help them stay ahead of the curve and prepare for whatever comes their way. We stay close to our customers, conducting research often so we understand how they’re feeling. We’ll need to continue being agile so we can quickly adjust our strategies to best respond to their needs and wants. In order to accommodate their changing needs, we focus on surfacing solutions they may not have known we offer, or baking new products into our roadmaps or fast-tracking tools that were already planned. Square started with the purpose to enable any individual and business to participate in the economy. 12 years later, we have a full ecosystem of commerce solutions from software to hardware that enables merchants of every size, type, and complexity to run their business all with Square. Since our customer base has expanded significantly over the years, we’re more focused on audience specific strategies. Our marketing efforts need to speak to these different audiences, including executives, with updated language and content to match the complexity of their operations. We’ll continue to cater to our existing customers, but believe we’re in a great position for upmarket growth. We’ll continue to grow and scale our teams globally while employees continue to enjoy the flexibility of remote work. Like many other organizations, we need to focus on finding opportunities to connect and create a sense of community among a large team of people, most of whom have never met before. In addition to connecting our team members, we also want to focus on bringing more learning and development tracks to help our teams build their skill sets over time.
What Do CMOs Actually Want in an Agency? By Emmy Liederman
Before settling down with Chipotle, Chris Brandt had been around the block. The chief marketing officer has made stops at General Mills, Coca-Cola and Taco Bell, so he’s learned a thing or two about working with ad agencies. And just as all symbiotic relationships require loyalty, determination and dedication, Brandt advises against jumping ship on an agency after hitting a roadblock, as the right synergy cannot always be replicated.
When Kirstie Foster, the senior vice president of marketing at global agribusiness cooperative CHS, worked at an agency that held a motorcycle brand as a client, she got her motorcycle license in an effort to “fully understand the consumer experience.” Similarly, Foster believes that CHS’ 26 year relationship with Colle McVoy has been defined by the agency’s commitment to internalizing the company culture and the needs of its customers.
“The grass isn’t always greener,” he told Adweek. “Giving agencies feedback is a tremendous skill. It’s not enough to just say ‘I don’t like this.’ You need to have seen enough creative to actually give effective feedback.”
“At CHS, (internalizing the brand) might mean talking to local farmers, spending the day as a ranch hand, engaging with agricultural influencers online or attending farming events or trade shows,” she said.
Finding the right ad agency is a lot like dating: some partnerships will fail miserably, others will exemplify the perfect chemistry and each eligible bachelor will carry with them their own set of red flags and baggage that is symbolic of past relationship mistakes. But unlike romantic partnerships, agencies are constantly under pressure to articulate their purpose, which is often subject to questioning and scrutiny. Agencies must be clearer than ever in defining their role in the marketing ecosystem, so Adweek asked 12 CMOs and top marketers to share what exactly they look for in these partnerships. Here’s what they had to say.
Brandt also prioritizes viewing the client’s business as an extension of their own—he stressed that the best and most reliable agencies “treat your money like it’s their money.” Erin Harris, CMO of Lobos 1707 Tequila, and Stacey McCormick, senior vice president of brand marketing at Aerie, both view their agency partners as natural extensions of their in-house marketing teams.
Finding the right match
When selecting marketing partners, brands look for agencies
“Our wins are their wins, our losses are their losses,” said McCormick. “We are continually learning and growing together through hindsights and learnings as we develop each new campaign.”
