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Dear Friends: I can sense the spring in your step before the summer sets in. Loads to accomplish and the world of branding and marketing is increasingly restless. The heat is truly on. What with how ad agencies are re engineering influencer marketing to be programmatic or How Google is branding Tech’s next big paradigm. Soak both of these high calibre content in this issue. When Elon Musk talks, the world listens. The Founder CEO of Tesla/Space X(and many more) offers his Ten Commandments on Twitter Marketing. Go for it and come our enriched. Yes, it is certain, the world does not need another agency but it needs an other agency (get what we mean?). Space the bar, raise the bar. If not, the feature on the subject in this issue will truly provoke a new line of thinking.The amoebic, all pervasive penetration of social content & 24X7 social listening comes with it’s own set of jungle law. Understand how agencies & PR firms are investing social media damage control in the article featured herein. Top designers predict the radical future of branding and the trends that will emerge in the year 2017 itself. All this and much more to relish. Dig deep, stay cool and get nourished.
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CONTENTS
The Radical Future Of Branding 10 Questions You Need To Ask When Building a Brand. New York Times CRO: If You’re Not Facebook, Google Or Snapchat, You’re A Niche Advertising Business How Google Branded Tech’s Next Big Paradigm 10 Twitter Lessons For Brands From Elon Musk Why you need “an other” strategy The Future Of Social: Crowd-Sourcing And Artificial Intelligence How to effectively bring science to marketing Is Design Still Relevant? A Candid Look At Branding Clinton’s Failed Campaign Bypassing creative: How agencies are turning influencer posts into programmatic ads How agencies are pushing voice technology How brands, PR shops are investing in social media damage control Build Your Brand Book, Line & Sinker
The Radical Future Of Branding DESIGNERS PREDICT THE MAJOR BRANDING TRENDS OF 2017. By Suzanne Labarre
At a time of tremendous political and cultural upheaval, one thing remains certain: Companies will keep trying to sell you stuff, and they’ll keep coming up with new ways to do it. Design is, of course, a major part of that pitch. We spoke with designers and design leaders at nearly a dozen agencies to identify the major branding trends of 2017. Below, find their five key predictions. (And read the second installment of this series, in which we discuss branding trends for 2022.)
BRANDS WILL RADICALIZE Conventional wisdom has it that brands shouldn’t talk politics. Why risk alienating potential customers? That was before Donald Trump. Now that a sneering, orange man-child is sinking his tiny fingers into every aspect of “With the rise American life, experts believe activism will become nearly of political as ubiquitous in the brand world as it is on college authoritarianism, campuses. “As a reflection of brands will face the changing political tides, many brands will evolve from fundamental choices.” ‘mission-driven’ to ‘activist,’
encouraging consumers to go beyond simply subscribing to a set of core values and driving them to participate in actions to defend them,” says Geoff Cook, partner at the branding agency Base Design. “In choosing sides, brands will alienate certain consumers, yes, but will galvanize an impassioned constituency in the process.” To Melanie McShane, head of strategy at Wolff Olins in
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New York, activism isn’t just about tapping into the zeitgeist; it’s a business imperative. “With the rise of political authoritarianism, brands will face fundamental choices,” she says. “About whether to take a stand on issues that offend them and their users, risking the wrath of politicians and their acolytes. Or stay quiet and seem complicit.”
Brand-led activism is already well underway. Following Trump’s executive order last month banning immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim nations, Lyft donated $1 million to the ACLU, Starbucks vowed to hire 10,000 refugees, Airbnb offered free housing to refugees, and Budweiser flaunted its immigrant roots in a heartfelt, if predictably corny, Super Bowl commercial. Other companies issued statements decrying Trump’s actions, to varying degrees of success; Gizmodo deemed IBM’s milquetoast statement “embarrassingly weak for a company that collaborated with the Nazis.” Which raises an important issue: It’s one thing to take action on matters that reflect a company’s values. It’s another to exploit a fragile electorate to garner attention. Now is not the time for shameless opportunism. We have plenty of that in the White House.
shilling morally questionable goods is anyone’s guess (will McDonald’s commercials start looking like clips from Super Size Me?). But the larger takeaway remains: Consumers are sick of the bullshit. And brands will have to adjust.
SYMBOLS WILL BECOME MORE THAN GRAPHIC ICONS Consider the most iconic logos of the 20th century: Nike’s swoosh, NBC’s peacock, Apple’s bitten fruit. These were testaments to the power of symbols. But Sagi Haviv, partner at the graphic design firm Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, believes the era of traditional symbol-based logos has drawn to a close. “When my partners Tom Geismar and Ivan Chermayeff were designing logos in 1957, the year our firm began, practically any conceivable geometric shape was available for trademarking,” he says. “Today it seems like every conceivable shape has been done. . . . As a result, both designers and clients have started to associate graphic logo design with trademark infringement, and many of them are deciding to play it safe by simply rendering the name alone, without a distinctive graphic icon.”
BRANDS WILL FINALLY STOP TRYING TO TRICK YOU Trump’s pathological lying could affect brands another way: It could actually persuade them to tell the truth. “2016 was one expression after another of an unprecedented collapse of people’s trust in established institutions,” says John Paolini, partner and executive creative director at Sullivan. “In 2017, this macro-societal trend will impact brands, creating pervasive skepticism among consumers in how they perceive the messages and promises companies are making to them. This sense of distrust and suspicion will catalyze a brand neo-traditionalism.” Brands will be stripped down to their essential parts, their narratives made simpler and more transparent. “Honesty will reign,” Paolini says. “Successful branding will have fewer tricks and more truth.”
Consumers are sick of the bullshit. And brands will have to adjust.
How or whether that would apply to mega-corporations
Haviv believes designers will still find ways “to create new, original graphic icons.” Indeed, we’ve already seen symbols take on new, unconventional forms. The hotel booking app HotelTonight turned its logo, a bed-shaped “H,” into a user interface element that consumers swipe to confirm a purchase. Wolff Olins recently designed an open-source mark that’s nothing but a colon and two slashes–a code string that can be rendered and remixed in text, on a web page, or
anywhere else a brand might live. Expect more experiments that bring symbols to life in 2017.
eye of the beholder than in the eye of top-down business leadership.”
THE VISUAL LANGUAGE OF VR WILL CREEP INTO MEATSPACE Branded virtual reality “experiences” are every company’s favorite new marketing tool, which is a pretty good sign they’re headed for the graveyard. But once you get past all the gimmicks, you’ll start to see VR used in some unexpected ways. “Right now, companies are approaching [VR] in a computer game way,” says James Trump, creative director at Moving Brands in San Francisco. “But there’s so much more that can be done. It’s new ground, and we haven’t really scratched the surface.” Trump envisions brands experimenting with new forms of typography and layered visuals that capitalize on the 360-degree perspective wearing a virtual reality headset affords. Perhaps most intriguingly, he thinks the visual language of VR will inform branding in the real world. “Brands will start to be influenced by and borrow from the visual style of VR,” he says. “I can imagine this playing out in lots of ways–combining flat and 3D elements, more spatialfeeling typography, and more layering to imagery.”
AI WILL FORCE BRANDS TO EXAMINE THEIR ETHICS The trend with the greatest potential to transform how brands reach consumers in 2017 and beyond is the rise of artificial intelligence. Whether through chatbots or voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, brands can now speak directly to customers. On one hand, this lets companies cater their message to individual consumers, which could potentially reduce the annoying, spray-and-pray approach of most marketing today. As David Schwarz, partner at the experience design agency HUSH, puts it: “Much like your Facebook or Instagram timeline is both personally and algorithmically curated, branding will be more in the
On the other hand, AI gives companies unprecedented access to consumers’ lives. My colleague Mark Wilson paints a dark picture of such a future: “Have we evolved to be such inherently social creatures that when we have the opportunity—and eventual necessity—of talking directly to companies all day, will we all just be consumer pinballs, being knocked around a manipulation machine? Will regulators be able to keep up? Will social niceties allow big data to meld with big manipulation, so we’re sweet-talked into supersizing before we’re shamed by a drill instructor into exercising it off?” These are troubling questions–ones that brands will have to grapple with before embracing artificial intelligence, and all the moral and ethical responsibilities attached to it. As for consumers: If we’ve learned anything from 2017 so far, it’s that even though brands may sound more and more human, they’ll never be our friend. Suzanne LaBarre is the editor of Co.Design. Previously, she was the online content director of Popular Science and has written for the New York Times, the New York Observer, Newsday, I.D. Magazine, and Metropolis.
