Branding matters. Because branding matters.
Scan these QR Codes to download the Brand Knew App Published by
brandknewmag.com
IOS
Android
05.19#79
10 16
Dear Friends: May this be a summer of content! Actionable, usable, archivable. As you would have seen, we have increased the number of of editorial pages in BrandKnew just to pack in more insight and observations that can be leveraged by the branding & advertising community. What Advertising can learn from Art? You can read some brush strokes here.The new eye opener for marketers and brands is the emerging significance of visual search. Understand more about it in this issue. For all those trying to decipher how to achieve maximum impact and engagement from your posts on social media, we offer a primer in this edition. The story on the changing landscape of advertising will be interesting to many in the fraternity. As would be the feature on how to advertise your advertising agency. We also take a look at the Rise & Fall of the Facebook’s memory economy. As they say it takes two to tangounderstand how to combine influencer and emotional marketing to enhance your content program. Also get to know how your brand can cut through the noise and send out the right signal. Bucketfuls more in this edition that you can soak and extract meaning from and I leave it to you to do exactly that. Till the next, my very best!
@ISDGlobalDubai
@Brandknewmag
linkd.in/1dsjYaW
isdbranding
bit.ly/1h95tgO
isdglobaldubai
suresh@groupisd.com
For Advertising Enquiries: info@groupisd.com or call + 971 4 386 7728 All Copyright of the content in this issue rests fully & comprehensively with the respective contributors and/or media platforms at all times, as the case may be.
24 26 28 30 32 38
Suresh Dinakaran
Brand Consultancy | Advertising | PR | Publishing Digital Media | Film Academy
22
34
Best
Brand Knew is published by
20
Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Business Development Director: Rishi Mohan Senior Hustler-Digital Marketing & Brand Development: Nikhil Thekkumkoottathil Brand Research & Creative Engagement Specialist: Anushka Kartha Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Regional Director: Krishna Chugh Country Manager, India: Vinit Chugh Performance Marketing Architect: Ryan Govindan Video Content Specialist: Mikhaela Cena Brand Engagement and Outreach Specialist: Anuva Madan Content Development Specialist: Abijith Pradeep
40 44 46 48 50 52 54
www.brandknew.groupisd.com www.groupisd.com
56
Download Mobile App from
62
CONTENTS
5 Brain Hacks for Marketing Get ready for a new era of personalized entertainment Now with extra brush strokes! What advertising can learn from art A fresh start: Rethinking the advertising landscape When is the best time to post on social media? Facebook’s Ad System Might Be Hard-Coded For Discrimination Brands can tap sensory power from tangible brand assets Take 5: Fine-Tuning Your Powers of Persuasion How to Integrate Influencer and Emotional Marketing to Improve Your Content Program Marketers, retailers find success with visual search The major trends shaping, breaking and consolidating global media by 2021 10 Ways To Advertise Your Advertising Agency Editor’s take marketing and advertising: Social media, tech revolution and people-focused advertising How marketers can leverage the value of branded apps Is brand authenticity disrupting advertising? The Rise And Fall Of Facebook’s Memory Economy How can your brand cut through the noise Managing a brand’s reputation via online reviews Influencers are flocking to a surprising new kind of social media Book, Line & Sinker
5 Brain Hacks for Marketing SECRETS OF THE BRAIN TO CRANK UP YOUR ONLINE PROFITS By PAUL MAXEY
“Go ahead and multiply the number 8,388,628 x 2 in your head. “Can you do it in a few seconds? There is a young man who can double that number 24 times in the space of a few seconds. He gets it right every time.
I challenge you to be among the first.
Secret #1: The Myth of Multitasking
“There is a boy who can tell you the precise time of day at any moment, even in his sleep. “There is a girl who can correctly determine the exact dimensions of an object 20 feet away. “There is a child who at age 6 drew such vivid and complex pictures, some people ranked her version of a galloping horse over one drawn by da Vinci. “Yet none of these children have an IQ greater than 70.” So begins the introduction to an intriguing book I recently read called, “Brain Rules – 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School.” It’s written by molecular biologist and brain scientist, John Medina.
I don’t even have a biology background.
I meet a lot of people who brag about their ability to multitask, almost wearing it on their sleeve as if it were a badge of honor.
But I’m fascinated by neuroscience, how the brain works and its magical capabilities.
But research has shown time and again that the human brain wasn’t designed to multitask.
As a copywriter, marketer or online business owner – you should be too.
In fact, the very act of trying to do so has negative long-term effects on brain function.
Because gaining a deeper understanding of human nature… how we learn and process information… how we make decisions… and what makes our prospects, customers and clients tick is the fastest way to crank up your profits.
A 2009 study by Stanford researcher Clifford Nass challenged 262 college students to complete a variety of experiments that involved filtering irrelevant information, switching among tasks, and using working memory.
So today I want to share with you five secrets from John’s research.
Expecting to find multitaskers outperforming non-multitaskers, they were shocked to discover much the opposite.
I encourage you to pick up a copy of his book to learn the rest. As you’ll see, this stuff is not rocket science (and some will even seem obvious) …
Not only were multitaskers less effective when multitasking, that loss of effectiveness spilled over into other areas. It even left them less effective when they were focusing on a single activity, and weren’t trying to multitask at all.
… Yet the people who are out there creating the majority of training courses, programs and webinars that I come across are clearly not using it.
The study revealed that our brain works at half capacity when we are forced to multitask, and our error rate goes up by 50%!
Now, I’m no biologist.
brandknewmag.com
11
Those effects are long term, not just in the moment.
Secret #2: Emotions Influence Our Learning
So what does this have to do with us as online business owners? One of the worst problems I see with online courses (or any other type of training) is a “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” approach to conveying information. It’s disjointed … lacks focus … and tries to convey too much information too rapidly. …All in a haphazard effort to overwhelm the person with so much “value” that they immediately become raving fans. Unfortunately, it’s more often completely the opposite. There’s so much input coming at them, so quickly, it quite literally overloads the circuits of the brain. It leaves the person confused, frustrated, and discouraged. Their brain simply shuts down, and one of two things happens: They ask for a refund and you never hear from them again. They fail to follow through and you never hear from them again. Either way, you’re out potential referrals… repeat business… and a whole lot of profits. So what can you do about this? Practice what’s called microlearning to prevent cognitive overload. Microlearning means to deliver content to learners in a logical, step-by-step fashion, and in smaller, specific bursts. Another word for it is chunking. In psychology or linguistic analysis, chunking refers to the act of grouping together connected items, words or thoughts so they can be stored or processed as single concepts. TED Talks are a great example of microlearning. When someone delivers a TED Talk, it’s generally in the range of 10 to 15 minutes long. In fact, the people at TED Talk have an 18-minute rule. You can be Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Anthony Robbins – it doesn’t matter. You’ve got a maximum of 18 minutes to spit out what you want to say. The people behind the TED Talk discovered that 18 minutes is long enough to be serious, yet short enough to hold attention.
In my last post, I told the story of how my daughter’s interest in interior design was quickly snuffed out by an expert’s complete lack of emotion on the topic. The brain is highly influenced by the emotions (or lack thereof) of the teacher or trainer. Our limbic system – the emotional center of the brain – has the ability to open up, or shut off, access to learning and memory. If you’re bored out of your mind, your limbic system quickly gets frustrated and shuts down. That’s why we talk so much about the use of stories here on The EMAIL ALCHEMIST blog, and in the EMAIL ALCHEMY training programs. When someone tells you a good story, especially when it touches you on an emotional level, your limbic system fires on all cylinders. It engages you… it inspires you… and it opens your mind. Your ability to learn and retain information skyrockets. People remember strategies and principles much more when they are connected to stories than if they are simply relayed as a laundry list of “next steps.” The sad reality today is, student’s brains are shutting off emotionally because they are absolutely uninspired and unengaged.
Most importantly, it’s short enough to be memorable.
It’s happening all over the world … at work, home and school.
You absorb and remember more, because it’s delivered in smaller, bite-sized chunks.
For many, it’s impacting the trajectory of their life.
Studies show that students zone out after about 15-20 minutes in a lecture. Beyond that, our brains go into cognitive overload, and absorption and retention crash.
My daughter could have been a great interior designer, but a single course derailed her. So what do we do about this? FIRST, offer a warm and welcoming atmosphere.
Include a video on the very first screen that immediately makes them feel welcome, and that emotionally reinforces what they’re about to learn, discover and accomplish.
It allows you to quickly and easily integrate images and other graphics into your slides that are contextually relevant, making it more engaging.
The selling doesn’t end when you’ve sold someone on buying your program.
Of course, PowerPoint and other presentation tools are great too.
You’ve got to continue to sell them on completing it and taking action.
SECOND, integrate a heaping helping of stories and scenarios.
SECOND, inspire them with stories and examples.
They engage and inspire, and greatly increase learning and retention.
Help them to mentally insert themselves into the shoes of someone who has already accomplished what they hope to … so they not only retain things more because they’ve been inspired, but are also moved to take action. They’ll quickly attach emotions to your program, whether positive or negative. Make sure they’re positive. THIRD, actively engage them to apply what they’re learning. If you can get them to quickly use what you’re teaching them, they’re more likely to continue that progress.
THIRD, create opportunities for application. Tell them what they need to do next. Give them activities to practice, reinforce and implement what you’re teaching them. FOURTH, facilitate interaction. Set up a private Facebook group, or even a WordPress forum plugin, to get people involved and interacting with each other.
Secret #4: Multimedia Improves Brain Performance
Forward progress, even if minimal, creates positive emotions.
Secret #3: The Snooze Factor
A lot of fascinating studies have been done about the use of multimedia.
Many experts get so wrapped up with just getting their information out there, they forget about the actual delivery of their training. It ends up being crazy boring, and everybody is left snoozing on the other end. You’ve got to put as much thought into how you’re delivering your information as you do the information itself. That’s especially true when it comes to online learning, where a student can’t see your body language and visual cues. There is a far greater chance of losing them to distractions, or simply losing their interest. So what can we do to make sure we are not delivering boring stuff? FIRST, include relevant visuals. A great tool if you’re just getting started is HaikuDeck.com.
They show that when you include such things as sound effects, music, audio narration and images the student is able to retain far more of the content. Of course, multimedia creates better engagement. But it also helps your brain to learn and digest the information in a variety of ways, as it creates multiple levels of learning and memory. Think of different shelves on a bookshelf within your brain. One shelf may be your basic rote memorization. A second shelf may be visuals that provide context and allow you to apply the principles you’re learning, such as examples and case studies… A third shelf may be visualization exercises that guide you in using the new principles. The more varied the experience, the greater the learning and retention.
So how do we do this?
So how do we use this?
FIRST, incorporate video and audio as much as possible.
FIRST, repeat the “must know” core principles throughout your training.
Don’t force your students to learn solely from a bunch of written material. If you don’t want to be on camera, for whatever reason, that’s fine. You can create video presentations using slide decks and screen recordings. Perhaps, even include musical interludes at the beginning and end of each video segment, to help keep emotions high and activate deep learning. And always have an audio version of your training available, even if it’s heavy on demonstration, as it provides a secondary way for them to review the information. SECOND, incorporate lots of worksheets, handouts, action guides, etc. These types of supplemental materials invite your students to work with the material, and to integrate it more easily and quickly. THIRD, consider finishing out each module or primary segment of your training with a test or quiz. This is another great way to get them to interact and work with the material. Again, so they can integrate it more quickly.
Secret #5: Repeat to Remember The photo above represents what’s known as first-level memory retention. He’s forced to write the same phrase over and over again, so it will be forever etched in his brain. It’s like learning your multiplication tables when you were in grade school.
Not multiple times in a row, so it gets annoying, but at various strategic touchpoints. Even if it’s as simple as repeating them at the beginning, middle and end. Every time the brain receives new stimuli, the connections between the neurons strengthen. But in order to really strengthen those connections, you need repetition. SECOND, provide relevant context by which to remember the core principles. This could be sharing metaphors, analogies or examples. Or perhaps mnemonic association, where you’re using an acronym of some sort. Think about a child that puts their hand on a hot stove. You can tell them “don’t touch the stove, it’s hot!” until you’re blue in the face. It’s not going to mean the same thing as if the child touches it and gets burned. Suddenly, the child has memorable context. The child will remember that experience forever, at a far deeper level. That’s what we’ve got to be thinking about when we create our training programs.
It’s Time to Use It or Lose It … Just like your brain, you can use these secrets or simply forget about them. Before you decide which, consider this… People who remember more of our training material, with positive emotions, will have a far better chance of taking action and applying it. Many of those people will buy more of our courses and share them with other people. You see the ripple effect here? This isn’t just about learning some obscure scientific facts about the brain. It’s about building a successful, profitable, long-term online business. I said in the beginning… This stuff is not rocket science, and much of it will seem beyond the obvious. The question is…
I remember sitting with a set of flash cards for hours, going over them again and again. After enough repetition, those tables moved into my long-term memory. That’s why I can think 7 x 7 and 49 instantly flashes into my brain, without even thinking.
Are you actually using it? Paul Maxey has been a freelance copywriter and strategic consultant for over 12 years. He cut his teeth as a “Copy Cub” for legendary copywriter Clayton Makepeace - where he learned how to write copy that sells under what could only be called the trial-by-fire method.
Get ready for a new era of personalized entertainment THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE WILL NOW TELL STORIES By Jarno M. Koponen
New machine learning technologies, user interfaces and automated content creation techniques are going to expand the personalization of storytelling beyond algorithmically generated news feeds and content recommendation. The next wave will be software-generated narratives that are tailored to the tastes and sentiments of a consumer. Concretely, it means that your digital footprint, personal preferences and context unlock alternative features in the content itself, be it a news article, live video or a hit series on your streaming service. The title contains different experiences for different people.
