BrandKnew May 2016

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

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Dear Friends: Ring in the old. Remember bed time stories and the campfire chats? Story telling has come to the forefront again in marketing and how. The article on the topic bears testimony.

They are the ones with the intent and the purchasing power, so marketers should choose to ignore Gen X at their own peril. Read more about it in this issue. It’s often said that an agency is as good as the client brief. Now, it’s being said that the client knows exactly what it wants. Know more about it here. For all the brands wanting to catapult from being mere Meh to Marvellous, the feature on the subject articulates the traits to do so. Its all about going video gaga when it comes to content marketing. Historically it has been building intellectual property for the brands that they work with. Now, agencies are increasingly focusing on investing in and creating it’s own intellectual property. The good old brand mascot has touched many a heart. Now, it appears that the days of the brand mascot might just be behind us. Understand why in this issue. All this and a load more to soak in from the May edition of Brand Knew. Happy Reading!

PS: We take great pride and pleasure in announcing the first ever BrandKnew Awards: Celebrating Excellence of Home Grown Brands. Know more about the 3 country edition (UAE, UK & India) at http://bit.ly/25rOizX

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Till next, the very best.

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Suresh Dinakaran @sureshdinakaran

@Brandknewmag

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suresh@groupisd.com Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Regional Director: Krishna Chugh Regional Director: Vinit Chugh Country Head, India: Sanjay Kothandaraman Digital/Social Media Marketing: Khaleef Mayowa Junaid Web Specialist: Prasanta Kumar Sahu Online Support: Mahendra Kumar Behera

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CONTENTS

Four Traits That Turn Your Brand Story From Meh to Marvelous Storytelling: Out of the Campfire and Into Your Marketing Campaign A Quick Brief: To The Client Side And Back Are brands becoming feminist?

Microsoft’s CMO on the art and science of immersive storytelling Integrate real-time components into ad campaigns Is the era of the brand mascot over?

Hyper real-time engagement – are you ready?

What marketers can learn from Snapchat’s growth Emotional Sustainability in Brand and Product Design 5 Reasons Marketers Have Largely Overlooked Generation X Video: the future of content marketing?

Why ad agencies are putting cash into intellectual property Hey, Agencies: Marketers Are Pretty Clear About What They Want Book, Line & Sinker

Four Traits That Turn Your Brand Story From Meh to Marvelous

By Brad Shelton

In the perpetual search for the next big thing, the branding buzzword of the day has arrived: story.

You can’t read a magazine, listen to a podcast, or open a bestselling business book without encountering the author’s lofty claim of being a storyteller.

Fortune 500 companies hire “chief storytelling officers.”

Retailers and store designers describe their establishments as “story experiences.” Global conferences cover the revolution in storytelling. There are claims that each new technology, gadget, and invention has revolutionized forever the way we tell stories. Everyone is a storyteller, and every company, television commercial, video game, theme park attraction, and outlet mall now claims to tell a story.

There’s just one thing wrong with this. It’s crap.

Why is everyone trying to make a quick buck off stories?

Because real stories are powerful. They possess the unparalleled ability to connect people and forever change those people for the better. Great stories exist outside time.

They live beyond the realm of the commercial. They live in people’s hearts.

That love of storytelling is why, for example, millions of people from different generations lined up on opening day for the latest Star Wars movie. As a story, “The Force Awakens” just works: The Force—the binding energy of the universe— seized the world’s imagination. Forty years later, the world is still captivated by that emotional journey.

Just as a great movie can change people, so, too, can

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successful brand storytelling. When done well, brand stories transcend pure messaging or user experience. They engage the audience’s emotions and senses, and reflect their hopes, dreams, and desires—taking them on a journey of discovery and self-reflection.

Great storytelling is also hard as hell, which is why there are so few great storytellers. It’s also why so many self-proclaimed master storytellers (incapable of creating authentic, transformative connections) render the word meaningless by slapping the label of story onto almost anything.

Some of the biggest offenders are the technology and retail industries.

Technology itself does not tell a story... The cave wall, parchment, printing press, television, robots, virtual reality headsets, and mobile devices are not storytellers. Story is the emotional narrative arc that illuminates eternal truths.

Technology can bring a good story to life, but no matter how dazzling it is, technology is transitory. How individuals or the world are transformed as a result of the technology can be a story but not the technology itself.

Retailers also routinely commit crimes against story. Store design and merchandising are not storytelling. True, they can enhance the value of a great storytelling brand like Apple or Nike. However, more often, poorly thought-out displays or design experiences alienate customers and create confusion rather than construct a cohesive narrative that takes guests on an emotional journey.

So if technology, retail and marketers frequently get story wrong, which brands have gotten it right? How should marketers use storytelling to win customers’ hearts and deepen their loyalty? Check out these examples...

Good stories touch the heart The whisky company Johnnie Walker effectively uses the power of story. Its “Joy Will Take You Further” campaign (which builds on its past “Keep Walking” campaign) takes the story of whisky and its brand, and transforms it into the story of their consumers’ lives.

That narrative clarity extends to the Johnnie Walker House, which immerses guests in the story while it recreates the distillery experience, all in an environment that confirms for guests that their story is the key component of the Johnnie Walker experience.

Another example comes from baseball. Few things are more treasured in the United States than baseball is. In 2015, the Milwaukee Brewers opened an intimate fan experience at Miller Park to share the emotional story of the city’s dream of having a team and how it came to be because of the fans’ love and the commitment of Commissioner Bud Selig.

In “The Selig Experience,” an evocative film immerses fans in the history of baseball in Milwaukee. It was Selig’s passion and unwavering drive to keep baseball in the city that led to the construction of Miller Park and the return of the Brewers to the city that loved the team so much. A poignant and uplifting multimedia presentation and a museum experience leave visitors genuinely touched with a deeper connection to baseball and the team, engaging guests and letting them

know they are every bit as much the heroes as Bud and the Brewers.

Four traits of great storytelling Great stories originate from emotions, not information, which is a point many marketers tend to overlook.

Here are four key principles marketers should consider to become better storytellers.

1. Align on a shared purpose. Just as Luke Skywalker transforms from a sheltered farm boy to become one of the greatest Jedi leaders in the Rebellion’s fight against the Empire, an evocative brand story needs to follow a similar path and inspire some kind of change in the audience.

Change can come in many forms, such as improved brand perception, greater purchase intent, stronger preference and loyalty, or increased word-of-mouth.

To determine if your brand story hits the mark, define the key performance indicators and desired changes up front and build touch points into the storytelling expressions to measure whether they are being met effectively.

2. Start in the heart. Brand stories—and their physical manifestation—can miss the mark if they are built from the outside in. If the exterior “pretty shell” is designed first, and the guest experience (if it is given much consideration at all) is an afterthought, it can create confusion and disappointment for the visitor. Emotionally engaging brand experiences, whether physical or virtual, are built from the inside out. They start in the heart of the visitor and tap into the shared values that authentically connect the brand and the guest.

3. Focus on one unifying theme. We can only keep so much in our heads at one time. Brand storytelling often falls into the trap of pushing too many messages. Instead, marketers should focus on one central theme. That theme can be expressed in a variety of ways, but without a central, core idea, your story will always fall flat.

4. Engage all the senses. Audiences are most present and receptive when all five senses are engaged. Unlike other forms of marketing, physical branded experiences can enhance the emotional narrative through choreographed music, product sampling, strategically placed aromas, and participatory exhibits. Combined with visual elements, they can create a more immersive guest experience. But the coolest experiences and activations in the world are meaningless unless they’re used in support of a compelling story, not in place of one.

So, avoid the crap pronouncements of today’s “story”-touting snake oil pitchmen. They don’t care about your story. Instead, create authentic emotional connections with your customers.

And the next time somebody raves about an experience that changed their lives—ask them to describe it. Count the emotional adjectives. I bet there won’t be a one mention of technology.

Brad Shelton is a creative director at BRC Imagination Arts, an experience design agency that turns brands into destinations.

Storytelling: Out of the Campfire and Into Your Marketing Campaign

By Jake Athey

Ah, the campfire... it conjures up fond memories of toasting marshmallows, strumming guitars, and, of course, telling stories. Today, stories have gone far beyond the realms of campsites and fiction; they are at the core of what creates powerful marketing campaigns. Without them, campaigns languish, off to the side and in the dark, unnoticed by consumers seeking warmth and illumination.

For all those reasons and more, stories have become a vital component of marketing. Stories help brands cultivate a personality and convey authenticity. They also grab—and, more important, hold—people’s attention. The content becomes no longer a nuisance but instead fits into all the other content that a user is consuming, such as news articles, photos on Instagram, or YouTube videos.

Stories are an essential part of marketing today because consumer attention spans are shorter than ever before. The human of 2015 has an attention span of eight seconds, shorter than that of a goldfish, according to a recent Microsoft study.

That’s because consumers are now bombarded by marketing and advertising.

Smart marketers are now channeling storytelling as a powerful tool to create the most authentic connections possible with customers.

Carrying a mobile device means receiving messaging when you are in bed, in the bathroom, at work, or on a weekend getaway. There is no escape, and consumers are growing increasingly frustrated by and uninterested in advertising.

Millennials in particular do not trust content that does not seem “authentic,” and they are more interested in more genuine relationships with brands.

Images and user-generated content are a couple of the best ways to create that emotional and personal connection with customers, so let’s take a look at how marketers can optimize their storytelling, particularly via visual media.

Jake Athey is director of marketing at Widen Enterprises, a provider of marketing technology and services.

A Quick Brief: To The Client Side And Back

By Patrick Condo

About four years ago, I decided I was going to get out of advertising.

Headhunters would call with agency opportunities, many of them great. ‘Not interested,’ I would quickly explain. ‘Not working at another agency,’ I would tell them. I had bigger plans. Better plans. I was going to go in-house. I was going to transform a brand, and a company, from the inside out.