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Questions You Need To Ask When Building a Brand. By The Chief Outsider
Does your business have what it takes to succeed in today’s increasingly competitive marketplace? Learn how to build your brand.If you have a product or service that everyone needs and no one else offers, it’s easy to be the best. Unfortunately, that’s not a reality for most businesses today. To succeed in the real world, businesses need every advantage they can get. Many CEOs agree that the way to win is to build and manage their company’s brand. Have you heard
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the saying, “Build it and they will come?” Well, it might not be that simple, but if you build a strong brand, then customers will be more likely to come!
A Logo is NOT a Brand Your business has a name and logo and you advertise, but do you have a brand? Successful CEOs and business owners know that branding goes deeper than a name and logo. Logos, tag lines and advertising campaigns are traditional marketing tactics that merely scratch the surface. Brands connect with customers.
Do you Need a Brand? Branding a product or service differentiates you from your competitors. It’s the key to turning prospective consumers into loyal customers. A brand is more than what your product does or what you communicate. Your brand identity is the total perception of your brand in the marketplace, including an implied promise to your customers that your product or service will consistently meet their expectations every time they interact with your brand. Brands evoke emotions, delight us, and feel familiar and reliable. About now, you might be saying to yourself, “That’s great for large corporations like Apple or Nike, but what can building a brand do for my business?” Defining your brand identity and implementing a well-thought-out brand strategy is probably one of the most important business objectives a company can have. Marketing is about improving your odds of success — and branding your product or service is a powerful way of doing just that. Why? Think about it. In today’s global, high tech world, product features and designs, manufacturing processes and services can be easily duplicated — often for less somewhere else. On the other hand, strongly held beliefs, associations, and attitudes in your customers’ minds are not so easily copied.
A strong brand can give you the competitive edge you need. Strong brands can: •
create greater customer loyalty
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make you less sensitive to competitive pricing
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increase trial of new products
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increase support from trade partners
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provide focus to marketing efforts
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allow you to attract the resources you need such as talent and capital
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are instrumental partnerships
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act as a powerful tool for guiding internal decision making.
in
developing
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Keeping this in mind, it becomes easy to see that a strong
brand is a powerful tool for all businesses — large or small — whether you are selling a product or service, selling to consumers or to other businesses. And a well-defined brand strategy is especially critical for start-up companies or those looking to expand.
10 Questions You Need To Ask to Build Your Brand So now, you know you need a strong brand. The real question is, “How do you build one?” Building a strong brand is about having a clear understanding of what your brand stands for, and then making sure everyone else understands it too. It is as simple — and as complicated — as that. If you’re serious about building a brand, don’t start advertising just yet. Marketing tactics are the last step. Building or reenergizing your brand starts with answering some questions about your product or business: •
Who are my customers?
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What customers do I want to have?
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Who are my competitors?
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What is my competitors’ brand position?
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What problem does my company solve? Does anybody care?
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What is my value proposition? Is it distinctive? Is it relevant to my customers?
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When people think about my company or product, what are the feelings and associations I want them to have? Are they unique? Can we “own” them?
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What are the functional benefits that we deliver to our customers?
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What are the emotional benefits that only we deliver to our customers?
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What kind of personality will my brand have?
The last two questions are critical if you really want to build a valuable brand. In his Top 10 Brand Precepts, David Aaker talks about the importance of getting beyond functional benefits. Emotional benefits are a much stronger way to differentiate your brand. How does someone feel when they buy or use your brand? Volvo, Hallmark and Crayola are all brands that evoke strong emotional associations. Brand personality can set your brand apart from the competition. When you answer these questions, you will have the basic building blocks of your brand strategy. Although it may seem like a lot of work, the benefits of defining your brand identity will be more than worth it. Developing your brand strategy is much more than a marketing tactic. It’s a fundamental part of good business. Done right it becomes a powerful management and execution tool to help you develop stronger customer relationships, create effective, cost-efficient marketing campaigns and a more unified organization.
New York Times CRO: If You’re Not Facebook, Google Or Snapchat, You’re A Niche Advertising Business By Kelly Liyakasa
Any publisher who is not a big platform company is on the express train to becoming a niche ads business, predicts Meredith Kopit Levien, EVP and CRO of The New York Times. “Up until now, we’ve been a niche consumer business with a $1 billion-plus newspaper ad business,” Kopit Levien said, speaking Thursday at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview event in New York. “Now we’re on a path to becoming a very big consumer business and a niche ad business,” she added. “If you’re a content company and you’re not Facebook, Google or Snapchat, you’re in the niche ads business.” Rob Norman, global chief digital officer for WPP’s GroupM, sat down with Kopit Levien and Dave Morris, CRO for CBS Interactive, on Thursday to assess how both major media organizations are grappling with fragmented consumer attention and growing platform domination.
Here were some of the salient points:
On blending subscription and ad-supported revenue. MEREDITH KOPIT LEVIEN (NYT): We’re more driven by subscriptions than advertising now, so we’ve shifted the company toward [growing our] subscription rate. (On last count, The New York Times had about 1.6 million digital-only subscribers.) We’ve had an awesome year for subscriptions, and not just due to the elections. Two things are driving that: frequency, depth and variety of content, and getting people to come back and feel deeply. If they read politics, maybe it’s getting them to read something else like fashion. We think we run the most successful model for paid journalism in the world. DAVE MORRIS (CBSi): Advertising was our core revenue model eight years ago when I joined CBSi. Since then, we’ve
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15 seen our international content and licensing business grow. Our subscription business is a small business, but a growing business. CBS All Access now has more than 1 million subscribers. We’re at about 50% advertising and 50% “other” revenue today. … There is a future for subscription plus adsupported revenue and you will see it more in some of the shows we launch this year.
On the importance of brand in the new media environment. Kopit Levien (NYT): The value of our assets is going up. The New York Times is a consumer brand, which a lot of people have passion for. Given what’s going on in the world, geopolitically, the importance of being a consumer brand is significant. Over the last two decades, journalism has become more of a transactional business, but with all the conversation that’s gone on about fake news and how one gets at facts and the truth, we will see a shift back to news as a brand. News is a relationship business and the purpose of The New York Times brand is to give people understanding. … [But] making great content is hard, expensive and it requires experts in storytelling and finding formats that make people
give a damn about the topics [we write about]. That extends into our brand storytelling, too.
On how a TV media company creates a “unique cocktail” for consumers and advertisers cross-screen. Morris (CBSi): I sit in an interesting place at CBS because I run ad sales for digital for both direct and programmatic, and I report to Jo Ann Ross (president of ad sales) on the TV side. So I sit right at the fulcrum of digital and TV. Our biggest asset is still CBS television. Eighty million people watch CBS programming every single day on TV alone, 365 days a year. Yet we have over 700 people who work at CBS Interactive, and CBS.com is certainly one of the biggest sites on the web.
We are the epitome of TV at scale, and extend those people into digital channels. We like plans to be screen-agnostic, including television, video on demand, OTT, tablet and smartphone. We sell across all those screens, but there is no question mobile has driven our growth on the web. Out of 700 million streams on digital platforms now, more than half of that is on mobile devices. It’s a huge growth catalyst to our business. Media meets data. Morris (CBSi): A lot of data is used for planning and targeting and I get it. It’s important and we do it, too. But we need a lot more data for attribution and reporting to know, [did a campaign] work? Where did it work? We need to do a lot more post-campaign reporting and attribution. Kopit Levien (NYT): We have power users who read topic-totopic and we think we can use data to unlock who’s interested in what, and where they are interested. Readerscope is a tool we launched, which allows us to do probabilistic “topic modeling.” We’re using it to direct marketers on what stories they should be telling on our platform. We also think about how we bring the world new media
innovations. Sometimes that means bringing in new technology. We partnered with Google and embedded Google Maps into our “36 Hours” series, for instance, and this is going to sound old-[fashioned], but particularly at this moment in time when brands have a lot of things to say, I think brands want to associate with topical subjects that actually matter to their businesses. Brands will rally around big bodies of content that we wouldn’t necessarily have had the resources to architect on our own. Kelly Liyakasa is a senior editor covering commerce, video, TV and marketing tech for AdExchanger. Previously she was an associate editor for Information Today, where she reported on enterprise technology and strategy for its flagship publication, CRM magazine.
How Google Branded Tech’s Next Big Paradigm DAYDREAM IS THE FIRST DECENT VR BRAND. AND THAT’S BECAUSE IT WAS INSPIRED BY NATURE, NOT TECHNOLOGY. By Mark Wilson
Facebook called it “the Oculus,” a throwback to ancient, Byzantine architecture. HTC chose “the Vive,” the sort of pseudo-word that sounds like it was born from a New York ad agency. But Google? Google named its virtual reality headset “Daydream.” And in doing so, it created a foundation for the first decent virtual reality brand. It’s both a signifier and a definition of itself in one. How do you explain what an Oculus headset is to grandma? You can’t. A daydream, however, anyone can understand. It may come as no surprise that the Daydream name wasn’t brainstormed by your typical branding agency. As Google told me, in the company’s first interview on the Daydream brand since it launched at Google IO, it was actually the internal code name used by developers. The daydream was, in essence, how the design team conceptualized the experience they wanted to build—a bit of whimsy accessible to anyone, that could be slipped on and off at a moment’s notice. Joshua To, who led the branding as design manager at Google VR and AR UX, was a big proponent of keeping the project’s code name intact. The challenge was figuring out Daydream’s visual branding, from its logo to its UX. What does a daydream really look like, anyway?