From smart recommendations to smarter content When you use Youtube, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, Netflix or Spotify, algorithms select what gets recommended to you. The current mainstream services and their user interfaces and recommendation engines have been optimized to serve you content you might be interested in. Your data, other people’s data, content-related data and
machine learning methods are used to match people and content, thus improving the relevance of content recommendations and efficiency of content distribution.
groupisd.com
17
However, so far the content experience itself has mostly been similar to everyone. If the same news article, live video or TV series episode gets recommended to you and me, we both read and watch the same thing, experiencing the same content. That’s about to change. Soon we’ll be seeing new forms of smart content, in which user interface, machine learning technologies and content itself are combined in a seamless manner to create a personalized content experience.
different genres. Now, imagine, that TikTok’s individual short videos would be automatically personalized by the effects chosen by an AI system, and thus the whole video would be customized for you. Or that the choices in the Netflix’s interactive content affecting the plot twists, dialogue and even soundtrack, were made automatically by algorithms based on your profile.
What is smart content? Smart content means that content experience itself is affected by who is seeing, watching, reading or listening to content. The content itself changes based on who you are. We are already seeing the first forerunners in this space. TikTok’s whole content experience is driven by very short videos, audiovisual content sequences if you will, ordered and woven together by algorithms. Every user sees a different, personalized, “whole” based on her viewing history and user profile. At the same time, Netflix has recently started testing new forms of interactive content (TV series episodes, e.g. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch) in which user’s own choices affect directly the content experience, including dialogue and storyline. And more is on its way. With Love, Death & Robots series, Netflix is experimenting with episode order within a series, serving
Personalized smart content is coming to news as well. Automated systems, using today’s state-of-the-art NLP technologies, can generate long pieces of concise, comprehensible and even inventive textual content at scale. At present, media houses use automated content creation systems, or “robot journalists”, to create news material varying from complete articles to audio-visual clips and visualizations. Through content atomization (breaking content into small modular chunks of information) and machine learning, content production can be increased massively to support smart content creation. Say that a news article you read or listen to is about a specific political topic that is unfamiliar to you. When comparing the same article with your friend, your version of the story might use different concepts and offer a different angle than your friend’s who’s really deep into politics. A beginner’s smart content news experience would differ from the experience of a topic enthusiast.
the episodes in different order for different users. Some earlier predecessors of interactive audio-visual content include sports event streaming, in which the user can decide which particular stream she follows and how she interacts with the live content, for example rewinding the stream and spotting the key moments based on her own interest. Simultaneously, we’re seeing how machine learning technologies can be used to create photo-like images of imaginary people, creatures and places. Current systems can recreate and alter entire videos, for example by changing the style, scenery, lighting, environment or central character’s face. Additionally, AI solutions are able to generate music in
Content itself will become a software-like fluid and personalized experience, where your digital footprint and preferences affect not just how the content is recommended and served to you, but what the content actually contains.
Automated storytelling? How is it possible to create smart content that contains different experiences for different people? Content needs to be thought and treated as an iterative and configurable process rather than a ready-made static whole that is finished when it has been published in the distribution pipeline.
Importantly, the core building blocks of the content experience change: smart content consists of atomized modular elements that can be modified, updated, remixed, replaced, omitted and activated based on varying rules. In addition, content modules that have been made in the past, can be reused if applicable. Content is designed and developed more like a software. Currently a significant amount of human effort and computing resources are used to prepare content for machine-powered content distribution and recommendation systems, varying from smart news apps to on-demand streaming services. With smart content, the content creation and its preparation for publication and distribution channels wouldn’t be separate processes. Instead, metadata and other invisible features that describe and define the content are an integral part of the content creation process from the very beginning. Turning Donald Glover into Jay Gatsby With smart content, the narrative or image itself becomes an integral part of an iterative feedback loop, in which the user’s actions, emotions and other signals as well as the visible and invisible features of the content itself affect the whole content consumption cycle from the content creation and recommendation to the content experience. With smart content features, a news article or a movie activates different elements of the content for different people. It’s very likely that smart content for entertainment purposes will have different features and functions than news media content. Moreover, people expect frictionless and effortless content experience and thus smart content experience differs from games. Smart content doesn’t necessarily require direct actions from the user. If the person wants, the content personalization happens proactively and automatically, without explicit user interaction. Creating smart content requires both human curation and machine intelligence. Humans focus on things that require creativity and deep analysis while AI systems generate, assemble and iterate the content that becomes dynamic and adaptive just like software.
Sustainable smart content
Smart content has different configurations and representations for different users, user interfaces, devices, languages and environments. The same piece of content contains elements that can be accessed through voice user interface or presented in augmented reality applications. Or the whole content expands into a fully immersive virtual reality experience. In the same way as with the personalized user interfaces and smart devices, smart content can be used for good and bad. It can be used to enlighten and empower, as well as to trick and mislead. Thus it’s critical, that human-centered approach and sustainable values are built in the very core of smart content creation. Personalization needs to be transparent and the user needs to be able to choose if she wants the content to be personalized or not. And of course, not all content will be smart in the same way, if at all. If used in a sustainable manner, smart content can break filter bubbles and echo chambers as it can be used to make a wide variety of information more accessible for diverse audiences. Through personalization, challenging topics can be presented to people according to their abilities and preferences, regardless of their background or level of education. For example a beginner’s version of vaccination content or digital media literacy article uses gamification elements, and the more experienced user gets directly a thorough fact-packed account of the recent developments and research results. Smart content is also aligned with the efforts against today’s information operations such as fake news and its different forms such as “deep fakes” (http://www.niemanlab. org/2018/11/how-the-wall-street-journal-is-preparingits-journalists-to-detect-deepfakes). If the content is like software, a legit software runs on your devices and interfaces without a problem. On the other hand, even the machinegenerated realistic-looking but suspicious content, like deep fake, can be detected and filtered out based on its signature and other machine readable qualities. Smart content is the ultimate combination of user experience design, AI technologies and storytelling. News media should be among the first to start experimenting with smart content. When the intelligent content starts eating the world, one should be creating ones own intelligent content. The first players that master the smart content, will be among tomorrow’s reigning digital giants. And that’s one of the main reasons why today’s tech titans are going seriously into the content game. Smart content is coming. Jarno M. Koponen is working on intelligent systems and humancentered personalization. He currently is product lead at Yle, one of the leading media houses in the Nordics.
Now with extra brush strokes! What advertising can learn from art By Adam Pierno
Ads tend toward product features and functional benefits despite the industry’s preoccupation with emotion. Art doesn’t emphasize function, it plays to emotion. Writer and strategist Adam Pierno explores why its up to brands to find the emotions that move consumers. You walk through a museum and take in all the art on the walls at a distance. Something catches your eye that beckons you to approach. What is it? Color? Composition? Recognition of something you have seen or felt before? You tap your phone and scroll to find Spotify. You’re looking for music. You are going to the gym, you are driving to work, or heading to a concert. You’re walking the grocery aisle looking for breakfast foods to put in your cart. You see: 10% more this, 50% less that, zero trans those. Now with more, now with less, none of these ever. Plenty of exclamation marks!!! In a vacuum, each of these claims is observed by product, brand and marketing people to be as compelling as possible. Yes, en masse the calls-to-action work like so many carnival barkers. One alone might draw attention, but two in proximity can cancel each other out. When we’re selecting art, we don’t choose based on features of the art. We choose by benefit we get. Usually an emotional benefit, although sometimes expressive. How the art makes us feel, or how it makes us look. The best advertisement for a musician is not a social ad listing features. Imagine? The new Lil Nas X song now contains 15% more samples! 20% more yee yee juice! 100% more Billy Ray Cyrus!!! Without hearing the track, or maybe seeing some video, you’re not very moved to listen. You are more likely confused. But recorded music is a product. It is art that is created and packaged to be sold, usually with a target audience in mind. Executives think about who they will be reaching when promoting an artist or an album. Replace the artist with a box of granola bars, Spotify with grocery aisles. Suddenly we think people are driven exclusively by quantified features. So much research is conducted to test benefits and claims. Almost all of that research is within a framework of confirmation bias. Marketers make a major assumption at the beginning that shapes the remainder of the output. We assume that people want features over emotion. We assume that they process those exclamatory red numbers on our packaging as an end benefit to themselves. We assume they have done the work before shopping to carefully consider ingredients, additives, packaging types. Most consumer research into CPG brands is designed to twist the knobs on these assumptions.
The result is, people are fed a list of features while they shop. Packaging tests often assume a baseline will achieve certain goals and callouts will only improve results. Of course, when we ask consumers what a red callout reading “20% more calcium” tells them about the product, we’re setting up the result. Especially when we combine it with our understanding that this consumer is statically more likely to want more calcium. When we choose art, we aren’t lured by any benefits. We are pulled in wholly by emotion or by mood. The similarity used to be in the advertising and sometimes in the packaging, designed to elicit an emotional response to get a shopper to pick the product up. That’s lost today, but not because people aren’t emotional about products. Even predictably dull ones. It’s up to the brand to work with those emotions to move consumers. In a study I conducted into floor cleaner solutions, the brand target did have extreme emotions about their wood floors. In addition to all the standard questions about packaging and callouts, we conducted a study solely on emotional state and shopping with our core target group. They signaled that they had high levels of stress and worry about taking care of their wood floors. The floors are a point of pride and symbol of status and skill in homemaking. When searching for ways to clean and maintain wood floors in social groups or on message boards, there is almost never a solution mentioned that isn’t quickly rebuffed as potentially damaging to the wood. Some people swear by white vinegar, and some say that it can be harmful to the finish leaving the wood potentially duller and less protected. This confusion leads to the stress. In seeking a cleaner, they think ‘what if I choose something that damages the floor?’ The result was packaging that played to the category stress and the relief experienced by core buyers. No callouts on existing products. Advertising that plays completely to the emotional payoff, enjoying (and showing off) the floors as opposed to the laundry list of features. And price elasticity that indicated target customers were comfortable paying up to 30% more for the product. This doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for the well-considered callout. The challenge is giving features a clear emotional context to help consumers make the decision to buy. The most seemingly dull categories have emotion behind them. It is sometimes difficult to find, but valuable when found. Even very advanced brands get caught pushing features as attributes instead of driving an emotional response that earns expanded attention. We have to push to treat our products as something more akin to art, and reach our consumers on an emotional level.
A fresh start: Rethinking the advertising landscape By Emily Kaufman
At the recent U7 summit in London, industry experts and world-renowned brands discussed the issues of complicated supply chains, self-policing and a lack of global guidelines on transparency. However, it’s not all doom and gloom — many companies are working hard to clean up the ad landscape by bringing transparency and trust back to the industry. Initiatives like the U7, and trade bodies like the IAB and TAG, are transforming the dialogue. So what would the advertising industry look like if it were launched from scratch tomorrow? If we could start afresh, which technologies, processes and standards would we put in place from the get-go to ensure the industry remained transparent and trustworthy — while being as efficient and effective as possible?
A global standard Thinking along the lines of the IAB and TAG, we’d need an independent organization to create a global standard or a set of protocols that companies who participate in the exchange would need to adhere to. At Unruly, we often speak about the idea of ID as a commodity rather than a USP. In our current ecosystem, only a few media giants own people-based identifiers, leaving smaller companies to struggle. In this new industry, ID would be available for all, giving the market a more level playing field and allowing companies to work across borders.
Working together In order to succeed, it is necessary to put processes in place that encourage collaboration and unity. Rather than battling against each other, we should be looking at the overall picture and joining forces.
much like the IAB is working towards in our current industry. In the new world, we wouldn’t focus so heavily on the numbers. Performance metrics only tell part of the story. With CTRs you’re chasing empty dollars, there are only so many people who are going to click and a click doesn’t always lead to a purchase.
Managed service vs. programmatic In the future, it’s likely that all premium publishing will be plugged into programmatic supply in a way that renders all formats successful, but that presently isn’t the case. So if we were to launch again tomorrow with programmatic as it is today, we’d still need managed service until programmatic gets to the point where it can self-sufficiently operate.
Overseeing the data flow Data is the buzzword of 2019 — and in this brand new advertising landscape, an independent body would oversee the flow and exchange of big data sets. There would be a lot more second party data marketplaces in the future, where two first parties share their data. For example, BA and Hertz are two companies that are noncompetitive — one knows about fliers and one knows about car hirers — but by simply exchanging data, they can start to build a more complete picture of their shared consumer. In this new industry, direct data alliances between brands, publishers and advertisers should be encouraged and the benefits conveyed to all. This would eliminate the worry of murky or fraudulent data, as it would be coming directly from the source, as opposed to a shady third party.
Thinking ahead
This is especially necessary for small independent companies — without teamwork, there’s no chance of competing against the walled gardens.
The industry we have today is great — but it’s nowhere near perfect. Imagining the possibilities afforded by a clean slate encouraged the evaluation of what needs to be changed.
Standardized measurements
Encouraging collaboration and the sharing of data, being more transparent with our practices, re-evaluating how we measure success and looking at how we can make ID fairer are great places to start. And if others in the industry also step back and imagine a fresh start, perhaps these changes can begin to take place.
With companies having different standards for metrics like viewability and CTRs, implementing consistent measurement is a must. We’d need to launch with a set of standards in place for measurement from an independent governing body,
When is the best time to post on social media? By Farah Hussain
Exactly when is the best time to post on social media and your website? It’s definitely a question that we think of when we create our content. From developing your social media posts to adding to your blog page online, we invest valuable time in producing great captivating pieces that we hope results in shareable content. Which is why understanding the best times to post online can help drive performance level.
How can your brand reach its audience effectively? With the newest updates, the Facebook algorithm means that users are seeing less business content and more from friends and family. However, starting conversations is the way to get noticed, and will result in better engagement and brand awareness for you. So when do you post to get this conversation started?
So, where do we start? Firstly, understanding your audience is key. As this changes across each network, knowing when to get maximum reach in front of your demographic will help decipher peak activity times.
What we can take away from the data represented in this casestudy is that the best time to post on Facebook are Wednesday at noon and 2pm, as well as Thursday at 1pm and 2pm.
Let’s break it down across each network.
Best times to post on Facebook
Engagement levels tend to drop around the weekend and more users aren’t online. Weekdays seem to be the safest times to post.
With more than 1.49 billion daily active users, Facebook can be a great tool for your brand if you discover your audience tends to ‘hang out’ there when they are online. With users accessing the network both on mobile and desktop, at work and at home, it’s definitely worth using.
