BrandKnew March 2019

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

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Dear Friends: The year has been marching on and we are already into the 3rd month. Don’t know if it is the weather but there certainly seems to be more spring in the steps of the branding and marketing fraternity. Some of it has been captured in the issue. How nostalgia can lead us to be more patient for example and how marketers could use this. When it comes to social networks, creating ad campaigns require a different approach. We examine how in this issue. Having a well etched out brand purpose can revitalise your marketing. Read more on it here. With the Academy Awards just over, we take a look into the economics of an Oscar win and a nomination. If as a brand guardian or brand owner you are looking to crack the code on brand growth, the feature on the subject will help you greatly. We have also put out an infographic on how AR (Augmented Reality) can help brands attract customers. UGC (User Generated Content) needn’t be a unsung hero and we share the strategies that marketers can use to capture and market it. There was certainly a momentum dip in the social networks in 2018 and we investigate if they can regain some of its vintage in 2019.

There is a bunch more to soak in and action on in this edition and I will leave you all to do exactly that. Till the next…

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Suresh Dinakaran @ISDGlobalDubai

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Business Development Director: Rishi Mohan Senior Hustler-Digital Marketing & Brand Development: Nikhil Thekkumkoottathil Brand Research & Creative Engagement Specialist: Anushka Kartha Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Regional Director: Krishna Chugh Country Manager, India: Vinit Chugh Performance Marketing Architect: Ryan Govindan Video Content Specialist: Mikhaela Cena Brand Engagement and Outreach Specialist: Anuva Madan Content Development Specialist: Abijith Pradeep

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CONTENTS

Cracking the Code on Brand Growth “Brand purpose” is a lie How to Use Augmented Reality to Attract Customers [Animated Infographic] Can social networks regain momentum in 2019?

Retail Like a BOSS: Your Go-To-Market Guide Oscars Economics: Does Winning Mean a Windfall?

How Marketing Leaders Can Thrive Amidst “Tectonic” Shifts in Expectations ‘Still in its infancy’: Despite advancements, AI adoption for media buying remains low Striving Strategically Feelings of Nostalgia Can Make Us More Patient How to Create Successful Ad Campaigns for Social Stories Cover Story: Adtech Won’t Fix Ad Fraud Because It Is Too Lucrative, Say Specialists Marketers: T-commerce is ready to takeoff in 2019 Brand purpose is the future for the majority of marketing leaders 13 Strategies For Capturing And Marketing User-Generated Content Why Social Media Is the New Weapon in Modern Warfare How Introverts Can Learn to Network Effectively Why We Can’t All Get Away with Wearing Designer Clothes Book, Line & Sinker

Cracking the Code on Brand Growth

By Knowledge@Wharton

When Dollar Shave Club founder Michael Dubin launched his now famous YouTube video in 2012, no one imagined that it would cause earth-shaking tremors under razor behemoth Gillette. But it did. The tongue-in-cheek style video explaining the Club’s many virtues had a seismic effect. The day it was released, the brand’s website crashed from huge traffic. Within 48 hours, 12,000 orders were received. A few years later, Unilever bought the Club for $1 billion.

Most analyses of the Dollar Shave Club’s success conclude that it accomplished this feat because of millennials’ obsession with direct delivery, the founder’s comedic flair, or its bargain basement prices. We say it was something much deeper.

In fact, Dollar Shave Club rose to prominence because it employed the formula we have discovered to be the key to changing subconscious brand preference: the expansion of a brand’s positive associations in customers’ memories to the point that it becomes an automatic, involuntary choice.

While some marketers have called this startup’s success an anomaly, we have found that the opposite is true. Every brand, whether a startup or an established household name, has untapped growth potential and the ability to become the automatic choice of more consumers.

The implications are vast, unseating many sacred cows that marketers have relied on for decades. First and foremost, it means that the battle for business growth does not take place on the internet or on store shelves. Rather, it takes place in the subconscious mind of prospective customers. And their purchasing decisions are much more malleable and easily influenced than many brand leaders realize.

Ecosystem of Associations In their groundbreaking book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout argue that brands are monolithic in the mind, with each standing for only one immovable concept. “It’s difficult enough to link one concept with each product. It’s almost impossible with two or three or more concepts,” they write. “The most difficult part of positioning is selecting that one specific concept to hang your hat on. Yet you must, if you want to cut through the prospect’s wall of indifference.”

Trout and Ries were correct that brands exist in consumers’ memories. But they were wrong about the limitation. In fact, every brand has a host of interconnected associations — an ecosystem of multi-dimensional, accumulated memories that dictate which brand you instinctively favor and buy most often. The more positive associations your brand has, the “EVERY BRAND … HAS healthier it is and the greater its UNTAPPED GROWTH growth. So, a dogmatic pursuit of a single brand concept may be POTENTIAL AND THE detrimental to success.

ABILITY TO BECOME The biggest key to the Dollar THE AUTOMATIC Shave Club’s success was not CHOICE OF MORE that it communicated a singleminded idea, but rather that it CONSUMERS.” rapidly stood for many, including good value, high quality, practicality, direct delivery, job creation, and an understanding of what you need (and what you don’t).

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The Brand ‘Connectome’ Brands that dominate and are growing in their categories are bursting with a myriad of positive associations. To envision what this constellation of brand associations looks like, it’s helpful to learn about the human connectome, or a “complete map of the neural connections in a brain,” according to the Brain Preservation Foundation.

The Human Connectome Project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, is giving scientists a new way to “navigate” the brain and explore how decisions are made.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine have introduced a new brain mapping model based on the project.

We have discovered that within the complete human connectome, every brand has its own mini-network of associations composed of every memory a customer has of the brand. These accumulated memories, both positive and negative, form what we call the Brand Connectome.

Think of the brand as a tree planting its roots in customers’ subconscious. As the brand grows, it adds more associations and more branches to hold them. And as the branches take root in our memories, the tree spans more of the brain’s terrain.

Back in 2002, psychologist and behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking theory that the human mind has shortcuts, or heuristics, that overtake the rational decision-making process. Now, we have found that what lies within this shortcut is a dynamic network of associations and memories. Every brand has one. The brand with the more robust sphere and more positive associations is your “go-to” brand — the one you buy instinctively.

This network of associations is remarkably consistent among consumers. Brain imaging studies show that convergence of positive thoughts among subjects is a strong predictor of business growth.

For example, among users of Secret antiperspirant, the Secret Brand Connectome is practically identical. It is filled with mostly positive associations such as being hard-working, clinically effective, an integral part of my life, something I used as a teenage girl, for powerful women and a marker of achievement. There is a convergence of very particular, positive themes, imagery and symbols in virtually every Secret user’s memories.

In contrast, among users of competitive antiperspirants, the Secret Brand Connectome is weighed down by several negative associations: harsh, made with chemicals, leaves white marks on clothing, makes the underarm skin burn after shaving. That means the Brand Connectome for Secret among users of competing products is also convergent, albeit in a more negative way.

The more similar and positive a Brand Connectome is among customers, the more likely they are to recall it — a key component of brand equity and major driver of purchases.

In fact, a robust Brand Connectome filled with positive memories is actually the source of what is often referred to as the “emotional connection” to a brand.

Michael Platt’s brain imaging “BUSINESSES research shows that brands that MUST CREATE create strong, positive emotional connections with their customers UNIVERSAL BRAND generate feelings of empathy MESSAGES THAT and personal identity in the brain. This difference predicts WILL BUILD POSITIVE stronger loyalty and less churn. ASSOCIATIONS IN Businesses that fail to build THE MINDS OF NONthese connections face a higher likelihood of brand switching. USERS.” Stronger personal identity with a brand also leads customers to share more information about the brand, making it go viral.

To capitalize on this information, businesses must create universal brand messages that will build positive associations in the minds of non-users. This is much more productive — and much more economical — than trying to create a different story for every customer. If each individual receives a different message, each will ultimately have different associations with the brand. What gives Facebook, IBM, Instagram and Apple their value is the set of similar associations that billions of people have with these companies.

In fact, we would go so far as to assert that current efforts

by AI and automated marketing software companies to customize brand messages down to the individual level could be counterproductive. Taken too far, they risk damaging brands and preventing them from prospering. After all, a brand is a collection of similar associations in the minds of prospective customers. If a brand starts to mean something completely different to each customer, it stops being a brand.

To be clear, we fully believe that obtaining individualized information about where and when consumers shop is useful.

And giving consumers tactical messages tailored to particular interests (e.g., lunchbox ideas for moms, doggie treats for pet lovers, etc.) is good business practice. But, those consumers must still be sent the same core messages about the brand itself.

Share Of Mind No matter where they fall in any demographic, customers choose the brand with the more robust, developed connectome in their minds over and over, without knowing why. Elevated by their abundance of positive accumulated associations, these brands rise to dominance and salience in our minds. We reach for them instinctively, whether on the shelf “IF A BRAND or on Amazon.

STARTS TO MEAN

This finding gives all new SOMETHING meaning to the term “share of mind.” What was once a COMPLETELY figurative term describing the DIFFERENT TO EACH amount of influence a brand CUSTOMER, IT STOPS had on its customers is now a scientific imperative indicating BEING A BRAND.” that leaders must continually nurture and grow their ecosystem of associations. If they fail to do so, new companies will take root and displace their brands. To become the brand a prospective customer favors,

your Brand Connectome must be larger and more positive than that of your competitors.

brand network can branch out to become a prospect’s go-to choice, changing the trajectory of a business.

How does this growth in the Brand Connectome happen?

Brain imaging studies show that, as customers learn new positive information about a brand, the brain’s memory structure expands. We call this “brain branching.” Like a tree receiving nourishment, the brain sprouts new memories about the brand and pathways to hold those memories. But watch out, because this is true for both positive and negative information. In fact, negative information is often more powerful, damaging the ecosystem and reducing brand value.

Three Imperatives of Business Growth

One could say that business leaders have been looking for growth in the wrong places. If you want to grow in the market, you must first grow your brand in positive ways in prospects’ subconscious minds. The strategic call to arms for brands is clear: Grow your network of positive associations — or wither and die.

We can now examine Dollar Shave Club’s rapid success in

Three principles can help you manage your brand’s network of associations and accelerate top-line sales growth for any business: • Replace negative associations with positive ones. To grow your Brand Connectome in the mind of your growth target, eliminate your brand’s negative associations. Do this by building your message around positive associations, rather than trying to explain away the negative ones. The key is to replace the negatives — supplant them — with positives.

• Develop marketing communication that create multiple rich associations, not single ideas. Contrary to popular belief, the best communications have an overarching umbrella message comprised of multiple themes underneath. If your advertising boils down to just one thing, you might end up with a fairly barren brand network.

• Segment Your Media, Not Your Message. Target segmentation is useful for learning how to reach prospects, but it should not be used to slice and dice your brand’s messaging. Keep your communications consistent and universal. This will help bring in new users and build a brand community that shares emotional and cognitive connections with your company.

Every story of exceptional business growth, every company that seems to get on the map overnight, and every switch in brand preference can be traced back to the ascendance of the Brand Connectome in buyers’ minds. In fact, many business concepts popularized in the past 30 years can be linked back to growth of this network of associations.

a different light. Its launch video created scores of positive associations practically overnight. Its Brand Connectome took root in consumers’ memories and “branched out” with a multitude of new pathways, overtaking traditional razor companies. Hyper growth of the Club’s Brand Connectome in turn created accelerated revenue growth.

You don’t have to be Dollar Shave Club to obtain disruptive growth. Every brand, at any stage of the life cycle (e.g., launch, maturity or decline) has untapped growth potential. That’s because, just like the human brain, all Brand Connectomes are remarkably dynamic, constantly learning and changing.

As long as the human brain has the ability to learn, any

For example, we can now look at Malcolm Gladwell’s “tipping point” through a new lens. The moment a business “tips” is the moment at which its connectome branches out sufficiently in people’s minds to overtake competitors. Or take Fred Reichheld’s Net Promoter Score. While NPS is an interesting metric of customer loyalty, the Brand Connectome that lies beneath it reveals the true root of that loyalty.

No business is stuck with the revenue level it is at today.

Every brand has hidden growth potential because its network of associations and memories has endless ability to keep growing. This means that virtually any new prospect can be won over and turned into a die-hard customer.

In short, the key to accelerating penetration and top-line growth doesn’t lie in your marketing plan or your budget.

It lies in the subconscious mind of your prospects. And you have much more power over that growth than you think.

“Brand purpose” is a lie FROM GILLETTE TO STARBUCKS TO JOHNSON & JOHNSON, COMPANIES LOVE TO EXTOL THE VIRTUES OF THEIR BRAND, WITHOUT ACTUALLY LIVING UP TO THEM. HERE IS WHAT TODAY’S COMPANIES COULD LEARN FROM THE QUAKERS, WRITES PADDLE CONSULTING’S BRIAN MILLAR.

By Brian Millar

This week, Gillette joined the noble ranks of Purposeful Brands with a new ad. It suggested that a decent chap should call out toxic masculinity where he sees it, which was something of a departure from their output of three decades: phallic symbolism that would make Sigmund Freud choke on his cigar.

On the one hand, you could see where Gillette was going.

It’s been slashing prices, squeezed by Dollar Shave Club on one side and Generation Beardy Boy on the other. From a strategic point of view, the ad made total sense. There’s just one thing. Purpose is something you believe, not something you make up one day as a marketing strategy. Its social media mentions flooded with women complaining that Gillette’s razors for women are pink and cost more. For a company that makes shaving kits, Gillette didn’t seem to have looked in the mirror.

In recent years, companies have been told that they need a purpose, a reason for existing beyond making money.

Consumers look for authenticity, and prospective employees want to work somewhere that makes the world better.

“Purpose” has been touted as the key to 21st-century success by both the Harvard Business Review and Fast Company.

Johnson and Johnson claims, “We put the needs and wellbeing of the people we serve first.” Starbucks exists “to inspire and nurture the human spirit–one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.” State Street made a statue of an empowered little girl facing down Wall Street’s bull.

With the world’s top companies staring nobly into the middle distance, it seemed to be the dawn of something magnificent: capitalism with a soul.

LOL, just kidding.

banks, Clarks (of desert boot fame), Nike, and even Sony.

All these companies had founders who believed in a commonwealth, who wanted to create a tide that floated many boats, not just their own. Centuries before anybody said the words “brand purpose,” these companies had it–and flourished because of it. Quakers were honest.

Quakers were straight dealers.

Quakers paid their debts. There’s a great documentary about them here– but don’t watch it yet, I’m just getting to the good bit.

State Street underpays women. Starbucks paid no U.K. corporate tax for three years on sales of £1.2 billion (about $1.5 billion), thus failing to nurture my local neighborhoods by paying for police, social services, or even street sweepers.

Johnson and Johnson kept 98% of its cash offshore in 2017– almost $42 billion. If you wriggle out of paying the taxes that cover your customers’ healthcare and education, you don’t really care about the wellbeing of the people you serve.

Right now, purpose is often left in the hands of ad agencies. Every second brief begins, “In a world where everybody is increasingly polarized, at least they can come together over [insert client’s product here].”

It would be better to set the senior management an exam

Brand purpose is at risk of losing any meaning; it’s already being hilariously mocked.

We need genuinely moral companies to exert their power and tackle the big problems of the day. Besides, highmindedness can make a company a ton of money. It has done so, over and over again, for centuries.