Since that time, many creative colleagues, myself included, left their agency jobs and headed for client-side jobs. An internal talent manager recently told me this has reached epidemic proportions, that agencies are bleeding top talent to tech companies and media concerns.

And it’s no wonder. In addition to offering more competitive, fulsome compensation packages, these jobs also offer the best opportunity for advertising creatives to do what we do best – build brands. And they don’t have the endless layers, the Game of Thrones-level politics, and the stubborn clients constantly standing in the way of us bringing the blossom of our creative genius to full flower.

And let’s face it, anything is better than working in an ad agency (especially those with open floor plans) where you can lose your job at the drop of a client’s hat or business.

Is that what you wanted to hear? Well, none of it is true.

Actually, it’s true that the overall compensation is better. But that’s where it ends.

When you go in-house, you’re still pitching ideas to clients.

Only now you work with them or, in some cases, for them.

They aren’t always as ambitious or brand savvy as those you’ve grown accustomed to in advertising (yes, I did just say that).

Politics: there’s the same amount of politics, if not more, because where there are people, there are politics.

As for job security, you may think in-house jobs are safe since the “client” can’t fire the “agency.” But what you need to remember is in an agency you are the maker of the very product that keeps them in business. If you’re a great creative, your agency will always have a place for you. Conversely, when you go in-house, you’re not revered as the superstar, award-winning creative. In fact, no one cares about your

Cannes Lion. You’re just support staff. And support is the first thing that gets cut when profits aren’t met. So don’t even bother unpacking it in the move.

Add to all of this no foosball tables, no beer fridges, no bean bag chairs, no dogs, no industry parties, no trips to Cannes, no anything that might even resemble fun. That’s corporate culture at it’s finest. Otherwise known as: The Complete Absence of Culture.

That’s not to say all client-side jobs are bad. If your creative vision, values and ambitions align, going in-house can be a brilliant, mutually beneficial, enormously fruitful relationship.

Think Jony Ive partnering with Steve Jobs at Apple. But, if not, well, think Jony Ive partnering with Donald Trump in hell.

Great in-house jobs do exist. I know more than a few folks who have found that magical, mystical beast, that unicorn wrapped in glitter and rainbows, carrying a 20% bonus and an amazing profit-sharing plan in its mouth. And if you find your unicorn, by all means go! Don’t walk, run toward its warm embrace.

But if it’s not a magical unicorn job, stay where you are.

Because here’s what I learned, or came to realize, at my inhouse job: Advertising is about to get great again – it has to; it has no choice. For it to reach full unicorn status, however, it needs people like you, my ambitious, imaginative friend.

I know it looks more like a narwhal than a unicorn right now. But I’m not kidding. The opportunity to do something monumental, something career-defining, something industrychanging, is right there in front of you, lurking in your hipsterinfested open floor plan.

Don’t wait for the brief.

Open your eyes.

Get to work!

Patrick Condo has learned from legends of the industry while working at top shops, such as Hal Riney, AKQA and TBWA\Chiat\Day LA. He most recently served as VP/ECD of Esquire, launching Esquire Network.

Are brands becoming feminist?

ADVERTISING’S GENDER PROBLEM: SOME BRANDS ARE STARTING TO GET IT

By Jean Freeman

When CEOs of holding companies have public he said-she said spats about gender inequality in the advertising industry, it’s apparent we have reached a tipping point.

I’m referring, of course, to the sexual harassment lawsuit filed last month against J. Walter Thompson, owned by WPP, and its now former CEO Gustavo Martinez — which has rocked an industry that thought it had come a long way from the Mad Men era.

During the 4A’s Transformation conference last month, WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell was asked directly about the lawsuit, and part of his answer included an acknowledgement that the industry has work to do in terms of gender equality. Sorrell added that while women make up 50% of WPP’s workforce, they account for only 33% of senior-executive positions, a number he says he is committed to seeing increase. Important footnote: WPP’s board of directors consists of four females out of 13 seats. My POV: He should start there.

But here is another sad reality about advertising today: Women control an estimated 85% of purchasing decisions in this country, yet over 91% of them feel like advertisers don’t understand them.

Recently, the objectification of women in advertising reached a critical mass with the launch of the #WomenNotObjects movement. “Women” have become the latest buzzword in the ad world, with more focus on the problems and not on the positive examples or solutions.

But some brands are embracing women in a modern way.

Industries such as beer and children’s toys, which have decades of ingrained habits regarding gender stereotypes, are starting to make much-needed progress.

Mattel, after years of pressure to address Barbie’s outdated ethos, earlier this year announced major updates to the doll, which include giving Barbie a variety of looks to better represent today’s women and girls through varying body types, hair and skin tones. Ironically, when Barbie was created in 1959, she sported a more natural body and a positive representation, but over the years high heels, pouty lips and Malibu Beach House became the norm.

As a category, beer has been notorious for speaking to men at the exclusion of women.

But two of the nation’s largest beer brands are making strides.

Coors Light’s recent “Climb On” campaign demonstrates an effort to include women in non-objectifying ways. Similarly, Bud Light’s Super Bowl spot, “Party”, which featured Seth Rogen and Amy Schumer, is a significant upgrade from last year’s “Up for Whatever” debacle. These advertisers are realizing that a broader target means better business.

Nothing changes overnight, which is why I’m a proponent of “progress, not perfection.” I will continue to applaud brands whose messaging displays progressive approaches to culture and gender. I like to envision a future where the more than 85% of women who make purchasing decisions identify with 91% & of the advertising they consume.

And I hope it will be in five years and not 50.

Jean Freeman is a majority owner and COO of Zambezi, an independent ad agency based in Venice, California. A serial entrepreneur, Freeman also serves as owner and vice president of Licensing at Blue Sky, an organizer/planner company.

Microsoft’s CMO on the art and science of immersive storytelling

By Paul Davies

Technology and creativity are inextricably linked. Microsoft’s chief marketing officer for the UK shares advice on combining the two.

It’s in no doubt that today’s consumers are over exposed to marketing messages. Everywhere you turn there’s a plethora of brands jostling for your attention. It’s a noisy world out, and marketers are rightfully having to up their game to win valuable engagement time with consumers.

catalyst is still the big hairy creative idea. We need it to capture audience minds and spark passion, intrigue, the lot.

Emotion kick starts a response. We can then marry the art with the science to create something personal, unique and memorable.

Memorable storytelling should stimulate the imagination of the respondent to create an experience that is entirely personal to them. Active involvement between storyteller and listener is what brands are striving for with their audiences – but in order to motivate any kind of participation, the experiences created need to be more interactive than ever before.

Today, technology and creativity are inextricably linked. Storytelling relies on the art of the medium and the message, with the science of the delivery and the personalisation of the experience.

And in many ways, technology is mass media’s new BFF. Just look at all the new techniques at our disposal as the mass media owners breathe new life into their offerings to advertisers through digital technologies.

As an industry, we have some wonderful marketing science and technologies at our disposal to understand how to gain the affection of our audiences. But I suspect we are all being dazzled by over-complex jargon and buzzword bingo, which few of us truly understand. It’s important stuff, but without any truly great advertising ideas, the marketing science has little application. As a result, are we in real danger of undervaluing the art and creativity that lies within our discipline? I worry we might be.

The good news is that neuroscience now confirms what many marketers have been hedging their bets on for decades: emotional storytelling is the answer to cutting through the noise. It resonates with people in a way that improves brand recall, advocacy and referral.

You may already be aware of the left brain / right brain notion. Left side dominates in language, processing what you see and hear. When you need a fact pulling up, your left brain digs in your memory. Your right side is in charge of movement, face recognition, the emotion and the “feel”.

Neither side can function without the other. Left side feeds the data which helps the right to be creative – put very simply anyway.

So what does that mean for our work today? The ultimate

Reading the IAB’s recent adspend report, almost half of online display ads were bought programmatically last year. But the art and science can’t exist without each other.

One of our most immersive marketing initiatives of the last year came from fusing together the art of storytelling with the science of technology, creating that perfect marriage. We wanted to communicate how personal Cortana – Microsoft’s digital personal assistant – is, so a dynamic, live OOH campaign was created. The campaign changed the message ten thousand times a day based on location, day of week, weather etc – all through a bespoke algorithm. This meant that the ads served to the people walking by were deeply personal to their surroundings, creating personal experiences for every individual that engaged with the campaign. You might have seen our interactions with Chris in Glasgow and his dislike of cricket.

But back to this story. It’s the art and science of storytelling that sparks imagination. Let’s celebrate the two in tandem, and not one at the expense of the other. After all, isn’t that the secret of a happy marriage?

This article was first published on campaignlive.co.uk Paul Davies is the CMO of Microsoft UK.

Integrate real-time components into ad campaigns

By Andrew Alcock and Yann Aïtbachir

As mobile phones and tablets have become an indispensable part of consumers’ daily lives, their attention spans have become increasingly brief.

Consumers are constantly being pulled in twenty different directions, whether it be to check out their friends’ latest Instagram posts, search for the best price for a flight, or beat a family member in a game of Yahtzee.

Slippery fish According to comScore, mobile use has skyrocketed and is now the leading digital platform consumers use, with total activity on smartphones and tablets accounting for 62 percent of digital media time spent, and app use representing the majority of digital media time at 54 percent.

At the same time, a recent Microsoft survey found that the average attention span has dropped to eight seconds, which is less than a goldfish’s nine-second attention span.

Mobile is obviously a crucial market for brands to reach, but consumers do not want to deal with ads that are irrelevant or in the wrong format – they expect their mobile experience to be simple, intuitive and lightning-fast.

To capture their shrinking attention spans, it is critical that brands make sure that they are reaching the right person at the perfect time and place and in the correct context.

Milliseconds can separate stellar advertising outcomes from lackluster results.

To be successful on mobile, brands must think about instantaneous advertising to capture consumers’ attention on the fly when it matters the most.