Planning your timing around your audience is also key, for example, does your brand cater for parents? It’s worth factoring in school times, as their hours of availability will differ. With school runs lasting between 8 - 9am in the morning, to after school runs between 3 - 3.30pm it might
brandknewmag.com
25
be better to avoid times of the day when your audience will potentially be busy. To avoid drops in reach and engagement try to avoid times of the day that conflict with these hours – be sure to avoid times of the day your audience is likely to not be online, especially if it’s paid advertising. It’s imperative to figure out what your audience is likely to be doing when you’re thinking of scheduling posts. Timing it half an hour later or before will make all the difference when it comes to impressions, views and engagement.
Best time to post on Instagram A platform designed for mobile use and visual content, Instagram is easily digestible and convenient for users. The added feature of Instagram shoppable links, makes this the place to post, if you want to see users click through to your products (if you are an eCommerce business). However, the Instagram algorithm is also constantly changing, so it is difficult to predict if your content will reach your desired audience as feeds aren’t in chronological order and is dependent on how much the user interacts with your content (e/g comments and likes). So how do you reach out in the best possible way? As data suggests the safest times to post are Tuesday through to Friday 9am to 6pm. Weekends are a good time to post, with more social engagements happening, people are likely to use it throughout their days off, and therefore see your content. Another thing to remember is fitting in your scheduling within the wider calendar and thinking about the impact of seasonality such as New Year, Christmas, Easter and school holidays – this is especially important if your sector has a seasonal ‘busy’ period. Planning around those all-important micro-moments for your audience, will optimise your chances of targeting people when they need it. For example, a good tip if you’re a travel brand is to consider utilising a visual platform like Instagram during the winter months - the post-Christmas blues is real, and consumers are usually more likely to book a holiday then. So tempt them with some fabulous images of hot beach hols, when they are most likely to need it! This principle can apply to many sectors - do some research, and check your own traffic stats and find out when your users are most likely to need you. Then plan your visual cues to users accordingly around this.
Best time to post on Twitter When it comes to Twitter, it is a little different as it is totally audience dependent. It funnels everything and acts like reading material used during times like commuting and breaks, etc. So, this is similar to Facebook in the way that it is user dependent. Hubspot takes a further look into this, suggesting weekdays have a stronger performance rate than on the weekend. With
noon, 3pm or 5-6pm being strong to maximise retweets and clickthroughs. Do you factor in time zones? For those of you who have audiences outside of the UK, demographic research is important to understand where your audience is based. Giving you the opportunity to target their time zones appropriately. If your audience is primarily in the U.S then you will need to think about Eastern Time Zone and Central Time Zone. This is where multiple social accounts come in handy, as they are based depending on location. For example, Ryan Air have multiple Twitter accounts based on language and location such as Ryan Air Spain and Italy.
Best time to post on LinkedIn LinkedIn, is for working professionals who tend to use it around working hours, 9-11am, morning commutes and midday breaks are when most users seem to engage. As the world’s largest professional network, helping advocate and share useful career tips, it is an important platform to use, especially if you are a B2B brand. The best days to post are Tuesday through to Thursday, with engagement rates dropping around the weekend. People prefer to scroll their feeds during the week, so focus on these days to get optimum visibility. Conversely, if you are looking specifically to target higher management, then they may actually have more time to scroll their professional feed at the weekend. If you are trying to engage them, a personable private message at the weekend might get more of their attention, instead of during a busy work week.
Lessons learned When thinking about the best times to post there are many other considerations to include: •
Target demographic;
•
Industry you’re in;
•
Purpose for using social media;
•
Content engagement – engaging with your audience and posts;
•
Creating quality content - don’t just create for algorithms, remember you are always catering for your audience who are real people.
The best times to post does differ depending on brand. So, it is important to analyse your own data using Google Analytics, and the data provided on each platform (most social platforms have some level of analytics now!). Find the times that work for you, and keep track as network algorithms and audience habits change. Farah Hussain is a senior PR executive at Zazzle Media
FACEBOOK’S AD SYSTEM MIGHT BE HARD-CODED FOR DISCRIMINATION By Louise Matsakis
CIVIL RIGHTS GROUPS, lawmakers, and journalists have long warned Facebook about discrimination on its advertising platform. But their concerns, as well as Facebook’s responses, have focused primarily on ad targeting, the way businesses choose what kind of people they want to see their ads. A new study from researchers at Northeastern University, the University of Southern California, and the nonprofit Upturn finds ad delivery—the Facebook algorithms that decide exactly which users see those ads—may be just as important. Even when companies choose to show their ads to inclusive audiences, the researchers wrote, Facebook sometimes delivers them “primarily to a skewed subgroup of the advertiser’s selected audience, an outcome that the advertiser may not have intended or be aware of.” For example, job ads targeted to both men and women might still be seen by significantly more men. The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, indicates that Facebook’s automated advertising system—which earns the company tens of billions of dollars in revenue each year—may be breaking civil rights laws that protect against advertising discrimination for things like jobs and housing. The issue is with Facebook itself, not with the way businesses use its platform. Facebook did not return a request for comment, but the company has not disputed the researchers’ findings in statements to other publications. Discrimination in ad targeting has been an issue at Facebook for years. In 2016, ProPublica found businesses could exclude people from seeing housing ads based on characteristics like race, an apparent violation of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Last month, the social network settled five lawsuits from civil rights organizations that alleged companies could hide ads for jobs, housing, and credit from groups like women and older people. As part of the settlement, Facebook said it will no longer allow advertisers to target these ads based on age, gender, or zip code. But those fixes don’t address the issues the researchers of this new study found. “This is a stark illustration of how machine learning incorporates and perpetuates existing biases in society, and
has profound implications,” says Galen Sherwin, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, one of the organizations that sued Facebook. “These results clearly indicate that platforms need to take strong and proactive measures in order to counter such trends.” In one experiment, the researchers ran ads for 11 different generic jobs in North Carolina, like nurse, restaurant cashier, and taxi driver, to the same audience. Facebook delivered five ads for janitors to an audience that was 65 percent female and 75 percent black. Five ads for jobs in the lumber industry were shown to users that were 90 percent male and 70 percent white. And in the most extreme cases, advertisements for supermarket clerks were shown to audiences that were 85 percent women and taxi driving opportunities to audiences that were 75 percent black. The researchers ran a similar series of housing ads and found that, despite having the same targeting and budget, some were shown to audiences that were over 85 percent white, while others were shown to ones that were 65 percent black. Facebook doesn’t tell businesses the race of people who see their ads, but it does provide the general area where they are located. In order to create a proxy for race, the researchers used hundreds of thousands of public voting records from North Carolina, which include the voter’s address, phone number, and their stated race. Using the records, they targeted ads to black voters in one part of the state and white voters in another; when looking at Facebook’s reporting tools, they could then assume the users’ race based on where they lived. In another portion of the study, the researchers tried to determine whether Facebook automatically scans the images associated with ads to help decide who should see them. They ran a series of ads with stereotypical male and female stock imagery, like a football and a picture of a perfume bottle, using identical wording. They then ran corresponding ads with the same images, except the photos were made invisible to the human eye. Machine learning systems could still detect the data in the photos, but to Facebook users they looked like white squares.
groupisd.com
27
The researchers found that the “male” and “female” ads were shown to gendered audiences, even when their images were blank. In one test, both the visible and invisible male images reached an audience that was 60 percent male, while the audience of the visible and invisible female ones was 65 percent female. The results indicate that Facebook is preemptively analyzing advertisements to determine who should see them, and is making those decisions using gender stereotypes. There’s no way to know exactly how Facebook’s image analyzation process works, because the company’s
advertising algorithms are secret. (Facebook has said in the past, however, that it has the capability to analyze over a billion photos every day.) “Ultimately we don’t know what Facebook is doing,” says Alan Mislove, a computer science professor at Northeastern University and an author of the research. The study also found that ad pricing may cause gender discrimination, because women are typically more expensive to reach since they tend to engage more with advertisements. The researchers tested spending between $1 and $50 on their ad campaigns, and found that “the higher the daily budget, the smaller the fraction of men in the audience.” Previous research has similarly shown that advertising algorithms show fewer ads promoting opportunities in STEM fields to women because they cost more to target. The study’s authors were careful to note that their findings can’t be generalized to every advertisement on Facebook. “For example, we observe that all of our ads for lumberjacks deliver to an audience of primarily white and male users, but that may not hold true of all ads for lumberjacks,” they wrote.
But the research indicates Facebook’s highly-personalized advertising system does at least sometimes mirror inequalities already present in the world, an issue lawmakers have yet to address. The study could have implications for a housing discrimination lawsuit the Department of Housing and Urban Development filed against Facebook late last month. In the suit, HUD’s lawyers allege Facebook’s “ad delivery system prevents advertisers who want to reach a broad audience of users from doing so,” because it discriminates based on whether it thinks users are likely to engage with a particular ad, or find it “relevant.”
Regulators may also need to examine protections granted to Facebook under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields internet platforms from liability for what their users post. Facebook has argued that advertisers are completely responsible for “deciding where, how, and when to publish their ads.” The study shows that isn’t always true, advertisers can’t control exactly who sees their ads. Facebook is not a neutral platform. It’s not clear how Facebook might reform its advertising system to address the issues raised in the study. The company might need to exchange some efficiency in favor of fairness, says Miranda Bogen, a senior policy analyst at Upturn and another author of the research. Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief security officer, similarly said on Twitter that the problem may only be solved “by having no algorithmic optimization of certain ad classes.” But that optimization is a large part of what makes Facebook valuable to advertisers. If lawmakers decide to regulate its algorithms, that could have damning implications for the company’s business.
Brands can tap sensory power from tangible brand assets By Warc Staff
Marketers are missing a trick by not opening their minds to opportunities afforded by unlocking sensory power from tangible brand assets, according to an industry figure.
“This is an area that brands have barely started to explore but it is one that could make meaningful impacts on consumer engagement,” Wardlaw maintains.
Andy Wardlaw, marketing & insights director at MMR Research, argues that distracted consumers are making more fast, intuitive and emotion-based decisions (commonly referred to as System 1), “yet very few of us are embracing the power of the human senses as a direct response”.
He puts forward five facets of sensory branding that marketers can consider, including such ‘brand body language’.
Writing for WARC, where he summarises a presentation given at MMR’s BE THE CHANGE conference platform, Wardlaw offers a definition of sensory branding: stronger cohesion between how a brand is thought by the consumer, and then felt – physically – across the packaging and product experience. “Equity that is felt in this way reaches out to distracted and sceptical consumers without communication being known to have taken place,” he writes. (For more, read the full article: Time for brands to reach out to the human senses.) The advantages of such an approach are threefold, he suggests: the senses work faster, they work together and they “shift reality”. In MMR’s research, square structures have been shown to shift the perceived intensity of orange juice, for example, while thicker structures shift perceived viscosity.
Others are: • ‘equity that’s felt’, such as Galaxy Milk Chocolate, which has “engineered a proposition that physically embeds the brand promise around texture”; • ‘being meaningfully distinctive’, as in the case of a pasta brand whose roughened, mottled and slightly flattened spaghetti signals made the traditional way in cutting machines; • ‘sensory signature’, or the acquisition of a unique set of sensory characteristics that can enhance a brand promise; • ‘measured authenticity’, where what is promised is absolutely delivered. Wardlaw’s message is that sensory science can address many of the key issues around communication effectiveness and brand authenticity, while sensory branding can find new ways to communicate vital equities below conscious awareness.
brandknewmag.com
29
Take 5: Fine-Tuning Your Powers of Persuasion FROM UNDERSTANDING POWER DYNAMICS TO TELLING A MEMORABLE STORY, HERE’S HOW TO SELL YOUR IDEAS. By Anne Ford
Being persuasive is a critical skill, whether you’re trying to get people to agree with you, buy what you’re selling, or just understand what you’re saying. To win others to your cause, it helps to understand the subtle factors that influence everyday decision-making. Here, Kellogg faculty reveal strategies for getting others to jump aboard your bandwagon.
1. Tips for Persuading People Your Idea Is a Winner Got a great new idea? It won’t necessarily be easy to get others to agree. “People just aren’t naturally oriented towards innovation or change,” says Loran Nordgren, an associate professor of management and organizations. In fact, it’s the opposite: we love to hang on to the tried-and-true.
Fortunately, Nordgren—who studies influence and decisionmaking—offers up some ways to get around this tendency. First, let the audience know what it’s missing. Your first inclination may be to stress the benefits of your new idea. But, Nordgren says, it’s usually more effective to emphasize what someone would miss out on by not embracing it. That’s because we are wired to feel the pain of a loss more acutely than the pleasure of a gain. Next, let people experience the benefits. According to a psychological concept called “the endowment effect,” we tend to value something more once it is in our possession. That’s why, for example, HBO offers its movie channels free for three months—because it’s hard to give those channels up once they’ve been “ours.” And lastly, win over a critical mass. People tend to make decisions based on the behavior of those around them. So if
groupisd.com
31
you can first secure some easy wins, that will help convince late adopters to get on board.
2. Understanding Power Dynamics Will Make You More Persuasive When trying to persuade an audience, is it better to appear competent (highlighting, say, your expertise on a topic) or to appear warm (stressing, instead, your sincerity on an issue)? According to marketing professor Derek Rucker, the answer may depend on whether the speaker and the audience feel equally powerful—or powerless. In a series of experiments, Rucker and colleagues prompted participants to temporarily feel either very powerful or less powerful. The researchers then assigned some participants to be communicators and some to be audience members. The communicators were tasked with trying to persuade the audience to, for example, dine at a specific restaurant. High-power communicators tended to rely on competencerelated arguments, while low-power communicators were more likely to use warmth-related arguments. Furthermore, high-power audience members found pitches that focused on competence to be more persuasive. And lowpower audience members were more likely to be persuaded by pitches that focused on warmth. In other words, the better the power match between communicators and audience members, the more effective the communicators’ tactics.