groupisd.com
57
that know how to avoid weighing down their ideas with corporate jargon and don’t get too caught up in the formal pitch process. Sang’ona Oriedo, vice president of marketing at digital healthcare company iRhythm, says an inability to communicate with clarity and brevity is a huge turn off. “No matter what subject is being addressed—the category, the product or the audience—a lay-person should be able to read any brief or receive any pitch and understand it,” she said. Russell Wager, vice president of marketing at Kia America, believes the best agencies know how to offer a range of creative ideas, from conservative to innovative. Kia has been able to develop this balance throughout its more than 20year relationship with creative agency David & Goliath. “Sometimes it’s a little more mellow communication, and sometimes it’s a Super Bowl spot all about an electronic dog that doesn’t really have a single product feature in it, but does a really good job of getting awareness for our EV 6,” he said. “They always give us a range.” When it comes to immediate red flags, brands no longer look for agencies that present creative strictly backed by a “gut feeling,” opposed to meaningful data and consumer research. According to Wager, “gut-feel decisions are falling by the wayside.” “The proof is in the pudding, so anyone who cannot provide viable client references or case studies, provides a onesize-fits all plan or an unrealistic guarantee of success always causes concern,” said Jesus Valdez, vice president of integrated marketing at Pourri (formally known as PooPourri). “A lack of financial transparency is a big flag for us as well.” Crafting a healthy relationship Most brands want to be heavily involved in the creative process, and as Brandt put it, they are not interested in suddenly being delivered a “big dog and pony show” after months of being left in the dark. “I love the idea of demystifying the creative process and not having creative presentations feel like the ‘big reveal.’ Ideas and creativity are a team sport,” said Melissa Wildermuth, global creative director at General Mills, adding that “a creative presentation should feel like the beginning, not the end.” When crafting a meaningful agency relationship, brands prefer to communicate directly with creatives and media buyers, as opposed to playing a “game of telephone” through account managers, according to Brandt. Chris Luna, consumer business group senior global manager at 3M, wants to meet everyone on Colle McVoy’s media team. “Sure, not everyone needs to be in every meeting of course, but we find opportunities…to get to know everyone as a person beyond faceless names on an org chart,” he said. “Honestly, this builds trust and relationships, and we have
a lot of fun together, too. And you can’t underestimate how having fun can lead to amazing work and value.” Like in any healthy relationship, brands want agencies that don’t just constantly feed them what they want to hear— they are looking for debate, respectful disagreement and challenge. “Early in my career, one of the biggest issues that I encountered with agencies is that people tried to fix something that wasn’t fixable,” said Brandt. “You need to be candid and clear when offering why you don’t like it.” When things don’t go as planned, building a correction plan based on honest communication is critical. “Agencies don’t wave magic wands, and experimentation and optimization is a crucial operational aspect of digitalfirst marketing,” said Mandy Dhaliwal, CMO of software company Boomi. “Optimizing is part of the equation, but if something goes wrong, learn and course correct.” The most effective agencies find ways to shock their clients, either through unexpected creative or interesting data. “We found that our number one purchasers online are females in their 40s, meanwhile we created this brand as 22-year-old male college students,” said Jimmy DeCicco, CEO of SuperCoffee. “Good data really shows surprising insights.” Making long-term plans Gayitri Budhraja, chief brand officer of e.l.f. Beauty, is particularly attracted to agencies that can grow alongside the cosmetics company. When the brand started working with creative shop Movers and Shakers in 2019, the agency only staffed two people. Two years later, it became the fastest growing agency of 2021 with a three-year revenue growth of 2,227%. But just as some relationships only last for a season, not every brand is looking for agencies that are end game. Some marketers, like Baumgardner, carry nimble philosophies that allow them to readjust strategies as the world progresses, and communicating this outlook at the get-go is crucial. Among the agencies that the brand does want to work with for more than a season, SuperCoffee warns agencies against stretching themselves too thin, as this often causes the spark in a relationship to dwindle. “For an agency to maintain that intimacy and attention to detail on your account, it requires them to have the discipline to say ‘no’ to other customers,” said DeCicco. “It’s a tricky balance, and the question is ‘How can you scale responsibility without sacrificing and comprising the level of attention and quality of work?’” Emmy is an Adweek staff writer covering ad agencies. Emmy is a 2021 graduate of The College of New Jersey with a major in journalism and minors in Spanish and broadcast journalism. For Adweek, Emmy reports on influencer agencies, independent agencies and broader industry trends.
The rise of Canva, the $40 billion design juggernaut By Mark Wilson
Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht trudged unhappily through a park in Redwood City, California.
every second. The company, which is valued at $40 billion, expects to exceed $1 billion in revenue in 2022.
It was May 2012, and the Australians, both in their midtwenties, had flown from Sydney to Silicon Valley six months earlier to raise money from investors on Sand Hill Road. The couple had met as teens at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Neither had formally studied the discipline of design (Perkins had majored in communications, Obrecht in education), but Perkins had tutored other students in Photoshop in her spare time and had become fascinated by tools that made design more accessible to, well, selfdescribed Luddites like Obrecht. Together, they had launched Fusion Books, an online yearbook-design product that was chugging along back home. They’d come to California with a simple pitch: They needed funds to build a platform that would allow anyone to design just about anything, all within a single interface.