A BRAND DESIGNED FOR VR Daydream’s virtual world is inspired by the natural one: The platform’s interface is designed as a series of idyllic landscapes that serve as portals to games and apps. To brand it, To’s team drew inspiration from a broad and unlikely array of sources—from pinecones to pop art. “We watched a lot of Drake music videos,” he says. His team was trying to solve a particular problem with Daydream’s identity—not just how to brand VR, but how to create a brand mark that could function in both the 2D and 3D worlds.
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Google’s own Material Design rules offered some guidance, but not enough, because ultimately, Material Design is meant to live on a 2D screen. Drake’s “Hotline Bling”’s immersive color-fields seemed to break all dimensional bounds. They wanted Daydream’s logo mark to feel ephemeral and spatially rich in the same way—but also natural. That led them to the mathematics of nature itself. “It sounds almost a little bit cheesy, but some of the most beautiful things in the world are natural things. We’d go on nature walks, look at pinecones and flowers,” says To. “We did this period of a week where we geeked out about the golden mean, and printed out seed formations, nautilus, etc. Then it was like, oh my god!, the Fibonacci numbers!” Many believe Fibonacci sequences—simple mathematical progressions in which each new number is made of the sum of the two that came before it—are the common thread of the cosmos itself, the equations that connect flowers to galaxies to art to architecture. You may also know it as the golden ratio or golden mean. Its scientific validity has been disputed, but there’s no doubt that it appeals to the human eye—photography, films, and paintings have followed the rule of thirds as long as they’ve each existed.
printing of physical models, with which the designers would subtly tweak the geometry, color, and even materials ranging from aluminum to clear polycarbonate. “We’ve done some [digital] tests. We have a bunch of demos that allow you to pick up an Eon, throw it as far as you want. There’s ones that bounce, ones that are heavier. We did early explorations asking, is this a fun object to interact with?” says To. “There’s also the physical corollary, too. We had tons of these things 3D-printed, so people are using it as fidget balls in meetings. Throwing it around, playing with it. That gave us a lot of physical prototyping and research as well.” In VR, they set up entire virtual rooms full of various Eons of different sizes and shapes, allowing designers to walk up to them and inspect each under different lighting conditions. Additionally, they tested how the logo could work in motion— without making the viewer vomit. Given that the Eon appears whenever you load Daydream, that would be a lot of motion sickness. “If you’re animating the logo really closely to someone’s face, and you move the camera on them, and jerk it, it can make them really sick,” says To. “But the more relevant thing is, [VR] is the first time that brands could really violate your personal space. How close can a logo be to you? Generally, with your interaction with brands today, you get to decide how close they get. Or a swoosh on shoes.”
SKEUOMORPHIC BRANDING
Based on their research, the team began sketching several spiraling golden ratios as one figure, circumscribing them around one another—2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and up to 7 at a time. The resulting shape seemed to spin, a graphic representation of nature’s math repeating itself again and again. They began to call the logo the “Eon”—a name To liked because it had significance in astronomy and geology, tying the brand back to its natural roots. Indeed, a billion years is the sort of time scale that we only talk about in reference to nature. And yet, there’s an uncertainty to the word. Aside from a strict billion years, eon is also defined as an “indefinite and very long period of time” by another definition—an ethereal time stamp on something momentous.
A LOGO YOU CAN TOUCH, THROW, AND FEEL The logo had to look good in all dimensions, of course, but Google had bigger plans for it. The Eon would one day become a way to touch Daydream. It might be an object a player would throw to open a portal in VR, or collect to unlock special bonuses in a game. It had to have presence. Testing and tweaking involved looking at it on computer screens and through VR headsets—as well as lots of 3D
Daydream is a virtual experience that’s anchored in the natural world. When you load it, you don’t appear in the West Elm catalog that is the Oculus Rift waiting room, nor do you appear in the soulless, white Matrix load-out screen that is found on the HTC Vive. You appear inside a forest or a cave, to load your first VR app. And if you choose to look at art? Google will place you inside a gallery that’s flooded with (simulated) natural light. In that sense, Daydream’s branding extends from a logo into its user interface. Slipping on a Daydream headset and exploring a virtual world should look and feel as natural as going on a hike. “The reason why, in human history we’ve built houses and shelters is not that nature is ugly, but the elements can be kind of fierce sometimes,” says To. “VR at least now unlocks a bit of the possibility of environments you can be in that are safe, but also take advantage of the beauty and peace of the natural world.” Or, at least, give us an extra excuse to daydream now and again. Yes, this is skeuomorphism, in a sense—a series of metaphors that help new users understand a nascent technology like VR. The grass, trees, and sunrise are all just an illusion. But Daydream is about being accessible and intuitive, and what’s more intuitive than nature? Mark Wilson is a senior writer at Fast Company. He started Philanthroper.com, a simple way to give back every day. His work has also appeared at Gizmodo, Kotaku, PopMech, PopSci, Esquire, American Photo and Lucky Peach.
10 TWITTER LESSONS FOR BRANDS FROM ELON MUSK IN 2015 ELON MUSK MADE NEWS FOR WHAT CAME TO BE KNOWN AS HIS “$900 MILLION TWEET”. JUST 10 MINUTES AFTER POSTING A TWEET ABOUT A NEW PRODUCT LINE HIS SHARES HAD INCREASED BY ALMOST A BILLION DOLLARS. By Catherine Hayden
More recently, the entrepreneurial giant transformed a complaint on Twitter into the ultimate customer service success story by taking a new approach to a challenge from idea to execution in just six days. Musk’s approach to social media is much like his approach to business. He is, above all, “agile” in everything he does. Musk is proof that Twitter’s notorious 140-character limit can make money – and garner impressive publicity.
LESSONS FROM THE “$900 MILLION TWEET” In March 2015, Elon Musk saw his company add $900 million to its market capitalization in just 10 minutes following a single tweet.
In this “$900 million” tweet, all Musk did was announce the unveiling of a new Tesla product line. In just 114 characters he got people to listen, and to buy. The product announcement garnered over 7,000 retweets, 6,000 likes, and was picked up almost immediately by @MarketWatch. This led to more
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exposure as the media began to follow the story. It isn’t an accident that Musk chose to use his personal Twitter account @elonmusk to announce Tesla’s new product line. He currently has a following of 6.78 million under his own verified handle. Tesla’s corporate account, @teslamotors, has 1.23 million followers. The numbers are outstanding on both counts, but an announcement from a “real person” is almost always more powerful than a message from a corporate account to an audience that is resistant advertising and paid media.
like an agile startup. He’s also a PR genius on his own by listening, executing so fast and making his process public. There was quite a bit of coverage of this update.”
AGILITY AND SOCIAL MEDIA Agility in the context of business is an organization’s ability to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in productive and cost-effective ways. You could argue that business agility is the outcome of “organizational intelligence”. The Harvard Business Review does an excellent job of explaining the link between agility and good leadership.
Musk’s personal Twitter account is the perfect PR channel that links him to his brands – and the other way around. This is, in part, why Musk’s tweet about a new product line got Tesla enough exposure to dramatically boost shares in the company.
MUSK: CHANGING THE FACE OF CUSTOMER SERVICE On 11 December 2016 a Silicon Valley entrepreneur sent @ elonmusk a tweet that has become synonymous with Musk’s ability to use the social media platform to gain great press.