3. Tools for Communicating Complex Ideas Getting complicated ideas across in an effective way is at the heart of successful business interactions, from one-on-one meetings to company-wide presentations. Kellogg finance professor Mitchell Petersen offers a few tools to help others understand and buy into complex ideas. For one, use visuals, particularly to help your audience remember the relationships between variables. Illustrated with the right images, those relationships become much more memorable and powerful. Another tool: stories. Narratives that summarize the relationships between variables are even more effective at cementing your concept in your audience’s memory. “The dopier the story, the more people may groan—but years later, they remember it,” Petersen says. Finally, Petersen stresses, encourage audience participation. Body language, such as leaning forward or nodding when asked a question, can help convey that you are genuinely interested in providing clarity.
4. How to Make Ads That Persuade Savvy Customers Customers know when they’re being marketed to, which can make the marketer’s job of persuasion difficult. Research from associate professor of marketing Kent Grayson
has found that customers consider some advertising tactics to be legitimate and informative. This can help marketers avoid wasting time and money on unnecessary or ineffective advertising strategies. Among the strategies considered most trustworthy are reporting a product’s position on a ranked list from a verifiable third party such as Consumer Reports, and giving both the sale price and the regular price of the product when it has been discounted, Grayson found. Least trustworthy tactics include celebrity endorsements and statements that the product will be on sale “for a limited time only.” Grayson stresses that while consumers are far from naïve, advertisers need not throw out the rulebook entirely. “If you approach marketing with the presumption that people perceive all your actions with suspicion, you may end up taking an overly careful approach to avoid triggering an effect that is not there,” Grayson says.
5. How a Room’s Lighting Shapes Our Decisions Persuasion isn’t always about convincing others of your good idea. Sometimes we try to persuade ourselves. For example, when you’re hungry, are you more likely to decide that it’s a good idea to eat a salad or a sundae? The answer may hinge on the flick of a light switch, according to Ping Dong and Aparna Labroo. Via three studies, Dong, an assistant professor of marketing, and Labroo, a professor in the same department, learned that when a room is dimly lit, we feel more at liberty to choose what we really want (think sundae), rather than what we think others would approve of (think salad). Previous research by others had postulated that dimly lit settings lead us to make hedonistic choices because darkness lets us feel anonymous. But Dong and Labroo found a different mechanism at work. They say that in the dark, people feel less connected to others, and so we give less weight to what others think and more weight to our own (sweet, cool, creamy) desires. FEATURED FACULTY Loran Nordgren: Associate Professor of Management & Organizations Derek D. Rucker: Sandy & Morton Goldman Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies in Marketing, Professor of Marketing, Co-chair of Faculty Research Mitchell A. Petersen: Glen Vasel Professor of Finance and Director of the Heizer Center for Private Equity and Venture Capital Kent Grayson: Associate Professor of Marketing; Bernice and Leonard Lavin Professorship Aparna Labroo: Professor of Marketing Ping Dong: Assistant Professor of Marketing Anne Ford is a writer in Evanston, Illinois.
How to Integrate Influencer and Emotional Marketing to Improve Your Content Program AS MARKETERS IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL, WE ARE MOVING AT THE SPEED OF DIGITAL WITHOUT THE CHANCE TO ASSESS PATTERNS AND THINK DEEPLY ABOUT OUR WORK. MEANWHILE, CONSUMERS’ DEVICES ARE CONSTANTLY BOMBARDED WITH MARKETING CLUTTER AND MEANINGLESS ADS THAT DON’T TAKE THE TIME TO UNDERSTAND CONSUMERS’ NEEDS OR PREFERENCES By Mark C. Nardone
As it always has, our success as marketers stems from using emotional marketing to focus on consumers’ needs and preferences in order to capitalize in our markets. However, although emotional marketing is a powerful approach, it cannot stand alone; it needs to be integrated within marketing channels and tactics. With the emergence of influencer marketing as an important trend, part of our job as marketers in 2019 is to pair emotional marketing with influencer marketing so that we can better target and reach our desired audiences.
But what does emotional marketing entail? It starts with defining values that your brand was established upon and using those principles to make connections with your customers. Whether you’re looking to play up industry trends, target a specific demographic, or mention the latest social or political movements in your messaging, find something that resonates with the people you’d like to reach. Don’t get too personal, but do understand how they feel.
Let’s review how you can integrate emotional and influencer marketing into your content marketing programthis year and beyond.
Across the customer journey, each stage reflects a different stage of emotion. Here are a few considerations to keep in mind:
What is emotional marketing?
Evaluation of your product/service. Emotionally, they’re still not sold on your brand quite yet. How can you get them emotionally involved at this stage of consideration? Here are three tips:
Emotional marketing is an method that’s driven by your target audiences’ feelings and values. It involves connecting with your audience through a captivating story that aligns with their beliefs. Those connections are critical, considering that emotional responses influence intention to buy much more than the ad’s content itself, research shows.
1. Employee advocacy. Getting customers on board starts internally: Nobody knows your brand better than the people who live and breathe it every day. Let your
brandknewmag.com
33
employees be part of the potential customer’s evaluation process. 2. Demos. The proof is in the pudding. Nothing speaks to the quality of your product or service better than a demonstration, and this is the perfect time to respond any questions or concerns. 3. Influencers. Hearing validation from someone with influence has a powerful psychological effect. We’ll dive deeper into influencers later on. Purchase. In this stage, customers are feeling good about their choice—but not great (yet). They might have some anxiety about the commitment or feel that risk is associated with the product. Make them feel confident that they made the right decision and ensure you’re their trusted brand for life. Decided not to purchase. In this stage, they either delayed or went another route. Emotionally, they may be on the fence or have another vendor on a short list. Stay connected, remain positive, and outline your brand’s unique selling proposition. Loyalty/advocacy. Keep them active and excited about the brand. Building loyal advocates who rave about your brand will produce a positive return on investment: 92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising, research from Nielsen finds. Emotional marketing helps you become their friend, their confidant, their go-to brand. Most important, your efforts should be geared toward being memorable.
Leverage influencers But how can you make sure your brand is the one everyone’s talking about in today’s competitive environment? Here’s where influencer marketing comes into play. According to influencer marketing expert Linqia, 86% of marketers reported using influencer marketing in 2017, and 92% of those respondents said it was effective. Using influencers to represent your brand allows you to take a more personal approach to engaging with your customers— especially if your personas line up with the influencer’s intent and interests. For example, what industry events are you planning to attend in 2019? Have you considered investigating which influencers will be there, or what they’ll be discussing? Events are the perfect opportunity to make connections with influencers. To get your foot in the door, find a way to relate your brand’s current services or initiatives with those influencers’ passions. Once you’ve successfully connected with those influencers and they’ve endorsed your product or service, your brand is positioned to build emotional connections with customers. Your next step is to humanize your brand through interactions with those influencers across channels. Content is a wonderful asset for ensuring your influencer relationships are influencing the behavior of your audience: Q&As, blog posts, roundtables, webinars—whether demand gen activities or earned media efforts—these valuable
connections should be leveraged across channels that drive intent.
Incorporate emotional and influencer marketing into your content program Creating emotional connections involves aligning your influencer marketing efforts with your content marketing program. Nothing will hit home for your customers more than a piece of content that brings your brand down to earth. That process can start at a basic level: having a conversation. Initiating conversations with your influencers will automatically familiarize their followers with your brand—increasing your reach and expanding awareness in a seemingly natural fashion. From there, learn to fully integrate those influencers into your content program. The following four tactics will help you do that: 1. Events and webinars. Use influencers to bring brand awareness via demand gen activities. This type of content is rich with potential and can help you target your ideal prospects. 2. Twitter chat. This is the most direct way to have a conversation with your influencers and showcase your thought leadership on a topic. It is also a great way to engage members of your audience who may be listening in. And, who knows, you may pick up a batch of new followers along the way. 3. Guest blog series. (Emphasis on “series.”) The more your influencers are associated with your brand, the more their followers will become emotionally invested. To prove consistency and authenticity, challenge your influencers to commit to a blog series rather than a oneoff piece of content. (Bonus: A paid influencer strategy is much cheaper when you pay by the “bundle”—in case you weren’t already sold on the series idea.) 4. Live video/podcast. Nothing says “I believe in your brand” more than publishing live conversations with your influencers on your social channels. Plus, according to research, social videos generate 1,200% more shares than text and images combined. Sounds like a no-brainer. Learning how to seamlessly combine emotional and influencer marketing will be challenging, but the rewards will be invaluable. Both techniques will become incredible resources for starting conversations with your customers and create a sense of brand validation that can’t be found anywhere else. Figuring out the pattern of your customers and emotionally connecting with them at specific stages of the journey will be the most difficult task to conquer. It comes with a commitment to truly understanding your buyers, personalizing the experience, and taking the time to nurture the relationship every step of the way. Advocacy doesn’t happen overnight—it takes years to establish. So, are you ready to emotionally invest in your marketing efforts?
Marketers, retailers find success with visual search WINDOW SHOPPING 2.0: HOW VISUAL SEARCH IS REVOLUTIONIZING DIGITAL FASHION RETAIL By Inbal Lavi
The future of fashion retail is e-commerce, but the future of e-commerce is unclear. On the one hand, e-commerce grew 15 percent in 2018, but on the other, 80 percent of those gains went to Amazon alone. And while traditional fashion retailers are set to shutter record numbers of physical stores this year, many notable digital-native brands made a concerted push into brick-and-mortar with great success.
and action. Far from being a thing of the past, the window shopping experience is now being digitized and amplified thanks to visual search – and with the right visual optimization techniques, marketers can ensure that their brands stand out in this landscape.
Retailers understand they must innovate to survive, but rapidly changing technologies and tastes make it hard to decide which innovations are worth pursuing, and for marketers seeking to navigate this ever-evolving space, always staying one step ahead can prove a challenge.
Visual search lets users look for images using other images instead of text. This might sound simple but translating image data into information useful for finding similar images requires deep learning technology and tons of training. Nevertheless, where visual search stands today, it is already showing potential to transform e-commerce. The underlying technology poised to drive this revolution has been quietly developing and maturing in the R&D labs of top tech giants for years.
Amidst the chaos of the past decade or so, one unassuming technology has quietly been proving its potential for retailers and marketers alike. Visual search began as a novel computer science demo, but as mobile cameras improve, and AI gets smarter, tech giants are increasingly throwing their weight behind this unique approach to search – and fashion is already seeing the biggest impact. Social media has conditioned an entire generation of shoppers to think visually and seek inspiration from what they see online. Visual search empowers shoppers to act on that inspiration and cuts down on the friction between intent
A new vision for e-commerce
Microsoft Bing was an early pioneer of the technology, but recent iterations by Google and Pinterest (both coincidentally named “Lens”) have carried the tech to term and proven visual search as a viable greenfield opportunity for digital commerce. In just the past few months Google unveiled shoppable ads for its image search and Instagram announced integrated e-commerce tagging within individual posts.
The ‘safest’ ads are at greatest risk of going unnoticed!
Play Unsafe: Get Attention! Marketers are prone to this flaw. There’s a tendency to overestimate people’s interest in our brands. Perhaps because we’re so interested in the minutiae of our brands, we assume others share that enthusiasm. Psychologists call this the ‘false consensus effect’, the finding that we overestimate the prevalence of our own behaviours and views. This overestimation of the level of interest manifests itself in ads being created that take being noticed for granted. – or advertising copy that fixates on the second-step problem of perfecting its message rather than the first-step problem of grabbing people’s attention.
Get your advertising noticed. Attract attention. Talk to us to see how we can get your brand the attention it seeks and desires!
Call +9714 3867728 or email nikhil@groupisd.com
groupisd.com/story
Spotting social trends In March 2019, an unlikely item became Instagram’s must-have accessory. The trend began when people started noticing the same, mysterious faux-pearl hairclips showing up on multiple influencers and celebrities. Commenters clamored to find out where to buy them, and eventually, they did – it turns out the clips came from a noname seller on Amazon charging just $2.65 for a set of three. But they weren’t easy to find.
Although still in its infancy, visual search is already resonating with users. Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann recently shared that the company processes more than one billion visual searches each month, a number equal to the global total just one year before. Pinterest has leaned into visual search’s potential to transform e-commerce, rolling out an AI-driven “Shop the Look” feature and pushing partnerships with retail giants like Levi’s. When Pinterest made its IPO registration public this March, the company categorized itself not as a social platform but as a search engine. Even more interesting, Pinterest named Amazon its number one competitor. This speaks volumes about where Pinterest sees the biggest potential for visual search. After decades of technology changing the way we shop, Pinterest believes the way we shop can influence new technologies. While Amazon is optimized for people who know exactly what they want, Pinterest’s visual search allows shoppers to seek out inspiration in a more organic, non-linear way.
Window shopping 2.0 Forward-thinking retailers are already implementing visual search to invigorate their online presence and deepen their connection with tech-savvy shoppers. In May of 2018, fashion retailer Forever 21 rolled out a visual search feature, and in the month following launch the company saw increased sales conversions and a 20 percent jump in average order value. The ability to digitally replicate the age-old pastime of window shopping has similarly inspired other fashion retailers. Soon after Forever 21’s announcement, ASOS and Farfetch quickly followed suit, deploying visual search functionality of their own. Especially amongst digital-natives currently coming of age, shopping based on photos they post or see in their newsfeed is no longer just a novelty – it’s second nature. One study found that 62 percent of GenZ and Millennial shoppers wanted visual search to be part of their shopping experience – underscoring that for marketers hoping to reach this coveted demographic, a visual search strategy is vital. The same study found that nearly 80 percent discovered products on mobile while on the go. The rise of visual search amongst digital-native shoppers makes sense because it represents an improvement in the ways they are already shopping.
Holly Bullion, editor of popular fashion blog, Refinery 29, shared her experience: “I had been seeing the pearl barrettes all over Instagram and couldn’t figure out where to find them (quickly) and affordably.” She did track them down eventually, but it took some digging. Now think about how perfectly visual search would have fit this situation. Instead of a few fashion-forward Instagrammers taking inspiration from New York Fashion Week then hunting down a stylish, affordable alternative hidden deep within Amazon, they could have simply snapped a photo and searched for “hairclips like these.”