LEARN FROM THE QUAKERS When Queen Victoria was still young and athletic, two brothers took over their father’s cocoa business and started making chocolate bars. Their surname was Cadbury so–spoiler alert–this is a success story. They outgrew their factory in the U.K.’s industrial heartland of Birmingham, so they began planning to build a bigger one. They bought land, lots of land; far too much land for a chocolate plant. They had a vision for a factory in a garden, and a town that would grow in that garden. George Cadbury decreed that, “one-tenth of the Estate should be laid out and used as parks, recreation grounds, and open space.” Those spaces weren’t just for Cadbury’s employees.

They were for everybody.

George and Richard Cadbury were Quakers. They believed that wealth was meaningless unless you used it to raise the living standards of others. It’s a concept called the Commonwealth, something Quakers exported to America.

Quakers have proved remarkably successful in business, founding Barclays and Lloyds, two of the U.K.’s biggest

question: What is this company’s commonwealth, and how do we help it to prosper? Patagonia treats the environment as a commonwealth: There’s no point in making great outdoors clothes if the outdoors has become a climatebaked hellscape. It donated its $10 million tax break to environmental charities. If you can easily identify your commonwealth, then you probably had a purpose all along.

If you can’t, then I’d advise you to spend some time watching the documentary above.

Cadbury was sold to the food-processing giant Mondelez in 2001. In 2017, Mondelez U.K. managed to pay £122,000 ($157,000) of tax on sales of £1.65 billion ($2.12 billion). Its purpose states that it will be, “Right for our communities as well as the planet.” Yeah, right.

Brian Millar is the cofounder of Paddle Consulting, a company that collects data about the things that people love on the internet.

How to Use Augmented Reality to Attract Customers [Animated Infographic] AUGMENTED REALITY CAN HELP YOUR BRAND STAND APART FROM THE COMPETITION BY OFFERING INTERACTIVE AND ENGAGING EXPERIENCES.

By Laura Forer

Customers can “try on” clothes virtually, or see how products would look in their homes before they buy.

This infographic by mobile marketing platform CleverTap defines augmented reality, explains the benefits of the technology, and offers tips for creating an AR app.

AR is being adopted by many industries, and there are infinite uses of the technology that can help engage your customers. Check out the infographic for the basics.

Laura Forer is a freelance writer, email and content strategist, and crossword puzzle enthusiast. She’s an assistant editor at MarketingProfs, where she manages infographic submissions, among other things.

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Can social networks regain momentum in 2019?

By Robert Passikoff

“When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place.” -- Hilary Clinton Mark Zuckerberg may have spoken prematurely. Yes, yes, the appetite for social media may have seemed like it was a bottomless maw. But now some social media companies are starting to look desperately for new users. Or any users.

Why would we say that? Well, at Brand Keys we track social networking sites in our annual Loyalty and Engagement Index and incidence levels have dropped. That means it makes it harder to find users to interview. We couldn’t find nearly enough to assess Google Plus in 2018.

What’s also dropped have been social networking sites’ engagement and loyalty rankings. Facebook is down.

Pinterest is down. Twitter is down, and Snapchat is down.

Snapchat lost 3 million daily active users in the second quarter of 2018. That’s the first time that the company has reported a decline since it went public. Twitter -- despite its presidential notoriety -- has struggled to increase platform engagement.

It posted a decrease of one million users, year over year.

The loss of users raises a question: Has social media reached a saturation level? Security issues, charges of misinformation, foreign hacking and misuse of user data have compounded all this. Consumers may be social, but they’re not stupid.

What happened?

Facebook had what it calls a “mixed” third-quarter earnings report. Results fell short when it came to revenue, daily active users and monthly users. The brand had few answers for how it planned to change the trajectory.

The company created a war room to prevent disinformation and Russian trolls on its site. But already facing scrutiny, had to admit that an attack on its network exposed personal information of nearly 50 million users. The breach was the largest in the company’s 14-year history. There’s an ongoing crisis of trust in the brand.

And Congress is now asking questions about how Facebook entered into dozens of data-sharing partnerships, like the disastrous collaboration with Cambridge Analytics, and its loosey-goosey approach to oversight, what’s being called the “3 D’s” -- delay, deny, deflect.

Facebook says it is “committed to protecting people’s information.” But when officials from nine countries met in London at the end of November seeking answers to Facebook’s privacy breaches and role in spreading propaganda, Zuckerberg was a no-show. He was represented at the international conference by an empty chair, which was appropriate. Facebook has done nothing but make empty promises and consumers have come to understand that!

Come to it, Facebook employees are coming to understand it too. Just over 50% of employees said they were optimistic about Facebook’s future. That sounds good until you grasp the fact that this number is down from 83% last year.

Twitter and Snapchat continued to lose users. Twitter reported its first consecutive quarterly drop in users signaling additional declines to come as it culls fake accounts. Snap lost two million daily users and said it expected the trend to continue not, apparently, recovering from the widely-panned redesign of its platform.

Google Plus, launched in 2011 as a challenge to Facebook, exposed a half-million users’ private data, but they didn’t bother to inform them. Seven years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, Google abandoned their consumer effort and shuttered the social media site.

That’s what happened to specific social networking sites.

Generally speaking, and for the first time ever, fewer Americans are using social media than the year prior, down nearly 4%.

Any drop in social media usage is unprecedented, and it indicates Americans are not wholly satisfied with social in ways they may have been in the past.

Feel free to share that. Just be careful which social network you use.

Retail Like a BOSS: Your Go-ToMarket Guide

By David Bell

We are in an economy where deaggregation is actually cheaper, more efficient and more beneficial than aggregation.

The governing idea of retailing has been to ship all of your products to a big box retailer and have consumers buy them there for efficiency and economy of scale. But now, thanks to technology, the model has flipped; servicing the collection of individual interactions is actually cheaper than aggregation, and the end experience is actually better. That is why I developed the BOSS model, and why I believe that these four shifts in perspective can help move any company’s retail approach forward.

I received strong interest in it as a guide to the new retail reality, so I thought I would expand on this presentation a bit for readers.

When I presented this at the IAB Direct Brand Summit

As a quick introduction, the four pillars of the BOSS Model are: •

Bonding, not branding

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Orators, not customers

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Showrooms, not stores

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Science, not service

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Bonding A close relationship that develops as a result of shared experiences with a brand.

If you were doing business 100 or so years ago you would have seen the origins of bonding. If you ran a shop that I frequented, we would have developed a bond between us based on the trusted exchange of goods for money. Fast forward, and the scale of commercialization eventually removed that opportunity by creating anonymity. But we have now regained our ability to bond.

Today, Direct To Consumer (DTC) brands bond with every interaction. When I take my daily vitamins I am looking at a package that literally says “Made for David” on it because I get my vitamin pack personalized for me from Care/of.

Consider the very different experience than I would have every morning if I had purchased them at a vitamin store instead.

The biggest challenge for established CPG brands is having this kind of resonance. The key here is to create compelling content for engaged and expanding communities. One of the best legacy companies doing this is Nike. When I travel I take my running shoes with me, and thanks to Nike I can pop online and find someone else to go for a run with wherever I am. That is a bond that starts with the company and expands well beyond them.

Orators Vocal fans and “regular customers” who feel compelled to tell others about your brand and your company.

DTC companies realized in their early days that Millennials like to discover stuff and share their discoveries online. And of course, that sharing is amplified because of their social channels. If you are able to create a story and a narrative that is really appealing, you can gain traction quickly.

The story around Away luggage was built through a careful cultivation of brand orators. They went online and shared all the things they loved about their Away suitcases: they talked about the portability, the great price and about how their bags could even charge their phones. They also loved the content that the brand produced, and how it informed their travels.

A lot of DTC brands have also done a good job of getting broadly famous people (and those famous within a focused group) to become micro-influencers. Why? Because when your goal is to create orators, you develop the innate ability to pull the right triggers so that customers feel motivated to tell their stories about you.

Showrooms Physical spaces where customers are given an elevated and in-depth experience.

What big retailers have traditionally done is to combine the selling and the inventory functions of retailing under one roof. That no longer resonates. If I want inventory I will go to Amazon because they literally have everything, and if I want

an experience I will go to the Allbirds store because of their personalized Service Bar. Some big retailers have adapted through acquisition.

Walmart has benefitted from the acquisition of Bonobos, Eloquii, ShoeBuy and ModCloth, and from the thinking and organizational viewpoints of company founders like Andy Dunn, who pioneered the zero inventory store; an experiential space where the brand holds interviews instead of inventory.

Smaller retailers have options as well. They can develop a great aesthetic to the physical footprint to give people a reason to come in. Think about Christmas shopping for instance. Stores can be more than a place to buy gifts; they can also be a place to experience the Christmas season in a more immersive way. The second thing they can do is to develop their own in-house brands that mimic the lower cost/higher quality/faster delivery of direct brands. And the third thing they can consider is opening stores with a smaller footprint and less inventory, but with more customization.

Science The systemic knowledge of the world gained through observation and experimentation.

Most large CPG players are really good at top down research.

They can see where there is a market gap, and can do all the right formulations to get distribution and awareness for their products. But when you are in a world that is much more bottom up than top down, you have to start at the opposite point with the customer journey.

What does a guy shopping for razors really want? He wants a company to help solve the particular problem he has with shaving. Wandering into a store and trying to figure out what incarnation of razors he needs, and at what price, not to mention having to find someone to unlock the shelf once he decides, is not an optimized experience. These kinds of observations let the new razor companies disrupt and dislodge the giants of the industry. Instead of sending guys on a wild goose chase, they send them a box in the mail with exactly what they need.

Benefits Beyond Retail A lot of what is happening in retail now is not only better for the entrepreneur and the end customer but better for the world in general. Without taking too much of a high and mighty view, if you have a company like Smile Direct that is giving people access to dental care at a price they are able to pay, or one like Plus Ultra, whose bamboo toothbrushes have prevented tons of plastic from entering landfills and oceans, you have a benefit for the greater good. These kinds of benefits are a direct result of the DNA that is built into these new retailers, and into the future of retail itself.

David Bell is Co-founder and President of Idea Farm Ventures, a New York City-based venture studio created to catalyze the next generation of outstanding consumer lifestyle brands. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and was a researcher and early investor in many iconic new economy companies including Bonobos, Harry’s, and Warby Parker. He speaks frequently on business model innovation in the digital economy.

Oscars Economics: Does Winning Mean a Windfall?

By Knowledge@Wharton

The Academy Awards — or “Oscars” — is arguably one of the most important ceremonies in the movie industry. This year’s contenders include one of 2018’s blockbusters, Black Panther — a first for the Marvel franchise and an unusual pick for the Academy. It also includes another unusual entry: The Netflix film Roma — a black and white Spanish language movie by director Alfonso Cuaron — is the first film produced by the streaming service to be nominated for an Academy Award.

Winning an Oscar is a great honor for a film, actor, director or those working behind the camera. But is there a measurable financial benefit to taking home a gold statue, or even being nominated for the award? The Knowledge@Wharton radio show on Sirius XM invited two experts to discuss that question: Jehoshua (Josh) Eliashberg is a Wharton marketing professor, and S. Abraham (Avri) Ravid is a professor of finance and chairman of the finance department at Yeshiva University’s Syms School of Business.

According to Eliashberg, when measuring the financial benefit of the Oscars, “we need to distinguish between two time periods” — the period from the nomination up until the awards ceremony, and the time following the announcement of the winners. “According to the data, it is the nomination that drives the box office more than the actual winning of the movie,” he said.

“Certainly, there is a benefit to being nominated and winning the award,” Ravid noted. “It doesn’t mean it’s going to be a blockbuster … but it does give you a bump.” There are followon effects, too, according to Ravid: Studios do well in hiring award-winning writers and directors, but not so much awardwinning actors. “There’s no evidence that [Oscar-winning actors] contribute” to a film’s bottom line. However, “if you do win an award as an actor, your salary goes up.”

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: Is there really a financial benefit for anyone who wins an Oscar?

Abraham Ravid: What we have found in the research that we’ve done over the last two decades is that Academy Award winners really do not move the financial needle in terms of success of movies. In other words, if you wait and see who is winning, and you hire them, there is really no statistical correlation between the success of the films that

they participate in and these winnings. So, it really doesn’t pay to hire actors.

The other thing we have found is that what really determines success of movies is the director and the writer, to a much greater extent. If you look at the Academy Awards, it’s extremely rare that a movie would win without the director and/or the writer being nominated. And it’s quite possible that they win without actors being nominated. That really agrees with the gist of a lot of the research that we have done.

Jehoshua Eliashberg: I basically agree with Avri, but you have two different researchers. We looked at two different data sets and analyzed them somewhat differently. From the work that I’ve done, and from what I’ve seen others doing, it’s mainly the screenplay that predicts the Oscar winning. I don’t think I’ve seen enough evidence supporting the director, but I do agree on the writer or the screenplay.

In terms of the profitability of the movie, I think we have also to distinguish here between two time periods: The time that the movie is nominated to the Oscar, all the way to the Oscar event, and the time that the winners are announced. From the data that I’ve seen, it is the nomination that gives rise to the box office, more than the actual winning of the movie.

Knowledge@Wharton: Many of the nominated films were in theaters for some time before the announcement, so they’ve already built up a certain economic impact. After the awards, is there a benefit from the re-release or release to other formats?

Ravid: Certainly, there is a benefit to being nominated and winning the award. It doesn’t mean that it’s going to be a blockbuster. There are quite a few films that won the Academy Awards and never became blockbusters, but it does give you a bump. What I was saying earlier is that if you do win the award for being an actor, director or screenwriter, then the research shows that there is a different path. In other words, if you’re a studio, you’re much better off hiring the director or the writer, rather than the actors. The actors could be very good, but they could be very bad. There is no evidence to show that they contribute to the film. So, the winning does not make a big deal.

The only thing that I would say is that if you do win the

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25 Academy Award and you’re an actor, your salary goes up.

It doesn’t mean that the film will succeed, but the salary goes up. Regarding the directing, we do have just-published research and ongoing research that shows that experienced directors make a huge difference in terms of the success of their films.

Let me just say one more thing about the director. There have been a lot of conversations about women, and we see that this year there are no women directors nominated. We have an ongoing research agenda dealing with this issue, trying to see if there is any discrimination in Hollywood. What was interesting so far — we haven’t done all the data analysis — is that the number of women who enter the profession is very low. That’s really a big, big problem that we see in that sense.

Eliashberg: If you look at the nominees, the movie Bohemian Rhapsody has made quite a bit of money, I believe around $200 million. A Star Is Born also made quite a bit of money, also around $200 million. I’m not sure how much of a gain they will have as a result of winning the Oscar. But if you look at a movie such as Green Book that has not made that much money, this is the one that is likely to benefit most if it wins the Oscar.

Knowledge@Wharton: Avri, do you agree that a film like Green Book can get a boost after an Oscar win?

Ravid: I think that Josh is right, that movies that have made a lot of money cannot make a lot more money. But again, it’s not clear that a movie that hasn’t made a lot of money and doesn’t have a lot of audience will get a lot more after winning the Academy Award. I don’t think it changes the trajectory dramatically, but it could make a difference.

Knowledge@Wharton: Black Panther has made more than $1 billion globally and is part of the very successful Marvel Comics franchise. It’s nominated for a number of awards, including best picture. What more will it gain if it wins?

Eliashberg: Well, I don’t think it will gain in terms of financial benefit, in terms of adding more to the box office. It is also quite unusual, I think, that a movie based on a franchise is making it to the Oscar nominees. Based on data that we have and historical behavior, I don’t think it has a very high chance of winning the Oscar. I don’t think franchise-based movies have a high probability of winning the Oscar.

Ravid: It will be a surprise if it wins. First of all, blockbusters haven’t won, and that’s why the Academy tried this ill-fated “popular” award, which they canceled very quickly. There is actually only one really big blockbuster that won, which was Titanic. The other thing is, in Black Panther, neither the director nor the writer is nominated. So, it will be a big surprise.