Loic Le Meur’s (@loic) tweet complained that people were leaving their Tesla cars parked at superchargers for longer than necessary – essentially using them as parking bays and limiting other drivers’ access. Musk responded within minutes, acknowledging that he was aware of the problem and adding that he would take action to resolve the issue. This matter was resolved in just six days when Tesla announced that owners would be charged a fee if their cars were left at supercharger spots for longer than necessary. A software update was pushed immediately, warning them about the fee. Le Meur, influential in his own right, was impressed. He shared his experience with his 27,000 followers on blogging platform Medium, where he writes on entrepreneurship. Summarising how Musk uses Twitter as successfully as he does, Le Meur wrote: “Elon listens, answers personally, and makes changes at an incredible speed. That is one of the reasons he is so successful. He manages a 30,000 employee public company
These same principles of agility in business and entrepreneurship should be applied to social media and, with the platform’s fast-paced nature in mind, especially to Twitter. There are four key areas to focus on when it comes to cultivating online organizational intelligence and agility in the way Musk does: 1. SHARED INTERESTS AND VALUES Interactions between people and groups with similar values, interests, and long-term goals grow businesses on- and offline. Cultivate a following that’s relevant to your interests and communicate with them in a way that reinforces your similarities. If you know your audience, you can share the news that’s relevant to them, establishing yourself at the forefront of your field. If you’re building your own Twitter presence as an adjunct to your brand or brands’ accounts, focus on reflecting the ways in which your own personality and interests intersect with your work and with the personalities and interests of your audience. 2. POWERFUL INTERACTIONS Take the time to engage with your audience and start real
conversations that matter to them, retweeting thought leaders that you respect, and commenting on what they say. Sharing news related to your own work is important, but the most powerful interactions come from people, not brands. The power of sharing personal anecdotes and thoughts should not be underestimated, as in this irreverent tweet about a coffee cup that got Musk 1,302 retweets and 6,586 likes. Never underestimate the impact of having a sense of humour. You want your Twitter following to know you’re just like them and that you share the same experiences, thoughts, and feelings that they do. You must be relatable. 3. CO-EVOLUTION In business, products and services should continuously evolve to meet a changing environment. Twitter can serve as an excellent platform for gauging consumer opinion, getting access to news that influential followers find relevant, and knowing what consumers want and need. Learning from insights gathered online has become essential to the evolution of brands.
THE TAKEAWAY Here are 10 things Musk does, and that you should do, to improve your own personal profile and boost your overall online presence: 1. Be your own brand: use your personal brand as a way to connect with your audience on a human level. Use Twitter to educate people about yourself and then about your products – not the other way around 2. Take analytics seriously: use the best analytics tools to know your audience and their interests, to learn from what has worked in your social media the past and what isn’t currently working, and to stay on top of the numbers when it comes to how many happy versus unhappy followers you have. “Sentiment” is key if you want to keep up-to-date with influencers and identify current and future business challenges that need to be addressed, as well as in prioritising whose tweets should be responded to first 3. Have a plan but…
4. SPONTANEOUS DECISION-MAKING
4. …Be flexible at the same time. Twitter moves incredibly quickly. While you do need to have content planned in advance, you also need to be ready to share relevant news or contribute to important conversations as they arise.
Research shows that customers expect a quick response time on Twitter. Quicker responses manage potential negative press if a customer has a complaint, while actually earning you more money.
5. Be fast and think on your feet. Respond to a complaint within minutes and always follow up. Empty promises damage your personal brand as much as prompt follow-through will build it. Don’t ever promise something you can’t deliver. 6. Position yourself as someone people want to follow. Use Twitter to reflect your personality, your ideas, and your thoughts. Learn the right balance between newsworthy tweets, personal commentary on politics or world events (where relevant), industry-related retweets, and information about your own brand or brands. 7. Be accessible. Musk’s audience believes they have the pace, on Twitter, to go directly to him when they have a problem or a query.
A 2015 study on customer service in airline carriers published by Twitter found that customers who received a response to a tweet in under six minutes were willing to spend almost $20 more on that airline in the future. If your personal Twitter account is successful, your audience should feel they can come directly to you with complaints and that you will take their feedback on board – quickly. This requires the ability to think on your feet in crafting the best response possible, and the ability to resolve the issue quickly. Companies like Facebook and Google are excellent case studies in business agility and co-evolution, and @elonmusk is arguably the best example of a person who successfully applies these principles to Twitter.
8. Know when to respond and who to respond to. Analytics help. Musk gets thousands of messages a day and can’t respond to every single one. Making sure tweets from influential accounts are prioritised is great PR. 9. Follow the right people. Pick influencers and industry leaders – interacting with them boosts your profile and can lead to excellent publicity. 10. Be relevant and “real”. Don’t use corporate speak. Find your voice. Finally, don’t be afraid of short, expressive, frank tweets on topical issues. Just seven characters in the right place and at the right time can do a lot for you (like 686 retweets). For some of the best possible metrics information available online, try Locowise. We will even give it to you for free, for fourteen days.
Why you need “an other” strategy By Steve McKee
“The world doesn’t need another ad agency.”
That’s a quote from Seema Miller, marketing strategist and co-founder of a new firm she describes as a “creative consultancy” in an effort to avoid being lumped in with the sameness of the world she just left. I took note of Ms. Miller’s words because they’re identical to those my business partner and I struggled with nearly two decades ago when we launched McKee Wallwork + Co. And they’re eerily similar to the discouraging thoughts that ran through my mind when I set out to write “When Growth Stalls”: Did the world really need another business book? The numbers are pretty discouraging. It would be difficult to throw a stone in any direction and not hit one of the 13,000plus ad agencies there are in America. And books? It would be impossible to even scan the titles of the several hundred thousand that are published each year, let alone read them. We have more restaurants, cars, clothiers and -- name the category -- than we could ever take advantage of (at least in the developed world). It’s not an exaggeration to say that in most cases, we really don’t need another. On what then is Miller pinning her hopes for her new venture? Why has my firm thrived for the better part of 20 years? How did “When Growth Stalls” come to be published in four languages? In all three cases, we recognized, at least subconsciously, that the world didn’t need another, it needed “an other.” It’s amazing how a single tap on the space bar can make such a difference. “Another” is one of those odd English words that have multiple and contradictory meanings. One definition is “being one more in addition to one or more of the same kind,” like having another car payment or eating another piece of pie (two more things none of us likely need). But “another” also means “different or distinct from the one first considered.” That puts an entirely different spin on things, and putting a space between the letters underscores the point. The world rarely needs “another,” but it will always welcome “an other” -- particularly in the most mature, crowded and commoditized industries, where sameness leads to staleness. Time after time, another product or service gets superseded by an other product or service, making our lives more pleasant, more efficient, more productive, or better in a host
of additional ways. In 1967, the world didn’t need another airline; Herb Kelleher’s insight was that it needed an other airline, and Southwest was born. In 2007, the world didn’t need another cell phone; Steve Jobs saw what could be and introduced an other way not only of making calls but also of interacting with the world. And, in 2009, the world didn’t need another book; but when our research turned up four hidden and destructive internal dynamics that, sooner or later, trip up every company, an other book was born. Seeking “an other” is a good strategy to keep pace with the inexorable march of creative destruction. In the marketplace, what is will not always be, and what is to come has not always been. The task of strategists is to be agents of creation rather than victims of destruction. Our challenge is to pursue the new and unproven even as we preserve the existing and profitable. That’s not a simple task. As Machiavelli wrote, “there is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful in its success, than to set up as a leader in the introduction of changes. For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new.” No one ever said this stuff is easy. But whenever you’re on to something, there will always come competitors who mimic your methods, commoditize your model and crunch your margins. You have no option but to continually look for ways to innovate, even at the risk of attacking yourself. If you don’t do it, somebody else will. So yes, the world does need an other ad agency, an other book, and an other whatever it is you make or do. And it’s your job to pioneer what is to come even as you preserve what already is. Unless you can ensure your company, product or service is continually and legitimately “an other,” it’ll end up becoming just “another.” Steve McKee is the president of McKee Wallwork + Co., an advertising agency that specializes in working with stalled, stuck and stale brands that was recognized by Advertising Age as 2015 Southwest Small Agency of the Year. He’s the author of “When Growth Stalls” and “Power Branding.”
The Future Of Social: Crowd-Sourcing And Artificial Intelligence By Matt Karasick
In 2005, 5% of adults in the U.S. were on social media; today it’s around 70%. Facebook has over 1.65 billion users engaging for more than 50 minutes per day. Social media is ubiquitous, and smart brands are sprinting to keep pace. But what about getting ahead of the curve? What has evolved beyond Social Monitoring to Social Listening is now poised to enter a 3.0 phase in which crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence will play pivotal roles.
A New Era: Social Listening Social Listening starts with a required input: “What, where or whom should we listen to?” Creating that list, similar to how SEM and SEO marketers derive their keyword list, takes expert practitioners and smart tools. However, social is just more wild, more organic and more unpredictable than search. It is simply not possible to anticipate everything you should be listening for. Let’s take the example of what Mondelez, creator of Oreos, did during Super Bowl 2013. Oreo prepared for the event by organizing a team of creative writers, thinkers and executives to react to anything notable during the big game. When a power outage hit, Oreo tweeted, “You can still dunk in the dark.” The earned media that came out of that single tweet was phenomenal (and well summarized here). As brilliant as Oreo’s execution was, it was not actually the result of Social Listening. This was a more proactive, realtime form of social marketing that will be able to scale with the Social Listening 3.0 that is yet to come.