Making sure that the following real-time components are part of ad campaigns will help brands see the best results:

Use a fast, high-inventory bidding platform Brands should make sure that they are using a lightning-fast, real-time mobile bidding engine with instant access to a high number of worldwide impressions.

The more inventory that a platform can access, the more opportunities that brands will have to reach their target audience when and where they will get the best results. This will ensure that brands are connecting with the most relevant consumers with compelling messaging throughout the day, whether they are in applications or using the mobile Web.

Act instantly on results Gone is the era of waiting days or weeks until a campaign is over to determine success.

Unlike email, television, desktop display, Web traffic and search campaigns, on mobile brands can now determine within milliseconds if a campaign resonates with an audience.

Brands can now view their ad spend, clicks and consumer conversions in one place for a holistic view of how their campaign is tracking.

Then, brands can leverage these instant consumer insights to make real-time adjustments to a campaign and ultimately get more value out of each dollar spent.

Rapidly retarget customers Speed is critical to reach potential customers at the right time and place as they can quickly lose interest.

As such, brands must retarget with consumers on a global scale in real-time to inspire them to take action.

For example, brands can create trigger-based marketing campaigns, where customer actions can drive unique ads targeted to them. They can also re-engage shopping cart abandons within minutes with compelling offers to increase interest in a purchase.

Using these real-time capability will drive overall engagement, active use and brand loyalty.

Localize advertising campaigns Instantly reaching customers where and when they are most likely to make a purchase will significantly increase the relevance of the ads that they view and their chances of buying.

Brands can make ads local and personal by connecting with people in real-time when they are in close proximity to specific events, business conferences or retail stores.

Mobile is a unique advertising platform in that it can use location to reach the right consumers, so brands should take advantage of these capabilities.

Location-based targeting can significantly increase the relevance of ads to customers, especially if the timing is right.

EVERY MILLISECOND matters in mobile and if brands do not implement real-time components into their campaigns, they are lowering their chances for success.

Ensuring that real-time is a major part of mobile campaigns will drive consumer awareness, enable brands to personalize the customer experience, boost conversions and retain customers.

Andrew Alcock is chief product officer and chief technology officer and Yann Aïtbachir is head of product research, both at PocketMath, San Francisco.

Is the era of the brand mascot over?

By Lisa Lacy

Is your marketing team dreaming of creating the next Green Giant?

Bad news: It’s no longer possible to create a character like Tony the Tiger, Mr. Clean or the Michelin Man and see these figures endure for decades and bleed into pop culture simply by featuring them in ads.

That’s right: The traditional brand mascot is going extinct.

Despite what might be decreased relevance overall, these characters nevertheless still have years of consumer good will to cash in on. More modern brand reps, however, face pressure to evolve and to be nuanced in order to remain relevant because in part attention spans are short and channels abound.

#AdiosAmigo Look no further than beer brand Dos Equis and its Most Interesting Man in the World.

According to a press release on March 9, the brand said #AdiosAmigo as he headed on a one-way mission to Mars.

But, the brand added, “Fans can rest assured that Dos Equis will reveal a new Most Interesting Man in the World in 2016, as this is not the end of the campaign, but an evolution.”

A Dos Equis rep declined to provide specifics about what’s to come, but said 2016 is the right time for the brand to “take interesting to new heights” as Dos Equis opens “the door to a new world of possibilities for what it means to be interesting” and the brand prepares to assume its role as the official beer sponsor of the college football playoff on ESPN in the fall.

“It’s important for Dos Equis to evolve with our consumers and their changing attitudes and behaviors and recent research shows 83% of men want to live an even more interesting life, which reinforces Dos Equis’ Stay Thirsty mindset,” the rep added. “We see this evolution of The Most Interesting Man similar to that of Batman, Superman and James Bond, where our guy has seen multiple iterations of these cultural icons and enjoys different takes on the same character. These franchises not only endure, they grow, as the characters’ stories are bigger than one individual. They refresh themselves and stay relevant, just like The Most Interesting Man in the World.”

The latest in a string of makeovers The Most Interesting Man is certainly not the first brand rep to undergo a change. Look no further than the Maytag Repairman, McDonalds’ Hamburglar or the Brawny Man,

who have all been revamped in recent years.

But with all due respect to these latter icons, Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man still arguably had more cultural cache left, meaning he’s making something of a Seinfeld-like exit at this point.

Value in going out on top To wit: The #AdiosAmigo spot announcing his departure has 1.3 million views on YouTube and, per video ad tech firm Pixability, it has 4200 shares on YouTube with an additional 10.3 million views and 23,000 shares on Facebook.

And while the Most Interesting Man does not have an official Twitter handle, a number of unofficial accounts exist and the quips about him — which, since 2009, include, “He has won the lifetime achievement award, twice,” “His business card simply says, ‘I’ll call you,’” and “When he drives a new car off the lot, it increases in value” — have inspired countless memes and even a meme generator.

The Most Interesting Man has also bled into popular culture with executions like a 2012 Saturday Night Live sketch featuring actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt as his obnoxious son.

In an additional nod to his popularity, Dos Equis is giving away his Coveted Collection of worldly possessions, including his tuxedo, guitar and mariachi and astronaut suits.

Why timing is everything Many marketers agree the timing is right for this change.

Rafael Serrano, executive creative director at advertising company GSD&M’s multicultural arm, Sibling, says the Most Interesting Man was getting a little stale and repetitive.

“Some of the last executions I saw were expected and no longer had the freshness that they once did, so I was not at all shocked that they were going to retire him,” Serrano said, adding that it’s time to take the campaign in a new, unexpected direction. “I would have retired him a little earlier, but that’s just me. I did like the way they retired him though — epic. Very fitting.”

Now the challenge is for Dos Equis to retain its engaged fans while gaining new ones with new content.

“The bar is high and you can’t afford to disappoint,” Serrano said.

Brook Flagg, account executive at Desmond & Louis Public Relations, added this move potentially gives Dos Equis an opportunity to boost public interest in the brand itself again rather than simply in the character of the Most Interesting Man.

To boldly go…

It’s not just Dos Equis that has to prepare for a bold new mascot future.

Per Matthew Scott, senior vice president of business development and strategy at online community Crowdtap,

groupisd.com

20 spokespeople functioned as brand icons during a time when the media landscape was much simpler.

ever. Based on thirdparty research, Flo is more likable now than ever.

And based on our own marketing measures, she’s as effective as ever.

Simply put — the Network Strategy is helping keep Flo relevant, even after more than 120 episodes.”

“There were limited distribution channels — newspaper, radio, TV — and less opportunity for everyday people to influence the message,” Scott said. “Consider that among today’s teens, online creators are more influential than most traditional celebrities and young adults are watching 2.5 times more online video than TV. This spells big changes for the way brands utilize spokespeople.”

Further, as the pace of the marketing world accelerates and brands prepare for incoming generations of consumers that demonstrate vastly different preferences and behaviors, Scott noted change will be a constant.

“Advertisers can’t please all people all the time. Sure, some fans might be sad to see The Most Interesting Man in the World go, but let’s remember that consumers can be fickle,” Scott added. “Today’s tweet lamenting the retirement of a fictional spokesman will likely be replaced by an entirely new conversation tomorrow. That’s why brands today need to focus on building longer-term relationships, beyond the campaign, to stay relevant amid cultural ebbs and flows.”

Misty, water-colored memories Nostalgia remains a powerful motivator, so even inconsolable Dos Equis fans need not necessarily despair forever.

In fact, Serrano said nostalgia is one of the main reasons brand reps stay relevant in the first place and this evolution

by Dos Equis really signals an attempt to make the campaign more relevant again and to offer something new to fans.

“TV shows, for instance, that stay way longer than necessary — I’m looking at you, “Two and a Half Men” — still bring in the numbers and have a rabid loyal following, but they are no longer part of the national conversation,” Serrano said.

“The retirement of the Most Interesting Man in the World has people talking about him again. It’s brilliant.”

As such, Serrano said he believes we will see the Most Interesting Man again and give him a hero’s welcome, adding he hopes the Geico cavemen come back at some point, too.

“When they bring the original actor back, it will strike a nostalgia cord in the audience and the brand will have accomplished not just one, but two long-term objectives,” Flagg added. “Bringing him back can happen no less than five years from now, because these things are cyclical. [And] the brand has to wait for its audience to mature in order for the reprise of the character to truly be nostalgic.”

The perkiest mascot of all Insurance provider Progressive is in a similar position with Flo, who has been shilling for the brand since 2008.

According to Progressive CMO Jeff Charney, the brand keeps Flo fresh with what it calls its Network Strategy.

“We don’t treat our ads like ads — they’re episodes. Just like a hit TV show, over the years we’ve introduced foils, a supporting cast, integrated set changes and even spin-offs,” Charney said. “The result? The campaign is as relevant as

And so while Progressive may not have recast Flo to date as Dos Equis is doing, she has nevertheless evolved in her own way.

“Progressive has dimensionalized Flo across social media channels, and the mascot often gets more engagement than the brand itself,” Scott added. “Progressive also recently ran a ‘Dress Like Flo’ Halloween contest to encourage people to share branded content using the popular character as a fun and relevant way in.”

Insurance provider Allstate’s Mayhem character is a similar example. Introduced in 2010, he’s arguably the new kid on the block, so his initial chaos shtick still works, so it will be interesting to see what Allstate does with him as time goes on. An Allstate rep was not available for further comment.

Modern mascot takeaways In short, brands that want to introduce mascots today — or more powerfully leverage those that have been introduced in the last decade or so like Dos Equis, Progressive and Allstate — need to make sure they: • Evolve: Mascot relevance is all about evolution and keeping up with the times today, Serrano said. “Even the King from Burger King became ‘edgier,’” he added.

• Build long-term relationships with consumers: While we cannot anticipate all upcoming trends and preferences — especially among future generations, Scott said these relationships can help withstand cultural ebbs and flows.

• Empower consumers to participate in brand conversations: “While there is clearly still a place for creating iconic personalities to associate with brands, marketers need to balance this with tactics that empower everyday people and online influencers to participate in brand storytelling, too,” Scott said.