Knowledge@Wharton: Netflix and Amazon have had a huge impact on the movie industry, Can you talk a little bit about that in the context of the Oscars?

Ravid: Roma is a very interesting case. We don’t know how much money it made — probably not that much in theaters. They just put it out in theaters so it would qualify for the Academy Awards. It’s nominated for best film and

best foreign film. I think Netflix wants to become a studio, like all the other studios. I think the big effect of Netflix and organizations like that is the release windows have been much shortened. The whole idea of release windows, which used to be part of the industry for many years, has practically disappeared as movies are being released internationally and in the U.S. at the same time, and sometimes streaming at the same time. So, they are changing the business model in many ways.

Eliashberg: Netflix is also doing a hell of a job finding local producers in different countries and providing them with financial support to develop stories that are locally appealing and at the same time have some global appeal. They have offices in Spain, they have offices in Japan, they have offices in other countries in Asia. Their philosophy and strategy is to identify local storytellers that will enhance their portfolio of movies. I think that’s another big change in the way that movies used to be produced in the past.

Knowledge@Wharton: Does this signal a change in how films could be nominated in the future, that perhaps they will never have to be released in theaters to be considered for an Oscar?

Eliashberg: That’s quite possible. It’s quite possible that in the future, movies will be more and more nominated either without showing it in the theater or, as Avri mentioned, when they are shown simultaneously in the theater as well as on the Netflix network.

Ravid: Yes, I completely agree. I think there are several ways in which the Academy is sticking to tradition, and they might want to change. There is also a lot of talk about shortening the Academy Award telecast and putting some of these awards of less interest — for example, the ones for shorts and other types of behind-the-camera awards — out of the telecast. But there’s a lot of resistance, and the Academy seems to be very traditional in the way it does things.

But I agree with Josh in what they could include in addition to movies that are theatrically released. As we know, the change hasn’t started today. If we look even 20 years ago, the U.S. theatrical release was the minority — less money in terms of the revenues. Now, it’s still the same way. So, the Academy might want to reconsider how they define a feature film that could be nominated.

Knowledge@Wharton: Because of the uncertainty of the film’s success, will it be important to watch what happens if Roma takes the Oscar?

Ravid: I’m sure it will do reasonably well. The other problem is that Netflix doesn’t release information, which is not very good for us as researchers. My first paper 20 years ago in this industry showed that sequels and franchises were the best way to go. The Academy, on the other hand, is trying to encourage original works. That’s why there has been a disconnect between Oscar-winning movies and popular movies. The nomination of Black Panther is a unique nomination. I think it would be really interesting to see, going back to what Josh said about the data, whether they can actually produce original films that will also be popular, rather than going with the endless franchises and sequels, which unfortunately are the most lucrative types of films.

How Marketing Leaders Can Thrive Amidst “Tectonic” Shifts in Expectations FOUR EXPERTS DISCUSS CMOS’ UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY TO DRIVE GROWTH AND COLLABORATION ACROSS THEIR COMPANIES.

By Fred Schmalz, Editor of Kellogg Insight.

BASED ON INSIGHTS FROM: Stengel

the conversation and the expectations of the work they do with companies. Clients are more self-sufficient, so customer engagement has been expanded to be omnipresent.

Over the last decade, the roles of the marketing team and chief marketing officer have undergone fundamental transformation. As a result, marketing leaders are undertaking expansive, nuanced roles that require great agility.

Stengel: And the end consumer has changed dramatically.

People are shopping differently, getting information differently, being affected by news differently—and most companies are struggling to keep up with that.

Four marketing experts on Kellogg’s faculty—Jim Stengel, former global marketing officer at Procter & Gamble, Diane Brink, former CMO for global technology services at IBM, Eric Leininger, former corporate senior vice president at McDonald’s Corporation, and professor of marketing strategy Gregory Carpenter—discuss the ways current trends are remaking companies, brands, and marketing careers.

Eric Leininger: To add to that, there are two topics that I think are really increasing in intensity for marketing leaders.

The first is what I would refer to as tectonic channel shifts, particularly in b2b. The b2b marketing department role is really being changed by a disruption from the traditional sales-driven channel focus—where marketing was in a support role—to digital, automated capabilities.

Gregory Carpenter | Eric Leininger | Diane Brink | Jim

Jim Stengel: One of the trends I’m seeing is that CMOs and senior marketing leaders are going way beyond the old definition of the marketing function. They’re leading a repositioning of companies. They’re working on the culture.

They’re getting everyone across functions on board, on the purpose of their company and what that means to everyone’s daily work.

Diane Brink: While brand building is still essential, there is an expectation on: Where are the new sources of revenue? How can I become deeper ingrained in my existing customers? How can I acquire new customers? It’s all about driving growth.

The aspect of marketing that hasn’t changed is the function’s understanding of the customer, the marketplace, and the competition. And I think that since marketing leaders are uniquely positioned to offer up those insights, there’s an expectation that new ideas and new ways to perform will come out of marketing departments’ efforts.

Another aspect is that clients are doing a lot more to drive

Marketing people also need to take on explicitly—in ways that may have been more implicit in the past—responsibility for customer experience. Companies need to realign their workflows so that a customer has a more consistent experience with the brand across channels. This is a lot easier to say that it is to do! You’ve got to get the organization working horizontally instead of vertically and educate so many more people about the experience you want the customer to have with your company.

Brink: Marketing is the one function that can knit the various functions together in an enterprise. How many times have you been around the table and you were orchestrating the conversations between sales, finance, general management, product development, right? Many times, it’s the CMO who’s facilitating that end-to-end alignment for the enterprise’s success. I believe that’s going to continue to be an essential part of the CMO’s role.

Greg Carpenter: There used to be so many more people who were under the direct control of the CEO, and now

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it’s people outside the organization you have to inspire as well as inside. I think of Steve Jobs and the app developers: 60,000 employees and 400,000 developers, which suggest that the CEO must inspire people outside the organization in addition to leading the formal organization. Developers are smart people who can do lots of things with their time. Is that task of inspiring people outside the organization falling to CMOs too?

Stengel: As a CMO, I think your people have to believe in it and internalize it, understand their role and be able to talk about it in their own language. We live in a frenemy world—we’re working with so many people that we’re also competing with, and I think it’s important they all understand what you’re trying to do: your purpose, your meaning, your differentiators. I recently read a PWC study that showed that nearly 30 percent of CEOs are considering or are working with competitors. Think Microsoft and Dell, Amazon and Unilever, WPP and Google.

Brink: To build on that, the collaboration that’s required across functions by the CMO is incredibly intense. Take ecommerce: the conversations that CMOs are having now with product management and how new offerings are designed to be able to seamlessly work through digital channels is a whole different set of conversations than were had in the past. Or conversations with the CFO on new types of metrics as you look at digital engagement.

Stengel: I was with the CMO of a global beverage company recently. And the CMO laid out the capabilities they needed to build for the future. Think about these versus traditional marketing skills: the first one was ecommerce leadership, the second one was digital storytelling, then agile innovation, agile data, service capability, and venture capital capabilities.

I mean, geez.

Carpenter: Can you talk about the venture capital capabilities? That seems a little bit unusual. The others seem more apparent or obvious.

Stengel: Everyone has some method or system to work with startups. They realize their organizations are not that great at creating new value, and they have to be better at acting like venture capitalists. That means having a wide-swath approach to ideas that are relevant for their company, how to source them, how to find them, how to invest small amounts of money to see if they’re proving out.

You’re hard-pressed to find a legacy company that doesn’t have some sort of active venture capital–like operation.

And good CMOs are in the middle of that because they’re responsible for the growth of the company.

Interestingly enough, GE, which is a company that faces many challenges, has a very aggressive venture program with more than 100 companies they’ve invested in, partnered with. We may see GE turn around based on these relationships they’ve built through GE ventures. And they recently made the GE ventures head, Sue Siegel, Chief Innovation Officer for GE. Leininger: This calls out some old paradigms that are still in place and that may be counterproductive. One is the b2b versus b2c paradigm—it’s just not as useful as it used to be.

People like Jim at P&G and Diane at IBM and the leaders at McDonald’s, we weren’t just thinking about b2b and b2c, we were thinking about B to G: business to government; B to E:

business to employees; and B to S: business to stakeholders.

This requires much more integrated thinking and planning and internal orchestration than how those functions were managed in the past.

Brink: One of the leadership imperatives that CMOs today need to embrace and demonstrate is getting comfortable with the uncomfortable and having the ability to employ agile methods to think about speed versus perfection and creating environments and cultures that are open and curious versus planned and static.

At IBM, in our digital marketing work, we would have two weeks spurts where we would try different things, and if something failed, we would characterize it as “fail fast and move on.” We saw no downside to making a mistake.

If something was slightly off-brand, we would take that, integrate it into our learning, and apply it in our next round.

It was quite uncomfortable. It wasn’t the traditional planning process where you have 6- or even 12-month market plans.

You were literally evolving what you were going to do every two weeks.

Carpenter: All of you describe the job as much more complex: it’s much broader, it involves these cross-functions, it involves more control outside the organization, it involves dealing with ambiguity and change. So it seems like the person who would do this is really a very different sort of person with different characteristics than would have been valued 20 years ago.

Leininger: You see many fewer people who came up one organization, and many more who made strategic moves across companies, across industries. Relative to 20 years ago, it’s more global in scope. Global capability is now practically assumed, as opposed to being a differentiating capability for candidates in the past. The requirements that have changed least are operating experience with profit and loss responsibility, enterprise-wide general management orientation, and leadership skills.

Stengel: When I was at P&G years ago, there was a very deliberate career path: get out of your own country, do learning assignments in other functions, go spend time on the retail customer teams. It was meant to open up your mind, give you different experiences, get you out of your comfort zone by being in a different culture. And I think that more thought has to be given to the capabilities that marketing departments and CMOs want to build now, and structure career paths around that.

Leininger: When I talk to people about their careers now, I say, go someplace where you’re going to get that strategic discipline, someplace that knows how to move fast and where the modern marketing capabilities are fully in place.

I feel like that’s good advice, but it also puts a lot of burden on the person thinking about their career to go find those places, because it’s not as simple as saying, “seven years at Procter & Gamble and you’re golden.” We used to be able to sort more by company, and now we’re telling people, “here’s what you need to go look for.”

Brink: It means being able to get comfortable with the fact that there isn’t a cookie-cutter career path that you’re going to follow or a cookie-cutter job description. The CMO role will continue to evolve and transform—accept that and embrace it.

‘Still in its infancy’: Despite advancements, AI adoption for media buying remains low

By Ilyse Liffreing

Artificial intelligence for media buying remains a far-off dream.

“More marketers are using AI for media, but more is a relatively low bar when very few if any marketers were using AI for media as recently as two to three years ago,” said Brian Krick, evp of global media planning at WPP GroupM’s Essence. “It’s still in its infancy.” Krick said most of Essence’s clients are still learning about AI through pilot programs or research.

In media buying, AI is a forecasting process that analyzes massive amounts of consumer data and campaign content to measure campaign performance, allowing marketers to redirect budget toward ad placements that are performing the best. AI also helps marketers diminish their cost-peracquisition while generating higher-quality leads by working to find the right match of images, videos, headlines and callsto-action in campaign materials that get viewers to convert.

Digiday research has found that marketers don’t understand AI well, with roughly half of the 37 marketers surveyed ranking their company’s understanding of AI as a C on a grade scale from A to F. It can take many forms. Agency ForwardPMX used AI to process a client’s large online product catalog so it could recommend better keywords for search bidding. Krick said that for Google, an Essence client, the agency uses AI to analyze data sets for patterns to identify more valuable customers. What once took multiple weeks across a billion records of app activity, ad exposure and site visits, becomes only a weekly endeavor. It can then use those patterns to better place ads for Google and on behalf of Google clients.

Jesse Brewer, head of demand sales and operations at technology vendor BounceX, said that, overall, marketers continue to consider AI as more of an innovation tactic than a core part of their media-buying practices, with the main use so far being improved targeting for programmatic ads.

According to Brewer, out of 155 brands it works with, 29 are adopting AI in any meaningful way.

And yet, AI media buying capabilities have grown tremendously in the past year. Namely, AI platforms started allowing DSP access about a year or so ago, which opens up analyzing multiple campaigns and different types of campaigns at once.

When The Tombras Group launched its AI offering in October 2017, it could only overlay its AI platform over Facebook or Google data to measure and optimize direct-response campaigns. Now, a little more than a year later, there can be DSP connectivity. The Tombras Group uses multiple AI platforms for media planning and buying, matching the best technology to clients’ campaign needs. This allows brands to run multiple types of campaigns, whether it’s a brand awareness play or a direct-response ad, on top of

each other and let AI analyze them for optimization. This can also incorporate types of creative like premium video, audio, native and OTT. “Now there’s almost nothing in the digital space that you can’t run without an AI brain over the top,” said Kevin VanValkenburgh, chief connections officer at The Tombras Group.

The Tombras Group has five clients that are currently working with the agency to incorporate AI into their media buying.

While the agency has been selective about choosing which clients to work with around AI, VanValkenburgh admitted that the level of adoption is not yet there.

Tombras’ client Orangetheory began using AI to make its media buying more efficient in December 2017, and has since decreased its cost-per-lead from $20 to $8, with those leads becoming more high-quality.

“We open a studio just about every day, so a generation of high-quality digital leads helps get our studios a solid member base quickly as they open,” Kevin Keith, chief brand officer of Orangetheory told Digiday.

Volkswagen has used AI to forecast ad spend decisions. The car company told Digiday it has increased its car orders during certain campaigns by as high as 20 percent.

There are definitely hurdles for AI adoption. VanValkenburgh said ad buyers don’t want to be replaced. “Fear from the people who are actually doing the job is very real because their immediate notion is that, boy, there’s a machine that does this, what am I going to do?” It’s a fear that is understandable, he said, but not altogether true. “It’s not like you just throw this stuff up into the AI platform and it starts running and it manages itself. You have to give it human guidance, especially from a strategic perspective.”

There’s also a lot of confusion that still exists. Krick said the industry doesn’t have a stable cost structure for the technology yet — while some solutions are free, others ask for 10 percent of media spend. Krick also said most vendors do not define their offerings correctly.

“Too often, the answer to ‘what does your AI tool do?’ is ‘whatever you want it to do,’” he said.

But the biggest hurdle comes down to the accuracy of consumer data to begin with. For many marketers, their data is not in fair-enough shape to be fed to AI anyway. Brewer said a lot of his clients are focusing first on improving their identification capabilities. Before marketers can even think about using AI, he said, they have to make sure that the technology they use to match cookies or other IDs back to individual consumers is accurate. Otherwise, AI is pointless.

“You can’t expect AI to dramatically improve targeting when the initial truth set it’s basing those targeting decisions off of is questionable or incomplete,” said Brewer.

STRIVING STRATEGICALLY MEETINGS ARE A MANAGER’S MEDIUM. By strivingstrategically.com

Imagine yourself as a painter. Specifically oil on canvas. You do landscapes, portraits, abstract art. All the styles. You work at this beautiful craft daily and produce art that gets better with time.

A meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather using the time spent in them as efficiently as possible.

Sounds lovely, right?

Bad Managers = Bad Meetings

Now stretch your imagination and consider a scenario where society doesn’t paintings. Imagine a world where we speak negatively about paintings at every turn with statements like “No one likes paintings” and “I avoid paintings however I can”.

No one likes meetings. I get it. And there is good reason to not like them. But to Andy’s point, meetings are the medium of a manager’s work. So the only way a manager can be effective at their craft is through the quality of their meetings.