Social Listening 3.0 The next generation of Social Listening is fast approaching and will operate more nimbly. This new type of Listening will be able to to identify opportunities that would never have been included in a brand’s “listen to this” input. Brands want to find topics that are not yet trending, but that they could own if they moved fast enough. So how will this new generation of Social Listening work? Very likely, there will be two main drivers.
The Crowd Economy First, the crowd economy that already exists will be invited to take on a new role. Oreo had its team at the ready for
the Super Bowl; however, no brand can have always-on staff, listening to every conceivable tweet, share and post. But imagine if consumers are asked to Listen on a brand’s behalf. Here’s a purely fictional example: Lululemon is likely listening for social conversations around keywords “exercise or gym fashion.” But there are other opportunities happening all the time. Let’s say there is an unfortunate wardrobe malfunction — such as a dancer ripping the seat of his pants during a dance routine on Dancing With The Stars. Lululemon would probably love to be alerted to that in realtime through whatever platform is geared for rapid user alerts and tweet out a screenshot and caption such as: “This wouldn’t happen in our pants.”
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This new Listening workforce will be recruited the same way consumers are recruited for advocacy programs, content creation programs and more. They will be trained and empowered and eventually will compete with each other at Social Listening.
Artificial Intelligence The second driver is artificial intelligence (AI) as machines learn to understand which social content might represent brand opportunities. AI is already being applied to decipher not only images (such as when Facebook automatically tags
the correct person based on facial recognition) but also the sentiment behind images. AI will also be applied to Listening in a way that requires less of a prescriptive input of what to listen to. Opportunities such as the hypothetical Lululemon example will increasingly be able to be identified by AI-powered natural language understanding and image interpretation. Yet, don’t despair, fellow humans, while machines will get more skilled at identifying these moments, creative humans will remain better at responding. I’ve heard songs written by AI recently and none of them are on my playlist. Overall, brands should stop monitoring and chasing trends but push themselves or their technology partners to better create the trending conversations that lead to greater engagement.
How to effectively bring science to marketing
BRANDS ARE ADOPTING A ‘TEST AND LEARN’ APPROACH TO MARKETING STRATEGY. RECENT IPA EFFECTIVENESS AWARDS PAPERS SHOW HOW IT CAN BE DONE - WITHOUT COMPROMISING ON CREATIVITY... By Jonathan Allan
The most effective advertising has always been a blend of art and science. However, with the proliferation of channels and technologies, it is potentially more difficult to gain cutthrough for the art in advertising, and more intellectually challenging to deal with the science. While the meaning of “art” is often a subject for debate, the dictionary defines science as: “The intellectual and practical
activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.” With this definition in mind, taking a scientific approach to marketing would involve making greater use of “systematic study” and “observation and experiment” to develop communications strategy and execution and to build
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experiments and feedback loops into everything a brand does.
a brand may start to compromise the “top of the funnel” that the business relies on for future success.
But where can we learn about how brands have effectively applied science’s “test and learn” mindset in practice?
Successful approaches such as that adopted by Direct Line blend long-term and short-term objectives, ensuring that these are consistent with long-term brand and business health, while also delivering more immediate sales impact.
Winning papers from the most recent IPA Effectiveness Awards provide several pointers. They demonstrate how to benefit from a more scientific approach to marketing and communications, without undermining the transformative potential of great insight or creativity.
Test and learn is a philosophy not a campaign idea Sir Clive Woodward, the coach of England’s 2003 Rugby Union World Cup-winning team, famously said his team’s victory was “not about doing one thing 100% better, but about doing 100 things 1% better”. Both Sir Clive – and Sir Dave Brailsford, his equivalent in the world-beating British cycling team – have been influential proponents of the view that outstanding performance is often the product of striving for systematic, marginal gains rather than large uplifts. They argue that to be effective such an approach needs to be part of an organisation’s DNA, with enough time provided for gains to accumulate and yield their full benefits. This holds true in marketing. There is no point in applying the marginal-gains approach to one campaign or channel. It needs to be a holistic, long-term endeavour to enable learning and optimise the approach across all a brand’s marketing activities. For example, Plusnet, the Yorkshire-based broadband provider, focused on testing and learning to drive its business growth over five years. As the brand’s 2016 IPA Effectiveness Award-winning case study sets out, Plusnet adopted a suite of measurement techniques to modify its tonality, messaging and media mix over an extended period. The strategy enabled Plusnet to alter subtly the communication of its Yorkshire values to emphasise it was a national brand, not a regional one, and maintain its growth momentum in a dynamic and highly competitive market.
Make sure the business tests and measures the right things Too much optimisation is focused on intermediate metrics or looks only at a few channels in the mix, or short-term sales results. This is misleading because the display return on investment might look great this month, but the longer-term brand equity and awareness may be suffering as a result of off-brand creative, or diversion of budgets from brandbuilding into short-term activities. What is more, it is possible to optimise strongly in the latter stages of the purchase funnel to deliver a very strong return on investment through re-targeting, for instance. However, the total volume of sales or revenue may dip significantly, or
Measurement can also have wider benefits such as creating benchmarks for future activity, by supporting more risk-taking and innovation in an organisation, and in spreading industry learning.
We still need great insights to form hypotheses to test When brands are using multi-variate testing and learning on the fly, there is clearly a danger that not enough thought will be put into the initial strategy, proposition or creative because people may think: “We can always change it as we go.” However, the evidence from the 2016 winners highlights that a strong underlying insight often drives brand success. For example, by data-mining, the Australian swimming pool-maker Narellan Pools pinpointed the moment when consumers first aspired to buy a swimming pool as well as a clear tipping point when they were most likely to move from consideration into purchase mode. This insight drove the brand’s entire, digitally led strategy, and Narellan was able to optimise further as it went to market.
Using science does not mean we can forget the art When using multiple copy and optimisation techniques, it can be the case that the initial creativity goes out of the window and ads become very utilitarian. It is therefore crucially important that as much effort goes into the creative development of a research-based idea as with any other activity. In a note to its winning case, which featured the creation of digital ads on the fly and programmatic media placement, The Economist client emphasised this creative element, saying: “We tested machine-generated, dynamic creative and it was consistently and significantly outperformed by crafted communications.”
Do not kick yourself for mistakes – see them as chances to improve In business, there is generally too much negativity around failure. As a result, people tend to cover up mistakes when things do not go according to plan. Instead, we should view everything we do in marketing as an experiment in which there are lots of opportunities for those 1% improvements the next time round. Rather than apologising for sub-optimal results, we should look forward to identifying areas for improvement and be much more open about how we tackle them for our next campaign. After all, that is what learning is all about…
Case study: Direct Line
Faced with market-share losses to price-comparison websites and competitors, Direct Line used a broad set of research tools to look back and pinpoint what was not working and establish a new organising principle to differentiate it from the competition. Research underpinned its decision to adopt “hassle-free insurance that just works guaranteed” as the ethos linking everything from its service propositions through to its call centres, website and ads featuring Harvey Keitel’s fixer
character from ‘Pulp Fiction’. A long-term testing programme also encouraged the brand to drive the efficiency of its media mix. The advertising campaign launched in mid 2014 and by February 2016, the brand had recorded 12 months of increased volumes of both car and home insurance volumes, improved its brand metrics and staunched the decline in policies.
Case study: Wall’s classics
Stretching a modest budget to provide combinations of older and newer media, the “Talking Ice Creams” strategy profitably grew the sales and share of Wall’s Classics for the first time in years. The core insight was that the brand was loved but forgotten.By creating a humorous series of outdoor and digital ads placed near points of purchase and activated
in hot weather – Wall’s put the product memorably back in front of consumers. Econometrics estimated that the strategy delivered £1.84 of short-term revenue for every £1 invested, before adding in longer-term benefits. The approach was later adapted for 120 previously unsupported Unilever ice-cream brands in 30 countries.