While many unicorns pivot again and again to find their market, Canva’s proposition today is remarkably similar to that pitch of more than a decade ago. Its easy-touse, templated design platform allows people to create business cards, birthday invitations, social media ads, sales presentations, coffee mugs, and yearbooks. It works equally well on a phone, tablet, or laptop. Canva is a word processor for our modern visual culture, adjusting anything you see— text, an image, a background, an animation—with a simple tap. “We’re trying to reduce the time [it takes] to get you feeling confident in your ability,” says Perkins.
Instead, they received more than 100 rejections. That afternoon, the final name on their once-promising spreadsheet of VCs had turned red. So, the usually optimistic pair went on a “misery walk,” recalls Obrecht, to decide if they had run out of options. After three hours of soul-searching, they determined they hadn’t. “We got up the next morning and just started back at it,” he says. Within a few months, they raised the first part of what would become a $3 million seed round. A year later, they launched the online design and publishing tool, Canva. Just over a decade later, Perkins and Obrecht are married and back in Sydney. As for Canva, where Perkins is CEO and Obrecht is chief operating officer: It’s now one of the most influential design platforms on the planet, with 75 million monthly active users who create, on average, 150 designs
By putting its templates in everyone’s hands, Canva has changed the way people design things, both for work and personal projects—though the value of that mission may not have been apparent in 2011. At the time, design was the near-exclusive purview of professionals, the kinds of people who knew their way around the intricacies of Adobe’s software, which includes Photoshop and InDesign. Everyone else was just . . . creating content. At work, they used a patchwork of tools—slideshows, spreadsheets, and documents powered by the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Apple—that helped to disseminate information, if not make it particularly beautiful. Outside of offices, Instagram and Snapchat were giving people easy-to-use editing tools that inspired them to become amateur designers—but kept their creations within walled gardens. Headquartered more than 7,000 miles from most of these companies, Canva had a different vision. While it left design with a capital D to the professionals—you still can’t use Canva to draw a logo from scratch or design a custom typeface—
brandknewmag.com
59
it combined the best qualities of enterprise software (simple templates) and social media (intuitive design tools). And then, year after year, it systematically rolled out tools for every content form imaginable. The result is an increasingly robust product that empowers amateurs to pump out visual content, be it a pitch deck, TikTok video, ad campaign, or family holiday card. (It’s so easy to use, in fact, that more than a few professional designers deride it as being a crutch, at best.) By democratizing design—and challenging the unwritten rules around who gets to consider themselves a designer—Canva has earned its place as an MIC and Fast Company‘s 2022 cover. And it’s just getting started. The service, which debuted as a free tool before adding a paid Pro tier, currently has 5 million Pro customers. It’s now selling companies on its twoyear-old Enterprise subscription. Over the past 18 months, it has rolled out features that allow for real-time collaboration across large companies, along with templating options that empower employees inside diffuse organizations. Canva says that 85% of the world’s 500 largest companies are using its platform (though many of those users could be working on free or Pro accounts). At a time when communication channels are quickly evolving, Canva is more than keeping up. It’s setting the pace. Talk to anyone inside the company, and they will tell you that it’s a platform to design “anything.” That’s not hyperbole. “I mean it very literally, actually,” says Perkins, who projects a Kimmy Schmidt-like optimism. “We are continuously picking off the next, most critical strategic pillar that we believe is most important to our customers. . . . Maybe in 20 years’ time, you can take your imagination as far as it will go.” Though Perkins set out to fix all design software, she started more discretely: by developing a desktop browser site, built for tasks like creating Facebook banner ads and business cards. She had hoped to launch quickly, but in 2013, after almost a year of development, she discovered a pressing problem—her target customers had never even used design software. Canva had been testing a beta product with them, but “they were scared to touch buttons,” Perkins recalls. So she stalled Canva’s launch. “It was at a time when The Lean Startup was popular, and there was a push to just get something out,” recalls Rick Baker, founder of Blackbird Ventures, who led Canva’s seed round. (He met the couple in 2012 at MaiTai, Bill Tai’s Hawaiian gathering for kiteboarding investors and entrepreneurs; Perkins prepped for it by learning kiteboarding.) “There was a decent amount of pressure on Mel, but she was steadfast, and said, ‘No, I’m not releasing this product until I’m proud of it.’” She began creating challenges within the platform that asked the user to, say, change a circle to their favorite color, or drag a hat onto a monkey. These weren’t typical tutorials. They were fun, personal, and perhaps a bit silly. “We continuously refined the experience until we got it to a point that people could jump in, and within five minutes had designed something,” says Perkins. Once Canva hit that crucial mark,