As a painter, I imagine this would be cause for crisis. No one likes paintings? The craft I dedicate myself to? People avoid the work I do?

Such a crisis might make you stop painting altogether. Or scale back the effort, anyway. In fact, I think it would take a tremendous amount of discipline and commitment to continue the work if the craft, in its entirety, was that disliked.

This strange scenario is what I think about every time I read the following from our featured book, High Output Management. Here’s a line from our author, the great Andrew ‘Andy’ S. Grove:

You can’t be a great painter without having great command of the medium. And while a bad paintings are harmless and even humorous, a bad meeting is a certifiable waste of many, many people’s time.

Jason Fried, Founder and CEO at Basecamp, has written a lot about this and his TED talk is a great place to start understanding his point of view. There are a lot of other TED talks on the topic and a great summary article to study further. There’s also a fine book by Patrick Lencioni that we’ll cover some day.

All of which is to say that the world is well-aware of the problem and offers many ways to fix it. And what’s great

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about this is that a fix, of any kind, has tremendous upside.

In fact, if there was one superpower that a manager must possess in the most universal sense, this is probably it. Yes, as stated in yesterday’s article, you must be a great teacher and coach. You must also be capable of designing and maintaining a terrific work environment. But how does one do those things? Through meetings.

So again, Andy’s idea of “meetings as the medium” is quite important here. Let’s briefly consider how to make them better.

The Anatomy of Meetings Andy categorizes the meetings he held at Intel as either “process-oriented” or “mission-oriented”. Process-oriented is the most common meeting type and the one that most people consider to be tedious and boring. As Jason Fried points out in many instances, including here, these meetings can be replaced with an equally-effective surrogate: software like Basecamp.

Before you go there, though, understand the framework of these meetings. On the process-oriented side, Andy points to three core meetings that occur on a regular basis: At Intel we use three kinds of process-oriented meetings: the one-on-one, the staff meeting, and the operation review.

To make the most useful article possible, I can’t cover all three of these meeting types. Instead, I’ll focus on the oneon-one. It seems obvious enough. A supervisor meets with an employee and they talk about work. And presumably talk about Life. And Living. And if it’s a slow week, they move quickly into gossip and grievances. There is seldom, if ever, an agenda because this is a more “intimate” and “relaxed” setting. There is no ideal state. What is a great one-onone supposed to look like? And who asked for this meeting anyway? Who is responsible here?

How To Have A Great One-On-One Meeting I think Andy’s book, written in 1995, might be the first real instance where someone formally lays out a sensible logic for what the one-on-one is supposed to be. He writes: Its main purpose is mutual teaching and exchange of information. By talking about specific problems and situations, the supervisor teaches the subordinate his skills and know-how, and suggests ways to approach things. At the same time, the subordinate provides the supervisor with detailed information about what he is doing and what he is concerned about.

That sounds right. But what really helps is that Andy formalized a set of tactics to make these meetings, this use of the medium, as effective as possible. This includes the following from our author:

The one-on-one is the subordinate’s meeting. The agenda and tone is set by him.

I love this. It completely reversed my thinking and use of the

one-on-one. Before this book, I set the tone of these meetings and had staff come to my office. I always made sure to let them start the meeting with anything on their mind. But it wasn’t their meeting. It was mine. So I always dominated the meeting with what I wanted. And what I wanted typically was different from what they, the subordinate, needed.

Today, I meet staff at their office. Or wherever else they would like to meet. And we go with their agenda. I do usually have something to convey but I wait for the time that suits them.

This shift has really helped everyone.

But it comes with renewed expectations and necessary actions. As Andy explains, [The subordinate] should be asked to prepare an outline, which is very important because it forces him to think through in advance all of the issues and points he plans to raise.

Moreover, with an outline, the supervisor knows at the outset what is to be covered and can therefore help to set the pace of the meeting according to the “meatiness” of the items on the agenda.

This is a test. Call it an outline. Call it an agenda. Whatever the title, if there is no document describing the focal points of discussion and desired outcomes, delivered prior to the meeting, there should be no meeting. Conducting an improv session for an hour is not an ideal use of work time.

This requires discipline. This requires time. This requires … less meetings. After all, Andy’s clear standard is centered on a quality-first approach. Also, this is where the supervisor truly does hand over control of the meeting to their subordinate.

My old way of thinking was that I, the supervisor, should craft that agenda. Because it was my meeting. Or it was “our” meeting and, in the instance of shared responsibility, I would carry the load. Which is silly because any meeting that has shared responsibility—“this is our time”—is a meeting devoid of accountability. If it’s everyone’s job, it’s no one’s job.

So someone must be responsible, must have ownership, and as Andy explains, that person must build the outline. In this case, for the one-on-one, it’s the subordinate.

I struggle with this at times because the outline will often not reflect what I want to discuss. This, of course, is the entire point. It’s not my meeting. So the subordinate’s outline is a defensive move: having them craft it preserves their ownership.

From this outline, the meeting commences. Information is exchanged, lessons imparted, agreements forged, progress made. Hooray. But there is a handful of tactics from our author that I think really helps ensure that the meeting is productive. I’ll offer them in brief summary below: 1. Assure parties have a copy of the outline and take notes on it. Want to get on the same page?

Start by literally sharing copies of the same page. And write on it. The act of writing things down is akin to a commitment.

1. Use a “hold” file. As important but non-urgent issues arise in the conversation, save them for the next meeting.

1. Raise heavy issues at the start. Andy points to

an all-too-common issue in one-on-one meetings: the “zinger”. There are times an employee has some deeper concerns but they wait until the very last minute to raise it, giving neither party the time to really unpack the item and thus pushing it into a “hold” file for later conversation.

This is not helpful. So it’s critical that everyone feels comfortable, perhaps even required, to put those issues at the forefront of the outline.

1. Schedule one-on-ones on a rolling basis. I like this a lot. I typically have these as recurring meetings, hard-coded into the schedule every two weeks. That might seem like a good idea. But I’m becoming increasingly suspicious of such meetings. For one, you often miss these meetings when they fall on holidays or vacation.

Think about that for a second.

If a meeting is cancelled due to mere coincidence, then it was probably only scheduled by mere coincidence.

For another, anything preprogrammed in this fashion becomes rote. All context is lost and you’re now just going through the motions. Going through the motions of a Tai Chi routine makes a lot of sense. It make zero sense with meetings. This is what has gotten so many managers, myself included, in trouble. You don’t meet to meet. So set these one-on-ones on a rolling basis. You’ll maintain the default interval, I’m sure. Maybe you have one-on-ones every two weeks. Go ahead! Do it until things change. Keep the routine until there’s so much going on that you decide you need to shake it up and meet sooner (or later) for that circumstance.

You get the idea. The meeting schedule becomes more intentional and deliberate and thus more useful when done on a rolling basis.

Or Just Abolish One-On-Ones Altogether One of the best things that Jason Fried and others have offered us is a third way. To have a meeting or not have a meeting.

That used to be the question. Today, tools like Basecamp can help with a whole other approach. Old technologies can help, too. Such as that thing we call a telephone. Maybe the faceto-face isn’t as important. Maybe the whole conversation can

be taken care of with a few kilobytes of text. Or, again, a phone call.

Maybe. But just remember the purpose of the one-on-one as our author defines it: Its main purpose is mutual teaching and exchange of information.

If that’s the destination, the path we take to get there is the strategy. A good strategy probably gets you there in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of drag. That strategy includes a whole host of other tactics like, again, Basecamp. Or Slack. Or email. Memos. Reports. Whatever.

Can those work just as well? I don’t know. An experiment is in order. I’d like to see what happens when we try Grove’s beautiful technique for three months. I’d like to then cancel all one-on-ones for the next three months and switch to these other methods. Other than time, what is gained by not having these meetings? What is lost?

Does the mutual teaching and exchange of information continue?

It must in some ways. Or else you’d have failure. But if quality is the concern, and you want the exchange to be the very best it can be for the sake of effective teaching and understanding, I feel pretty sure the one-on-ones should resume face-toface.

I could be wrong, of course. Hence the experiment.

One thing is clear, though: a mediocre meeting is worse than no meeting at all. So the real determining factor in such an experiment is whether or not we, as managers, can really stick to the formula Andy has built. That takes real discipline.

The second approach with use of Slack and Basecamp and Trello? I find those to be much easier. Actual meetings require great managers using their medium appropriately.

Can we do that consistently? I’m not sure. But this book and its methods definitely help. If we can’t use this wisdom appropriately, I’ll be the first to welcome a bit more technological disruption.

Waiting is part of everyday life. We wait for dishes to be served at a restaurant, for products to be delivered to our homes, for web pages to load, and so on. But, in general, we don’t like waiting.

Companies know that (perceived) long wait times often lead to lowered consumer satisfaction, so they try to reduce waiting or make the time pass quickly and pleasantly. For example, a restaurant can offer self-service options to let their customers make orders themselves, which can reduce the wait time substantially. Alternately, firms can provide free Wi-Fi access to their customers to make the wait time at businesses more bearable. But sometimes wait times can’t be shortened, so companies would benefit from finding ways to make consumers more patient.

Previous research has pointed to numerous situational factors that can influence consumer patience. For example, one study showed how a lighter color (e.g., blue) may lead consumers to think that web pages load more quickly, and another study found that seeing a fast-food logo can make people value time efficiency and instant gratification in different situations. Yet there’s much to study about how emotions can affect patience. My work, which has largely focused on the effects of consumer emotions, led me to investigate the role of nostalgia, a sentimental longing for the past, on consumer patience.

In eight studies my colleagues and I recently conducted on U.S. and Asian participants (1,227 in total), we explored the role of nostalgia on consumers’ patience. We found that inducing feelings of nostalgia can help alleviate the negative effect of waiting — once consumers are made to feel nostalgia, they become more patient and feel that they’re not waiting as long.

For example, in one of the experiments we conducted, we approached patrons who had been waiting for 10–20 minutes to be seated at a restaurant. Ninety respondents who agreed to participate in a short survey were given a file folder containing a questionnaire on the right and a piece of gray paper on the left. For our nostalgia condition group, people saw the phrase “Nostalgia — Memories of our good old days” written in the middle of the gray paper, whereas in our control condition there was nothing on the paper. In the questionnaire, we asked patrons to estimate how many minutes they had been waiting to be seated. The results show that, on average, patrons who had been exposed to the nostalgia stimulus estimated that they had waited for 5.80 minutes, less than what those who had not been exposed to the phrase said (8.33 minutes).

In another experiment, we asked 80 undergraduate students to either recall a past event that they tend to feel nostalgic about (this was our nostalgia condition) or a typical day (our control condition). Afterward, we told participants that they could participate in a lucky draw lottery and could choose one of two rewards if they won. One reward was a payment of about $14 that could be collected immediately, and the other was a payment of about $22 that could only be collected one month later. The results showed that students who were asked to recall a nostalgic event were more likely to choose the larger, delayed reward (93%), reflecting a greater willingness to wait, than control participants were (65%).

We observed similar results across our other studies, using different measures of consumer patience, including people’s feelings of patience in waiting for a webpage to load and their preferences for expedited versus standard shipping methods. Nostalgic participants indicated that they felt more patient while waiting for a service and were also less likely to choose the expedited delivery method.

Why? But why do feelings of nostalgia make consumers become more patient? We believe it is mainly driven by the unique experience of recalling a cherished event. Nostalgia is often induced by someone remembering a favorite experience that is unlikely to recur. Most nostalgic episodes comprise elements of love and joy and typically involve interactions between an individual and family members, friends, or romantic partners. Knowing that the positive experience won’t happen again motivates individuals to savor their memory of the experience and prolong their reminiscence. This, in turn, can lead someone to prolong other experiences that they encounter later, consequently increasing their tolerance for waiting in these situations.

There are alternative explanations for our findings. For example, perhaps people become more patient after feeling nostalgic because that makes them relaxed or puts them in a positive mood. However, we ruled out these explanations by including an “exciting nostalgia” group, in which participants were asked to recall an exciting event that made them feel nostalgic; we found a similar effect in this group.

Our findings suggest that when consumers incidentally feel nostalgic, they may become more patient in terms of waiting for a product or service. Marketers can therefore seek to decrease negative reactions that result from a long waiting time by trying to evoke nostalgia among customers whom they expect will have to wait for something.

For example, a restaurant with long lines of customers waiting may benefit by playing nostalgia-inducing background music. Similarly, a telecommunications company that takes a long time to deliver new models of cell phones may benefit from applying a nostalgic theme (e.g., using vintage design) in the promotion campaign in order to alleviate the negative outcomes of waiting. In sum, companies shouldn’t try to make customers wait for things, but because waiting is inevitable, they can at least try to minimize the negative effects.

How to Create Successful Ad Campaigns for Social Stories EXECUTIVES FROM FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM AND SNAPCHAT SHARE BEST PRACTICES

By Debra Aho Williamson

ocial behaviors are shifting to stories—a combination of images, videos, graphics and text that last 24 hours and then disappear.

If you think of the feed as social media v1.0, stories represent the next generation. And because stories are full-screen, mobile and easy to watch, they have the potential to make social media fun again.

“We see a clear shift to stories as a communication format and how people engage and interact on our platform,” said Maria Smith, product director at Facebook. “It’s about the day-to-day sharing, more so than other important moments.”

As more consumers gravitate toward stories, marketers are catching up. eMarketer’s Debra Aho Williamson spoke with executives from Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram about why stories are so popular right now, and how advertisers should be incorporating them into their marketing efforts.

How can stories help marketers achieve their objectives?

Jim Squires, head of business and media at Instagram: There’s this view that stories are more of a branding medium vs. a direct-response vehicle. We see strong results across all the different objectives. These ads are full-screen, immersive and very involved. Even though people are moving fast [through the ads], they really draw you in.

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Maria Smith, product director at Facebook: Our hypothesis was that stories would be much more natural for broad objectives or top of funnel. But what we’re finding out is that for direct-response objectives—for advertisers who want to showcase or demo their products and drive traffic to those products or app installs—it works really well. We’ve seen that we can drive results across the board.

What are best practices for advertising in stories on each platform?

Jeff Miller, global head of creative strategy at Snapchat: Snap Ads are a single impression, so your goal is to be focused on a singular message and very clear from the first frame. You should also make sure your value proposition is evident, so the consumer viewing that impression clearly understands what’s being advertised.

In addition, be conscious of sound design. On average more than 60% of Snap Ads are watched with audio on, so marketers should build for sound on, not for sound off.

Squires: Once you’re using Instagram Stories, make sure they’re used holistically across the Instagram experience and probably across the larger Facebook experience as well. The marketers that I see doing it the best are using Stories, Feed, their profile, the shopping features and Direct across the Instagram experience. They have a consistent aesthetic, but they know that people are using them slightly differently. So they are gearing their messaging and creative accordingly.

How should advertisers think about using the feed and stories together?

Squires: I would not advocate that you turn off feed and start doing stories. They’re complementary canvases, and

you don’t have to use completely different creative. You can take your feed creative and start moving it into stories and see the results. You can also take your vertical creative in stories and move that back into the feed.

Smith: A full-screen, immersive ad feels totally native in stories, whereas in the feed, you need to customize your ad and make it feel native. In stories, you can immerse a user without the person thinking, “you’ve just taken over my space,” in the same way they might if you were doing that in feed.

Stories are vertical, and that’s new for some advertisers. How can marketers create story ads if they don’t have vertical creative?