• Listen: Per Scott, as brands find new ways to connect with their audiences, it’s vital they keep an ear to the ground and recognize opportunities to reintroduce past spokespeople. “Marketers can uncover these opportunities by having a more authentic and ongoing dialogue with their customers,” he said.

Lisa Lacy is the senior writer for Momentology. She previously covered digital and search marketing for ClickZ and SEW and is a graduate of Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

Hyper real-time engagement – are you ready?

By Hannah Rainford

Those working in the industry have been preaching the benefits of social media to brands all over the world, convincing them to adopt a social-first, or at the very least a social-second customer service strategy.

Those that have, are reaping the rewards, building their trust and credibility on social media and forging relationships with customers, some of whom have become brand advocates.

Now a new wave of real-time engagement has arrived. Hyper real-time engagement has stemmed from the conversational abilities made available by social media.

Consumers are used to having conversations with individuals and now they’re turning their attention to brands. It’s becoming unacceptable for consumers to have to wait for a response from a brand on social media.

This trend has recently been amplified by Facebook, which

has opened the doors for consumers to message brands through its app, as announced at its 2016 F8 conference.

While private messaging isn’t new to Facebook, consumers have been used to the email-style inbox. Messenger has more of a conversational feel, which means that consumers are more likely to be expecting a response in real-time.

Recent research shows that 42% of consumers who use social media for customer support expect a reply within the hour. This extends to evenings and weekends, with 57% of consumers stating that they expect the same response time after normal business hours. Are brands living up to this consumer expectation?

Unfortunately not. A recent study from Brandwatch showed that the average response time by retail brands is 157 minutes, which highlights that the majority of brands are falling short when it comes to response times.

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resource to responding to online queries. If you can’t offer 24-hour or weekend support, state opening hours on your social media channels.

• Make email alerts your friend. Set up alerts within a social media monitoring tool such as Mention.net or Google Alerts for the keywords you wish to track, and respond accordingly.

• If you don’t have an answer to a question, respond anyway to let people know they’ve been heard.

• Utilise instant saved replies for Facebook messenger to aid response times. Facebook has also supplied some hints and tips for brands wanting to use Facebook Messenger to communicate with consumers.

Introducing “Messenger Platform” A further Brandwatch study revealed that 96% of mentions of brands that aren’t tagged with the owned channels are ignored by the brand altogether. Many brands are guilty of only looking for mentions of their owned channels and are not utilising social monitoring tools, or even Twitter search to monitor for untagged mentions.

At Facebook’s 2016 F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg launched a series of new features for its Messenger app. This came a few days after the relaunch of the app to include messaging to pages via a code. While private messaging brands on Facebook is nothing new – opening up Messenger to brands makes it easier for consumers to start conversations.

To assist with this extra demand on brands, Facebook introduced chatbot, an automated way for consumers to talk to brands. It’s the online version of the automated telephone message – press one for sales, press two for returns.

While in its infancy, its effectiveness for providing hyper real-time engagement will be a real strength but it’s going to take some time before the technology and development from brands evolves the feature into an effective source of customer service.

Live video

So, why is hyper real-time engagement important and why do brands need to be on top of it? According to Zendesk, 40% of consumers switch loyalty because a competitor offers better customer service.

Consumers tend to visit a brand’s social media channels to determine how effective their customer service is before considering the brand. If they see that Brand A responds quickly, but Brand B is slow to answer queries, they’ll opt for Brand A. How can brands up their game when it comes to real-time engagement?

• Use a social listening tool to monitor for mentions of brand, competitor or industry keywords. Combine this with an engagement tool and you’ll never miss a mention again.

• Embrace a social-first customer service strategy. Dedicate

As live video starts to take off, this will pose a new challenge for brands. Live video will allow brands to demonstrate their human-side, showing unedited footage of real-time events.

Will the next step to this be live video conversations between consumers and brands? This step will be a lot easier for brands to adopt if they are already actively involved in realtime conversations online with their customers.

In conclusion Brands that have already adopted a social-first customer service strategy should be incorporating a social listening tool into their activity to capture all conversations and maximise engagement. Those who are still taking longer than an hour to respond to customer queries need to change and evolve to keep up with the pace, before they lose out to their competitors.

By Hannah Rainford, senior social manager at Jellyfish

What marketers can learn from Snapchat’s growth 12 VALUABLE MARKETING LESSONS FROM SNAPCHAT’S SUCCESS

By Tereza Litsa

Snapchat is turning into a very appealing platform for brands, while the engagement of its users keep increasing. How did it become the new trending social platform?

Snapchat has surprisingly evolved into a very interesting social network, both for the users, but also for the brands that start exploring its numerous opportunities for increased engagement, curated content and new creative directions.

Start with a narrow audience A small and engaged group of people can be very useful at the initial stage of your platform, in order to examine what needs to be adjusted, depending on the users’ habits.

There is no need to chase the larger audience yet, or at least, until you’re confident that you can really make a difference.

It has shaped a new form of mobile-focused marketing that combines engagement, (playful) creativity, uniqueness and fun filters and Snapchat has achieved to measure a significant growth, counting more than 100 million daily active users and we are expecting this number to rise very soon.

Which marketing lessons can we extract from its successful case then?

Pick the right early adopters Snapchat’s decision to focus on a young target audience seemed to be among the reasons it skyrocketed its fame, as it managed to win over the most demanding users.

A brand’s early adopters are the influencers that will affect its future, which means that if you pick the right ones, then you already have an advantage from your competitors.

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Boost engagement with psychology Snapchat users spend an average of 25-30 minutes on the platform every day and this impressive level of engagement was created by blending the idea of ephemerality and the right psychological triggers, in order to keep the users coming.

Spot a trend (the ephemerality of social media) Social media has been popular for the direct communication and the instant reactions from users. The increase of content in our feeds highlighted the ephemerality of our posts, which were still available if you searched for them though.

The fact that the posts disappear after 24 hours makes users visit the platform several times during the day, in order to beat the dreadful social F.O.M.O (Fear Of Missing Out).

This creates a sense of urgency that is very effective as a way to boost the engagement and I believe that Snapchat’s level of engagement will increase even more in the next months.

Every new platform should seek for the right way to encourage engagement, as this is the only way to turn the product into a habit that will hook users to keep using it and eventually expand its audience.

Seize the mobile power As the mobile domination continues, so do the chances of success when a product is launched in a mobile-focused approach.

Snapchat relied on the way we use our mobile devices to make instant communication easier, while it encouraged us to curate real-time content as part of the global stories, changing the idea of real time coverage.

Thus it managed to: • use the mobile power • turn users into publishers • create a new type of live coverage and what we can learn is that there is always the need to come up with new ideas to create an appealing product, by analysing the current trends, but even predicting the next ones.

Snapchat decided to take the ephemerality of posts to the next level by setting an expiry date to them, reminding us that if we want to enjoy what our friends post, we need to visit the platform daily.

It’s interesting to observe the stats below, as Snapchat users seem to really like their temporary posts, with 35% of them considering it the reason they use the platform.

brands to experiment with a more engaging visual content.

In fact, it was more challenging to persuade brands to adjust to the new type of content, as it looked from the beginning more appealing for instant communication and fun posts, rather than what we know as branded content.

When your platform is able to influence brands on their creative direction, then you know that you’re one step closer to monetising your idea.

Think locally Global success may come through focusing on the local element and this also occurs to Snapchat and its decision to highlight all the local stories that matter to users.

Now that users turn into publishers, they also want to contribute with their content into the right context and Snapchat’s micro-stories helped to measure a significant increase of content during the past year.

Hence, what we can learn from this approach is the importance of maintaining the local focus when trying to engage with users, as this will keep them interested in the platform, until they decide to add their own public content.

Disrupt communication Snapchat was initially used as a private (and ephemeral) method of communication, which was mostly relevant to teenagers who couldn’t stop using the fun platform.

By the time it managed to win the most demanding demographic in terms of communication, Snapchat knew that it’s ready to think of bigger plans and come up with new ideas on how to attract a wider audience.

Think of expansion Snapchat has reportedly acquired Bitstrips for $100 million, a popular app that includes personal emojis, the so-called bitmojis, which seem to fit perfectly to Snapchat’s idea of fun snaps.

This is a proof that a trending platform needs to consider new paths to maintain its relevance and provide more features to its demanding audience. It’s easy to lose your popularity just as fast as you earned it, so it’s important to never rest on your laurels.

Create effective advertising (the trend of vertical videos)

It’s no secret that Snapchat aims to replace Facebook’s Messenger as our main platform of communication and the introduction of Chat 2.0 proved that it seems to be on the right direction.

The introduction of audio and video calls proved that Snapchat is going beyond its favourite (young) audience and tries to stand out as a reliable platform for our daily instant communication.

It may be too early yet to tell whether it can grow that big to compete with Facebook’s Messenger (and this also depends on the audience’s loyalty towards the biggest social network), but at least Snapchat seems to be trying hard to expand its features (or else, to imitate what works better on other platforms).

Snapchat knew that its growth plans can’t be viable without an effective form of advertising and the idea of vertical videos turned out into its secret weapons for further growth, as it created a new trend in content.

Provide new creative directions

Full-screen vertical videos seem to work very well lately on Snapchat, with Facebook imitating the idea with the introduction of Canvas, as users seem to be up to 9 times more willing to watch a full ad, comparing to other types of videos.

Snapchat succeeded in providing a new creative direction, a more colourful and playful one that allowed both users and

As the time spent watching an ad is a significant measurement, Snapchat knows that the concept of vertical videos has been

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while its video views rose 400% since last year.

Video keeps growing as an appealing part of a brand’s marketing strategy, which means that Snapchat’s popularity (and its new form of creativity) makes more brands flocking to try out the new vertical content.