Jonathan Allan is the sales director of Channel 4, and was a judge of the 2016 IPA Effectiveness Awards. A version of this article appeared in the IPA book, “Advertising Works 23”. Awards case studies can be purchased from www.ipa.co.uk/effectiveness/winners
Is Design Still Relevant? A Candid Look At Branding Clinton’s Failed Campaign FOR THE FIRST TIME, PENTAGRAM PARTNER MICHAEL BIERUT TELLS THE FULL STORY BEHIND DESIGNING FOR HILLARY CLINTON. By Meg Miller
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After Hillary Clinton revealed her campaign logo in 2015, everyone in media, politics, and design seemed to have an opinion on it—though one designer stayed silent. In the months that followed, it became an open secret that Pentagram’s Michael Bierut had designed the logo and identity system—later confirmed by Wikileaks emails—and pieces of the branding story became known. But Bierut himself had declined to speak to the media about it. Yesterday, he broke the silence with a lengthy essay published on his site Design Observer. The piece is fascinating for many reasons, not least of all because of the previously untold details about designing for an election with one of the most surprising outcomes in recent history. Most remarkable, however, is the candidness with which Bierut writes about how designers, too, miscalculated the reality of a divided country. It offers rare personal insight into a very public, high-stakes project, from one of the leading designers and thinkers in the field. The essay tells the full story behind the design for the first time—from creating the logo in secrecy to an internal campaign controversy that left Bierut uncertain his identity would be used until the day Clinton announced her presidency. It details the surreal pendulum swing of public reaction to the logo, from all out bashing to eventual embrace (the first is
common in the age of Twitter design commentary, the latter not so much). It also sums up nicely the design legacy of Obama’s 2008 campaign, and why in 2016 it could be built upon but not repeated—a topic frequently brought up in design community prior to the election Most importantly, though, it reveals where Bierut believes the branding for the Clinton campaign fell short. For him, it wasn’t in the design of the logo or the systematic execution of the branding by Jennifer Kinon and her campaign design team. Rather, it was a fundamental misunderstanding of the political climate of a country for which red trucker hats resonated more deeply than a carefully orchestrated design campaign modeled after corporate identity systems. It’s the same miscalculation that led the most prominent political scientists and data crunchers in the country to miss the strength of the populist fervor to elect the candidate no one thought would win. Bierut’s essay looks at it through a design lens. “We had spent months developing a logo; Trump had spent years building a brand,” Bierut writes. “Had Trump won not in spite of his terrible design work, but because of it?” Bierut points to Obama’s 2008 campaign as the first time in history that a political campaign had treated its design and marketing strategy like a corporate identity program,
with a polished logo and consistent typographical system. The Clinton campaign followed suit, though Bierut and his team at Pentagram strove to make Clinton’s branding less about exuding familiarity and experience—unlike Obama, Clinton had already been in the public eye for decades— and more about being approachable. Still, Bierut and, later, Kinon executed the campaign similarly to how they would any corporate identity project at their design firms (Kinon runs Original Champions of Design). Bierut created an identity flexible enough to work across multiple platforms and for multiple coalitions, and Kinon rolled it out with precision and professionalism. However, the way that design is distributed and consumed had changed in the intervening years since Obama’s first campaign. Images are everywhere today, and design even more democratized. Digital tools and social media give everyone a way to create and share, enforcing multiplicity. In this new reality, difference and individual ingenuity are often valued over the top-down, collective consistency of corporate identity design popularized by midcentury modernists. This isn’t necessarily a new idea. What is new is seeing it articulated by one of the most famous corporate identity designers living today. Bierut puts it this way: As we worked on the campaign, it never occurred to us to be anything less than perfect. (As our campaign contact Teddy Goff observed much later, to be imperfect would have been inauthentic to our detail-obsessed candidate.) During the height of the primary battle, Lindsay Ballant, a Bernie Sanders supporter, wrote a perceptive critique that compared the graphics of the two campaigns. “While Hillary’s visual campaign is inarguably successful by all traditional design principles, it’s also calculated, expected, and contrived,”
Ballant wrote. “It reinforces the perception of establishment status, which is one of the main criticisms of her as a candidate. One of the consequences of a campaign so tightly controlled is the campaign feels so tightly controlled.” In contrast, the design of the Sanders campaign had the homespun charm one associates with do-it-yourself craft sites like Etsy. They looked and felt authentic. When I read this in the spring of 2016, I had to admit she was onto something. Still, as Bierut points out, it would have been strange and disingenuous to visualize homespun, grassroots-style graphics for a candidate who has been in politics for so long and was so connected to the establishment. The objective of the design was to be a representation of Clinton. As Kinon told me in an interview before the election, “To me, craft is a mirror for our candidate and all her wonkishness . . . we are holding ourselves to the most professional standard to reflect her because we know we’re her voice.” In that way, the branding did what it set out to do—it did mirror Clinton, her preparedness and her long-standing career in politics. The fact that Bierut feels that it wasn’t effective in reaching the people it most needed to reach also mirrors the gulf that has divided the country along geographical, economic, and cultural lines. Just as the election was a wakeup call to many, Bierut also considers it a call for designers to both rethink what has worked before, and consider design’s place in a changing world.
Meg Miller is an assistant editor at Co.Design covering art, technology, and design.
Photo: Celine Grouard for Fast Company
Bypassing creative: How agencies are turning influencer posts into programmatic ads By Yuyu Chen
Agency January Digital wants you to see influencer posts more than once. When it promoted a new skin defense cream for a big beauty brand lately, the shop found 10 social stars in the beauty category and asked each to create a blog post to educate readers on product benefits. The agency then ran those posts programmatically so people could read snippets of those articles with accompanying images on the likes of Allure, Bazaar, Shape and PopSugar. It worked. Within the first week, the engagement rate was “100 times higher” than it would have been in an influencer campaign without programmatic, according to Vic Drabicky, founder for January Digital. “We always want influencer endorsements but we cannot see much value if people only read the content on an influencer’s blog or social channels,” said Drabicky. January Digital is one of the few agencies using influencer content to give automated ads a native feel. The process is simple: Advertisers take a post that is doing well in an influencer campaign — be it a blog, an Instagram image or a YouTube video — repurpose it and then distribute the content through programmatic native vendors like TripleLift and Taboola. The approach aims fill the gap between programmatic and creative, an issue that has been lingering for years. “Advertisers usually negotiate upfront in the contract that they want rights to a piece of content. Then we will let the influencer know and negotiate a rate,” said Kamiu Lee, head of strategy and business development for content platform Bloglovin. “In some ways, brands are doing this to bypass traditional creative.” While every contract is different, for top-tier social stars, the price could be four times more than their standard rate if the content is repurposed for usage beyond a brand’s own social channels, Lee added. As agency executives and tech vendors grumble that little headway has been made in merging creative and programmatic, the merge of programmatic and influencer
content comes as an easy fix. Corey Martin, head of influencer marketing and PR for agency 360i, thinks that too often programmatic is served to distinct audiences, but with generic messaging. So by converting influencer content into programmatic native ads, advertisers can deliver content that is more relevant to the target audiences and see higher engagement. “Programmatic media can also provide another layer of measurement to help brands assess the performance of content and the ultimate value of influencers,” said Martin. But the success with this tactic is going to vary wildly with the appeal of the content, require lots of A/B testing and will probably fail to use the programmatic technology as effectively as possible, according to Victor Wong, CEO for programmatic creative company Thunder. “Agencies should at least consider buying sponsored story inventory so that they can repurpose the blog post in its entirety in the medium it was meant to be seen in, as opposed to trying to fit it into some other format,” said Wong. “And then the next challenge is to find the right inventory that matches the ad.” In order to make sure that programmatic influencer posts are targeted, January Digital’s Drabicky said that his agency usually starts with a whitelist of sites to ensure that the content is running in a brand-safe environment. Then the team layers demographic, interest, behavior and topic targeting on top, and optimize on a constant basis to find the right mix of targeting. “By leveraging both publisher-level targeting and user-level targeting, we are able to highly qualify the audience and ensure the brand is presented in the most appropriate way,” he said.