Smith: Our team worked hard to make it easy. The best thing would be for advertisers to optimize their ad for each placement, but we have a lot of small businesses on our platform, and even top advertisers don’t always do that. So we invested a lot in technology. We take [feed] ad assets and automatically make them full screen. Our technology picks the best colors from the ad and adds a background from those colors. It picks the ad copy and automatically puts it under the creative and adjusts it dynamically to perform better. All the advertiser has to do is to select the placements they want, and our system optimizes delivery for the best outcome.

Miller: In the past year, we’ve done everything to simplify the process for advertisers. We changed augmented reality from something we had to build ourselves into a democratized tool through our lens studio. And about a year ago, we introduced our Snap publisher tool, where people can create their own ads for free in minutes.

Cover Story: Adtech Won’t Fix Ad Fraud Because It Is Too Lucrative, Say Specialists

By Andrew Birmingham

Every hour of every day a million little crimes are committed online. And every time it happens, hundreds of legitimate businesses all over the world, with boards and shareholders and mission statements — some of them publicly listed — put the proceeds of those crimes in their own pockets. They do so knowingly.

Some people might consider it extraordinary that technology businesses — businesses that claim they can discern the intent of one buyer from a billion in milliseconds — somehow can’t recognise when millions of ads a month are served to a single unique user ID in, for instance, Belarus or China.

And, say ad fraud researchers, those companies will not change until financial incentives are removed or the cost of their negligence becomes impossible to sustain.

Vast, unimaginable criminality Fraud, like the poor, will always be with us. So it’s a question of tolerance. Brands — and ultimately consumers — are now paying handily for the tolerance that informed the first two decades of the adtech industry’s evolution.

Online advertising fraud is a huge problem. And it is getting worse, according to studies, even as some in the adtech industry claim it is getting better.

Juniper Research, for instance, says the cost of ad fraud to brands will reach $US44 billion by 2022. That would make it the second-largest black market in the world. Little wonder, then, that law enforcement is apparently taking notice.

Reports from the US last week say the Federal Bureau of Investigation is now looking into media trading practices and transparency.

That story, reported in Campaign Brief, is consistent with a Digiday report last year from DMexco which noted, “The FBI [is] investigating online fraud and [is] talking to adtech vendors at the conference to try and educate themselves about the problem. I heard one of them say to a vendor that the scale of the problem in online advertising was ‘crazy’ and unlike anything they had seen before. They’re looking into the Chinese bot farms and the Israeli ad networks that are trying to peddle fake traffic.”

The Campaign Brief story, if accurate, would represent the second significant inquiry into the advertising world pursued by the US Justice Department in the last 18 months.

As we reported last year, it is already scrutinising alleged bid-rigging by agencies in an investigation led by attorney Rebecca Meiklejohn.

The reports also gel with other darker rumours that Which-50 has encountered in the past year, such as the suggestion that law enforcement agencies in Singapore and the Middle East are examining the use of the adtech ecosystem by organised criminal syndicates for money laundering. Despite three independent references on the matter, we have not yet been able to confirm this independently with law enforcement.

As with all criminal enterprises, the leaders in the ad fraud world operate in the shadows. While the perpetrators are

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41 unknown, Dr Augustine Fou, a leading researcher in the ad fraud world, says many companies in the supply chain — like adtech platforms and ad networks — benefit from the flow of impressions through their networks.

“They are not committing the fraud but they are complicit in allowing it to continue,” he said. “Brands and marketers are also partly to blame. They are the ones who want to buy more quantity at lower cost, and this incentivises the bad guys to make fake ad impression inventory and sell it to them at low costs.”

According to Lizzy Foo Kune, research analyst at Gartner, “The industry has yet to fully address the scale of ad fraud. To date, I think that’s been because marketers really had few tools to face the issue themselves.”

Foo Kune says much of the onus for mitigating fraud has been on publishers, with marketers left to work with ad verification vendors on their media buys. “But that’s not enough. It’s possible for bad actors to buy traffic that’s been certified by the major verification vendors.” She references work by Method Media Intelligence as an example of how this works.

“Interestingly, Cybersecurity companies are beginning to recognise the opportunity, and many are looking to apply their technology to this space — and I find that innovation encouraging.”

Waving, or drowning?

The extent and trajectory of the ad fraud problem remain contentious questions. Ad fraud consultants we spoke to say the tech sector is barely containing the threat.

Some, like Dr Fou, effectively accuse industry leaders of behaviour that at worst amounts to willful blindness.

In an interview with Which-50 last week, Fou said many participants in the digital advertising supply chain do not want the fraud to stop because they make too much money providing platforms for it.

It is an accusation Which-50 has heard before, including from inside some adtech companies themselves, where sales leaders tell us the urgency to meet

their targets often overrides the kind of vigilance required to keep fraudsters from their rewards. In fairness to local practitioners, we tend to hear this more in the US. Dr Fou told Which-50 that the scale of ad fraud is truly enormous and far larger than anyone realises or is willing to admit.

Marketers have to carry some of the blame, he said. “After all, it would be embarrassing for a marketing manager to admit to his/her boss that the millions of dollars of digital ad budget which they approved were actually given to cyber criminals and drove no business outcomes.”

Everyone knows about ad fraud, but most still think it doesn’t affect them or they are actively trying to cover it up.

As a simple experiment, we rang the risk management departments of a number of Australia’s leading financial institutions and could find no evidence that they are actively investigating how much money their marketers are losing to fraud.

Adtech companies themselves are rarely accused of fraud.

Instead, most of the fraud that Which-50 has investigated is committed by bad agents exploiting technical and process weaknesses found in the legitimate adtech ecosystem.

The rewards are significant. One former fraudster last year described to Which-50 how a small operation he worked in, with only three staff running a fairly unsophisticated grift, was raking in $US25,000 a week.

Our recent report about the MegaCast app serving tens of thousands of video ads in the background — irrespective of whether the app was engaged — operated at different scale altogether.

Another example: last year Forbes reported that a “… South Korean company, Kiniwini, hid an illegitimate ad clicking function inside 41 apps, most of which were games.”

That scam was uncovered not by Google, which manages the Android app store, but by security company Checkpoint.

As Forbes noted, the scam bypassed Google’s Bouncer technology which is designed to mitigate against fraud. This was because the offending capability was downloaded after installation.

Google also missed the MegaCast racket. It was actually discovered by Pixalate which revealed the details in a company blog.

Accusations of direct fraud by adtech companies are more rare, although not unheard of. Occasionally these come to light where companies are accused directly of fraud by their competitors — such as when Steelhouse and Criteowent at each other in the US courts in 2016.

The parties settled their arguments shortly before their respective lawyers were due to commence the legal discovery process, telling the market through a statement that once they had a better understanding of how each other’s business worked, they realised it was all just an unfortunate misunderstanding.

Which-50 is not accusing either company of fraud. Rather we

merely point out that each accused the other of exactly that before they settled.

For its part, the — through bodies such as — claims it is back against elements.

industry formal the IAB fighting criminal

At the coalface Which-50 has spent the last month discussing the current state of ad fraud with leading consultants, researchers, and practitioners in the market.

We started by asking what are the most common types of fraud, and amongst the less common which are the most profitable.

Jonas Jaanimagi, Technology lead at IAB in Australia, tells Which-50 there are two types of ad fraud: general and sophisticated.

Impression fraud is committed simply by causing fake ads to load, using a variety of means: bots hitting web pages, or mobile apps loading ads in the background or in background processes. Click fraud, meanwhile, is a two-step process for bots: first cause the ad to load, and then click on it. The fraudsters get paid on a CPC basis.

“General is standard non-human traffic generated by bots and spiders, and other benevolent search-engine crawlers. Sophisticated is the work of genuine fraudsters who are making the effort to pass off the resulting fake behaviour as legitimate. This latter category has to be identified through technologies running advanced analytics and multipoint corroboration,” he says.

Asaf Greiner, founder, and CEO of Protected Media said, “In our experience, performance marketers are able to maintain a clean environment with considerably more ease than awareness advertisers. Performance marketers have a lower tolerance for invalid traffic so when they do experience fraud, it’s always in the low double-digit rates.”

The IAB, with much fanfare, launched its Ads.txt initiative last year, which has certainly helped address one small part of the ad fraud ecosystem: domain spoofing.

Domain spoofing occurs when advertisers (or their agents) are tricked into thinking they are buying from a legitimate site, like CNN, but they are not.

According to Yaron Oliker, CEO and co-founder at Unbotify, “This has been addressed by different vendors and the slow but positive embrace of Ads.txt promoted by the IAB.” But even that initiative has its flaws. Some the earliest adopters of ads.txt included web sites which themselves benefit from fraud. Ads.txt will merely confirm that the ad is being served to the nominated web site, but it won’t stop the publisher of that site then engaging in fraudulent activity.

Still, everyone agrees it has moved the ball forward. … or your money back The adtech sector is also more willing than in the past to provide refunds to clients where fraud is established.

We noted in a report on this year’s Ashton Media Programmatic Summit, “In 2016 under former CEO and founder Brett Wilson, [TubeMogul, now Adobe] became one of the first video DSP services to guarantee the quality of the inventory in its system by providing refunds to brands if a small, arbitrary level of fraudulent inventory was identified and breached during a campaign. But it wasn’t the first to offer refunds. DataXu led the way in 2015 and lately platforms like Pubmatic, and Appnexus have followed suit.”

And as we also reported earlier this year, some companies, such as Pubmatic, are investigating charging models that would remove the financial rewards for ad fraud that cost-perclick (CPC) models encourage — although their motivation is pricing transparency, not fraud prevention.

He said such marketers are often capable of filtering out bad audiences because they can identify a clear correlation between what looks like fraudulent traffic and what ends up being ineffective traffic.

“It’s difficult to quantify the average cost of ad fraud for an advertiser because it depends on the strength of each party’s anti-fraud vendor. The key for advertisers to mitigate the risks of ad fraud is to use the best anti-fraud vendor they can afford because all fraud detection solutions were not created equally and therefore those with a weaker vendor will absorb more of the advertiser costs of ad fraud than their competing advertisers, ” he told Which-50.

“The same cannot be said for publishers who are in the unfortunate position of sharing their revenues with the cybercriminals.

On the publisher side, the quantity of fraudulent traffic matters; 100% of the fraud on the publisher’s site will impact on the publisher’s revenue and perceived integrity by advertisers who could pull future budgets.”

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43 According to Ratko Vidakovic, founder of AdProfs — an adtech consultancy focused on education, research, and advisory services — there are two general scenarios the company has encountered during ad fraud audits.

He said click fraud is fairly common in cases where advertisers are buying through Google Display Network, especially using CPC pricing.

“There are simply too many long-tail sites,” he says. “Each site takes a dollar here and there, and all of a sudden tens of thousands of dollars disappear across these long-tail sites, with no actual performance to show for it. It’s basically death by a thousand cuts.”

“Even though marketers love the (perceived) lower risk of buying on CPC, the simplest way to mitigate against click fraud is to switch to cost-per-thousand (CPM) pricing.”

He said the second scenario involves campaigns executed through demand-side platforms (DSPs), where a sizeable portion of budgets are spent on very long-tail sites that don’t deliver any performance.

“The same pattern emerges,” he says. “On some DSPs these long-tail sites show up in reports as a single bundle of domains, making it impossible to drill down and scrutinise the exact domains.”

safety and one of the first companies brands often turn to to protect their investments from ad fraud. CEO Scott Knoll told Which-50, “Fraud, in particular, is a difficult problem and not just because the bad guys are super sophisticated and it is an easy thing to get into. There is a lot of money [to be made] and not a lot of downside risk and penalties.”

“There is no ground truth — no one knows what the true amount of fraud is and there is always a balance to be found between false positives and false negatives.”

Knoll is also critical of some of the ad fraud consultants.

“There’s a lot of consultants who try to poke holes and find missed fraud, but then again no one knows if that’s real or not. It’s just their word against someone else’s.”

According to Knoll, it is one thing to try to find fraud on a specific campaign, but another to do it on billions and billions of impressions.

“One of the advantages we have with fraud is that we are on so much inventory so we can see patterns that other people can’t. That helps us determine whether something that looks like an anomaly in a small sample is really a problem or not.”

Mobile fraud

Vidakovic says buying against a tightly curated ‘whitelist’ of domains is a typical way to mitigate against this type of fraud.

Mobile advertising is the new frontier for ad fraud, and it is growing quickly. Indeed it has doubled in the last year, according to measurement company Adjust.

“And now with the strong adoption of Ads.txt in the market, the effectiveness of using whitelists is much greater than it was a year ago, which is a promising development,” he says.

In a whitepaper called The Bad, the Ugly and the Truth about Mobile Ad Fraud, Adjust identifies five common fraudulent practices:

Dr Fou, meanwhile, says that CPM and CPC models represent 91 of digital ad spend, therefore the largest buckets from which ‘the bad guys’ can steal.

• SDK spoofing (also known as ‘replay attacks’) — A type of fraud that generates legitimate-looking installs without any real installs occurring, in order to steal from an advertiser’s user-acquisition budget;

“Considering that digital spend is expected to surpass $100 billion in the US this year, that is a huge bucket to steal from,” Dr Fou says.

“Brands ‘mitigate’ fraud by using fraud detection companies.

But unfortunately, this does not mitigate the fraud,” he says. “In fact, most of it still gets by — because the bad guys have specifically tuned their technologies and techniques to circumvent fraud detection,” cautions Dr Fou. “Paying for expensive fraud detection not only doesn’t work; it also creates a false sense of security, so more action, and vigilance is not actually taken,” he says. “This allows the fraud to easily continue.”

Needless to say, that is not a view shared by everybody.

Integral Ad Science is a global market leader in brand

• Click injections — Fraudsters can hijack a user’s device to detect when other apps are installed on a device, then they can trigger a click right after the install completes, and then receive the credit for (usually organic) installs; • Click spam — Fraudsters capture organic traffic and then claim the credit for the user later, which has a few profound effects on an advertiser — the most obvious of which is that they pay for a user who was actually installed organically; • Fake installs — A broad term that describes when a fraudster tricks an attribution partner into tracking an install that hasn’t taken place on a real device, attributing it to a paid source. To accomplish it, fraudsters use emulation software to fake installs in an effort to claim advertising revenue. Fake installs defraud everyone along the advertising chain, taking money away from advertisers, publishers and networks. On a traffic flow sample of over 400m installs over 17 days, we estimated that $1.7m worth of installs were being paid to fraudsters faking installs; • Fake in-app purchases (IAP) — An in-app purchase is made but no revenue exchanged. Adjust figures suggest that 30 per cent of attempted IAP spends on iOS are

fake — a sample based on millions of iOS devices. The main concern from developers about fake IAP has been about how much potential revenue they’re missing out on.

However, the impact on a business isn’t just monetary.

It’s also about how fake purchases (and the people who make them) damage the successful operation of a freeto-play app.

Mobile ad fraud will only grow in scale following the mass migration of eyeballs from desktop to mobile devices. In the US, more than 57 per cent of digital spend is now on mobile.

Dr Fou says there are really simple things fraudsters developing mobile apps can do to avoid bot detection.

“Rogue apps can load thousands of ads in the background even when the app is not in use. None of which involves a lot of bots hitting web pages. This gets by all fraud detection that is tuned to look for bots hitting web pages,” he says.

Those damn bots The focus on bots is a big problem, say the consultants, and leads to a serious miscalculation as to the extent of the problem.

Shailin Dhar is the co-founder of Method Media Intelligence.

“When you study actual bot traffic in isolation as well as in live ad exchanges, you realise quickly that the truth can be described best as ‘take the industry estimates of the financial impact of fraud and multiply by ten.’”