Snapchat’s success may attributed to the fact that it has become appealing both to users, but also to brands and this favors the chances of growing even more, provided that it manages to maintain the balance between the two different audiences. very successful and that’s what makes many brands find the idea of advertising on its platform appealing.

And since the measurement of a campaign matters to all brands, Snapchat promises to expand its measuring capabilities soon with the collaboration with “industry-leading measurement partners to help advertisers understand who their ads are reaching and what impact they are having”.

Showcase brand opportunities

Stay fun (but effective) Yes, Snapchat still manages to maintain a balanced focus between users and brands (even favouring user), but its growth may require a reconsideration of its priorities and this will be a challenge, which might affect its future.

Brands were cautious at first to join Snapchat and once they

Its fun and creative approach towards content and instant communication has contributed to its impressive engagement rates and this can serve as a useful lesson for any brand trying to grow in the digital landscape.

did, many of them were unsure whether it could be part of their marketing strategy.

Except for the big brands that joined its Discover section from the early stages, others wanted a solid proof that this network can be taken seriously in terms of effectiveness for their business.

2016 was certainly the year that brands realised that they cannot overlook Snapchat’s success, as its users keep increasing, the engagement is not expected to be reduced, Users should always be a brand’s main focus and this approach may help you build a solid platform, which will effectually attract brands and facilitate the process of monetisation.

Of course, there’s no secret formula that will help any platform turn into the “next Snapchat”, but still, we can all learn some valuable marketing lessons by understanding what led to the success of Snapchat and how a business may use it.

Tereza Litsa is a Writer at ClickZ.

Emotional Sustainability in Brand and Product Design

By Danielle Thompson

Product design is a creative discipline that challenges designers to build an aesthetic, functional and marketable product. The rapid speed of innovation has stimulated interest and change in designing the user experience. The discipline is now responsible to create a new paradigm in the product design process, as there are many more factors to explore.

Human behaviour has been studied to inform the design of this curated user experience.

Creating an emotional connection to your target market can translate into conversion, sales, as well as online and offline interaction. Good design is a huge part of this process. In order to understand the role of design, when establishing consumer relationships, we have to define design. Design is not just embellishing content , or the crafting of a clean site or application. Design can also be a way of thinking that is mindful of your market’s needs, and ideally addresses them before they are even known.

To build an emotionally sustainable brand, design thinking requires a focus on building personalities and stories in tandem with building a product in order to establish an emotionally sustainable brand. Giving a product a life beyond its base function is how Apple gets us so excited about their latest release or why your favourite restaurant has a line.

The Emotional Levels of Brand Design In the startup world, there is a term called “Unique Value Proposition.� This proposition is a clear statement that communicates to potential customers how your product or service will improve their lives. Instead of focusing on the

unique value proposition, I often pitch the concept of the emotional value proposition. The difference between the two is that the latter is based on narratives or personality, while the former often occupies a more practical space.

Author Donald Norman offers a digestible breakdown of a concept he refers to as the levels of processing. These levels

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can be directly applied in product design.

consumer interacting with your brand or product?

The Visceral

How easy is it to reach customer support on your website, for example? A hard to react support team may build narratives with a lack of trust and therefore reduce the emotional connection. A very interactive site with many members, for example, may build a sense of community in the user’s narrative of the brand or product.

The first emotional level is visceral. We have all experienced this level of emotion, as it is usually outside of our control and directly related to our physical senses. The visceral is an automatic, “prewired” level of emotion. When experiencing visceral emotions we make rapid judgments that are largely biologically determined. We are quickly able to categorize experiences as good or bad - safe or dangerous. This level is dominated by our senses.

Reflective The third emotional level is reflective and it’s about the message. The reflective level thinks back to the behavioral user experience and the visceral reactions to the user interface and gives the experience meanings. The reflective stage is when the user makes a connection between the experience and their own sense of self.

The meaning assigned to an experience will be contingent on a variety of variables; including the user’s culture, past experiences, and the situation they find themselves in when interacting with your product.

The reflective state is the most conscious of the three levels of emotion and can observe the impact of both the visceral and behavioural levels.

In a three dimensional sense, the visceral is our environment.

We react to the senses in the air, the touch on our skin, the sounds nearby and any taste we experience. Hearing a loud, unexpected sounds while relaxing on a quiet beach may ignite the classic flight or fight reaction. This would be an example of a visceral reaction.

Translated into design, the User Interface as a product would be a great example of designing for the visceral. The two dimensional world of our phones may not include smell, and a wide variety of touch - but color and fonts can have a similar effect.

These initial, visceral reactions shape our immediate experience of a product or brand.

Behavioral The behavioral emotional level mostly involves cognitive processing within the mind. Behavioral, is the interaction between your product or service and the consumer over time.

This level occurs as the user moves through the cognitive process of planning, expecting and learning within your product.

In the world of web or application design, the behavioral level could be seen as the User Experience design. How is the

Addressing the Cognitive Levels in Product Design Building emotional ties with a brand and their customers requires the designer to know their market. Each generation enters the world with a new set of needs and understanding of how the world is. Understanding the beliefs and priorities of your market is vital for your brand’s emotional durability.

For example, marketing to millennials has become a challenge because of the noncommittal, value based, experience oriented relationship this age group has towards

brands. Understanding the value systems of your target market will help you build your product’s value.

Identify Your Market, and be Specific Target market selection is a very important decision for many companies. Identifying your target market starts with looking at the problem you are trying to solve, or the ways you are attempting to make your user’s life better. It is imperative to tailor your marketing and sales efforts to reach the specific segment of the population that will most likely interact with you brand. As much as we may like to think our products or services will be useful and beneficial to all markets, this is often not the case. A broad market is a great starting place, but defining the specifics of your market will allow you to create a more curated experience for your users. Targeting a specific market attracts loyal first users or customers who then can become advocates for your brand or product.

Phenomenology Phenomenology is the focus on the individual and their understanding of the world. This research method focuses on the individual’s subjective experience and personal interpretation of the world. With this method of research we can understand a collective ideology of our market through individuals, to perhaps create a related brand culture. A great way to collect this type of data would be through formal and informal interviews.

Field Research Field research is an extremely broach approach to qualitative research but will certain help create a more internalized sense of your target market. Field research is when the researcher

Identifying a customer’s desire to buy your product or interact with your service is a question of customer values.

Understanding the value your product offers goes beyond knowing its ‘features’. A feature is a default characteristic of your product or service. Today, iPhones now come with the ability to scan your fingerprint. This feature is used to unlock your phone, make purchases and to open certain application. To some, the value or benefit of this feature is safety. Understanding that your market is not looking for a fingerprint scanner in a phone but rather values safety is a very important distinction to make.

What value does your product or service have?

Using the iPhone as example, safety is a largely universal value and will only segment your target market so far. Technical factors such as geography, demographics, psychographics as well as behaviour will help dissect your market further.

Don’t Create User Story, Listen to Them After identifying your market, listen to them. It is important that your brand has an internalized sense of who it is speaking and interacting with. Qualitative research is a method focused on understanding the motives behind thought patterns and behaviours. Interviews are a great source of data in qualitative research, so are observations. Observations are extremely important when designing an emotionally sustainable brand, as they take place in a setting that naturally occurs in contrast to a formal interview.

Renata Tesch, a qualitative researcher, outlines three major approaches to qualitative research that we can apply to product or brand design.

Ethnography The ethnographic approach, in regards to qualitative research, is largely based on the understanding of culture and its influences in a potential customer’s or user’s behaviour. Originally, designers could assume concepts of culture around ethnicity and geographic location. Today the concept of culture is much more broad as it includes groups, organizations, sexuality and much more. The most common way to study the ethnography of your target market is through observation.

enters a natural setting where their market can be found and observers. Notes are critical for successful field research.

Create a Personality A brand personality can be defined as a set of human characteristics associated with a brand. To illustrate, GoPro personifies itself as an adventurous, sporty, young, and creative brand. Consumers can easily relate to a brand if they can project their identity onto the values of the product.

Research around brand building techniques has suggested that the greater the connection between the human characteristics that describe an individual idealized or actual self and those that describe the brand, the higher preference the user or consumer will have for that specific brand.

Although there may be similarities in the adjectives used to describe human characteristics and brand traits, they are very different the ways that they are formed. Human traits are based on attitudes, beliefs, physical appearance as well as behaviour. Brand personalities are built based on direct or indirect contact with the consumer or user. People begin

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to build personas of brands based on the employees, the CEO, brand endorsements - and many more factors. Brand personalities are also built in indirect ways such as the brand name, logo, advertising and price for example.

There are many different aspects of a brand and consumers will continue to draw new links, that expand your brand identity further. Here are some dimensions of your brand to be mindful of: Attributes These are distinctive features that concisely characterize the product or brand name. For example the feature can be intrinsic - which would relate to product performance, features, and unique abilities of your product. In contrast, the attribute can be extrinsic and relate to the personality or history of your brand or product.

Benefits The benefits outline the individual value the consumer has attached to your products attributes. For example, the iPhone may be known by some for its easy to use interface. For many consumers, that is the primary attribute of the iPhone. Yet, the benefit looks at what an “easy to use” phone means for the consumer. How does it relate to their sense of self? For some the benefit may include a strong family connection - as even your grandmother can use this phone. For others, this benefit may include more family time because you spend less time figuring functions out on your phone. In Apple commercials, they often highlight the attribute in response to the benefit.

Now they are more connected as a family, because of Apples’ easy to use interface.

Imagery Visual information is often closely linked with a brand personality and overall voice. Imagery can be concrete and deliberate, sourced from your company, or they can naturally occuring. An example of a naturally occurring image could be a consumer wearing or using your product, seen by another consumer.

Experiences An experience of a brand can occur at purchase, contemplation of purchase, and during consumption.

These experiences shape the narrative of your brand. If the purchasing experience is difficult, your product and whole identity as a brand could be interpreted less positively.

Don’t Underestimate the Power of User Testing Usability testing is extremely important in product design.

