BrandKnew November 2022

Brand Knew is published by

Brand Consultancy | Advertising | PR | Publishing

Digital Media | Film Academy

For Advertising Enquiries: engage@groupisd.com or call + 050 6254340

All Copyright of the content in this issue rests fully & comprehensively with the respective contributors and/or media platforms at all times, as the case may be. www.brandknew.groupisd.com www.groupisd.com

Dear friends:

As we head into the tail end of the year, more tales that will make this a November to remember.

We bring to the fore the Top 5 Trends for Marketing. And at a time like this, it is really good food for thought. Innovation as a concept is used very loosely at a lot of times- here we talk in this issue about the Secret to Successful Innovation. The debate continues and this time we go deeper- Data V Humans! The creator economy is buzzing and we feature how it is empowering marketers. Brand purpose has been the flavour of the season for quite a while now- in this edition we talk about how to make that a true two way street. We also bring on the table ‘ Amazion’s device strategy ‘, be it from Echo to Astro. Understand more here. We clear the cobwebs surrounding Web3.0 and offer a distilled perspective in this issue. Third party cookies are on the way out and we feature what’s in store key strategies in store for advertisers. There is ample more to soak in and I would leave you to do just that.

Till the next, my very best!

Suresh Dinakaran

@ISDGlobalDubai

linkd.in/1dsjYaW isdbranding isdglobaldubai

@Brandknewmag bit.ly/1h95tgO suresh@groupisd.com

Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran

Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Chief Strategy Director: Rishi Mohan Awessibilitarian: Sreekar Bharadwaj Business Growth Architect: Tanseem Ara Chief Country Man, India: Rohit Unni Brand Trends and Research Architect: Meeta Pendse Revenue Growth Architect: Ritu Dey Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Performance Marketing Architect: Suresh Babu Technology & Web Enabler: Vyanky Charakpalli Social Media Outreach: Pooja Chhabda SEO Advocate: Santhosh Rakonda

Top 5 trends for the future of marketing

By Michaela Goss

Trends for the future of marketing prioritize meeting customers where they are -- primarily, on their phones -- and embracing innovative technologies, such as nonfungible tokens.

Speakers at HubSpot’s Inbound 2022 user conference in Boston highlighted key strategies and technologies they believe will shape the future of marketing. As strategies such as conversational marketing and social media optimization have become more popular, they emphasize marketers’ goals to connect communities and systems that became disconnected throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Explore five trends that will affect the future of marketing.

1. Conversational marketing

People carry their phones everywhere, so the easiest place for marketers to find them is on mobile -- whether through

messaging or other mobile apps.

The session “Conversational Marketing: Is This the End of Mobile Apps?” explored conversational marketing, a practice that prioritizes one-on-one conversations with customers to enable more personalization in customer interactions.

Griffin LaFleur, a senior marketing operations manager at Swing Education, said his conversational marketing channel of choice is live chat, as it can easily facilitate a two-way communication stream. This type of communication helps customers feel a human-to-human connection, which LaFleur said he finds difficult in marketing’s traditional one-to-many approach.

“If you sell to various personas, and you know that a certain persona is coming in … you serve up a different experience --

one that’s more tailored and catered toward them,” LaFleur said in an interview. “So, when we’re thinking about how we’re going to continue to excel in marketing, it’s adopting other channels.”

To get started with a conversational marketing strategy, marketers can pick a simple use case -- like loyalty program communications or newsletters -- to see how customers respond. If it’s successful, marketers can dip their toes into more use cases and channels, including social media.

2. Social media optimization

If people aren’t texting on their phones, they’re likely scrolling through, searching on and engaging with social media platforms. Yet the way people search organically has begun to change, LaFleur said, so marketing teams should start to optimize social media content as much as they focus on search engine optimization (SEO) for other content.

Social media offers real-time information, results and community building, which has led audiences to expect and desire more personal connections with brands.

“There is an attachment to brands for a lot of people. … We can put out stuff that appeals to potential clients and current clients, but for brands like ours, social media should be the heartbeat of your culture,” said Lauren Wiggins, a corporate communications manager in the steel industry, in an interview. “You should be able to showcase your culture and really use social media to connect people.”

SEO can help marketers create content that people can easily find, but it can’t build communities. That trait and its emotional connections are unique to social media, and these communities are the bedrock of online culture, said Kudzi Chikumbu, TikTok’s global head of creator marketing, in the session “What We Owe the Creators of Culture.” If marketers invest more time in social media, they are more likely to connect with these communities and keep up with online trends.