This is not news that marketers want to hear or particularly discuss. “When interacting with marketers and executives at brands, you realise they love the view they get when their heads are under the sand. It is much more simple than above ground. If you take publicly available information and establish a ‘knowledge baseline’ of ad fraud, reduce that by a factor of ten you get to where marketers and brands understand the scale of the problem.”

Another form of fraud that has been around for a long time is popunders and page redirects, where the web sites themselves misbehave and redirect to other pages in infinite loops.

“This also does not involve a tonne of bots hitting web pages and is therefore often missed by bot detection companies.”

Dr Fou recently published details on Linkedin of a traffic redirect service proudly selling 125 billion page redirects (equivalent to pageviews) per month. “That is larger than all the mainstream publishers’ sites page views per month put together,” he says. “Talk about ad dollars being stolen out of the digital ad ecosystem!”

Detecting fraud There are any number of signals that ad fraud consultants

look for to detect fraud.

Oliker’s company, for instance, collects sensor data such as mouse movements and touch events and uses machine learning on verified human datasets. “This is an order of magnitude harder for even the most sophisticated bot developer to simulate real human behavioural biometrics on a consistent basis.”

Dhar describes the experience of analysing log files for 15 different advertisers over the past year that spent over $1 million per month each in digital advertising.

He says often the first sign of trouble is not technical, but behavioural. “The initial sign of suspicion is generally when their DSP either refuses to share or comes up with excuses of why they cannot share log files of what their clients paid them to purchase.

“Once we do get the log files, there are several signs that are blatant red flags — for instance when we see thousands or millions of ads shown to the same IP or UniqueUser in one month.”

Other red flags include randomly generated domain names that are not actually registered domains (for example mokasdf8a88adsf78023r.net), or when you find hypothetical ad-tag placement names being used as the site URL. “This is meant to confuse a buyer that it is just a data reporting error,” he suggests.

Change the model Criminals, like everyone else in an economy, respond to incentives and pricing signals. We asked the ad fraud consultants whether they believed the adoption of new pricing models, or increasing the ‘cost’ of committing fraud, could contribute to mitigation.

Oliker is an optimist. “I believe fraud can be eliminated entirely by employing machine learning and flipping the economic scales in favour of the brands. Brands that adopt fraud fighting as part of their culture will see significantly improved results across analytics, product and monetisation metrics. Brands that do not will suffer double as the fraudsters will seek them out with renewed vigour.”

Ratko Vidakovic says, “Unfortunately, there is little incentive for vendors to address the fraud. If anything, pricing models have created an incentive for vendors to turn a blind eye. It’s only when advertisers and marketers start demanding action that they do anything.”

“Adtech players and even agencies make just as much revenue from fraudulent impressions as from legitimate ones, so there is no urgency to fight against fraud,” Vidakovic says. “The business model for most vendors in the adtech space is based on a percentage of the ad spend. This applies almost across the board: agencies, DSPs, and exchanges for example.

“The incentive for volume opens the doors to a tremendous amount of ad fraud, which deteriorates the quality of the adtech ecosystem. As a result,” he says, “many adtech companies turn a blind eye and pursue scale by any means necessary — even when it hurts advertisers and, ultimately, themselves.”

Marketers: T-commerce is ready to takeoff in 2019

By Tripp Boyle

T-commerce, or trade via a smart digital TV-set, has seen a lot of proof-of-concept activity over the last year and a half and is now poised to take off in 2019.

T-commerce acts as a marketing channel,enabling interactive advertising and addressable advertising. The two primary drivers for its current projected growth are scale and connectivity, both of which are nearing tipping points.

In the US, 74% of households now have at least one active connected television device, and voice-enabled devices are expected to reach more than 90 million users by the end of this year. Additional impetus will come from smart TV OEMs anxious to tap into the t-commerce revenue stream to help boost razor-thin margins in a highly competitive industry.

With t-commerce, one can draw parallels to the early stages of mobile commerce. Ten years ago, very few people could have envisioned themselves buying laundry detergent on a mobile device. It took three key developments to change that: massive growth in connectivity following the birth of smartphones, widespread deployment and adoption of user friendly commerce interfaces and the formalization of secure payment systems. M-commerce sales grew from less than $25 billion and 11% of total e-commerce sales in 2012 to an estimated $208 billion and almost 33% of total e-commerce sales in 2018. They are projected to surpass $420 billion and account for nearly 54% of all e-commerce by 2021.

The first element -- device connectivity -- is already in place for t-commerce growth. With the latest generation of smart TVs boasting a significant increase in processing power, a growing number of viewers regularly rely on them to provide a superior connected experience through the delivery of highquality video assets. That beefed-up processing power is being harnessed to enable speedy and increasingly seamless t-commerce solutions. This will provide the underlying framework for an emerging t-commerce ecosystem.

M-commerce, or the buying and selling of goods and services through wireless handheld devices, really picked up steam when OEMs and app developers started including user-friendly commerce interfaces on their mobile devices, and that’s already happening with smart TV OEMs. All the major players, from LG to Sony, are enabling t-commerce by building in the capability for retailers to introduce storefronts on their devices. As an example, the ShopTV app is now available for download on almost 50 million smart TVs in the US. The current user community is much smaller, of course, probably in the tens of thousands, and consumer education will be necessary to scale the user base. But the interface is there and available for use.

Smart TV OEMs are motivated to do everything they can to spur the growth of t-commerce. They are in a highly competitive market where margins are getting thinner every year, so they

are anxious to pursue all new monetization opportunities.

Possible revenue-generation models include payments based on sales generated through the OEM’s platform, viewers driven to the app or CPM-based reach metrics. There will no doubt be a period of testing to determine which models work best and offer the greatest revenue-generation potential, but these are all viable models that already exist in the digital advertising ecosystem.

The third piece of the puzzle -- secure payment -- will be a slightly greater challenge for t-commerce than it was for m-commerce, as TVs tend to exist as shared household devices. Additional security parameters will have to be put in place to make sure the person making a purchase is the approved individual. A PIN-based solution is one possibility, but as smart TV OEMs begin building technologies like facial recognition into their devices, more advanced solutions will become feasible.

The way viewers physically interact with their TVs is changing from the traditional “lean-back” experience to one that is userdriven and on-demand. Viewers control what they watch and when they watch it, and they can consume different content at will. An offshoot of that evolution is a strong opportunity for brand marketers to use t-commerce as a way to leverage media that they are already purchasing, such as ads on linear TV. Because consumers are already used to engaging with their smart TVs interactively for content purposes, they will be more open to using it for t-commerce transactions.

In marketing terms, TV will no longer be a one-way communication channel. T-commerce will make it a twoway street where viewers can interact with and purchase from their favorite brands. For example, advertisers will be able to introduce special offers that viewers can participate in immediately by providing a mobile number. Ultimately, consumers will be able to make direct purchases of an advertised product via their smart TVs. The t-commerce revolution has the potential both to increase sales and profits, and to radically improve brands’ ROAS (return-onadvertising-spend).

Early adopters in the marketing community stand to reap the greatest benefits from this emerging technology. T-commerce is not a concept anymore. It’s real, it’s here now and several marketers are already implementing strategies to learn the best ways to engage with consumers in new ways, on television. In the evolution of commerce from brick-andmortar to online to mobile, t-commerce is the next logical step in marketers’ multichannel efforts to give consumers what they want, when they want it. It’s time for marketers to move on this new technology or risk getting left behind.

Tripp Boyle serves as senior vice president at Connekt, where he is responsible for driving strategic business deals and partnerships with advertisers, brands and content companies.

Brand purpose is the future for the majority of marketing leaders P&G’S GILLETTE WILL NOT BE THE LAST BRAND TO PROMOTE ITS VALUES, AS A NEW SURVEY OF MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS EXECS REPORTS

By Jeff Beer

At Davos last week, P&G chief marketing officer Marc Pritchard talked about the swift and loud reaction to Gillette’s latest ad “The Best Men Can Be,” saying that consumers now expect brands to take stands and have points of view. “Take the Edelman Trust Barometer; eight out of 10 consumers say they prefer brands that take a stand . . . . We expected not everyone to respond positively, but that’s what being a leader is all about. It was time.”

A new survey from Weber Shandwick suggests that Pritchard isn’t alone. The company’s newest CEO Activism study focuses on marketing and communications executives in the U.S., UK, and China. Among its results are that 53% of communications and marketing executives are spending more time discussing and planning for executive and brand activism; 62% say they’d have a more favorable opinion of their CEO if he or she spoke out on a hotly debated current issue; and of those whose CEO has spoken out, 67% say it had a positive impact on their company reputation.

It echoes similar sentiments found in Accenture Strategy’s global survey of nearly 30,000 people, released in December, that found 62% of customers want companies to take a stand on current and broadly relevant issues like sustainability, transparency or fair employment practices.

Weber Shandwick’s chief reputation strategist Leslie GainesRoss says that the new report’s findings reflect the new reality that everything a company does–from its formal advertising to its CEO statements–are now brand communications and tie back into brand image. “It’s been a game-changer for companies in terms of realizing that employees, customers,

and communities are expecting CEOs to speak up for their company values,” says Gaines-Ross. “And this is where communications and marketing people get pulled in to the discussion.”

This is an important point, and a spot where companies can run into trouble if advertising or a CEO makes a statement around an issue, only to have the public find out the company’s practices don’t follow those same principles. Once again, let’s take Gillette. The brand makes a bold statement denouncing toxic masculinity, and yet remained one of the last major advertisers on Tucker Carlson. Gaines-Ross says her the survey results illustrate that more companies are planning ahead to avoid any conflicting signals that could undermine any given statement.

“Over the past few years, companies have become very prepared and ready so that they don’t speak out on issues that will be a vulnerability for them,” she says. “If you’re going to speak out about diversity, you better make sure your executive and board are diverse. There is progress, but companies need to make sure they check all the right boxes before they speak out. What we learned in this survey is that companies are increasingly becoming better prepared.”

13 Strategies For Capturing And Marketing User-Generated Content

By Forbes Agency Council

Getting people to hear about your brand and see what your business does is the goal of a good marketing strategy. Today, a growing number of companies include user-generated content (UGC), such as reviews, in their marketing, as these word-of-mouth endorsements are often seen as more trustworthy than any form of self-promotion.

The trick is knowing how to collect and present usergenerated content in the most effective way for marketing purposes. To help guide your efforts, 13 experts from Forbes Agency Council share strategies for collecting and presenting

content created by users.

1. Create An Open Platform User-generated content (UGC) is the most valuable because it’s genuine. Create an open platform via your website and allow guest blogs so users can share their experience. An even easier way is to share their posts on your social media so your followers can see real content from real users. Usergenerated content should be a big part of your content marketing strategy in 2019! - Tom La Vecchia, MBA, X Factor Media

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2. Ask For Permission UGC can be fairly simple to collect. Passionate brand followers/advocates like to share. Everything from a contest to simply asking your followers for content can be effective.

Having a defined strategy helps with focus. The one thing many brands forget is to ask permission before using UGC. There are a variety of platforms that exist to help brands streamline the “permission-seeking” process. - Brian McHale, Brandience

3. Go Live Creating live events that are rewarding for a brand’s audience and using those events (when advocates are closest to and deeply engaged with the brand) to include them in going forth and creating content is a very effective way to not only boost participation, but also to help ensure that what is created is relevant. - Brian Sullivan, Sullivan Branding

4. Just Ask Your Community It’s not all about you! Having different voices/users weigh in with real-time stories and use cases can help move your brand forward in ways you have not imagined. Everyone wants a chance to tell their story, and for marketers, this can be a powerful way to communicate value props and ideas through a variety of lenses. All you need to do is ask, and your community will respond with the best stories. - April Joy Rudin, The Rudin Group

conversations, build trust and create engagement. First of all, define what goal you want to achieve, then ask your audience to participate by publishing UGC. Make your request clear and specific, including what content you look for and what aligns with the project you are working on. UGC is a great opportunity to build stronger engagement with your audience! - Daniela Pavan, The Ad Store New York

9. Make It A Team Effort Many of the best applications of user-generated content rely on immediacy. It’s important to collect, synthesize and make actionable your user-generated content. The best way to involve agency teams is to eliminate barriers: Provide them with full access, empower them as an extension of your team and work with them to scenario plan to make the most of the great content that is coming your way. - Chris Cavanaugh, Freeman

10. Create Referral Programs Create referral programs to drive organic expansion and reach a higher multiple of new prospects/customers/users.

This serves as non-paid or “free” advertising since these users are acting, essentially, as brand ambassadors without your business incurring additional advertising or marketing fees to drive brand awareness and growth. - Jeeyan RostamAbadi, Hawke Media LLC

11. Become Friends With Superfans

Social media contests associated with specific hashtags can be an effective way of driving user-generated content. With a unique hashtag and a worthwhile incentive, user-generated content campaigns can gain significant traction. - Jordan Edelson, Appetizer Mobile LLC

Use social listening tools to identify brand loyalists. Search for, listen to and connect with them. Be proactive; give superfans exclusive access to your brand. Identify fans at events, build relationships and follow up with social shoutouts and Q&As. The more you engage fans, the more authentic content you’ll gather, and others will vie for the opportunity to connect as well. - Brian Salzman, RQ

6. Make The Experience Exciting

12. Have Something Worth Sharing

Be creative with how customers can contribute. Give them an exciting experience or to-do item, one that makes them feel proud, eager, opinionated or keen to share. If I see one more airport security bin with “Join the Conversation” written at the bottom, I might lose my mind. No one cares. We only use Twitter to complain and get free flights anyway. Okay, that last bit is a little facetious. - Jez Babarczy, NUU Group

If your brand is share-worthy, people won’t need an incentive to post it on social media. Focus on customer experiences when trying to increase UGC. How is your product? Is it novel?

Is it memorable? Is it exceptional? Do users want people to know they interacted with your brand? If so, people will tag your profile or mark their location, allowing you to easily gather and re-share their content. - Benjamin Collins, Laughing Samurai

5. Offer Incentives

7. Collect Customer Reviews There is no user-generated content more credible or relevant than customer reviews of a business or product. We help our clients conduct Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to identify their top advocates, then incentivize those advocates to spread the word on review sites, social media, case studies and more. Every happy customer can be an influencer if their experiences are shared widely. - Scott Baradell, Idea Grove

8. Design An Advocacy Strategy User-generated content can be a great way to spark

13. Try Out Cross Promotion Cross promotion can be a great use of user-generated content.

Share client success stories by giving them the platform to showcase their brand’s “wins.” Run contests for case study submissions and propose open-ended questions on social media to spark interest and get a conversation rolling. You need to make sure you give as much as you take—never forget how far a little reciprocity can go. - Bernard May, National Positions Members of Forbes Agency Council detail strategies for collecting and marketing user-generated content.

Why Social Media Is the New Weapon in Modern Warfare

By Knowledge@Wharton

If the first wars were fought with sticks and stones, modern warfare is a high-tech battlefield where social media has emerged as a surprising — and effective — weapon. From Russian hacking to influence the American election to online recruitment for terror groups such as ISIS, an array of players are using false news and bogus accounts to stoke fear, incite violence and manipulate outcomes.

Authors Peter W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking describe this as “likewar,” a term that plays on the Facebook “like” feature. In their new book, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, they explain how these platforms have become persuasive tools of propaganda. The recently joined the Knowledge@Wharton radio show on Sirius XM to discuss their work.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: It is incredible how social media has developed and expanded rapidly in the last 20 years, and the impact it has had on politics.

Peter Singer: It’s absolutely fascinating. One of the people we interviewed for the book was the literal godfather of the internet itself, Vint Cerf. He talked about how it was once this military network for scientists, and then there was this moment when the scientists began to email back and forth about science fiction. That’s when he realized, “Hold it. It’s become this social thing.”