Understanding areas where people may struggle with your product, opens up space for recommendations and possibly a strong end result. The goal is to have a better and more accurate understanding of how your product is being used and where it needs to improve. User testing often happens in a controlled environment that allows for live/real time observation or instant feedback.

When testing with users it is important to understand what aspect of your product you are testing. Although it may be

tempting to test the entire interaction, more valuable specific data can be collected when goals are established. What do you hope to learn with this test?

Testing can be done at each stage of product design, allowing for your product to be highly consumer centric. Here are the stages of product testing: Low-Fidelity Prototype or Paper Prototype This stage of testing is done very early in the product design process. A mockup, wireframe or hand drawn version of the product or website allows businesses to test basic assumptions and flows.

High-Fidelity Prototype An interactive version of the product, usually computer based, is used in this level of testing. The form of the product varies significantly depending on if it is natively digital or a three dimensional product, but interaction is the key to this stage.

The product responds to user inputs at this stage of testing.

Alpha and Beta Version These products are not ready to be released, but are stable enough to have an accurate idea of usability.

Release Version At this level of testing, the product has been released to the mass market. This is an opportune time to test entire user flows from beginning to end.

Comparative or A/B Test Multiple versions of the product are designed to measure the impact of small changes. These designs are alternated between consumers to test the performance and satisfaction.

During comparative testing it is important in emotional branding that concept are also tested, not solely elements.

For example, when testing which headliner works better refer to your qualitative data about your target market and build concepts around their values in regards to the words you are using in the headline.

Optimize for the Emotional Journey This article has provided a series of tools that will allow your brand to be optimized for the user or customers emotional journey. In no way has this article summarized all of the tools that are available to aid in building an emotionally sustainable brand, but simply serves as a launch point. Consumer values translate into consumer preferences. Understanding the “why” behind your target markets behaviour will aid you in building a strong emotional brand. Emotional brands not only translate into conversion, sales and offline and online interaction, but build strong consumer connections for your product or service and in turn strong consumer communities.

Danielle is a seasoned user interface designer, product developer, and team leader. She’s an expert in creating relatable brands, and building sustainable product communities. Danielle has been recognized for successful branding pitches and for her ability to emotionally engage millennial and Generation Z markets.

5 Reasons Marketers Have Largely Overlooked Generation X

THEY’RE AT THE PEAK OF THEIR CAREERS, BUT MANY BRANDS HAVE FORGOTTEN THEM

By Robert Klara

A few weeks ago, Lincoln Financial began running a 60-second spot about fiscal planning for your family’s future.

Financial services ads aren’t typically attention grabbers, but there was something stark and penetrating about this one.

Created by FCB and shot in black and white with a backing track of “Love Me Tender,” the spot showed people in their 40s, dealing with the joys and challenges of middle age— raising children, caring for elderly parents, trying to carve out time for themselves. Love, the ad said, means having responsibility—your responsibility.

If you happened to notice this spot, and if it happened to speak to you, it also may have shaken you from a kind of cultural torpor. The ad was targeted squarely at Generation X, consumers who fall between their mid-30s and mid-50s.

And that’s an age group that’s not used to being marketed to very much.

These days, nearly any brand you can think of is tripping over itself to reach millennials—and leapfrogged the generation

before them. It’s a situation that frustrates FCB’s chief strategy officer Deb Freeman. “I’m a proud, card-carrying Gen Xer,” she says. “We were the crossroads generation, and we had to absorb so much change—everything from growing up with technology to having no job security. We’ve been at the forefront of all that, and we’re stronger. Millennials haven’t had to fight the fight that we had. I’m so tired of hearing about the millennial spirit.”

Her pique is well founded. Demographers consider Gen X to be a “middle child”—bookended and lost between the bigger and louder cohorts of boomers and millennials. And just as middle children often feel neglected by their parents, Generation X has been disproportionately overlooked by brands and marketers, it would appear. A piece last year by the consulting firm Centro noted that “few marketers seem to be focusing on the demands and needs of this generation.”

Dan Schawbel, partner and research director at the consulting firm Future Workplace, has written that Generation X is “typically forgotten by the media.” And a recent white paper

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“Even when Gen Xers proved they weren’t slackers, nobody ever gave them another label, and nobody’s paid them any respect at all,” she points out.

In time, Gen X’s loser status would be cemented into the culture via grunge music, the suicide of Kurt Cobain and movies about spoiled wastrels like The Breakfast Club, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Singles—a film Lesonsky describes as “just a bunch of angry and lazy people not doing anything. It was a stupid movie and made no sense, but it defined the generation.”

Did it ever. A 2011 piece in the Journal of Behavioral Studies in Business suggests that those negative stereotypes made it all the way to academia. “These latch-key children grew up quickly, experiencing rising divorce rates and violence,” it reads. To Gen X, “nothing is permanent … they are pessimistic, skeptical, disillusioned with almost everything and are very questioning of conventionality.” Why would any brand marketer want to target such a group?

from NAS Recruitment concluded that Gen Xers “have been overlooked and underestimated for a long time.”

The numbers tell the story. Last year, CNBC analyzed a large sample of companies’ earnings calls with Wall Street analysts.

In 17,776 transcripts reviewed, companies mentioned Generation X just 16 times. While executives gave millennials plenty of love, the network noted, “companies do not seem to pay much attention to Gen X at all.”

The question is, why don’t brands seem to care about Gen X? As it turns out, there are several reasons.

Gen Xers came into the world between 1965 and 1982—and by all accounts, got a pretty raw deal in their youth.

They were more likely than any preceding generation to grow up with divorced parents.

(The national divorce rate peaked in 1980, when most Xers were barely into their teens.) Xers also came of age in an analog world, then had to scramble to catch up at the dawn of the digital age. Perhaps most notable, Xers started their careers at a time when pensions were disappearing, jobs were heading offshore, and the stock market crash of 1987 ushered in a recession. The result was a generation that grew up cynical, angry and profoundly insecure—or so goes the common perception.

“When Gen X first started making noise, they were labeled as slackers, and that stuck in the minds of companies,” says author and marketing consultant Rieva Lesonsky, who runs the content company GrowBiz Media. Inaccurate and unfair as that stereotype may be, she adds, it was the one that stuck.

While the slacker label might not have been fair, there’s no denying Gen X makes up a comparatively small segment of consumers. Pew Research counts 77 million boomers and 83 million millennials—two generations marketers have long viewed as ripe for targeting. By contrast, there are only 65 million Xers.

This is attributed to two factors. First, birthrates declined just as Generation X began (hence the moniker “baby busters”). But Gen X is also smaller by virtue of a demographic glitch nobody can really explain. “The boundaries of Generation X have not been defined by them but by the generations they’re bookended by,” observes Paul Taylor, author of The Next America: Boomers, Millennials and the Looming Generational Showdown. Taylor explains that because the U.S. Census fixed the last year of the baby boom at 1964 and because most agree that millennials starting coming along in 1982, Xers wound up with an 18-year generational period rather than the usual 20 years.

Of course, it’s not as if marketers give a consolation prize.

The fact is, Gen X is statistically small, and as Taylor puts it, “numbers matter, size matters, and that’s one thing that Gen X has going against it as the target of marketers.”

Gen Xers grew up before the Internet, then learned to adapt to digital technology in their early adulthood. Their age leaves them with one foot in the past and one in the future—and that leaves marketers confused about which platforms should be used to reach them.

“Brands feel like they can make more black-and-white assumptions about boomers and millennials,” says Erin Winters, vp, marketing strategy at Acxiom. Millennials, she

notes, “spend most of their lives on digital media. Boomers spend the lion’s share of their lives in the offline world. Gen X is right there in the middle.”

In fact, a marketer trying to strategize how to best target an Xer is faced with a complicated decision. According to Forrester Research, traditional media is still important to Gen X (48 percent listen to the radio, 62 percent still read newspapers and 85 percent have favorite TV shows). But at the same time, Gen X is plenty savvy when it comes to digital media. A survey by Millward Brown Digital found that 60 percent of Xers use a smartphone daily and 75 percent are routinely on social networks. Gen Xers are quite active online as well when it comes to banking, shopping and researching products they want to buy.

That leaves brands having to figure out just the right mix of old and new media.

Want confirmation that reaching Xers is a challenge? Just try Googling “How do you market to Generation X?” The results are all over the map. “Try word of mouth,” suggests one blog. “Think social,” another advises, while yet another proposes “an omnichannel approach.” Based on the data above, one might surmise that the best option would be D) All of the above.

Just for the record, Billy Idol’s first band took the name Generation X in 1976. But those Americans born after the baby boomer generation didn’t assume the moniker until after Douglas Coupland’s bestselling 1991 book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.

In 1993, Neil Howe and William Strauss published 13th Gen, the name they gave post-boomers.

Why does any of that matter?

“When we wrote our book, Generation X still didn’t have a name,” Howe explains. “Over 30 years after their birthday, they didn’t have a name. I think that’s germane.”

To Howe’s thinking, the culture’s failure to give something so basic as a name to the post-boomer generation had a way of telegraphing its inferiority. “Nobody paid attention to them,” he says. “And they internalized that.”

Never mind that the term Generation X, once it did take hold, was loaded with negatives. Like Madame X or Malcolm X, it implied something anonymous or scandalous. “C’mon, Generation X? What is it hiding?” Howe says. “We named them X because we didn’t want to name them anything worse.”

But in fact, we had. Consider that all the other labels applied to Xers are also negative: baby busters, latch-key kids, slackers, the “Why Me?” Generation, the New Lost Generation. Howe believes that Xers felt the scorn of all these. “It was epitomized in Wayne’s World: ‘We are not worthy!’” he says.

Is it any wonder, then, that many marketers also see Gen X as not worthy?

As a recent Pew Research study put it, “Generations, like people, have personalities.” And there’s no question that boomers and millennials each see themselves as a distinctive group. Boomers were defined by the civil rights and women’s movements, and by challenging authority. Millennials, who ushered in social media and gay marriage, see themselves as confident, tech-savvy and socially progressive.