Optimizing visual search marketing So much of the way people naturally want to shop is far better served by visual search than it is by text search or site-navigation. It goes without saying e-commerce has made shopping incredibly convenient. But it’s also removed some of the magic and delight of just browsing between shops, scouring windows and aisles looking for nothing in particular…but holding out hope because you’ll “know it when you see it.” How can marketers help their brands thrive in an e-commerce ecosystem where high-tech window shopping is becoming more integral? First, it’s essential to verify that a brand’s images can be easily displayed, which means paying careful attention to image size, file type and enabling compression per device. Image file names and URLs should also be keyword rich. No less importantly, brands should include image sitemaps to help Google identify images. Other essentials for boosting a brand’s search rankings: Detailed product descriptions, structured data markups and descriptive alt-text, which helps search engines decipher images. Lastly, to help understand the context of the images, it’s recommended to have text above or below an image. The promise of visual search for fashion e-commerce is to translate the window shopping experience into the digital age: simultaneously preserving and enhancing the benefits of e-commerce, while also recapturing and modernizing a more holistic approach to product discovery and customer experience. Visual search technology is already available and getting better each day. Now it’s up to pioneering brands to realize this bold new vision for fashion e-commerce and embrace visual search.
Numerous trends are shaping the future of media including the growth in digital advertising, consumers’ love of OTT streaming services, an over-saturation of quality content and the consolidation that the previous trends may forge. McKinsey has previewed with The Drum its Global Media Report which examines the next five years facing the industry. The full report will be released at the OMR Festival 8 May in Hamburg, Germany. The Drum explores some of the themes indicated by the research.
Ad spend The report indicates that over the last half decade, 90% of media spend growth has come from digital – and the focus on mobile platforms will grow in the coming half a decade. Traditional media will not share this growth generally but will see pockets of performance and resilience. By 2021, pay TV will generate $299bn and exhibit 3% growth, with video games up 12% to $179bn. Over-the-top will reach $53bn (+20%) cinema $49bn (+6%) and physical home video down to $10bn (-13%). Global advertising revenues will exhibit growth. By 2021, digital advertising will be the largest segment attracting $339bn (+12%), then TV advertising at $209bn (2%), then OOH at $38bn (3%) and then video game advertising at $6bn (+13%). You can get a good feel for UK ad revenues in the recently released IPA Bellweather report (here).
Adam Bird, global leader of the McKinsey Consumer Tech and Media Practice, told The Drum: “Most of the providers to that space are competing for time and money. What we’re seeing is where consumers are going to continue to invest their time and money is in every sort of digital format. That will continue.” As we look forward, we will see more direct to consumer services in video and music.
Company for the digital ad duopoly Bird noted that ad offerings like Amazon’s will come into play in the next five years to closer compete with Facebook and Google. He said: “Amazon’s advertising business is both search but also a form of digital slotting allowances that companies used to pay offline retailers. It’s at that intersection between advertising, sending promotional spend. Ecommerce becomes a bigger part ever bigger part of the retail mix.” Philipp Westermeyer, founder of Online Marketing Rockstars (OMR), added: “Speaking with a lot of players in the industry, I hear that digital is too expensive for some advertisers, due to these auctioning systems. There you’re really driven to the edge of your margin, be it Google or to Facebook or Amazon.” He predicted a modest “renaissance of classical media”. “They don’t use these auctioning models and there is a chance it may be cheaper.” “All of a sudden you look at cheaper TV, out of home or
groupisd.com
39
The major trends shaping, breaking and consolidating global media by 2021 By John McCarthy
magazine channels, it’s a surprising development that it will hold or like slow the decline in some places.” He also noted that the tech startups are moving into physical media. “We are seeing fully developed startups going through classic retail partners more than they used to. The whole competition on Amazon and other cash crops has become so expensive that it may all of a sudden make sense to develop in retail stores. That is an interesting development that I didn’t see coming a couple of years ago.” Of course, even Amazon is moving into physical retail...
Subscription services Consumers love the value proposition, the selection, the personalization and the pricing of subscription services, compared to buying physical media or pay TV packages. Access is continually trumping ownership: music streaming accounted for almost half of music spend in 2017 and will reach 80% by 2022. Music and video streaming subscriptions will grow faster than 10% per annum. Bird said: “Consumers are telling us decisively that they like streaming offerings in music and video. That’s not going to change. People will continue to invest in there to get an advantage. There may at some point be an oversupply of offerings. We will see who is going to emerge as the winner there. But I don’t think people are going to stop investing in trying to delight consumers with video content or music
streaming content.”
More consolidation In the subscription space, Bird sees consolidation coming. “We’re going to have even more choice. It could be driven by consumers saying, ‘I don’t really want to subscribe to five offerings instead of a rebundled or reaggregated option’. A combination of consumer preference and economics will probably lead to consolidation in that space.” He noted that the Disney and Fox, Comcast and Sky mergers were a “huge step” in the direction of continued consolidation and theorized that “more traditional players will bond together to create scale around content, intellectual property, and being able to compete in direct to consumer”. The tech giants are likely to wade in too. “Over the next few years, it’ll be interesting to see if they participate in that consolidation, whether that’s purchasing a more traditional media company or extending into new area. You have Google’s move into gaming with Stadia, Apple’s intention to be more competitive in video, and Amazon moving into sports rights.” And east could meet west amid this trend. Bird concluded: “The top 10 consumer tech companies globally by market cap are divided between the US and China so the reality is that they will be the shapers. Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu, they’ve had plenty to do in their home market but you will start to see them moving abroad.”
10 Ways To Advertise Your Advertising Agency By Peter Levitan
Do you advertise your advertising agency? Based on my industry experience, most do not. This means that agencies are not aiming and tailoring their primary sales messages to their target audiences. This post offers 10 ways to advertise your advertising agency as well as the why you should to it, like, yesterday. Caveat: You should seriously consider advertising your advertising agency. However, you should first run a smart, consistent account-based marketing program to directly drive agency awareness to your best prospects. Advertising – A Definition Just for the heck of it, and to get us all on the same page, here is a definition of advertising. I use ‘advertising’ as a universal term for marketing communications companies. Advertising is a means of communication with the users (or, non-users) of a product or service. Advertisements are
messages paid for by those who send them and are intended to inform or influence people who receive them, as defined by the Advertising Association of the UK.
Why An Advertising Agency Should Advertise There are four reasons an agency should advertise. 1. You want to be where prospective clients look for agencies. 2. You want to put your agency right in front of the right prospects (and even busy agency search consultants like Laura Bajkowski) 24/7. 3. You want to borrow the interest that on and offline publications can deliver. 4. You want to prove that you believe in advertising and that you are super creative.
brandknewmag.com
41
10 Advertising Platforms Your Agency Should Consider WARNING: Most likely, your agency cannot create and run efforts on all of these platforms. Roll them out based on your marketing plan. TEST: Test everything. Do more of what works and less of what does not. Yeah, I’m being very obvious. But, testing is the mantra. Your clients want ROI. You do too and running your own programs may make you a better judge of how to judge success across advertising channels. In addition to listing the ad platforms, I am also giving some, not all, of the reasons that a local/regional agency and an expert agency (example, lead gen B2B agency) should choose the platform. This is meant as food for thought. There are too many types of agencies for me to give every iteration. But, you get it. Update: It is five hours after I wrote this. I now have number 11. It’s at the bottom of the list.
1. GOOGLE ADWORDS. Every client in need of a new agency searches on Google. If you are not on page one for the search, buy the position. Do keyword research and buy the keywords that meet your reach objectives. Local/regional agency. It would be insane to not try to be on Google’s page one for your location. Example: if you are based in Seattle, buy ‘Seattle advertising agency’ or ‘Seattle SEO agency.’ Expert. Buy ‘Lead generation agency’ or ‘high tech leads agency.’ Do you want Purina as a client? Think about what their marketing team searches on.
2. YOUTUBE.
audience. The agency also retargets. Since there are fewer results on YouTube than on Google, the agency gets more attention (and, yup, these videos also turn high up in Google searches.) It would real easy for a local agency, most are, to ‘own’ their town’s video world. How about a weekly where to eat in Kansas City series shot on an iPhone? Need inspiration? Here is john st.’s rather viral video (as of writing it has 2,447,266 views) about the power of Catvertising. Frankly, has any other agency ever had over 2 million views?
3. ADVERTISING AGENCY DIRECTORIES. This is a serious no-brainer that many agencies do not take advantage of. In many cases, an agency directory is on Google’s page one and lists your competitors. Make sure you are every relevant agency directory and spend the cash if it nets you a higher position or allows you to deliver more information (i.e. your work) and, especially, a link back to your website. A very obvious example is Agency Spotter. Frankly, how could you not be present on this directory and even consider the power of paying up for greater visibility and the opportunity to deliver more information? Like stats? In 2017, Agency Spotter had 250,000 searches for agencies and to read its guides, reports, and tools.
4. LINKEDIN. EZ Stat: LinkedIn has 650 million business people and 40 million decision-makers – including your target accounts. Go to Campaign Manager and DIY some ads. Sponsor content on your corporate page. You are probably already amplifying your content across digital platforms, right, so why not actually aim your thought leadership at your LinkedIn audience. Share your LinkedIn posts with your audience to increase awareness, and get more Followers and clicks. You can target geographies and categories. Go ahead, build your Kansas City CMO awareness.
5. FACEBOOK. I have mixed feelings about Facebook for many reasons. But, they are a gorilla and you should test there ad platform.
I have an agency client that produces an interview with marketing leaders every month. They blast them out in emails, on their blog and… yup, leverage the power of the number two search engine to aim their videos at their
One of my most viewed blog posts was passed across the Saatchi network on Facebook. I was surprised at first. I saw the power of sharing on Facebook. Give people at your target companies something to share. I am not a super Facebook marketer. However, Social Media
Examiner is. Head over to 4 Ways To Improve Your B2B Facebook Ads and let them be your Sherpa.
6. INSTAGRAM.
an agency ad on Adweek or Ad Age is when the agency is patting itself on the back for winning an award (of course the other winning agencies are doing the same at the same time) or when the publication lauds one of their client CMOs. Go ahead, test advertising on websites like Asia’s Branding in Asia. If you go here you can read my blog post about agency awards and a
If you are wondering if Instagram is only for USC honor students, note that Hubspot (with 167K followers), IBM, Intel, and Zendesk use Instagram’s B2B power. At present, Instagram is an underutilized advertising tool so you get a bit of exclusivity (most agencies just put up cute photos without a strategy) plus, Instagram is adding ad tools. You advertise on Instagram using Facebook’s Ad Manager. Manager lists campaign objectives, audience options, types of placements and budgets and schedules. Since advertising on Instagram is relatively new, there is less clutter. Your choices include Video ads, stories, photo ads, and carousel ads. You can define your audience by location, demographics, and interests.
Guest post too. Get your thinking on ad, digital and client category websites. Everyone is hungry for content. Why not yours? Doing this third-party publishing delivers much higher reach than your website plus you should get the link back.
11. PODCAST ADVERTISING. I listen to a lot of podcasts. From marketing to lifestyle to digital industry podcasts. Advertising seems to work on this platform. Many podcast ads are delivered by the host. Reminds me of the golden days of radio advertising. I think you should explore advertising on relevant podcasts. Even Ad Age has its Ad Lib podcast. Check out the Midroll podcast advertising network.
7. TWITTER. Twitter’s advertising tools help you to grow your followers and boost awareness. Twitter also can act as a direct marketing tool. You can target the Twitter followers of specific accounts. Isn’t this an offer you cannot refuse – reach your competitor’s followers? There are a few tools that will help you build a list. Check out export tweet.
8. SLIDESHARE. I’ll make two assumptions. 1) You produce PowerPoint-like decks and 2) white papers (or long blog posts). Why not help them reach more people by putting them up on LinkedIn’s SlideShare. Relevant keywords and phrases will help your ‘new’ clients find your content. I have a bunch of stuff up on SlideShare. Just one of my presentations, “The Agency Book. From Idea To Published In 6 Months’, a presentation about how easy it is for an agency to write a book that I made at a HubSpot conference, has over 2,250 views.
9. CONFERENCE ADS. If your agency has a marketing conference strategy, you are already thinking about tactics related to reaching out to and convincing attendees that they should meet you. You might get a booth, speak at the conference, book a hotel suite for more intimate sales pitches. You could also advertise in the conference magazine. I’d approach this ad program using direct marketing basics. You want the reader to raise her hand. Make them an offer they can’t refuse.
10. INDUSTRY NEWS WEBSITES. Here is a weird one. In many cases, the only time I ever see
Does Advertising Work? If you are a marketing communications company, you better think that it works. If it works, why not try it for your agency? Frankly, if I were a client checking you out, I would ask how you market your own agency. I suggest having a good answer. I Actively Help Advertising Agencies Design and Run Effective Business Development Programs. My consultancy focuses on delivering affordable, customized strategic business development solutions that build high-quality sales pipelines.
Editor’s take marketing and advertising: Social media, tech revolution and people-focused advertising By Emily Crowe
Today’s marketers and advertisers are navigating uncharted territory, from perfecting their social media strategy to adopting technology such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality and machine learning. SmartBrief readers have been keeping a close eye on these evolving trends in our marketing and advertising newsletters, with social media stories by far making the biggest splash. Here, we examine the biggest trends of Q1 based on SmartBrief’s top-clicked marketing and advertising stories, and what they will mean through Q2 and beyond.
The continued importance of social media Stories about social media in marketing and advertising took precedence in Q1, with readers most interested in optimal posting times, key platform trends and the rise of TikTok and Instagram Stories. Users are increasingly seeking out ondemand content and highly tailored services, which makes finding the right social media strategy more important than ever. What’s next? Immersive content, nontraditional search, messaging and privacy are all expected to be important components of social media marketing throughout 2019. TikTok, the short-form video app, is being hailed by many as the social platform to watch this year. While it doesn’t yet offer paid advertising, marketers are increasingly using TikTok to create content and collaborate with influencers. Similarly, Instagram Stories is growing more popular, with creator usage growing 60% in the final quarter of 2018. Expect platforms that let marketers tell engaging stories and connect with consumers in unique ways to continue gaining steam this year.