You move forward, and now [there’s] Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you name it. They’re not just the nervous system of the modern world, they’re where we do business. They’re where we set up dates. But they’ve also become this space of battle, and battle over everything from political campaigns to use in military operations, marketing wars, you name it.

One of the things that the book is about is essentially how, if cyberwar was the hacking of networks that both governments

and businesses have had to deal with, we now have this phenomenon of what we call “likewar,” which is the hacking of the people on the networks by this mix of “likes,” but also lies.

Knowledge@Wharton: You think about the stories we’ve heard about ISIS and other organizations using social media to recruit people. Can you talk about that?

Emerson Brooking: This issue came on our radar and the radar of a lot of folks across the country back in the summer of 2014, when the Islamic State invaded northern Iraq. They only had about 1,500 militants. They had pickup trucks and secondhand weapons from a lot of militant groups past.

But they did something new, and that was instead of keep their invasion a secret, they actually tweeted about it. They had a hashtag campaign, #AllEyesOnISIS, which they used to consolidate and broadcast their propaganda. And they had a huge network of both passionate supporters but also Twitter bots, which they used to lock down the trending hashtags on Twitter for the Arabic-speaking users.

As a result of that, even though they only had a small invading force, they were effectively able to spread fear [and seem to become] much greater than they were, and pushed these demoralized defenders of a city like Mosul — with 1.5 million residents — to drop their weapons and flee. In the process, ISIS started scoring these propaganda videos and weaving them back into their online messaging. It became a source of great inspiration for people following along at home.

It was a direct result of these online tactics that they were able to recruit some 30,000 fighters from the Middle East, but also the wider world — more than 100 countries where people would leave their homes to journey to Syria and Iraq to join them. Or if that wasn’t possible, they felt inspired to commit acts of violence at home.

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53 Knowledge@Wharton: Is social media changing the military and defense strategy for some countries?

Knowledge@Wharton: How is it also going to impact our culture in general?

Singer: It has become a new battle space. To build on what Emerson was saying, it’s a battle space where a wide variety of actors with very different real-world goals are ending up using the very same tactics. You would see ISIS’ top recruiter, this hacker from Great Britain named Junaid Hussein, using the very same tactics that Taylor Swift uses to sell her music albums.

Brooking: If you think that social media had a decisive impact in shaping the millennial generation, you need to look further. You need to look to the Gen Z folks who are growing up now, and the way a platform like Instagram is now the center of social life in these schools. It’s not a minor thing when you talk about something like bullying on Instagram, because it is the primary social gathering place after school.

Or you would see in terms of organizational operations the approach that the Trump campaign used to win its online fight. It’s very similar to the model that Buzzfeed used to, in effect, rewrite the story of media.

But there are also more serious examples of how social media is affecting these folks coming up. In Chicago, some 80% of school fights now originate because of comments made online. Gangs recruit actively through these social media platforms. In the book, we tell the example of a very talented young rapper, Shaquon Thomas, who was also a proud member of a local gang, the Gangster Disciples. He winds up being the target of three hits by a rival gang. The first two times he gets away. Unfortunately, bystanders are killed in the process.

Part of that aspect of it being a conflict is all the sides are watching, all the sides are learning. And they’re learning not just from whom they’re directly facing off against, but also from people in other kinds of conflicts. You see this proliferation of military campaigns to re-create these lessons.

But then you also see private corporations starting to do the same. For example, Facebook talked recently about how it has created a “war room” to deal with these kinds of disinformation operations.

Knowledge@Wharton: Take us into that, because [CEO] Mark Zuckerberg has said that these problems are not something he would have conceived of when he developed Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard.

Singer: That’s one of the other just immense historic changes that we’ve seen: Over a very short period of time, a handful of tech geeks have become among the most powerful figures in all of politics and war. They don’t set out with this plan in mind. It’s a similar story not just at Facebook; it’s at Twitter.

The very name Twitter is taken from a term for short bursts of inconsequential information, yet it’s shaping the outcome of elections, wars, you name it.

This handful of people are now making decisions on everything from what Russian disinformation campaigns are allowed to thrive or not, to should Myanmar’s generals be able to use their platform to call for genocide or not. It’s First Amendment questions that have hit everything from [conspiracy theorist] Alex Jones to activist groups.

In many ways, I liken it to parents going through the stages of grief at what has happened to their babies. First there was denial. For example, Zuckerberg famously says right after the election, it’s a “pretty crazy idea” that his platform could have been used in this way and could have shaped the way people voted. He’s saying that, though, at the very same moment that Facebook is marketing to political campaigns that this is the best space to influence people.

But you move forward a couple of years, and now he’s saying things like we are in an “arms race” against these adversaries. The tech companies have undertaken a series of activities that are certainly good, but they’ve clearly not gone far enough yet. And there’s a bit of bargaining going on with government of, “We’ll do this, but please stay out of our space.” I think that bargaining back and forth is really going to shape not only politics moving forward, but it will shape the internet for the rest of us.

Typically, when you’ve survived something like that, you might lay low a while. But he immediately starts rapping about it because he sees it as great content and a great way to build his brand. Well, they get him the third time. He immediately becomes an online martyr. A week later, we see another shooting. This shooting happens because someone was making fun of Thomas, and it had originated because of a mean online comment. In gang violence generally, in crime moving forward, we see situations where a local argument that might start online can nonetheless spread or be answered by violence miles away or even in a gang franchise in another city.

When you think about it, something like a gang feud or even a really angry political argument, so much of it is performative. If you’re in one of these performative contests, it’s the logical tool to broadcast yourself to a wider audience.

But the trouble is, just the way this information flows, we’re not yet really adapted to deal with it. Very quickly, emotions can make these feuds spiral out of control.

We draw on a lot of studies in the book regarding what’s called “emotional contagion.” It’s the rate at which emotions spread over social media, and how they influence people.

Again and again, anger and outrage are shown to be the emotions that spread farthest and fastest, and incite others to violence.

Singer: Part of the research found that whatever the group, whatever the goal — whether it was private business, a political campaign, a gang, a celebrity — there were a series of new rules on driving your message viral, on winning the war of attention online. These helped explain why certain brands were thriving and other ones were losing.

One of the best businesses at this is Wendy’s. Another person that we interviewed for the book was a producer who was behind the Kardashians. But we also interviewed extremist group recruiters. It kept coming back again and again to these rules. One of them you talked about was emotion, and particularly the most powerful emotion, at least online, is anger.

It’s not just the case in our own politics. It plays out even in, for example, studies of the closed Chinese system. There are other key rules. There are things like narrative, there’s building online community, there’s inundation crossed with experimentation. What’s just utterly fascinating is these rules of the game are defining who is winning online.

But in a world where so much depends on winning online, it’s having very real-world effects. This is important to understand, whether you’re a business that’s dealing with these phenomena, but also all of us as individuals because we are the targets of these wars — whether it’s a marketing war or a real-world war. We’re the ones whose clicks decide whose side wins out.

Knowledge@Wharton: Is it as big a problem in Europe or Asia or Australia as it is in the United States?

Singer: It is, indeed, and it’s one that helps drive why these tactics are spreading. Let’s look at a micro-example: the use of bots, artificial voices online, to not just trick people as individuals, but also to drive overall internet trends, to steer things into your newsfeed and the like.

In the Brexit campaign, one-third of the online conversation was generated by these false voices. Of course, the online conversation is affecting not just the individual voter, but it also shapes what journalists are covering. They decide what to cover based on what’s trending. For example, the Mexican election was earlier this year. One-third of the online conversation was generated by bots.

We’re seeing this change the nature of politicians, but also CEOs that win out. Just like television created a demand to be telegenic and rewarded people who could do that, it’s the same phenomenon happening in social media. You’re seeing the rise of new types of politicians who are leveraging that, but also new types of CEOs. We could go back and forth on whether it’s for better or for worse, but just like TV, it’s having that same kind of effect.

Knowledge@Wharton: Can you talk about the role that social media has been playing for Donald Trump, both in his presidency and before?

Singer: That was one of the more fun but exhausting parts of the research. We went back and read all of Donald Trump’s old tweets, so you didn’t have to. The opening of the book is Donald Trump’s very first tweet, a little-known story where he is turning to social media to announce an upcoming TV appearance to try and save the ratings for “The Apprentice.”

He announces that he’s going to be reading the Top 10 List on Letterman, and it’s a way to market for the season finale of “The Apprentice,” which is sinking in the ratings. It’s this strange moment in time where you’re using social media to promote TV, and he, like the rest of us, begins to get addicted over time.

You can see over the next years, his style, his approach change. He also begins to hone some of the tactics that would take him into the presidency. For example, he begins online beefs. It’s a little bit of a parallel to what Emerson was talking about of gangsters. It’s this performative thing online, but it’s also to draw what he wants most, which is attention.

Then his eye begins to turn to politics.

One of the other fun stories in this period is he announces the creation of a website as if it’s by a fan. It’s ShouldTrumpRun. com. He says, “Hey, everybody, what do you think about it?” What he does not reveal is that the website was created

by Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer. But you move forward, and that very same account that was being used for business promotion, TV appearances, Trump Mattresses, etc., announces, “I’m honored to be the 45th president of the United States.” And we know it’s Donald Trump who wrote it because “honored” is misspelled.

Knowledge@Wharton: You used the word addiction, which is a recognition of the behavior in using social media.

Tell us more.

Brooking: For many years, the designers of these social media platforms designed them to be addictive. Think about something as simple as the notification button, which is often a little red dot that you press on an icon to get rid of it and see who commented on you. Every part of that design is extremely deliberate.

Red is the color of a particular physiological arousal. You want to touch things that are red. Notifications don’t suggest what the notification is about. On Facebook, it could be an acquaintance’s birthday, but it could also be a long comment from a dear friend.

And for over a decade, there was no consideration whatsoever on the social impact of these platforms because it was thought that it was a universal good. The more people who were connected, the better. Now there is much more a reckoning regarding the social impact of these platforms, but there’s still a long way to go.

Knowledge@Wharton: What do you expect will happen?

Singer: There has been a pattern that goes back to the early days of MySpace and Six Degrees, Friendster, AOL — if you remember all of those. The pattern has essentially been that the platform companies have wanted to stay out of difficult political decisions of what’s on their network, but they’ve repeatedly been forced to intervene by a combination of their own customers getting angry and demanding it, and the fear of political intervention.

This goes back to the very first intervention in terms of policing internet porn, which appropriately enough came out of a fake news story. You’ll remember there was this claim that one-third of the internet was porn. It was actually drawn from a false story, but it had a real effect. This pattern has continued all the way to today, and you see the same thing playing out with Facebook and Twitter. That points to us as consumers, users, citizens of these digital empires who are going to demand it be cleaned up, and there’s a fear of government intervention that’s going to shape it.

There’s a second pattern, though, that concerns me. In trying to solve their problems, the technology companies always turn to new technology, and it then creates a whole new set of problems. You can see that, for example, with the newsfeed algorithm. And what looms is artificial intelligence.

How Introverts Can Learn to Network Effectively

By Knowledge@Wharton

Learning how to network effectively is an invaluable skill to have when it comes to discovering job opportunities and making career connections to get ahead. But such socializing doesn’t come easily to everyone. In her new book, former communication executive Karen Wickre offers introverts advice on how they can build long-lasting relationships to enhance their careers. She was an editorial director for Twitter and a senior media liaison at Google, among other jobs. Wickre, who describes herself as an introvert, recently joined the Knowledge@Wharton radio show on Sirius XM to talk about her book, Taking the Work Out of Networking: An Introvert’s Guide to Making Connections That Count.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: Why is networking not fun for some people?

Karen Wickre: Apparently, [it’s not fun] for many people.

People seem to even hate the word. I think it’s because we think of it as a transactional kind of thing that we have to do.

We have to do it because we need a new job, we want to find a different opportunity, something has come up that puts a time pressure on us. Therefore, we think, “I have to go out and network.” It doesn’t have to be that way — that is the point of my book. But I think that’s why people dislike it. They feel like it’s kind of phony and transactional.

Knowledge@Wharton: If they viewed it a little bit differently, as more of a relationship rather than a requirement, it might be more acceptable?

Wickre: Exactly. I found a great line from [networking expert] Ivan Misner that I used in the book, which is, “Networking is less like hunting and more like farming.” You could substitute “gardening,” but it’s the same idea. Hunting is very transactional, whereas farming or gardening are cyclical, ongoing. You’re weeding, you’re planting, you’re watering, you’re nurturing. That’s the nature of making connections that count in your network.

Knowledge@Wharton: Networking is important right

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now because there’s more turnover in companies. People are not spending 30 years at a company and getting the gold watch anymore. It’s three years, five years, seven years, and that person is off to the next company, right?

observe behavior and style in the manner that we do when we people-watch. That’s a wonderful skill for connecting so that you can correctly gauge characteristics. Is someone anxious?

Are they open and friendly and candid? Are they worried?

Wickre: There’s never been more job fluidity. The fact is you can’t just have one network for your one job that you’re going to have for life, because those days are over. You have to continue to make new connections, have people to reach out to when you have a new question, a new quest going on.

If you make a daily habit of being in touch with people, it’s not so scary when you need to do it.

The third is simply being curious. I’ve always been curious about other people. Why are they the way they are? What got them to wherever they are in life? That kind of thing.

Being curious also means the default answer should be “yes” if somebody says, “Would you meet my friend who has a question for you,” or “I want to put you two together because I think you’d like each other.” Just say yes. It doesn’t have to be yes today. It doesn’t have to be yes in person on a deadline. But make it more a yes than a no.

Knowledge@Wharton: You call yourself an introvert.

How has this shaped your approach to networking?

Wickre: I am an introvert in that, at the end of a busy day, I need to go home and regroup and have quiet time. At the other end of the spectrum, an extrovert says, “I want to go to dinner and then the afterparty. I can take it all in.” Introverts tend to need to just be quiet and think things through for a while. It doesn’t mean we’re not sociable. It doesn’t mean we’re shy. I’ve been that way for my whole life.

But what has “IF YOU MAKE A DAILY happened over time HABIT OF BEING IN is people have said to me, “How is it you TOUCH WITH PEOPLE, IT’S know who everybody is and you have a big NOT SO SCARY WHEN network?” As I started YOU NEED TO DO IT.” to think about that, especially in relation to this book, I kind of broke down the process. Frankly, I do a lot of connecting online. If I had to fill my schedule with coffee dates and lunches, I would never make it.

Knowledge@Wharton: What is the difference between the quantity and quality of a network?

Wickre: It’s never a follower count. It’s really not the size of the network; it’s who you know that is as helpful and thoughtful as you are. I’m sure some do take pride in [having a large network]. In the old days, we would have said they have a big Rolodex. I’m sure there are some who are interested in that, but I wonder how genuine that network is in the case of a crisis.

Knowledge@Wharton: You mention in the book that introverts possess some characteristics that can really stand out in networking. Can you tell us about that?

Wickre: This is non-scientific, but rather based on my own observations over the years. I do think these are qualities that people who want to genuinely connect have, and I do believe introverts have. First and foremost is … being a good listener, because most introverts never want to go first in the conversation. They want to wait and see what the other person has to say first, then wade into the water. It’s not just waiting for your turn. It is also taking in what the other person says and having some understanding of how they are and why they are.

Related to that is the power of observation, of being able to

Knowledge@Wharton: How much do you think networking is enhanced because of digital communication?

Wickre: I think greatly enhanced. None of us would know as many people as is possible online. We have contacts with people around the country, around the world, that we would never be able to have strictly in person.