Perkins was ready to launch. Within two years, the company had a million users. Perkins’s early focus on speed has been central to the platform’s success, notes Wesley Chan, general partner at Felicis Ventures, and one of Canva’s other major investors. He launched Google Analytics in 2005, and compares Perkins to “Larry and Sergey sitting with a stopwatch” while timing search results. In the case of both Google and Canva, speed is a sign of reduced friction. And after nearly a decade of honing, Canva’s app is as smooth as Teflon. Load the software, and you are greeted with a button for anything you might want to make. Canva today feels something like the everything design store—but it’s also utterly intuitive. The platform has done away with its old tutorials in favor of a “progressive reveal” interface that introduces readers to its full functionality. “Rather than giving you 1,000 buttons to choose from, we only show you the tools that you need when you actually need to use them,” says Perkins. “If you want to add a chart, you can search for a chart, and add it onto your page. Then you’ll get all the chart tools that you need.” Within this simple interface, Canva mixes in complex capabilities. Users can do things like load live tweets into their slideshows, add licensed photos and music to their social media posts (thanks to Canva’s acquisition of stock media company Pixabay in 2019), and schedule their creations to publish online via an integrated calendar. Canva lets users build something as easily and richly as they can on closed platforms, such as Instagram, but then they can send it virtually anywhere they want: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, PandaDoc, Powtoon. (No, I haven’t heard of those last options, either. But be assured, Canva has!) Canva wants to push exporting options even further, by breaking its users out of the most limited format in design: the PDF. Later this year, Canva will begin allowing users to export projects not just as PDFs, but as single-serve websites with unique URLs. So a wedding invite built in Canva could be instantly published to the web, complete with the ability to accept RSVPs. Canva is reimagining stagnant files as interactive, shareable sites, which Perkins believes will be the predominant way designs are shared well into the future. “We say internally that we’re 1% of the way there,” says Perkins. As COVID-19 swept the world in early 2020, Zoom went from relatively-obscure-teleconferencing-product to household name, overnight. And Zoom’s creative manager, Brandon Realmonte, who oversees design across the brand team, scrambled to keep up. Then, as now, his team consists of just four designers and two video producers. After a colleague suggested Canva, Realmonte tried it out. He was impressed: “I’d never seen a design tool that I could hand to one of my friends, who doesn’t know anything about design, and they could probably figure it out.” He realized that a tedious chore for the rapidly growing company—creating branded Zoom backdrops with Zoom employees’ names and titles—could be transformed into a
locked template. Just five templates could save his team from having to generate 500 designs. He reached out to Canva to inquire about an enterprise account, which allows corporate users to lock templates with their brand standards. Canva pointed out that, by registered email addresses, thousands of Zoom’s employees were already on Canva, using free or Pro accounts. Today, hundreds of people inside Zoom work on a shared Canva Enterprise plan. It’s primarily used by members of the social marketing team—who cycle through a few dozen templates to create content—but employees in communications and sales use it, too. Marriott uses Canva Enterprise to promote hotels across its dozens of different brands, and Live Nation uses it to coordinate promotion between artists and venues. Other corporate customers include Salesforce, Warner Music Group, and PayPal. Canva’s growth as an enterprise tool has largely relied on its bottom-up design strategy: Woo the masses with simple templates at home, and they’ll eventually bring them to the office. To a large degree, it’s worked. Canva reports that 12% of its users are on a team account—a figure that has roughly doubled since last year—and there are now 800,000 teams paying for their accounts. (Since Canva won’t divulge subscription revenue, these teams could be paying anywhere between $13 a month for a five-person Pro subscription and $30 per person for an Enterprise one.) Canva’s ease of adoption within corporate ranks has been met with more than a little skepticism. While Adobe’s software suite, the gold standard for design, takes years to master, Canva’s interface is