What do Xers think makes them special? Well, that’s the problem.

A prior study by Pew, this one from 2010, found that only half of Xers saw their generation as unique, while there was little agreement among those who thought it was unique about why.

One might conclude that if Xers don’t find anything particularly distinguishing about their group, why would marketers?

The problem, once again, seems to be their in-between status. Taylor points out that his generation, the baby boomers, “made a lot of noise.

People said we were boomers.”

Millennials made a lot of noise, too, and certainly know that they’re millennials. “With these bookend generations, you see the start of a difference that makes for a big story,” Taylor says. By contrast “Xers represent a transitional generation, and that’s less compelling.”

There’s another theory. Generational change expert Neil Howe, founder of LifeCourse Associates, suggests that the overwhelmingly negative stereotypes about Generation X may have caused many Xers to disassociate themselves from their own age group. Howe recalls interviewing Xers in the ‘90s. “I’d ask them, ‘What do you think of your generation?’ And they said, ‘I don’t belong to that generation.’ That’s how negative the stereotype was,” he recalls.

Generation X “doesn’t like to think of itself as a generation,” he says, “and that may be as important as anything in diminishing the tendency to talk about them.”

While many marketers have given Gen X short shrift, that is not to say every brand ignored them. Wendy’s, Chipotle and Red Lobster are just a few that have long viewed Gen X as core customers. The same can be said for Cheerios, Virgin, Honda and Patagonia. And Apple’s “Think Different” is a Gen X mantra if there ever was one.

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understandable, even defensible, they can also be misleading.

Because if Xers weren’t an attractive target in their teens, they certainly are now. “Others have been concerned that Gen X isn’t going to give you the ROI, but we’re not afraid to target them,” says Tom Peyton, avp, advertising at Honda. “Gen X is not quite as big and sexy [as millennials], but at the end of the day, they are prime time in their income and they can buy a lot of expensive new cars.”

He’s right about that. Research from American Express revealed that Xers have more spending power than any other generation. And while Gen Xers are only a quarter of the population or so, Acxiom’s Winters notes that they account for 31 percent of consumer spending. “You’re talking about parents with children,” she says. “The buying power is massive.”

“My feeling is that we’ve been targeted our entire lives,” says author and marketing authority Seth Godin (who regards himself as “pioneer Gen X”). “But there’s a thing that might make it seem otherwise: American pop culture got mostly baked from Kennedy through Nixon, which means that the soundtrack and the imagery that has been used on us is still Beatles/Mad Men/CSNY/Godfather. In other words, baby boomers made our world.”

And though the stereotypes about Gen X might be

Gen X also has a home ownership rate of 82 percent, according to research from MetLife. And despite their purportedly cynical attitude, Xers happen to boast the highest rate of brand loyalty, at 70 percent, according to eMarketer.

Those stats don’t surprise FCB’s Deb Freeman—not only because she is an Xer herself, but because, following the Lincoln Financial campaign, she is working on two other Gen X-targeted spots for major brands.

Noting the enormous spending power of Xers, Freeman says, “You could call this the sandwich generation, but there’s a lot of meat in that sandwich.”

This story first appeared in the April 4 issue of Adweek magazine.

Video: the future of content marketing?

By Clare Hill

You hardly need to me to tell you that in the past five years there has been an explosion of online video.

away from the old criteria of clicks and are looking at more engagement based metrics.

YouTube, part of the UK’s media diet

One of the most exciting things about video from a content marketer’s perspective is just how flexible it is. As you will read from the list of articles and case studies included in this report, video is being used in all manner of ways.

Cisco even predicts that within three years 90% of the world’s online traffic will be video-based.

Major media players have responded to our apparently insatiable demand for video.

So, for example, The Huffington Post claims that 50% of its output will be video-based this year, while Buzzfeed received a very significant cash boost of $200 million from NBC Universal to invest in video studios.

There has also been an explosion of branded video content and today there are very few high profile FMCG companies that do not generate bespoke video and share it on social media channels.

And online video has moved well beyond YouTube. Facebook video now boasts around eight billion view per day, not too far behind its Google-owned rival.

Then there is the bewildering array of newer video platforms for brands and agencies to consider. From the snippets of Vine and Instagram, through to live streaming platforms like the Twitter-owned Periscope and the soon to arrive Facebook Live and YouTube Connect, there are many ways that brands can harness the power of video to reach their customers.

Our survey predicts growth It is not surprising then that marketers, and CMA members in particular, see video very much as the content marketing medium of the future. In Spring 2016 we undertook a survey among our members and associates including brands, media owners & creative agencies to gauge how they were using video.

A staggering 82% said that they believe that video will increase in importance in 2016, while just under 60% said they expected to be upping the investment in online video in the coming year.

There are however many elements to making branded video a success. It is not just about the content creation and the platform.

Brands have to know what they are creating video content for, and need to understand how to measure it.

Up until recently brands been rightly wary on how these issues were being addressed, but as our survey points out there is growing realisation that it is now possible to accurately assess a video’s ROI. Also companies are moving

have

There’s a fascinating story from TCO London about how it harnessed high profile bloggers to help sell the benefits of a country – in this instance Canada – to travel-obsessed millennials. While at the opposite end of the scale is a tale from French agency Citizen Press about how it worked with the French Order of Physicians to update their communication strategy by using short-form video.

Along the way you can learn how brands are harnessing UGC in a fascinating article from Factory Media, while learning how video is now becoming an essential part of B2B marketing. Included are case studies from brands as diverse as Casio, Morrisons, Philips, British Airways and many others.

Different platforms, tagging and optimisation, the psychology of video consumption and the role of animation are all covered, with expert advice given by marketers who not only know their theory, but have the real world case studies to prove their points.

What is emerging is a clear understanding of the how effective video can be for brands in a multiplicity of ways.

At the moment the focus appears to be on brand storytelling (in our survey over 55% of respondents said that this was the main purpose of video) though this could change in the future as new technologies and platforms emerge.

Ultimately brands will have to continue to up their game in video. With an estimated two billion smartphones in use on the planet there are so many potential camera people primed and ready to shoot content and share it.

Fortunately content marketing agencies and brands, especially CMA members, have built up a reputation for producing high quality content. Videos produced by Mediacom Beyond Advertising for Shell and Seven for Jobsite scooped the Grand Prix at the CMA awards in the last two years (2015 and 2014 respectively).

They, along with countless of the examples which you can read about, here underline how video can be a highly effective tool for brands.

No wonder the investment in video content continues to rocket.

Why ad agencies are putting cash into intellectual property AGENCIES GROW INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ASSETS WITH TECH

By Alexandra Bruell

On top of making ads for marketers, agencies have long created products of their own, from Eos lip balm by Anomaly to the HurryCane walking stick from Minneapolis directresponse shop Marketing Architects. Now agencies are pouring resources into developing a very different kind of intellectual property: marketing technology.

As brands spend more money to reach the right consumers with the right messages in digital media, agencies are looking to go after those dollars by creating the tech to help, such as tools to gauge consumer sentiment or optimize campaigns while they’re still running.

For marketers that buy in, shops often charge a monthly, subscription-like service or tech fee, a departure from the common per-head compensation model that agencies use to charge clients for traditional services.

While Publicis Groupe’s Razorfish Global is making hefty intellectual property, or IP, investments, including compensating a team of a few dozen expensive engineers and data scientists, it’s still generating a profit from the efforts.

“It’s higher-margin than the traditional agency business of paying for bodies,” said Shannon Denton, CEO of Razorfish Global. “Now we’re investing to get it scaled and ramped up.”

Razorfish’s IP business has grown from 1% to 2% of company revenue in years past to 3% to 4%, before counting any growth from luring clients with its techniques. “We’re planning on 20% of our leads coming from IP-related co-investments in 2016,” said Mr. Denton. “The economics are good for us,” he said.

Wunderman is planning to spend 20% more on new IP this year, and sibling shop Possible will likely grow its mix of IP assets by 20% this year.

All those numbers are bound to continue rising as so-called martech companies such as Adobe and Salesforce make it easier for agencies to build and sell products using their underlying technology. That is, when ad agencies are not competing with those marketing-tech giants to build the same products.

“These marketing-tech stack providers like Adobe and others are creating an app store for their technology, and the opportunity is for agencies to put apps in the app store and then license those and charge additional fees for those,” Mr. Denton said. “They haven’t focused on it until the last 12 months.”

Prior to that, it wasn’t as easy to work with the big marketingtechnology companies, he said.

There’s still the risk that the larger martech powers will build technology similar to the agency IP into their core product, but it’s worth the investment to differentiate, said Razorfish Chief Technology Officer Ray Velez.

Razorfish is working on an algorithm to predict which customers are most likely to churn (or buy and then leave the loyal customer base), and another that can guess what a customer is likely to buy based on what he or she has in a shopping cart. The IP can run on top of either Adobe or Microsoft Azure. The shop is also developing a product compatible with the Adobe Marketing Cloud that uses a

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Google image recognition algorithm to automate tagging and assigning metadata to digital assets.

Razorfish and Adobe 18 months ago created Razorshop, an IP play that can use both Razorfish and Adobe tech to send information on store visitors’ shopping history to sales associates’ tablets. It can also customize messages on screens as shoppers approach based on shopping history it gleans from their phones via Bluetooth.

Dentsu Aegis’ Isobar generates about 3% of its revenue from marketing tech IP, according to CEO Jeff Maling. That’s “up from about a couple years ago when it was zero,” he said, adding that it reinvests about the same amount. And the IP is profitable.

Clients are more willing to spend money on things that “actually touch a customer” than on expensive, one-off customized marketing-tech IP, Mr. Maling said. But they’re attracted to marketing tech that they can subscribe to through a software-as-a-service model. “It’s a lower cost of entry for them versus spending millions to invest in their own technology,” he said.