Yuyu Chen, Brands Reporter
How agencies are pushing voice technology By Tanya Dua
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Forget ordering pizza. Soon you’ll also be able to consult Alexa about your next period. Last weekend, digital agency Rain hosted a two-day hackathon for staffers and local developers at its Nicaragua office to play around with voice-driven experiences, and one of the Alexa skills that came of the exercise was a menstrual calendar for women planning to get pregnant. Rain isn’t alone. As services like Alexa, Siri, Cortana and Watson increasingly become embedded in consumers’ daily lives, agencies are doubling down on their efforts and looking to provide actual utility through these platforms on behalf of their clients. Agencies including Rain, Maxus, Huge, We Are Social and CP+B are betting on the future of voice technology, doing everything from encouraging internal demos and hosting hackathons to get employees better acquainted with the technology in-house. An it’s not just chasing the shiny, new object, they say. “It’s still in the early adopter curiosity stage, but a huge shift is underway as far as clients are concerned,” said Corey Szopinski, executive creative technology director at CP+B Los Angeles. Tom Kelshaw, director of innovation at Maxus, agreed that clients are very interested, particularly those with close integration with Amazon as it reduces friction for sales. But “budgets are small right now, because experimentation is very cheap and easy,” he said. Voice has been a big focus area for Rain ever since the agency debuted its recipe library for Campbell’s on Amazon Echo in 2015. The agency has designed Echo skills for a variety of clients and built a smartphone app called Reverb, which lets anyone interact with Alexa — even if they don’t have an Echo device. Most recently, it hosted the hackathon event for voice-driven experiences, out of which four projects are being submitted to Amazon, including the menstrual calendar above as well as a skill allowing people to check their balance for public transportation. “The idea of ‘learn-then-teach and repeat’ is part of the culture at Rain,” said Andrew Howlett, founding partner at Rain. “When you train others, you actually improve your own skills and expertise.” At Maxus, Kelshaw has an Echo Dot set up at his desk that staffers are encouraged to come and try out. The agency
also regularly demos skills at internal events and brings in specialist developers for staffers to school its employees further. Huge hosts regular hackathons to encourage applied learning for emerging tech across the board and had one focused on conversational user experience or voice interfaces. Among the projects was, for example, a voice-activated Alexa skill designed for marketers to use to get relevant marketing stats and figures. Wondersauce, on the other hand, has a small team dedicated to developing relationships with technology partners, diving into APIs, and attending hackathons and meet-ups. This group is then responsible for educating the agency’s staffers on practical use cases that they can help their clients with. Others, including We Are Social and CP+B, are also investing significantly in voice technology, hosting frequent meetups to school current employees as well hiring new talent, especially UX designers with experience working with voice. We Are Social launched its own daily news broadcast on Amazon Echo last December, giving consumers briefs on the latest news in marketing. Most branded voice activations — including CP+B and Domino’s pizza-ordering skill and VaynerMedia and Johnnie Walker’s cocktail recipe skill — seem gimmicky so far. But according to Rain’s Howlett, as the technology matures and developers start to grasp its true potential, real utility will emerge. “Look back at the early app store days for the iPhone — the large majority of apps were gimmicky and silly,” he said. “But voice technology will continue to improve in its accuracy and efficiency, and this will allow more opportunities for brands to create useful interactions for consumers and revenue opportunities will too follow.” The technology will particularly have implications for the automobile sector, as well as in third-party app integrations such as geo-location, maps and payment. “We are already working on some of these and are excited about what consumers will be able to do without ever taking their eyes off the road,” he said.
Tanya Dua, Brands Reporter
CKE Restaurants, the parent of Carl’s Jr., is expanding its executives’ access to real-time social media traffic about its brands. Credit Carlos Gonzalez for The New York Times
How brands, PR shops are investing in social media damage control UNITED AND PEPSI AFFAIRS FORCE BRANDS TO RESPECT SOCIAL MEDIA By Sapna Maheshwari
When Jason Marker, the new chief executive of the company that owns Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, met with several of his marketing executives this week, one of his first requests was for screens to be installed in the company’s headquarters to display real-time social media conversations about its brands. It is the sort of setup that already exists at the advertising agencies representing Mr. Marker’s company, CKE Restaurants, and that the company has built internally for events like the Super Bowl, said Brandon LaChance, the director of advertising and digital marketing for the chains,
who was at the meeting. But now, he added, that information will be available daily to the whole company, which is based in Franklin, Tenn. “In most organizations, supply chain, H.R., legal or whatever it is — they’re not exposed to the same kind of stuff as marketing because it’s not traditionally in their area of responsibility,” Mr. LaChance said, comparing the news flow on such screens to the humming activity of stock quotations, chyrons and headline tickers on CNBC. Now, he said, “anyone can take a look at that and see how what they do impacts the business.”
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The request by Mr. Marker, just days into his new role, underscores how seriously the highest levels of corporations are taking social media, which has provided brands with unprecedented access to consumers while exposing them to new risks. The perils were on full display this month as United Airlines and its chief executive dealt with the catastrophic fallout from a video showing a paying passenger being violently dragged off a flight on Sunday, and as Pepsi was castigated for a tone-deaf commercial that invoked imagery from the Black Lives Matter movement. In each instance, consumer outrage was amplified after initial responses from the companies were viewed as too slow and unapologetic. “The beautiful and the scary thing for marketers is that for the first time in history, they now have this open door for a two-way dialogue with consumers,” Mr. LaChance said. “But when you do open that door to a dialogue, you better be ready to have it with them.”
approach their online accounts and handle potentially problematic situations before they reach a fever pitch, particularly when they’re dealing with huge amounts of data from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google search and Instagram. Hyatt monitors its social networks and mentions of its brands around the clock, usually responding to people in less than 10 minutes, Ms. Banikarim said, adding that employees are trained to respond to everything and to be aware that all interactions are public. “It used to be that consumers interacted with you through call centers or they wrote you, so it was a one-on-one communication,” Ms. Banikarim said. “Now, you may be responding to one person’s Twitter, but everyone is seeing it, so you have to be conscious you have a public audience.” That includes private messages, she said, noting that screenshots can be taken and shared.
Crises that play out on social media are increasingly being viewed as threats to a company’s profits instead of short public relations episodes, said Leslie Gaines-Ross, chief reputation strategist at the public relations firm Weber Shandwick. “One tweet, just one dangerous tweet, can really impact your share price,” Ms. Gaines-Ross said.
Unilever, the consumer goods giant, relies heavily on deep analytics and powerful language processing tools to understand the “tsunami” of data it sees from social media, said Stan Sthanunathan, its executive vice president of consumer and market insights. He said that 25 percent of his team now worked with social media, compared with 5 percent two years ago.
Weber Shandwick uses a tool to simulate crises for executives, inventing a plausible firestorm then running a drill exposing them to a litany of “challenging media inquiries, news articles, social channel conversations and videos as you witness the immediate implications of your responses (or non-responses),” according to a description online.
While the tools are more often used to listen to consumers online and identify trends that can lead to new products, like Unilever’s recent introduction of Lipton’s Matcha Green Tea, he said, they can also help the company determine when to respond to potential problems.
These instances are not limited to social channels. The United video has been reposted on Twitter more than 170,000 times, and has circulated well beyond that on television broadcasts, news websites, YouTube and Facebook. Oscar Munoz, the chief executive of United, has been criticized for not making a full-throated apology until Tuesday afternoon. In recent months, companies have been girding themselves for social media grenades, whether it is critical Twitter posts from President Trump, or campaigns from socially and politically conscious consumers holding brands to account for where they advertise, including “The O’Reilly Factor,” “The New Celebrity Apprentice” and Breitbart News. Maryam Banikarim, Hyatt Hotels’ chief marketing officer, said that while most executives outside the marketing department had long been aware of the impact that social media interactions can have on their companies, the presidential election drove the point solidly home. “Obama got a lot of points for engaging with social media and doing things on Saturday Night Live, and that seemed record-breaking,” she said. “We today have a president that sometimes breaks news on Twitter before he does it anyplace else, and that’s a marked difference from a year ago. If you didn’t understand the power of social media before, how can you not understand it after this election cycle?” That has placed a renewed focus on how major brands
“Sometimes silence is golden,” he said. “That’s why it’s very, very important to have analytics, because there are situations where somebody says something and you end up overreacting, and by responding to that very quickly, you may actually fuel the whole fire. With analytics, you may actually note it’s tapering off and showing signs of decline.” The tools used to monitor social media have evolved vastly from their early days as “very blunt instruments of listening,” when they simply measured the volume of mentions or general sentiment without context, Mr. LaChance of CKE Restaurants said. That helped the marketers keep track of consumers who were talking about Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, rather than politics, this year when Andrew Puzder, the company’s former chief executive, was a contentious nominee for labor secretary. “As a brand, we were absolutely prepared for that, and we closely monitored it,’’ he said, “but we were able to understand what mentions were adjacent, if you will, versus people really talking about anything substantive of their feelings towards our brands.”
Sapna Maheshwari is a business reporter covering advertising for The New York Times.
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TODAY’S BUSINESSES NEED TO HAVE A POSITIVE IMPACT ON SOCIETY By Curtis Sparrer
In the 90s, name brands enjoyed a particular, short-lived heyday. You didn’t have to check the tag to know if someone was wearing Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss or the Gap because it was writ large on the clothing itself. The brand was the status symbol, and, in a way that only luxury brands now enjoy, young, hip consumers were happy to buy the brand and advertise it. Today’s young, hip consumers—Millennials—aren’t nearly as concerned with a brand’s cool factor as with its politics. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that a brand’s politics—not the products it sells—are what determine its cool factor. According to Deloitte’s 2016 Millennial Survey, almost nine in ten Millennials (87 percent) believe that the success of a business should be measured in terms of more than just its financial performance. Seventy-three percent said that business must have a positive social impact on society. What does this mean for you and your brand? It means that to woo Millennials, your business should have some form of progressive charter and make it known. Following are some tips and examples of brand-building using social (media) activism.