instantly accessible. To anyone. Reddit boards offer a taste of how some people view the platform. One design thread ponders, “Should a person be entitled to be called a Graphic Designer if they only use Canva?” Another Redditor laments: “My current ‘manager’ is a Karen who thinks Canva is just a perfect little tool.” Canva is well aware of criticisms that it’s not a real design platform. Perkins herself actually wrote a 15-minute parody of The Office that Canva turned into a short internal film. It features a quirky manager who falls in love with Canva, only to face the ire of black-shirted, scarf-wearing agency creatives. The sharply produced story—with a respectable count of laughs per minute—is a parable: The creatives learn that Canva can actually save them from having to make small, irksome changes to things like templates for business cards and sales decks. They can just hand that power over to businesses. Canva makes this argument repeatedly: It’s not out to replace designers and their specialized tools, but to work alongside them. Truthfully, Canva can’t replace the high-end design tools of today. For being a platform to design “anything,” it actually has clear guardrails on what it can and can’t do. Namely, you cannot free draw or illustrate within Canva. Drawing “was pretty much off the table,” says Cameron Adams, Canva’s chief product officer and third cofounder. “Not in a forbidden kind of way. But that fine motor skill of drawing that you associate with great artists is probably the biggest thing that puts people off from even thinking about designing
something.” And Canva, by design, doesn’t intimidate. The challenge now is persuading corporations to upgrade the accounts of employees who are already free or Pro users and turn them into Enterprise accounts. But Canva doesn’t appear to be in a hurry. “That’s certainly a focus of ours,” says Obrecht. “It’s just an area that needs resources.” Canva’s revenue is already growing more than 100% year over year, soon to break a billion dollars. “Most companies, by the time they’re at the scale Canva is, have pulled all their levers,” says Baker. “[They] have a full enterprise sales team and are all over the world, struggling to meet quotas. They’re paying up the wazoo for paid marketing to eke out every bit of growth. Canva still hasn’t done any of that.” In September 2021, Perkins and Obrecht made a surprise announcement. The couple owned 31% of Canva at its latest valuation, putting their personal net worth somewhere around $12.4 billion. They were now donating 97% of their stake—30% of all Canva’s shares or $12 billion—to the Canva Foundation, which they created earlier that year with a mission to solve some of the biggest, foundational problems around poverty. (The couple retains their voting rights in the company.) “I have this very wildly optimistic belief that there is enough money and goodwill in the world to solve all of the world’s problems,” says Perkins of the decision. Starting a foundation is commonplace for billionaires, and considered a smart way to park wealth while planning a strategy to donate. “It’s one thing to put a whole bunch of money into a foundation, and it’s quite another to give it out,” says Maria Di Mento, a staff writer at The Chronicle of Philanthropy, who covers large donors. “I believe you can’t judge a major philanthropist like this until they start delving in and giving to charity on a regular basis.” Even so, Perkins and Obrecht’s decision is striking. They’d already signed the 1% pledge, giving 1% of Canva’s resources and profits to charity (and would later sign the Giving Pledge, promising to donate at least half of their net worth to philanthropy during their lives or upon their death). “Who needs billions of dollars?” Perkins asks bluntly. “There’s nothing enjoyable to do with billions of dollars. That’s an absurd thing.” Though the couple is tight-lipped about plans for the foundation, they are approaching it much as they did Canva, which started simply and grew into its big ambitions. Obrecht says they have members of the team focused on long-term projects, but “we don’t want to sit around beard scratching for three years.” In the meantime, the foundation is partnering with Give Directly on a pilot program that will channel $10 million this year to people living in poverty. In 2023, they hope to give $100 million. After that, they want to increase it tenfold and give away a billion dollars—assuming that giving at that cadence remains practical. How the foundation ultimately progresses remains to be seen, but it has the potential to leave an even bigger dent on the universe than Canva. Perkins and Obrecht are determined to use their money to design a better world. As Perkins puts it, “If the whole thing was about building wealth, that would be the most uninspiring thing I could possibly imagine.”
Book,
&
Line
Uncopyable: How to Create an Unfair Advantage Over Your Competition (Updated and Expanded Edition) By Steve Miller What separates average businesses from extraordinarily successful ones? Better product? Nope. Your competitor will rapidly reverseengineer your “secret sauce” and get their “better-than-you” version on the market faster than you can say “Usain Bolt.”