Isobar, for example, built a data and analytics platform based upon a client request, licensed it to the client and then augmented it and licensed it to others. It tracks media performance at the geographic and campaign level across channels, including sales and competitive performance. An auto client uses it to gauge its media investment per channel based on on- and offline data from a number of sources, said Mr. Maling.

Another product the shop built, called Rapport, creates landing pages for web users based on the search query that brought them to a brand’s site. “Users convert at a much higher rate when you can reflect back to them what they are looking for,” said Mr. Maling. “Search on ‘convertible car rental’ and you will convert much higher if you actually show

them a convertible and list what is available versus dumping them to the home page. We built that for a single client and have used it for multiple clients.”

Like Razorfish executives, he recognizes that there’s the risk of Adobe, SAP or “you-name-it” software companies offering the same product. So he’s cautious and acknowledges that selling software as a service will never be the shop’s core business. But for now, as long as there’s client demand, the shop will continue to invest in its own tech, he said.

Wunderman CEO Mark Read echoed that. “Our focus has been on IP that enables us to take our and our clients’ offline data and use it online,” Mr. Read said. “It’s data we sell on a per-unit basis.”

The shop is also focused on integrating the different screens around consumers, recognizing them “on their TV set or on a mobile device or on a laptop to connect profiles of consumers.”

But building and licensing technology is not Wunderman’s core business, Mr. Read added. Rather, “it’s something we do to support our core business.”

WPP digital shop Possible still invests in a lot of campaignand client-specific IP, such as consumer-facing apps, and expects that business to grow 50% this year, said CEO Shane Atchison. Still, Mr. Atchison said he’s seeing an uptick in the shop’s IP investment around broader “sophisticated” marketing. “We’re not going to win an arms race against big software companies,” he said, “but we have to have a unique, more specialized position.”

Alexandra bruell is the lead agency reporter at Advertising Age. She specializes in coverage of digital, media buying & planning and PR. Prior to joining Ad Age in May 2011, she was a senior reporter at PRWeek.

Earlier in her career she worked at a small healthcare ad agency then called TheCementWorks.

Hey, Agencies: Marketers Are Pretty Clear About What They Want

By Maarten Albarda

In the movie “What Women Want,” Mel Gibson plays an ad executive who, after a freak accident, discovers he can hear women’s private thoughts. He of course uses this great gift to his own advantage to score with “da ladies.

Perhaps it’s time for agencies to collectively gain the ability to listen clearly to what marketers want. Because last week a number of very senior marketers were very clear about their wishes.

Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer at P&G, was asked what he wants from his agencies. He acknowledged that the agency ecosystem has gotten way complex, and that he’s looking to his agencies for solutions to decomplexify (a word I just made up) the situation. He was quoted as saying “Frankly, your complexity should not be our problem, so we want you to make that complexity invisible.”

Most agency ecosystems have organically grown into the monstrosities that marketers now struggle to manage. When websites were the thing, agencies offered specialist functions to develop and maintain websites. Then search came along, and in came search agencies. The same happened when social media became the thing, and again with mobile, messaging, e-commerce, and so on.

I am a firm believer and supporter of free and open trade, so one could argue that those agency solutions simply cater to a new need in the marketplace. But Pritchard is also right to place some of the blame with the agency holding companies which, like airlines, started pushing every addition as a separate service (and profit center) where it wasn’t before.

Clients, under pressure not to be seen as outdated dinosaurs, happily signed on each new addition to the agency holding Christmas tree.

This has made it more and more difficult to develop and distribute integrated content. And that is where Pritchard is pushing: He wants his agencies to seamlessly orchestrate marketing communications. Other marketers might want to take on the orchestration role themselves, but they, too want the same level of seamlessness Pritchard envisions.

There were other voices last week as well. Lou Paskalis, senior VP/enterprise media executive at Bank of America, echoed a call to action from Pritchard about ad-blocking. Marketers understand very clearly what consumers want, he noted: less intrusion, less irrelevance, less over-the-top frequency and other tactics that are driving consumers to ban advertising from their lives. Marketers are looking to their partners to come up with solutions to address this issue.

The problem is that as long as the industry keeps on focusing on efficient delivery of messaging, ignoring effectiveness beyond delivery, and as long as we keep telling marketers to focus on and incentivize cost performance, we will have a hard time moving to where marketers say they want to go. Paskalis put it this way: “Somehow we have divorced efficiencies and effectiveness.” Agencies and marketers could certainly find common cause around this issue.

So if I were to have the gift Mel Gibson has in the movie, I would start to develop solutions that address these issues.

And I bet conversations that address what marketers say they want (need!) could go a long way toward repairing marketers’ trust in agencies, a trust that is currently at an all-time low.

Maarten Albarda Global Citizen. Flying Dutchman. Dabbling in Integrated Marketing for clients anywhere they need me.

Book,

&

Line

Sinker

Unleashing the Ideavirus: Stop Marketing AT People! Turn Your Ideas into Epidemics by Helping Your Customers Do the Marketing thing for You.

CA$HVERTISING: How to Use More than 100 Secrets of AdAgency Psychology to Make Big Money Selling Anything to Anyone

By Seth Godin

By Drew Eric Whitman Prepare yourself for a unique learning experience as author Drew Eric Whitman takes you on a wild, roller-coaster ride through the streets of New York’s famed Madison Avenue and teaches you the specific psychological techniques that today’s top copywriters and designers use to...

Counter to traditional marketing wisdom, which tries to count, measure, and manipulate the spread of information, Seth Godin argues that the information can spread most effectively from customer to customer, rather than from business to customer...

Words that Sell: More than 6000 Entries to Help You Promote Your Products, Services, and Ideas

By Richard Bayan Looking for a better way to say “authentic?” Words That Sell gives you 57 alternatives. How about “appealing?” Take your pick from 76 synonyms.

You’ll even find more than 100 variations on “exciting.” Fully updated and expanded, this edition of the copywriting classic is packed with inspiration-on-demand for busy professionals who need to win customers--by mail, online, or in person.

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

Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity

The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism

By Hugh MacLeod

By Matt Mason

When Hugh MacLeod was a struggling young copywriter living in a YMCA, he started to doodle on the backs of business cards while sitting at a bar. Those cartoons eventually led to a popular blog-gapingvoid.com-and a reputation for pithy insight and humor, in both words and pictures.

MacLeod has opinions on everything from marketing to the meaning of life, but one of his main subjects is creativity. How do new ideas emerge in a cynical, risk-averse world?

In The Pirate’s Dilemma, VICE magazine’s Matt Mason -- poised to become the Malcolm Gladwell of the iPod Generation -- brings the exuberance of a passionate music fan and the technological savvy of an IT wizard to the task of sorting through the changes brought about by the interface of pop culture and innovation. He charts the rise of various youth movements -- from pirate radio to remix culture -- and tracks their ripple effect throughout larger society...

Confessions of an Advertising Man

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

By David Ogilvy, Sir Alan Parker

By Chip Heath, Dan Heath

David Ogilvy was considered the “father of advertising” and a creative genius by many of the biggest global brands. First published in 1963, this seminal book revolutionized the world of advertising and became a bible for the 1960s ad generation. It also became an international bestseller, translated into 14 languages. Fizzing with Ogilvy’s pioneering ideas and inspirational philosophy, it covers not only advertising, but also people management, corporate ethics...

Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas?

In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle headon these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the “human scale principle,” using the “Velcro Theory of Memory,” and creating “curiosity gaps.”

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Absolute Value: What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information

By Itamar Simonson, Emanuel Rosen Going against conventional marketing wisdom, Absolute Value reveals what really influences customers today and offers a new framework— the Influence Mix, a totally new way of thinking about consumer decision making and marketing, and about developing more effective business strategies.

Romancing the Brand

By Tim Halloran In Romancing the Brand, author reveals what it takes to make consumers fall in love with your brand. Step by step,he reveals how to start, grow, maintain, and troubleshoot a flourishing relationship between brand and consumer.

Along the way, author shares the secrets behind establishing a mutually beneficial “romance.”

Drawing on exclusive, in-depth interviews with managers of some of the world’s most iconic brands, this book arms you with an arsenal of classic and emerging marketing tools.

The Power of Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand

Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans and Followers

By Jeffrey K. Rohrs Proprietary audience development is now a core marketing responsibility. Every company needs audiences to survive. They are where you find new customers and develop more profitable relationships. And yet, most companies today treat their email, mobile, and social media audiences like afterthoughts instead of the corporate assets they are. With AUDIENCE, Jeff Rohrs seeks to change this dynamic through adoption of The Audience Imperative.

Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less

By Joe Pulizzi “Epic Content Marketing” takes you step by step through the process of developing stories that inform and entertain and compel customers to act--without actually telling them to...

Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People

By Marc Gobe

Filled with full-color images and thoughtprovoking examples from leading companies, The Power of Visual Storytelling explains how to grow your business and strengthen your brand by leveraging photos, videos, infographics, presentations, and other rich media...

Emotional Branding is the best selling revolutionary business book that has created a movement in branding circles by shifting the focus from products to people. The “10 Commandments of Emotional Branding” have become a new benchmark for marketing and creative professionals, emotional branding has become a coined term by many top industry experts to express the new dynamic that exists now between brands and people.

What’s the Future of Business: Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences

Brains on Fire: Igniting Powerful, Sustainable, Word of Mouth Movements

By Brian Solis

By Robbin Phillips, Greg Cordell, Geno Church, Spike Jones

By Ekaterina Walter, Jessica Gioglio

What’s the Future of Business? will galvanize a new movement that aligns the tenets of user experience with the vision of innovative leadership to improve business performance, engagement, and relationships for a new generation of consumerism. It provides an overview of real-world experiences versus “user” experiences in relation to products, services, mobile, social media, and commerce, among others...

Brains on Fire offers original, practical and actionable steps for creating a word-of-mouth movement for corporations, products, services, and organizations. It takes you step-by-step through the necessary actions needed to start your own authentic movement.