How tech is taking hold Beyond the realm of social media, other technology is beginning to proliferate rapidly in the industry. Voice marketing
is growing, and marketers and advertisers alike are finding ways to optimize their campaigns and products for the next wave. Alcoholic beverage company Diageo, for example, offered a free sample via smart speaker and generated more than 6,000 responses, proving that consumers are open to this tech when given an immediate reward. What’s next? Expect the continued growth of voice marketing, with best practices and new use cases popping up at every turn. Ad-supported over-the-top streaming is poised to become more common in 2019, as is enhanced audience targeting and data-driven marketing spurred on by advances in artificial intelligence. Let’s not forget 5G -- which is expected to help advance digital out-of-home advertising this year and beyond. Most importantly, while brands and agencies will be integrating more technology into their daily operations, they’ll also be looking for the right talent to make sure it runs seamlessly.
People-focused advertising SmartBrief readers were especially interested in the campaigns that aired during this year’s Super Bowl, which saw technology and car companies alike touting their products with celebrities, athletes and even a few everyday people. Microsoft’s ad for its Xbox Adaptive Controller, which featured young gamers with limited mobility, made an especially big splash, as did Verizon’s commercial featuring Los Angeles Chargers coach Anthony Lynn speaking with first responders who saved his life. Likewise, Gilette’s controversial #MeTooinspired “The Best Men Can Be” spot got people talking, with 65% of viewers saying it increased purchase intent. What’s next? We’ll likely see more brands and agencies thinking outside the box when it comes to grabbing consumers’ attention. These ads and others showed consumers’ desire to see campaigns that have a human interest angle and those that feature brands taking a stand.
How marketers can leverage the value of branded apps IN THE BATTLE FOR MOBILE ENGAGEMENT, BRANDED APPS HOLD UNTAPPED VALUE By Jon Feagain
Consumers spend an overwhelming majority of their mobile internet time within apps. Recognizing this trend, the world’s biggest brands have developed apps as tools for providing services (like checking a bank balance) or making a purchase (through an e-commerce store). But many of these apps have untapped potential. Beyond basic transactions, branded apps can be used as powerful video delivery mechanisms that increase engagement and brand loyalty. Especially as email open rates decline, apps can serve as a new way to connect with consumers with greater efficiency. Customers who have taken the time to download a brand’s app onto their device are some of the most loyal customers a brand has. This advocacy is ripe for brands to mine. When a brand has an app and separately has video content, produced either for TV spots, social media or their website, there’s no reason these ingredients can’t be combined. The result is a powerful in-app content marketing hub that keeps the best customers engaged and keeps the brand top-ofmind. Some companies, like Nike and Red Bull, are already doing this well. To effectively market in a mobile world, brands need to think of their apps as mobile video mailboxes. The fight for user attention To better understand the underutilized value of branded apps, it helps first to recognize just how hard it is to reach consumers through more traditional TV and video channels. TV still comes first for so many marketers, and they invest their budget in a series of spots that will run for 30 or 60 seconds on the air. But with cord-cutting on the rise, it’s harder and harder to achieve the level of penetration TV advertisers achieved in the past. While audiences have switched to digital video, reaching them isn’t necessarily easier in that channel: 65% of consumers skip pre-roll video ads when given the option. With mobile viewership on the rise, brands must find new ways to keep their loyal customers truly engaged. Maximizing efficiency The efficiency imperative is front and center for most brands, and leveraging apps as another way to promote alreadycreated video content delivers on that. By using their apps, marketers don’t have to buy media to retarget the consumers who love their brand. Instead, they can recycle content that they already have and hand it directly to the consumers who will be most receptive to its messaging. The biggest obstacle is that the app developers and media
teams are very likely working toward separate goals, and in many organizations, they may not be communicating regularly if they communicate at all. But investing time into connecting these disparate departments can yield great results for the company as a whole. Constructing a content hub Apps are purpose built. Airline apps are for purchasing tickets and checking in. Consumers download the AmEx app to access their credit card accounts. If the app development team is focused solely on that goal, there’s no reason to include a video player within the app, and no reason to consider content. No one explicitly downloads a banking app because they want to watch a three-minute video on smart investing tactics. But that doesn’t mean that customers aren’t interested in such content. A recent study from Hubspot found that 68% of consumers say video is their favorite way to learn about new products and services. Brands with a narrow focus can easily miss opportunities to increase spend and grow brand loyalty. Brand’s don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but they can add functionality to make their apps something better. Users already love the AmEx app – it has a 4.9-star rating in the Apple App Store, based on 910,000 ratings. What if the app included video to promote different rewards packages and destinations that are available to cardholders? Or videos about their card features, to inspire consumers to spend a bit more? Heck, it could even host a library of the brand’s famous Jerry Seinfeld TV ads from years past, which have tens of thousands of views online, thanks to user uploads. Pushing these videos directly to a user’s device and sending them screen notifications to tell them there’s something new for them to watch in the app is an easy, effective and innovative way to engage users. They can now watch these short videos during downtime: on a commute, standing in line at the store, waiting at the doctor’s office and other moments when they’re looking for content to entertain them. Brands that relied so heavily on TV advertising in the past are still learning how to market appropriately in a mobile world. The video they’re producing to recruit new customers can live in the branded apps, doing double duty to re-engage loyal customers. Rather than have app and ad teams live in silos, brands need to think about how they can best combine resources to efficiently and nimbly engage with consumers in the modern, mobile-first world.
Is brand authenticity disrupting advertising? By Tomer Tagrin
As powerful as it is as a channel for brand awareness and even commerce nowadays, social media is very much a double-edged sword. The social masses can be ruthless to brands who make a misstep. No company, no matter how admired or beloved, is exempt, be it Gucci, Burger King or Peloton. Many brands are lucky to boast a strong core of loyal supporters and advocates who’ll stick with them beyond the controversy, but competition is never far behind. In this socially-powered generation of consumers, brands need to cultivate a persona that embraces authenticity, and this extends to their advertisements. One study found that inauthentic content can be detrimental, prompting users to unfollow a brand. And a new survey of female consumers reveals that 84% of respondents prefer to see ads showing a diversity of body types, while 75% want to see different ethnicities. By taking an approach to marketing that is inclusive of their customer base rather than elitist, brands demonstrate that they “get” their audience, which is the first step in converting fans into customers.
How can brands get it right? Showcasing customer photos in marketing is good for fans of a brand; it’s good for fellow shoppers; and it’s good for business. The numbers back this up, and conversion rates increase because of user-generated content. The greatest impact was on Twitter, with a sevenfold increase in conversion rates because of user-generated content. What can you do to help promote brand authenticity in your marketing? Here are three examples of success. 1. Share customer photos: By adding Instagram photos to its product pages, Vanity Planet saw a 24% increase in
checkouts. That translated to $8,900 worth of additional income in 10 days. The impact of Instagram is significant far beyond its user base, and 72% of e-commerce customers say that Instagram photos of a product increase their likelihood of buying. 2. Build a tribe: Even if you have a niche audience, consumers will be loyal to brands that reflect their priorities. For example, Las Vegas-based grooming company Live Bearded earned what cofounder Anthony Mink called “raving fans” from a “Movember” social campaign that combined a beard-growing promotion with a donation commitment to help feed the hungry. The result was more than social loyalty; sales increased by 121% during the promotion. 3. Inspire authentic sharing: The brand Sol de Janeiro had a near takeover of social media with its product, Bum Cream. When the product was released on Sephora in 2016, it sold out in four days. When the company released a jumbo-sized version in 2018, it sold out in less than two hours. How did it go viral? Customers were so enthusiastic about the product that they organically liked, shared, posted, and reviewed. There’s still a lot of product love for #bumbumcream, with some users adding #NotAnAd to reinforce that their love is real.
A call for brands to be real Picture-perfect ads have been losing steam for a while now. Instead, consumers are drawn to brands that are both relatable and authentic. Already a media darling, brands have a tremendous potential to build a stronger network of customer advocates with their users’ authentic content. Tomer Tagrin is the co-founder and CEO of Yotpo, an integrated commerce marketing platform for brands like Steve Madden, Glossier and Esurance, an Allstate company.
THE RISE AND FALL OF FACEBOOK’S MEMORY ECONOMY By Molly Wood
Facebook’s Memories feature—where it shows you pictures and posts from a day in the recent or far-gone past—used to be my favorite thing about the platform. I mean, I have posted some hilarious things that my son said when he was little, and that time I went on a reporting trip to Area 51 was seriously cool. Heck, I’ve reposted it three years in a row.
I don’t know what’s happening on your feed, but it feels like we’re getting close. A recent scroll through mine showed some updated profile pictures, a handful of Instagram pictures that were cross-posted to Facebook, and no less than five memories. I suspect if it hadn’t been spring break and Easter/ Passover, there wouldn’t have been much new there at all.
Now, though, I think Memories is the platform’s most cynical element. It’s a cheap ploy to keep us creating new posts, keep us interested, at a time when our interest is starting to drift away.
Let’s be honest, oblivion is the fate this feature—and all of Facebook, really—deserves. In light of the constant flow of revelations that show just how much Facebook views our contributions to its database in terms of cold dollars and opportunity for monetization, it’s no surprise that turning your nostalgia into a digital economy was a cynical calculation from the start. Offering you a memory from days gone by every day so that you’ll share it out once again can, I guess, be called “engagement,” but it’s pretty cheap swill.
And my regular reposting introduces a bit of a plot twist, here. The “Memories” feature might work in the short term to keep us coming back, to keep us reposting, to keep retraining its algorithm as to what memories we really value, but long term, it’s Facebook’s Ouruboros—the snake that eats its own tail. If at some point, when we stop posting anything new, Facebook will inevitably hit Peak Memory, and the site’s News Feed will collapse upon itself, a heap of reposted content from the year before, the two years before, the four years before.
And since the News Feed is already a bit of a wasteland of algorithmically curated dreck that fits your predetermined filter bubble, perhaps Peak Memory will lead us on a slide down into the Slough of Eternal Repetition, which will finally be the end of our time on Facebook altogether. Obviously, this was not supposed to happen. See, around
groupisd.com
51
2015, an app called Timehop had hit 6 million users by pulling in photos and posts from across the web and aggregating them into memories. (It’s still around, by the way; I think I might try it!) People loved it. And shortly after that milestone, Facebook copied it almost feature for feature, down to the colors of the edges of the photos, according to its creators.
with uncanny precision. And that’s how we get to 2019, when CNET writer Tim Stevens is tweeting about how a Facebook memory post from 2012 was followed immediately in his feed by an ad for the very same car he had posted about back then.
As it happens, by 2015, Facebook was already aware that original sharing on the platform was in a steep decline. People were visiting Facebook, but they weren’t posting, and this 2016 piece from The Information cites “On This Day” as one of many tools the platform rolled out to juice people into sharing more. It was a blunt instrument. It would show you exes and dead relatives and horrible news events until it became sort of a dark joke how often it backfired, and the company slowly added filters and controls so you could exclude things from it or turn it off altogether. These days, Memories is newer and more improved with more AI. That’s right, your nostalgia is now being used to train the machines. Facebook is using artificial intelligence to determine whether a given memory might actually be a bummer, a good memory gone bad, a photo of a deceased person with a memorial page on the site, or something along those lines. (Triviality does not seem to be a disqualifying filter, leading to another question apparently unasked at Facebook: Just because it happened, do I need to remember it?) But here’s the thing. At some point, I started to realize that I was out of things I actually wanted to share with Facebook. Now, when I go there, it’s because I want to post something promotional to my public page (sorry), or maybe check in on some (sorry) older relatives who still use it to tell me what they’re up to. Me, though? I’ve got nothing to say, except on the off chance there’s a cute memory (usually something related to my kid) that I want to re-up. In fact, I went and looked at my profile as I was contemplating this column, and wouldn’t you know it, nearly everything there was either a memory I’d reposted, a memory someone else had posted that I’m tagged in, or an assortment of articles that people had tagged me on so I’d be sure to see them. In fact, on a memory I shared back in January, I’d written, “These might be the only reason I’m still ON Facebook, really.” But even that won’t last, because I’m no longer feeding the beast. I don’t want my son to be consumed by the robots, and I’ve pulled farther and farther away from Facebook myself. So at some point, the platform will start to lose value even as a resurfacing agent—after all, what good are the memories I’ve already seen a hundred times? Facebook turned memory into an economy because it seemed to work, in the short term. It certainly adds to the pile of information about you. We’ve got to assume that every time you choose to repost a memory, you’re signaling its importance in some way, and all of that is getting added to that mysterious profile on you that you can’t quite access or get control over, but that’s being used to target ads to you
So, on the one hand, Memories has started to feel gross— tainted by all the things that have tainted Facebook in general. And worse, if content is king, the memories-driven throne is pretty shriveled. That is to say, a News Feed full of other people’s nostalgia is ultimately as boring as being subjected to a slide show of someone’s summer vacation used to be. Maybe it doesn’t matter to Facebook, because so many new memories are being created on Instagram every second. But increasingly, people are sharing Stories on Instagram, and those ephemeral posts are gone in 24 hours. What if Facebook’s ultimate fate is to become a sort of digital time capsule, but one that mirrors a physical capsule: frozen in time and getting dustier and older with each time we decide not to top it off with new content? I’ve got a basket full of old photo albums under the bed that are dusty and probably have at least a couple of dead spiders in them. It sort of feels like that. I always think I’m going to look at them and remember the good old days, but at a certain point, I’m not as interested in what came before as I am in what lies ahead. Facebook may have the memories, but it’s definitely the past.
How can your brand cut through the noise WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NEWEST FRONTIER OF BRAND STORYTELLING By Mohanbir S. Sawhney
With consumers facing a barrage of branded content, today’s marketers know that in order to cut through the noise, messages have to be relevant and timely. They are also discovering that, if done right, digital media storytelling has incredible power to create conversations between brands and consumers. In the following excerpt from his chapter “Digital Brand Storytelling” in Kellogg on Branding in a Hyper-Connected World, Mohan Sawhney, a clinical professor of marketing at Kellogg, explains the importance of “transmedia storytelling” to the future of brand narratives. Now we come to the new frontier in brand storytelling. In the world of digital, it’s not just about taking a story and repurposing the same content for different channels: that would be a cross-media approach. Instead, each new medium requires new thinking. The idea is to create a coordinated story experience, or transmedia storytelling, in which each medium or channel plays a specialized role and does what it does best. This approach requires its own lenses and mental models. With transmedia, one overall story is orchestrated in multiple media, each
telling a part of the story. This coordinated, unified story experience encourages customers to go deeper into the story as they are drawn into the experience over a multitude of channels used to create a holistic story world. Henry Jenkins, the provost professor of communication, journalism, cinematic arts, and education at the University of Southern California, describes transmedia storytelling as a process in which integral elements are dispersed across multiple channels to create a coordinated entertainment experience. When first explaining the concept more than a decade ago, he cited The Matrix, which remains a quintessential example of a transmedia story told via three live-action films, a series of animated short features, comic books, and several video games. There is no single source; to grasp the entire Matrix universe, you need to experience them all.