Sinker The Advertising Concept Book: Think Now, Design Later (Third) By Pete Barry Structured to provide both a complete course on advertising and a quick reference on specific industry topics, it covers every aspect of the business, from how to write copy and learn the creative process to how agencies work and the different strategies used for all types of media.
Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World
He Said, She Said: Branding
By Brendan Kane
In He Said, She Said: Branding, the husband and wife team of Jaci and Michael Russo share what they’ve learned over their combined decades of experience working in branding and with each other.
Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World, by out of the box thinker Brendan Kane, breaks down the most effective strategies to generate new opportunities, innovate and scale your business, and create a compelling brand— both online and off—so you can thrive in the new micro-attention world in which we live
Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader by John Rossman
Social networks are the new norm and traditional marketing is failing in today’s digital, always-on culture. Businesses across the world are having to face up to how they remain relevant in the choppy waters of the digital ocean. In an era where a YouTube star gets more daily impressions than Nike, Coca-Cola and Walmart combined, traditional marketing as we know it is dead.
Good Is The New Cool: Market Like You Give A Damn By Andrea Fryrear Marketing has an image problem. Mediasavvy millennials, and their younger Gen Z counterparts, no longer trust advertising, and they demand increased social responsibility from their brands—while still insisting on cutting-edge products with on-trend design. As always, brands need to be cool—but now they need to be good, too.
By Michael Russo
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones By James Clear No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving--every day. James Clear, one of the world’s leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results.
The Cult of the Customer: Create an Amazing Customer Experience that Turns Satisfied Customers into Customer Evangelists By Shep Hyken In today’s competitive business climate, you can’t just satisfy your customers. You have to be better than that, giving them experiences that they won’t forget. Author Shep Hyken has spent thirty years studying great companies and the evangelists they create.
groupisd.com
63
Be Amazing or Go Home: Seven Customer Service Habits that Create Confidence with Everyone By Shep Hyken Want to amaze your customers, impress the people you work with, and outshine your competition? Going from average to amazing isn’t an out-of-reach goal. In fact, amazement is a habit that anyone can master—and Shep Hyken knows the tricks to making it your own.
Binge Worthy Branding: Build Customer Loyalty Using AI and Personalization Like Amazon, Netflix, and Starbucks By Kevin Albert More than 4 years of research, 34 entrepreneurs interviewed, $30,000 invested, hundreds of enemies made along the way, 1 attempted lynching, barred from the lucrative circle of ‘experts’...
From Individual to Empire: A Guide to Building an Authentic and Powerful Brand
Influencer: Building Your Personal Brand in the Age of Social Media
By Laura Bull
Every one of your favorite influencers started with zero followers and had to make a lot of mistakes to get where they are today—earning more money each year than their parents made in the last decade. But to become a top creator, you need to understand the strategies behind the Insta-ready lifestyle . . .
Bull spent ten years with Sony Music Entertainment, becoming one of the company’s youngest executives and spearheading artist development and marketing for globally recognized brands. She is an expert who specializes in transforming entrepreneurs into viable brands and teaching what it takes to become a powerful “influencer.
The Business of Aspiration By Ana Andjeli The Business of Aspiration is about how consumers’ shifting status symbols affect business and brand strategy. These changing status symbols, like taste, aesthetic innovation, curation or environmentalism create the modern aspirational economy.
Activate Brand Purpose: How to Harness the Power of Movements to Transform Your Company
By Scott Goodson We live in an age of activism - the conscious consumer is more socially aware than ever before, and this is reflected in their buying habits. Yet, activism on behalf of brands is lagging. While many claim to be ‘purpose driven’, far too often this purpose is relegated to a plaque above the CEO’s desk, and never goes any further.
ByBrittany Hennessy
Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life By Rory Sutherland “Sutherland, the legendary Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, uses his decades of experience to dissect human spending behavior in an insanely entertaining way. Alchemy combines scientific research with hilarious stories and case studies of campaigns for AmEx, Microsoft and the like. This is a must-read.” —Entrepreneur (“Best Books of the Year”)
The Context Marketing Revolution: How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media By Gavin Turner We are in the midst of a massive media revolution. For the first time in history, ordinary people around the world have the ability to create, distribute, and consume content instantly, from anywhere, using connected devices.