Identify a cause you care about There was a time when companies sought to protect their brands and market share by projecting neutrality on matters of politics and social justice. But these days, brands big and small are getting on board with the political zeitgeist to #resist. The most obvious examples are this year’s Super Bowl ads, which were dominated by brands—Coca Cola, Airbnb, Audi and Budweiser—being uncharacteristically vocal about politics and social justice. Meanwhile, in the world of fashion, United Colors of Benetton launched its “United by Half” campaign to promote its commitment to women’s rights and equality, and Nordstrom and other retailers dumped Ivanka Trump’s fashion line—to much applause on the left and outrage on the right. But taking a political stance doesn’t just work for the big boys. Like many people and companies, Studio 15 was displeased with the current administration and its anti-women, immigrant and Muslim vitriol. So they launched their The Future Is Female collection, featuring tees with slogans like “The Future Is Female,” “Nevertheless, She Persisted” and “Feminist.”
Studio 15 is also putting their money where their mouth is: 5 percent of all proceeds from this line are donated to Kleos Microfinance Group, a non-profit organization that helps entrepreneurs in developing countries fund their own small businesses. Through this partnership, Studio 15 has funded more than 30 successful ventures for female entrepreneurs in Africa. Said founder Jia Wertz: “We created this line to express how we felt about the political climate and to use the platform we have—our brand—to affect some good. It obviously struck a chord. People have really responded positively to it, and sales for this line continue to be strong.”
Take it to Twitter Once you’ve identified your political or social charter, don’t be shy about it—your Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram should all reaffirm your commitment to your stance. Lyft won many customers away from Uber in the throes of the President Trump travel bans and airport protests and is now promoting its new “Round Up & Donate” initiative on its social channels, which will allow customers to round up their fare to the nearest whole dollar “and push the difference toward issues impacting everyone everywhere, from climate change to the pursuit of equality.” And Microsoft has launched a new ad campaign on Twitter about empowering young girls to pursue careers in STEM fields. In a recent CNN article, Mark Borkowski points out that being vocal about social justice and anti-Trump ideologies might not just endear your brand to Millennials but might also have the bonus unintended consequence of provoking the wrath of Trump himself—which, it turns out, has only proved to benefit the brands under fire. “Taking to Twitter to lambaste Nordstrom for withdrawing his daughter Ivanka’s clothing line, [Trump] unleashed an outpouring of consumer love. The store’s stock finished the day up 4 percent. Meryl Streep’s […] high-profile spat with the U.S. President has likely helped secure her a record 20th Oscar nomination. But perhaps the greatest beneficiary of Trump’s bile has been his most-hated foe: the mainstream media. Despite being labeled as “fake news,” the “unfair” and “failing” New York Times has seen a tenfold increase in subscriptions since the election.” Curtis Sparrer is a principal at Bospar.
Book,
&
Line
Sinker
Think Outside the Inbox: The B2B Marketing Automation Guide by David Cummings
Hello, My Name Is Awesome: How to Create Brand Names That Stick
By David Cummings; Adam Blitzer
By Alexandra Watkins
Marketing automation has been called the most transformative advancement in sales and marketing since the advent of CRM. Never before have sales and marketing professionals had so much insight into prospects’ interests, behaviors, and buying intentions. Many people think of email marketing, and the inbox, as an effective part of online lead generation and nurturing, and it is.
Every year, 6 million companies and more than 100,000 products are launched. They all need an awesome name, but many (such as Xobni, Svbtle, and Doostang) look like the results of a drunken Scrabble game. In this entertaining and engaging book, ace naming consultant Alexandra Watkins explains how anyone—even noncreative types— can create memorable and buzz-worthy brand names...
Manufacturing Demand
Scientific Advertising
By David Lewis
By Claude Hopkins
In Manufacturing Demand, marketing guru David Lewis, CEO of Demand Gen International, reveals the transformations taking place in marketing today, including the rise of the marketing geek and the emergence of the so-called fifth and sixth P s of marketing: Process and Programming. You ll learn about the key practices and principles of creating your demand-generation factory : buyer personas, the demand funnel, lead scoring, lead nurturing, and analytics.
This Edition Includes: How Advertising Laws Are Established - Just Salesmanship - Offer Service - Mail Order Advertising - What It Teaches Headlines - Psychology - Being Specific - Tell Your Full Story - Art in Advertising - Things Too Costly - Information - Strategy - Use of Samples - Getting Distribution - Test Campaigns - Leaning On Dealers - Individuality - Negative Advertising - Letter Writing - A Name That Helps - Good Business
Digital Body Language
The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes
By Steven Woods The new book Digital Body Language Deciphering Customer Intentions in an Online World , discusses the transitions that this is forcing in marketing departments everywhere, as they move to succeed in this new reality. In it, Steven Woods, industry expert and CTO of Eloqua discusses best practices for analyzing and understanding customer intent through analyzing their Digital Body Language.
By Margaret Mark, Carol Pearson, Carol S. Pearson Written by best-selling author Carol S. Pearson (The Hero Within) and branding guru Margaret Mark, this groundbreaking book provides the illusive and compelling answer. Using studies drawn from the experiences of Nike, Marlboro, Ivory and similar brands, the authors show that the most successful brands are those that most effectively correspond to fundamental patterns in the unconscious mind known as archetypes.
Archetypes in Branding: A Toolkit for Creatives and Strategists
Growth Hacking: Silicon Valley’s Best Kept Secret Kindle Edition
By Margaret Hartwell, Joshua C. Chen
By Raymond Fong, Chad Riddersen
Archetypes in Branding: A Toolkit for Creatives and Strategists offers a highly participatory approach to brand development. Combined with a companion deck of sixty original archetype cards, this kit will give you a practical tool to: Reveal your brand’s motivations, how it moves in the world, what its trigger points are and why it attracts certain customers. Forge relationships with the myriad stakeholders that affect your business...
In Growth Hacking: Silicon Valley’s Best Kept Secret, growth consultants Raymond Fong and Chad Riddersen deconstruct the phenomenon used by Silicon Valley’s fast growing tech elite, growth hacking. Raymond and Chad’s framework, the ASP™, is an easy to understand blueprint that empowers any business to apply growth hacking. The ASP™ was developed through their work in the tech community and used to produce high-leverage...
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#AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur’s Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness By Gary Vaynerchuk #AskGaryVee showcases the most useful and interesting questions Gary has addressed on his popular show. Distilling and expanding on the podcast’s most urgent and evergreen themes, Gary presents practical, timely, and timeless advice on marketing, social media, entrepreneurship...
Email Marketing Demystified: Build a Massive Mailing List, Write Copy that Converts and Generate More Sales (Internet Business Series) Kindle Edition By Matthew Paulson , Elisa Doucette (Editor), John McIntyre (Foreword) Digital marketing expert Matthew Paulson reveals the strategies and techniques that top email marketers are currently using to build large mailing lists, write compelling copy that converts and generate millions in revenue...
Subscription Marketing: Strategies for Nurturing Customers in a World of Churn Kindle Edition By Anne Janzer Subscription Marketing offers creative marketing strategies for sustaining the customer relationships that build long-term success. This book is a practical guide for marketers, start-up executives, customer success management professionals, and executives of establishing businesses adopting or transitioning to a subscription-based model.
CA$HVERTISING: How to Use More than 100 Secrets of AdAgency Psychology to Make Big Money Selling Anything to Anyone By Drew Eric Whitman Prepare yourself for a unique learning experience as author 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 influence the masses...
Advertising & the Business of Brands By Bruce Bendinger Twelve of the top professors in ad education team up to create an up-to-date introduction to the fastchanging worlds of advertising and marketing. If you want to learn how the ad business really works and where you can get started, this book is worth reading. From the Introduction all the way through “You and Your Career.” Want to know more? Visit the Study Hall at adbuzz.com and try the Practice Tests.
The History of Marketing Science (World Scientific-Now Publishers Series in Business) By Russell S Winer (Editor), Scott A Neslin (Editor) The History of Marketing Science is a timely review of the accomplishments of marketing scientists in a number of research areas. Different research areas of marketing science, such as Pricing, Internet Marketing, Diffusion Models, and Advertising, are treated to a highly readable and easy-to-digest historical analysis by the contributing authors.
Lead Generation: Theory and Practice Kindle Edition By Ksenia Andreeva This book has a purely practical purpose, serving as an introductory resource to principles and methods that will enable marketing professionals to raise the number of potential customers and multiply the number of sales typically received. The book presents the results of a global benchmark report: “Lead Generation: Strategies and tactics for 2016”. This survey covered 259 respondents from information and telecommunication technologies, consulting, banking, wholesale, insurance, auto-dealers, etc.
Methods of Persuasion: How to Use Psychology to Influence Human Behavior Kindle Edition By Nick Kolenda Using principles from cognitive psychology, Nick Kolenda developed a unique way to influence people’s thoughts. He developed a “mind reading” stage show depicting that phenomenon, and his demonstrations have been seen by over a million people across the globe. Methods of Persuasion reveals that secret for the first time. You’ll learn how to use those principles to influence people’s thoughts in your own life.