Storytelling as Immersive Experience Transmedia storytelling allows a story to unfold across multiple media platforms. The “spreadability” of the narrative is an important consideration and is accomplished through viral marketing practices in social media channels. It begins with
brandknewmag.com
53
a core fan base that will share and disseminate the narrative, thus creating more interest in and buzz around the story. Transmedia storytelling strives for continuity of the narrative as the story expands across multiple channels, thus giving fans an immersive experience. Transmedia storytelling as we know it today emerged in the entertainment industry with films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999), whose promotional campaign incorporated televised “documentaries” on the history of the (fictional) Blair Witch and on-the-street personnel who distributed missing-person flyers for the characters who disappear in the film. This technique was adopted by brand marketers across a wide range of industries. The rise of transmedia brand storytelling was fueled by the ability of digital and social media channels to connect with diverse audiences across the world. A useful case study examines The Hunger Games film series, which began in 2012 with the launch of the first movie in the franchise. It was followed in 2013 by the second film, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, which set the record for the biggest opening weekend for any movie ever released in the month of November. A traditional marketing campaign would have focused on creating brand awareness a few weeks prior to the release of the film, using established media channels such as TV, radio, magazines, and billboards, as well as partnerships, a dedicated web site, and YouTube teasers. Other traditional elements might have included in-person PR (interviews, red carpet), online PR (blogs and social media), and crossmarketing partnerships. By contrast, the Catching Fire transmedia campaign was an elaborate effort that went beyond movie posters and web sites to attract attention and create intrigue in curious fans’ minds. Teaser billboards began appearing in April 2013, well in advance of the film’s November opening. The story world had many elements that played out over specialized channels. On Tumblr, the studio created an elaborate online fashion magazine called Capitol Couture. When curious fans googled Capitol Couture, they reached a Tumblr site about the Capitol, which in turn led to the Capitol’s links on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. Fans could experience the strange world of fashion in the Capitol through these sites and links. Fan engagement could be gauged from the huge amount of fan-created content on the film’s social media sites. On the Capitol Couture Tumblr, for example, a section called “Citizen activity” encouraged “citizens” to post their pictures and videos showcasing their fashion creations, thus serving, whether knowingly or unknowingly, as brand ambassadors. Tumblr’s focus on images and videos made the site a go-to for fans who loved fashion, design, and creativity. The Tumblr videos were quickly devoured by fans of the film, which provided strong encouragement to other fans to share and participate with their own videos. How successful was this transmedia storytelling approach? The numbers tell their own compelling story. The Capitol’s Facebook page had over 10 million likes and over 850,000 followers on Twitter. Catching Fire’s trailer was among YouTube’s most-watched videos, and the term “hunger games”
was one of the most searched categories on Google. The film was also a top trending topic on Twitter. On its opening weekend the film took in $158.1 million at the box office on the way to a total of $864.9 million globally. Catching Fire became the highest-grossing lm at the domestic box office for 2013.
Creating Effective Transmedia Campaigns To create effective transmedia campaigns, brand marketers should understand the four Ps: pervasive, persistent, participatory, and personalized (not surprisingly, two of the four are foundational elements of brand storytelling). Pervasive As the story evolves and gains more depth, it must remain coherent and connected to the overall story line. In the case of The Hunger Games, the campaign was so pervasive in its communication to the target audience via online and offline channels that there was considerable excitement as the movie’s release approached. Persistent The campaign must persist through multiple channels— social, digital, and traditional—to foster round-the-clock brand awareness and to stimulate the social participation of the target audience. The Hunger Games’s persistence also helped blur the distinction between reality and science fiction, which helped immerse fans in a world that was highly accessible. Participatory The audience must be encouraged to participate actively in the campaign through challenges, content creation (e.g., photos and vid- eos), and active sharing on social media. Active fan participation and real events contributed to shaping The Hunger Games story world and adding value to the fans’ experience. The interconnection among the media messages ensured that everyone was able to join the storytelling experience on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media. Personalized Story elements that allow viewers and fans to co-create their experience and help shape the story increase engagement. In The Hunger Games, YouTube served as the “official TV broadcast” of the story world. The audience was also given the opportunity to have a personalized experience through such tactics as identity cards, victors’ contests, and access to limited information. Transmedia is the next frontier for digital brand storytelling. The first movers, following the lead of the entertainment industry, will be able to take their brand storytelling to the next level, with the creation of an entire world that’s presented holistically and synergistically.
Mohanbir S. Sawhney, Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation Clinical Professor of Technology
Managing a brand’s reputation via online reviews By Kent Lewis
ONLINE REVIEWS: BUILDING A FRAMEWORK FOR THE REPUTATION ECONOMY The reputation economy is alive and well in 2019. Brands big and small, from retailers and service providers to manufacturers are impacted by online reviews. As a result, companies must be proactive and disciplined about managing online reviews to maximize the positive impact on brand perception and ultimately, sales. Unfortunately, managing online reviews is time-consuming, nuanced and the stakes are high. In this two-part series, we 1) outline an effective foundational framework to manage and monitor online reviews, and 2) discuss how and when to respond to negative reviews. (Come back tomorrow for Part 2.)
Why Online Reviews Matter According to an Invesp study, consumers are likely to spend 31% more on a business with “excellent” reviews, while a single negative review can cost a business roughly 30 customers. Additional study highlights include: • 92% of consumers say they will use a local business if it has at least a five-star rating • 90% of consumers read online reviews before visiting a business • 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations • 72% say that positive reviews make them trust a business more • 72% of consumers will take an action, only after reading a positive review
While the motivation to monitor and manage online reviews is clear, many brands still struggle to develop an effective online review management program. First though, before starting a program, make sure your company values its customers and employees, and owns any problems as they may arise. There is no better hedge against negative reviews than being the best business you can be. Secondarily, it’s important to ensure your company has a solid marketing foundation on which to build an online review management program.
Building a foundation The primary objective of online review management programs is to create a positive brand perception, as many review sites rank highly for brand-name searches. It is important to understand, however, that many (unfavorable) review on sites can be pushed down in the search results by a robust digital marketing program. Below are just a few of the strategies, tactics and channels to consider when building a strong foundation for your online review management efforts: • Search engine optimization (SEO): Optimize your website, blog and social media profiles to rank for branded search terms including company and product or service names. Beyond on-site optimization of content and code, build credibility by seeking links and directory listings from high-ranking local business and industry vertical sites. • Paid-per-click advertising (PPC): Augment your organic listings with branded ad campaigns, especially for terms related to any sensitive issues like lawsuits, disputes or stories in the media. The ads should direct to a relevant
groupisd.com
55
landing page, allowing you to control the narrative. • Social media: Create and optimize compelling social media profiles and organic content on popular platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn to maximize rankings for your brand. These highly-trusted websites rank well for branded searches with minimal effort and, while you don’t own the profile, you have control over the content and thus visibility. • Public Relations: Seek out media coverage opportunities, including expert interviews (via Cision’s HARO, for example), speaking engagements, syndicated articles and awards. Third-party validation is a powerful perceptionshaping tool and known media websites also have high credibility with Google, not just customers. • Influencer Marketing: When implemented authentically, connecting with and engaging industry influencers can create high-ranking content with viral potential that can mitigate negative results and help change perceptions. It can also backfire if done poorly, so be warned this is the most controversial method of generating awareness and reviews. With a robust marketing program in place, the next step is to build an online review management program. A robust online review management strategic plan should include the following elements. • Team training. The customer journey always starts and ends with your employees. It is essential to train employees to provide a compelling experience which increases the likelihood customers will write positive reviews. Also provide a framework and incentive for employees to identify happy customers and provide the tools that will help them solicit reviews from those customers. Training
must also include addressing negative reviews, even if only a select few employees have permission to respond. • Rules for engagement. For employees trained and certified to respond to reviews, ensure they have a roadmap or methodology to respond to any reviews in a timely manner, especially negative reviews. Employees best qualified (in order of preference) to respond to negative reviews include: customer service, public relations/marketing, product development, HR, sales and legal. The larger the company, the more likely legal and HR departments are to be involved, at least in the planning process. • Review monitoring. To maximize the positive impact of existing content and discussions, invest time in monitoring social media, review sites and branded search results to identify unhappy customers and respond in a timely manner. A good place to start is free or low-cost brand monitoring tools like Google Alerts, SocialMention and Mention.com. More robust review monitoring platforms include Chatmeter, NiceJob, Trustpilot, ReviewPush and Yext. Leveraging the above framework will ensure you have a solid foundation on which to manage and influence your brand perception via online reviews. In the next installment tomorrow, I will outline when and how to respond to online reviews, especially negative reviews. Kent Lewis, president and founder of Anvil Media, started his digital marketing agency career in 1996. He frequently writes and speaks about marketing and entrepreneurship.
Influencers are flocking to a surprising new kind of social media 350+ INFLUENCERS WITH A COLLECTIVE AUDIENCE OF 3.5 BILLION PEOPLE ARE FLOCKING TO A PLATFORM CALLED ESCAPEX, WHICH GIVES THEM THEIR OWN APPS. IT’S PART OF THE NEXT WAVE OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOCUSED ON SMALLER, MORE PRIVATE GROUPS. By Katharine Schwab
Last week, actor Jeremy Renner posted a time-lapse video of himself trying on different outfits in front of the mirror. “Suiting up for the Avengers press tour,” he wrote. “What are you wearing?” More than 2,000 people commented on the post (some offered outfit tips, but many agreed he looked better without a shirt). Others said good luck, or jovially wished everyone a happy Friday.
tiny, independent community that’s centered on a single celeb. Each app is like a mini, private Instagram for uberfans, who also use the apps to share their other obsessions, their achievements, and their struggles.
None of this was happening on Instagram, but on Renner’s own app, where his most die-hard fans gather to gush about their favorite actor. They do more than just comment on Renner’s photos, videos, and give-away contests. They also post their own images in a “fan feed”–a quick scroll reveals a woman’s before-and-after haircut, a call for recommendations for a trip to L.A., and a shot of tomato soup and parmesan-crusted chicken with bacon, which a fan had made from another fan’s cookbook.
Today, Instagram is one of a few platforms that dominate people’s interactions with celebrities. But some of these influencers are looking for something more: They want to own their photos and their audiences. They want freedom from the algorithms that decide who sees their content. And they want to stop relying on sponsored content and ad posts. Meanwhile, users have similar concerns. Some, fed up with the constant privacy violations and lack of transparency on the part of platforms, are looking away from the news feed and toward the refuge of messaging, small groups, and even separate apps like Renner’s and Rose’s. They all offer an antidote to Big Social Media.
What does any of this have to do with Renner? Everything and nothing. Renner’s app–along with many others from celebrities like Amber Rose, model Alessandra Ambrosio, and musician Bob Marley’s estate–is designed to create a
The company Escapex, which makes these apps, offers exactly that. Each app is a decentralized social media platform that acts like Instagram but is fully controlled by the influencer, offering them an unique insurance policy: When Instagram’s
brandknewmag.com
57
popularity inevitably shifts, they’ll still have their own safe haven for their biggest fans to congregate–and pay them. And for fans, they get more than an intimate glimpse at their chosen celeb; they also get a community of people who feel the same way.
$4.99 a month to get more personal, exclusive content from you as well as the chance to interact with you more directly, you could be making about $85,000 a year, just from an app. (It’s free for influencers to sign up for Escapex’s platform, and then the company takes a 30% cut of whatever they make.) The company offers celebrities the ability to make money directly from their fans, cutting advertisers out of the equation. “When you’re serving advertisers or brands, you have to be very careful and moderate authenticity to fit the brand image,” says Sephi Shapira, the founder and CEO of Escapex. “When generating [content] for your fans, you don’t serve any other master. You’re funded by them directly.”
[Photos: Alex Iby, Azamat Zhanisov, averie woodard, Joe Robles, sergio souza, Oladimeji Odunsi, Jessica Felicio, Alex Perez, Brooke Cagle, Angello Lopez, Allef Vinicius, Atikh Bana, ramadani Achmad via Unsplash]
CONNECTING CELEBS WITH THEIR FANS– FOR A SMALL MONTHLY FEE
Right now, influencers are dependent on centralized social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, which not only hold all the data about their followers but also control who sees what they post through opaque algorithms. But Escapex has decided to set up its business model such that its celebrity clients get full control over their apps–and the people who download them. “The [influencers] own the users, they own the content, they own the ramifications of their behavior,” Shapira says.
Escapex, which was founded in 2015 and has raised $18 million in venture funding to date, now hosts the apps of more than 350 celebrities and social media influencers in 18 countries who have a total of 3.5 billion followers, many of whom are looking for a new way to turn their popularity online into cash that doesn’t involve hawking other people’s goods. According to Escapex, the combined 350+ apps have over 20 million users, who on average open an Escapex app four times a day. In the United States, 12% of users who install an Escapex app subscribe, paying an average of $6 per month to access their favorite influencer’s content. For influencers, there’s a clear draw: It’s an easy way to monetize an audience that doesn’t require you to sacrifice whatever version of “authenticity” you’re selling by landing sponsorship deals with brands. Let’s say you’re an influencer or celebrity with 2 million followers on Instagram. The vast majority of those people might be somewhat interested in you, given the fact that they follow you, but there’s a small percentage–it might be as small as .1% of your following–that is really obsessed with you. If you can advertise your own subscription-based app, and convince these superfans to come download it and pay
[Screenshot: Escapex]
For Abigail Ratchford, a glam model who posts sexy images of herself on Instagram to an audience of 8.9 million, this control has freed her up to share as much content as she wants with her biggest fans, who pay $9.99 a month for the privilege of accessing it, without living in fear of the Instagram algorithm. “It’s a home base now where I can post a lot of stuff,” she says. “With Instagram, you don’t want to post too much. On the app you can post all day long and people love it.” Within two months of launching her app, Ratchford
accumulated 100,000 downloads on iOS and Android and is growing at a rate of 13,000 downloads a week. Ratchford, along with other Escapex influencers like Renner, Rose, and Ambrosio, are all making more than $35,000 per month.