Knowledge@Wharton: The referral is an important component to networking. Sometimes a third party plays the intermediary in trying to solve an issue. Can you talk about that?

Wickre: No one has the whole answer that somebody needs, whatever the question is. If it’s an issue, if it’s a job opening, it typically is pieced together by a few people, which is a thing I actually like about this “I DO A LOT OF kind of connecting and networking. CONNECTING ONLINE. We’re all trying to problem-solve one IF I HAD TO FILL MY thing or another, SCHEDULE WITH COFFEE and you’re piecing together DATES AND LUNCHES, I the answer for yourself. I will often WOULD NEVER MAKE IT.” say, “I’m not the right one. I don’t have that expertise. But let me introduce you to so-and-so. They know more than I do.” You make the introduction. It’s really an ongoing chain. It really is like this gardening metaphor.

Knowledge@Wharton: You talk about no-pressure networking. What is that?

Wickre: The main thing is to build the muscle around staying “in loose touch” with people, which is people you don’t necessarily know well or see often. We have our various social channels, plus email, to stay in touch with. Simply, if they come to mind for some reason, their team wins or loses, you want to just send a note saying, “Hey, great about last night, sorry about last night. How are you? Let’s catch up soon.” That’s a moment of staying in touch. If you do that with six or eight people a day whose mental paths you cross, you’re in loose touch. They may respond, they may not. But then when [the time comes, you can say], “Hey, I have a follow-up question for you,” or “When we have that catch-up call, here’s what I actually want to talk to you about.”

Knowledge@Wharton: But you want to make sure those loose contacts are intentional, correct?

put all the pressure on this one person. And then you hope for the best.

Wickre: For sure. One thing is, no broadcasts. You’re not sending the same “hope you’re well” message to 10 or 20 people at a time. It’s one-to-one, but it’s not every day to the same person. If you remember that one of your former colleagues is a big sports fan and their team did something, then that’s the one to reach out to for that. It’s not everybody who you know who might be a fan of that team. It’s because you thought of that person.

Knowledge@Wharton: You spend a little time in the book talking about LinkedIn, which has become vital to a lot of business people in the last decade or so. But there are probably some protocols for using LinkedIn and making those connections, correct?

Knowledge@Wharton: During the holidays, there are a lot of different work-related parties. How should introverts manage that?

Wickre: Networking is not really the thing you’re doing at a work holiday party. It’s more of a political moment, as it were. It’s important to see and be seen by the people who count at your own company party, obviously, so that you’ve been recorded as being present. But if it’s too big, there’s really not much you can do except have a little small talk as you make the circuit.

My advice over the years, as the company parties I’ve been to have gotten bigger and bigger, is you kind of have a drink in hand, you’re making eye contact with the crowd, no phones, and you’re circulating loosely and stopping to chat every so often. I give myself an hour or an hour and a half tops to make the rounds, see a few people, say hello, make sure I’m seen by the CEO, and then I leave. Because I know the rest of it is going to be probably too much liquor and not enough food — and it is a work obligation, at the end of the day.

Knowledge@Wharton: As you were learning more about networking, how much of the process involved putting yourself out there and taking that step?

Wickre: It’s true. It has become kind of a default look-up engine for people. People I know in long-term jobs say, “Oh, I don’t do anything with my LinkedIn.” That may be fine, but it’s not only recruiters who are looking. It’s also people looking for speakers and panelists, for board members, for all kinds of things. So, it is good to keep it up at least quarterly. There’s a preponderance of people who do want to connect. If you’re one of those who sends “YOU CAN’T JUST HAVE out those “I’d like to join your network,” ONE NETWORK FOR which I think is the YOUR ONE JOB THAT canned language on LinkedIn, please add YOU’RE GOING TO your own explanation because it’s an HAVE FOR LIFE, BECAUSE invitation to ignore THOSE DAYS ARE OVER.” you if you don’t explain why you want to connect with that person. What’s the question? What’s the interesting thing you want to share?

Knowledge@Wharton: How do you compare the connections and conversations on LinkedIn with Facebook?

Companies are getting more interested in looking at people’s Facebook pages as part of their hiring process.

Knowledge@Wharton: How do you follow up with a connection you just made at a party or a conference?

Wickre: It’s true. I think recruiters look at every social channel, or many of the popular ones, when they’re considering candidates. Facebook was designed much more for personal and one-to-one connections. Obviously, it’s outgrown those bounds. But I say in the book, in terms of making connections with people you don’t know, Facebook is not ideal for that except maybe in the private groups. From the candidate’s point of view or the recruiter’s point of view, I would say LinkedIn is the best place to put a business polish on everything. A professional polish. On Twitter, if you use it, the same thing is possible. People do have two Twitter accounts if they want to have fun on one and do more [workrelated] stuff on the other. I think you can blend them. [Ask yourself:] What is my discoverable face to the world? What is it that I want people to be able to find?

Wickre: If it was a fleeting introduction, remind them how you met, what you’re interested in, what your question is — at their convenience. Always at their convenience. Do they have time for a call or a follow-up email to say a little more about whatever the thing is? Or, if they’re local, could you meet for coffee? To me, that’s the best kind of follow-up.

Give the other person context. If they don’t answer — and sometimes people don’t answer — I generally will give one more try. But I always say in that additional note, “If you’re not the right one for this, or if you think someone else could help me instead, please introduce me.” That’s OK, too. Don’t

I have a chapter called “Mixing the Personal and Professional” because, frankly, we’re all doing it to some degree now. [CNN journalist] Jake Tapper has a Twitter account for his dog, Winston. If we ever met Jake, we’d say, “How’s Winston?”

— because that’s out there and we know that. We’re more used to sharing more in public, and I think it makes us more interesting as people. In the old days, you’d have this at the bottom of the resume: “Also likes skiing, hiking and surfing.”

Now, we have a lot more ways to show that we have other interests, and I think it’s more dimensional. Again, you have to control and decide what it is you want to say about yourself.

Wickre: That’s a very good question. I think that, within my comfort zone, I put myself out there in familiar settings where I know a few people. But even when I was at, say, a conference where I really didn’t know anybody, I made note of the fact that while standing at the coffee bar, waiting in line, waiting for the keynote, I could have a moment of chat with somebody. “Oh, you work at so-and-so company?

May I follow-up with you? Could I have your card? I have a question to ask.” You’re not doing all your business there; you’re just getting the contact to pursue away from the conference. That’s an easy way to go about it, and that’s kind of how I’ve done it.

Why We Can’t All Get Away with Wearing Designer Clothes IN CERTAIN PROFESSIONS, LUXURY GOODS CAN SEND THE WRONG SIGNAL.​

By Susie Allen

Imagine yourself at a meeting with an accountant. You spot a Rolex watch on her wrist, and a Louis Vuitton handbag on her desk. Seeing those luxury goods might inspire confidence— after all, the accountant must be good at her job if she can afford them.

Now imagine yourself confessing your innermost hopes and fears to a therapist who is sporting the same flashy items.

Would you view her as favorably?

Maybe not, according to a new paper by Derek Rucker, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School, on the surprising (and potentially unfair) downsides of luxury consumption.

Over several decades, researchers have observed a Range Rover–sized pile of benefits from conspicuously consuming luxury goods. High-status brands, these papers found, might help you get a date, obtain a job, secure a charitable donation, and receive more money in a negotiation.

But Rucker and his coauthor, Kellogg PhD candidate Christopher Cannon, suspected there may be more to the story. “Chris and I asked ourselves whether, economic costs aside, luxury consumption was really all gravy,” Rucker says.

In a series of experiments, Rucker and Cannon found evidence for their hunch; luxury goods can have a downside beyond their high price tag. While sporting luxury brands boosted perceptions of a person’s status, they observed, it also led them to be seen as less warm. The research also explored how this “social tax” on luxury might play out in a hiring context. When people seek candidates for jobs associated with prestige, it turns out, they might favor candidates who consume luxury goods. But when the job involves interpersonal

warmth, consumers who wear luxury goods might be viewed more negatively.

What’s more, Rucker and Cannon explored why we view luxury consumers as cold.

“We don’t find evidence in this work that the effects are driven by envy,” Cannon says. “We find evidence that luxury consumption can lead people to infer certain motives.”

Specifically, when people assume that someone has donned luxury goods in order to show off, this can lead them to see that person as less warm.

The Downside to Luxury Rucker and Cannon started with an experiment designed to broadly analyze the relationship between luxury consumption and perceptions of warmth. They recruited 120 online participants, who were asked about their impressions of a man in a photograph. Half the participants saw a man in a plain blue t-shirt. The other half saw the same man in the same blue t-shirt, but adorned with a prominent Gucci logo.

Next, participants were asked a series of question about the man they’d just seen. They were asked to rate how warm, caring, and sympathetic he seemed, and how much they associated him with having status. They also rated to what degree they believed the man had worn that particular shirt to impress other people, and how much they envied him.

The experiment replicated what other researchers had found—luxury consumption elevated the person’s perceived status. The man in the Gucci t-shirt was rated as more prestigious and elite than the man in the plain t-shirt. But

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importantly, Rucker and Cannon also discovered something novel: participants saw the Gucci-sporting man as less warm overall.

Envy didn’t seem to be an important part of the story: no difference emerged in levels of jealousy between participants who saw the man in the plain t-shirt and those who saw him wearing Gucci.

However, motivation did matter: participants who saw the man in Gucci viewed him as seeking to show off and impress others.

When Is Luxury a Good or Bad Thing?

So does luxury help or hurt you? As Rucker and Cannon demonstrated in their next experiment, it depends.

The researchers recruited 115 participants and asked them to participate in a mock hiring process. They first asked participants to fill out a questionnaire about their hobbies and interests.

Then, the researchers gave them similar questionnaires ostensibly filled out by two other participants, along with two job descriptions: one for a corporate publicist and one for a human resources coordinator. The description of the publicist role highlighted the importance of being part of an elite social network to boost the company’s image, while the description of the human resources coordinator role highlighted the importance of being able to handle interpersonal issues and get along with anyone. Next, the “Someone could be study participants were asked, the nicest person in the based on the questionnaires, world—they just happen which person they would hire for to like designer scarves. each role.

And all of a sudden, you’re judging them as if they might be a little less trustworthy, which I find both fascinating and also unsettling.”

— Derek Rucker

In actuality, the questionnaires the participants received had been created by the researchers to assess the effects of luxury.

One contained several references to luxury brands such as Burberry and Porsche, while the other did not mention any

high-status items or brands.

If luxury consumption didn’t influence job selection, you would expect each candidate to have a 50 percent chance of getting either job—“a coin flip,” says Rucker.

But that’s not what happened: participants chose the luxuryconsuming candidate for the corporate publicist job 73 percent of the time, and the average Joe only 27 percent of the time. Meanwhile, the luxury consumer had only a 13 percent chance of getting the HR job, while the other candidate had an 87 percent chance.

Even though the questionnaires didn’t reveal anything about either person’s skills or qualifications, Rucker acknowledges he could see himself doing what the study participants did.

“Had I been put in this situation, without knowledge of this research, I too might have chosen this person who mentioned Prada, Burberry, and Porsche for the publicist role,” he says.

“But now I’d probably hesitate, since that might not reflect

any substantive differences in the person’s ability to perform the job.”

Dressing to Impress?

Where does this idea that luxophiles are cold come from?

To find out, the researchers recruited 102 online participants and showed them the same man in either the plain or Gucci t-shirt. The participants then answered a similar set of survey questions about status, warmth, and why they think people typically purchase luxury items. The results largely replicated those of the first study: luxury consumption was, on average, associated with both higher status and less warmth.

But this time, the researchers crunched the data on the subset of participants who did not believe that, in general, people wear luxury brands to impress others. Among these participants, they found, the man with the Gucci t-shirt wasn’t viewed as less warm.

To the researchers, this finding suggested two things: first, the belief that people wear high-end goods in order to show off can lead people to view luxury consumers as unfeeling.

However, it also meant “this isn’t necessarily a problem for everyone,” Rucker explains. “Having a luxury label may not have as negative an effect when people believe luxury is not used solely to impress.”

Conspicuous Consumption: It’s Complicated The negative perception of those who enjoy luxury items may not be accurate at all, the authors explain.

“Someone could be the nicest person in the world—they just happen to like designer scarves,” says Rucker. “And all of a sudden, you’re judging them as if they might be a little less trustworthy, which I find both fascinating and also unsettling.”

Adds Cannon: “People might purchase luxury brands because they appreciate the aesthetics, enjoy the quality of the workmanship, or want to fulfill a personal desire for self-expression. Luxury doesn’t have to be about flaunting wealth.”

So, should consumers shy away from luxury goods out of fear of alienating others? Rucker and Cannon wouldn’t go that far.

“We’ve shown situations exist where luxury consumption produces positive outcomes,” Rucker points out—such as when filling the corporate publicist role in the experiment.

“Rather than luxury always being good or always being bad, it depends on whether status or warmth is more important.”

Indeed, the authors point out that the study reveals the need for researchers to keep exploring when luxury consumption has positive versus negative consequences. “As a starting point, knowing whether status or warmth is what you’re primarily being evaluated on will help you decide whether you should wear the Burberry scarf to the event,” Cannon says.

Based on the research of: Christopher Cannon, Derek D. Rucker

Book,

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Sinker Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

The first book to deal with the problems of communicating to a skeptical, media-blitzed public, Positioning describes a revolutionary approach to creating a “position” in a prospective customer’s mind-one that reflects a company’s own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its competitors.

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Identity Designed: The Definitive Guide to Visual Branding

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Ideal for students of design, independent designers, and entrepreneurs who want to expand their understanding of effective design in business, Identity Designed is the definitive guide to visual branding. Identity Designed is a must-have, not only for designers, but also for entrepreneurs who want to improve their work with a greater understanding of how good design is good business.

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Upstart!: Visual Identities for Start-Ups and New Businesses

What Branding ISN’T: Have more than a logo, make your brand LEGENDARY.

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The 23 Commandments of Branding: 23 Proven Branding Strategies to Promote Your Business without Going Broke

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By Andrew J Oleson (Author), Natalie Turner (Designer) Branding is essential to the success of your organization, and it involves many things. In this book, we will tell you what branding ISN’T so you can avoid the unwise and costly errors that we’ve seen organizations make. Knowing what NOT to do is just as important as knowing what to do.

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The Ministry of Branding: A Biblical Approach to Brand Building

Beyond Sizzle: The Next Evolution of Branding

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The Ministry of Branding: A Biblical Approach to Brand Building, is a manual for businesses, ministries and organizations on developing a successful brand, with insight on how God views the practice of branding. Featuring biblical references, detailed processes, steps and activities, the Mike Martin helps even the most novice reader understand the importance of branding and its methods.

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Developing Insights on Branding in the B2B Context: Case Studies from Business Practice

Logo-a-gogo: Branding Pop Culture

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For more than 20 years, Rian Hughes has been a versatile designer, illustrator and lettering artist working for international clients in the fields of publishing, music, sports, telecommunications, fashion and more. He has specialized in creating logo designs for the comic industry, notably for DC and Marvel products, including Batman and Robin, Batgirl, the X-Men, Captain America, Wolverine, The Spirit, The Invisibles, Shade the Changing Man, and The Atom.

This book presents real life business-to-business (B2B) branding cases. The book deploys a theoretical-practical approach, where theoretical and conceptual frameworks related to key branding topics are supported by empirical case studies. Each case helps to illustrate the framework and discuss its applicability in practice.

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Fiesta: The Branding and Identity for Festivals

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The Story Engine: An entrepreneur’s guide to content strategy and brand storytelling without spending all day writing Kindle Edition

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