FREEDOM FROM THE ALGORITHM Having an app also gives the influencer more control over moderation–whether that’s kicking out harassers or being freed from Instagram’s community guidelines. Shapira points to Amber Rose, who in 2017 posted a nude photo on Instagram to promote the protest march SlutWalk. Instagram quickly took the post down. Her decision to use her naked image to promote female empowerment crossed a line for Instagram, but doesn’t bother Escapex–since each app is siloed, what Rose chooses to share with her audience doesn’t impact any other celebrities that use the platform. Shapira says that 50% of the company’s clients have either been warned, delisted, or had content deleted by a social network. Model and influencer Kourtney Reppert, who has 1.5 million Instagram followers and whose Escapex app is launching next week, thinks that having an app will give her full control over her audience in a way she’s never known before. Celebs using Escapex apps own the app itself as well as all the rights to their images. “I think for me it has everything to do with visualizing what’s the next phase in social media in the future,” she says. “If social media has grown a massive amount in such a short amount of time, I can only imagine . . . if I was able to let all my fans get access to an app where I have full control, and I also own the images. I’m not posting on a third party. I have more accessibility to be more personal with my fans. And I personally would be more comfortable being more open about my real life and sharing real things.”
to pass advertising jobs she couldn’t do to other similar influencers. But then everything changed. (The company shuttered in 2013.) As Facebook’s News Feed evolved, only some of her followers would see what she would post–for her to reach more of her own followers, Reppert says she had to pay Facebook to share her own posts. Since then, she’s pivoted to Instagram, where she still suffers from the same problem. She feels like Instagram has deliberately given its influencers less ability to reach their audience because it wants to make its own advertising platform more valuable to brands. These personal apps aren’t just for influencers. Osric Chau, an actor who is best known for his role in the cult TV show Supernatural, has 624,000 followers on Instagram and launched his app in January 2018. He uses it for a very different purpose: to connect with his fans more intimately. While he charges $4.99 for a subscription, most of his content is unlocked and he says he has no idea how many subscribers he has–purposefully so. Only a few videos in which he talks about his innermost thoughts and feelings are locked. “It’s for my inner circle, stuff I’d say to my friends in person only,” he says. “It’s like my own house in a weird way. It feels like the safe haven for me.” But Chau’s official app is more than his personal diary–it’s also about actually getting to know his fans. He can’t develop relationships with all 624,000 Instagram followers, but because there are far fewer people on his app, Chau makes more of an effort to read people’s comments and respond. “It’s emotionally and physically impossible to know that many people,” he says. “On this app, it’s been nice to have familiarity. I can get to know some people and hear their stories.”
Her app will also give Reppert control over harassment, which is something that’s dogged her since starting a Facebook fan page many years ago. In 2012, Reppert worked with the FBI to apprehend a stalker that had harassed her with death threats. “If someone is on my app and they’re harassing me and saying things that are inappropriate, I can immediately remove them,” she says. “I have more accessibility in finding out who this individual is, when before I had to go through an Instagram or a Facebook and have them help me figure it out.” Moderation doesn’t always work out well–Jeremy Renner’s fans have protested his app over a mixture of what some fans perceived as an unfair contest, an app update that some believed served to wipe out negative comments, and content moderation practices that blocked anyone who said something nasty. (One user called his app a “totalitarian regime” as a result.) But for celebs, having their own app goes beyond control over their users and what they want to post. Fundamentally, there is a conflict of interest between people with large followings and the platform they’re posting on: Both are competing for the same advertising dollars. Companies can choose to advertise with an influencer, or they can advertise with Instagram. For Reppert, that’s one of the primary reasons she decided to launch her own app. Reppert starting sharing her modeling photos on Facebook back before the company had created an algorithm for its News Feed, and she built an audience so successfully that she started her own marketing agency, Bombshell Marketing,
[Screenshot: courtesy Enna]
His app has also created a community of fans. “My favorite thing about this app is creating the platform where people can get to know each other,” he says. “A lot of people in fandoms feel like they’re alone, and part of celebrating their fandom is about meeting everyone who has that same interest.”
THE NEW CULTURE OF SUPERFANDOM So why are people downloading these apps in the first place?
Why pay models like Ratchford and Reppert or actors like Chau for the privilege of seeing more of their content? Enna, a 30-year-old textile engineer who lives in Germany, has been a fan of Chau since he was on Supernatural, and she downloaded and subscribed to his app shortly after he announced it. “I gave in and was like, I want all of it,” she says. “Sometimes he upload videos just for subscribers, and I didn’t want to feel like I’m missing out on something.” One key feature of Escapex apps is that fans like Enna earn points based on how much they engage with the app, including the fan feed (points are also available for purchase). Then, they can use those points to boost their comment on one of Chau’s posts so that he’s guaranteed to see it. According to Shapira, that’s the primary way that celebs like Jeremy Renner monetize their apps–all the content is free, but people pay to be seen.
[Screenshot: courtesy Enna]
Enna says that while she treasures all her interactions with Chau, she also loves the fan community. She’s posted about the challenges of finding a job after getting her PhD. She remembers another fan who had cancer when the app first launched, and the entire community banded together to support her. “I joined the community for Osric and I got a family,” Enna says.
[Screenshot: Escapex]
As Baym points out, musicians have tried to create platforms for their fans for decades. Musician Kristin Hersh, who was the lead singer of the band Throwing Muses in the 1980s and ’90s before branching off into a solo career, created a website where fans could subscribe and receive exclusive content, as well as email other fans. Baym says that the band created the site after they discovered their fan forum on America Online–and presciently realized that the platform could disappear. “They got to know all the people in that fan group who were already there doing their own thing, and worked with them to say, what would it be to be on a site that we controlled instead of AOL, and what would make it worth it to you to make it worth subscribing?” she says. To this day, much of Hersh’s career is still supported by a similar subscription model derived from this late-’90s fan site. David Bowie did the same thing with BowieNet, in which he offered internet access tied to his website as well as a BowieNet email address. Musician Ryan Leslie runs an app called Superphone, where superfans can directly message him (and others who sign up for the service).
She’s also made IRL friends through the app: One woman recognized her from her profile picture at a Supernatural convention and they became fast friends. The two ended up meeting Chau at a music festival in 2018 and told him their story. It’s one of his favorite memories from the app. “I took them out for bubble tea,” Chau says. “It’s a way to make the world seem like more of a smaller place.”
“Fandom is all about community and identity,” Baym explains. “Being a superfan by yourself is a diminished experience. Imagine a huge sports fan who lives in a country where no one follows the sport. It’s part of your identity and connecting with others who share that identity is really important. It’s the major driver of fandom, which is why you see the same processes across all these different celebrities.”
SOCIAL MEDIA IS GOING PRIVATE
Baym sees Escapex’s apps as part of the same impulse. “Are they really paying for selfies, or are they paying for access to the club?” Plus, it’s a way for influencers whose stardom won’t last forever to futureproof themselves. “Most people’s career as a celebrity is going to end if they don’t find a way to keep the fans they have,” she says. “Building those fans connections is a great way to do that.”
Escapex’s success and the rise of these miniature social media networks speak to a larger trend: people’s online communications are becoming more private. “[Audiences’] social media use is moving away from feeds into messaging, into groups, into other kinds of more controlled, smaller spaces,” says Nancy Baym, author of Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection and a principal researcher at Microsoft who studies the ways that fans interact with celebrities–mostly musicians–online. This move toward smaller spaces is evident from popularity of messaging apps, private Facebook Groups, and email newsletters. Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has noticed, and is slowly transitioning the company toward private messaging.
These celebrity-focused apps aren’t for everyone; neither is it likely that every celebrity will create their own mini social media network. However, some celebs and their superfans, these micro-networks are a win-win. With the future of major social networks unclear, going independent on social media is a savvy financial bet. “I would not be surprised at all if there’s a handful of people who are making crazy livings on apps in the future,” Baym says.
Book,
&
Line
Sinker
Subscription Marketing: Strategies for Nurturing Customers in a World of Churn Kindle Edition
My Blogging Secrets: A guide to becoming a pro-blogger Kindle Edition
By Anne Janzer
By Amber McNaught
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.
Want to make a living simply by writing about your life? Here’s how one woman does it... On a sunny day in April, journalist-turned-PR Amber McNaught walked out of her well-paid office job, and started a blog.
This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See
Bigger Than This: How to Turn Any Venture Into an Admired Brand Kindle Edition
By Seth Godin For the first time, Godin offers the core of his marketing wisdom in one compact, accessible, timeless package. This is Marketing shows you how to do work you’re proud of, whether you’re a tech startup founder, a small business owner, or part of a large corporation. No matter what your product or service, this book will help you reframe how it’s presented to the world, in order to meaningfully connect with people who want it.
By Fabian Geyrhalter, Elaine Pofeldt (Editor)
Upstart!: Visual Identities for Start-Ups and New Businesses
What Branding ISN’T: Have more than a logo, make your brand LEGENDARY.
By Gestalten, Anna Sinofzik Upstart! presents fresh branding ideas for entrepreneurs and designers. To stand out in a land of consumerist plenty, the new generation of small business entrepreneurs has learned to set high design standards. Poised between playfulness and professionalism, their holistic visual identity concepts become an integral part of their core business.
The 23 Commandments of Branding: 23 Proven Branding Strategies to Promote Your Business without Going Broke By Jerome Ford The 23 Commandments of branding will show you how to build and grow your brand without going broke.This book gives you proven techniques that my freelance clients pay me for – on retainer every month.In fact, a client who owns a hair boutique in North Carolina is using these techniques to grow her brand...
In “Bigger Than This,” Geyrhalter analyzes brands that are based on commodity products – watches, socks, shoes, fish – yet they quickly turn into beloved brands. He emphasizes the importance of storytelling, encouraging brands to embrace 8 simple traits these brands showcase and offers specific, actionable commandments that any brand can implement – story, belief, cause, heritage, delight, transparency, solidarity and individuality.
By Andrew J Oleson (Author), Natalie Turner (Designer) Branding is essential to the success of your organization, and it involves many things. In this book, we will tell you what branding ISN’T so you can avoid the unwise and costly errors that we’ve seen organizations make. Knowing what NOT to do is just as important as knowing what to do. These principles are time-tested, and, if executed correctly, will guide you to having more than...
The Power of Licensing: Harnessing Brand Equity By Michael Stone As CEO of Beanstalk, a leading, New York Citybased global brand licensing agency and part of the Omnicom Group (NYSE: OMC), author Michael Stone has worked with companies as diverse as HGTV, the Ford Motor Company, the Coca-Cola Company and AT&T to create highly ambitious and successful strategic licensing and brand extension programs for Beanstalk’s clients. At an increasing pace over the past decade, all types of organizations with strong brands...
brandknewmag.com
63
The Ministry of Branding: A Biblical Approach to Brand Building
Beyond Sizzle: The Next Evolution of Branding
By Mike Martin
Award-winning management strategist Dr. Mona Amodeo brings together the best practices of change management, marketing, and communications to give readers an actionable process for creating brands that matterorganizations that are redefining workplaces, reimagining customer experiences, and creating innovative products and services that are building healthier, more sustainable communities in turn, creating a better world for us all.
The Ministry of Branding: A Biblical Approach to Brand Building, is a manual for businesses, ministries and organizations on developing a successful brand, with insight on how God views the practice of branding. Featuring biblical references, detailed processes, steps and activities, the Mike Martin helps even the most novice reader understand the importance of branding and its methods.
By Mona Amodeo
Developing Insights on Branding in the B2B Context: Case Studies from Business Practice
Logo-a-gogo: Branding Pop Culture
By Nikolina Koporcic (Author, Editor), Maria Ivanova-Gongne (Editor), Anna-Greta Nyström (Editor), Jan-Åke Törnroos (Editor)
For more than 20 years, Rian Hughes has been a versatile designer, illustrator and lettering artist working for international clients in the fields of publishing, music, sports, telecommunications, fashion and more. He has specialized in creating logo designs for the comic industry, notably for DC and Marvel products, including Batman and Robin, Batgirl, the X-Men, Captain America, Wolverine, The Spirit, The Invisibles, Shade the Changing Man, and The Atom.
This book presents real life business-to-business (B2B) branding cases. The book deploys a theoretical-practical approach, where theoretical and conceptual frameworks related to key branding topics are supported by empirical case studies. Each case helps to illustrate the framework and discuss its applicability in practice.
Growth Hacker Marketing By Ryan Holiday This book points out that many of the megabrands of today haven’t spent much of anything on traditional marketing. Instead, they figure out how to reach customers who “sell” other customers on using the product. While I’m not certain that the techniques Holiday espouses will work in every (or even many) business situations, the book is worth reading simply to understand how companies like Dropbox and Twitter suddenly burst out of nowhere.
By Rian Hughes, Grant Morrison (Foreword)
Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America’s Eyeballs By Gina Keating Journalist Gina Keating recounts the fast-paced drama of the company’s turbulent rise to the top and its attempt to invent two new kinds of business. First it engaged in a grueling war against videostore behemoth Blockbuster, transforming movie rental forever. Then it jumped into an even bigger battle for online video streaming against Google, Hulu, Amazon, and the big cable companies.
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy
By Richard H. Thaler
By Micah Zenko
Nobel laureate Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.
Red teaming. It is a practice as old as the Devil’s Advocate, the eleventh-century Vatican official charged with discrediting candidates for sainthood. Today, red teams-comprised primarily of fearless skeptics and those assuming the role of saboteurs who seek to better understand the interests, intentions, and capabilities of institutions or potential competitors-are used widely in both the public and private sector.