3. Emotional connections

Whether people scroll Twitter or watch TV, ads interrupt their experiences. This strategy is so common that many people have learned to filter them out over time. Now, customers want more personalized experiences and to feel connected to brands they engage with.

The session “Ignite Your Brand With Empowerment Over Interruptions” highlighted the power of emotional connections and how empowering and creating personal connections with customers can enable better results.

Marketers like Wiggins, who primarily interact with customers through social media, can meaningfully engage with them using empathy -- especially if the customer is unhappy.

Wiggins said customers frequently complain on social media, and they’re often the person who has to respond. In replies, Wiggins would apologize, empathize and aim to correct the issue, which often received positive customer responses.

“At the core of all of that is just being a human and [having]

empathy,” Wiggins said. “If you’re a marketer and you don’t have those things, if you don’t prioritize those things, then you’re doing it wrong.”

To facilitate these emotional connections, marketers also need to build trust with customers. Trust requires transparency, which means an open dialogue with customers about potential challenges and sticking to the brand’s values. Trust also requires consistency across channels and over time, meaning all content and campaigns should align with the brand’s core values.

4. Hybrid experience

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have forced most experiences to support both physical and digital elements.

The conversational marketing session highlighted the importance of connecting in-person and digital brand experiences to remain consistent and authentic with customers. Yet marketers like LaFleur wonder how to digitally capture in-person event engagement and ensure customers that receive physical mail can still reach company websites.

“[Make] sure you’re looking at your overall marketing strategies and how you can blend offline with online experiences,” LaFleur said. “But also make sure you can capture data digitally from offline experiences, as well.”

Brands don’t solely compete with competitors; they compete against themselves, too. If customers enjoy their online experiences with a brand more than the in-person experiences, this inconsistency can negatively affect their perceptions of the brand. However, if people can seamlessly search for a product on a brand website, find the product’s in-store location and purchase it that day in-person, they will likely feel more connected to the brand as they have some ownership over their experiences.

5. Web3

While Web3 still remains on the horizon, marketers can begin to learn about it and its features to prepare their strategies for the future, which may include nonfungible tokens (NFTs).

The session “What’s Next: Connecting the Dots in Web3” helped attendees understand what differentiates Web3 from its predecessors and ways brands can connect with customers in this new era of the web.

NFTs, for example, can open the door to Web3 for the general public. Additionally, as NFTs are still in their infancy, people who own them can easily build close-knit communities. If marketers and brands help build and support these groups over time, they can fuel customer loyalty as they work on their Web3 strategies.

However, Web3 and the metaverse aren’t areas many marketers focus on currently, as this new era continues to develop.

“I think everybody has their own idea of what it would become or what it could become,” LaFleur said. “But how do you build, how do you get there and how do you exchange funds? That’s still growing.”

What’s the Secret to Successful Innovation?

By David Schonthal

Henry Ford once said, “If I’d ask customers what they wanted, they would’ve told me a faster horse.”

Henry Ford once said, “If I’d ask customers what they wanted, they would’ve told me a faster horse.”

Most people in the early 20th century would not have been able to envision a motorized vehicle replacing horse-drawn buggies. But they definitely knew they wanted to get from

their homes to the store faster.

I have spent the entirety of my career (as an entrepreneur, designer, venture capitalist, and business-school professor) focusing on how to ensure that innovative ideas successfully gain traction in the market. One of the biggest lessons I have

learned in my experience working with companies of all sizes—including my own—is that most successful innovations speak directly to the progress consumers want to make, even when people can’t tell you that themselves.

As an innovator, then, your job is to reframe the product/ service-creation process as understanding the progress people want to make and then helping them do that in a more effective, differentiated way than what’s already out there.

The Three Dimensions of Progress

When people look to improve something in their lives, they’re usually thinking about three specific dimensions: functional, social, and emotional.

The functional dimension is about getting something done faster or better, as in the car-versus-buggy example above. The social component is how a given product makes us appear to others, such as wearing specific clothing brands. The emotional dimension is about how a given purchase makes us feel about ourselves.

People “hire” a product to serve them on all three dimensions. Consider why someone might pursue an MBA at a top business school (like Kellogg, where I teach). Functionally, the degree will provide learning in areas they may need, such as finance or operations, which will help them progress in their careers, land a new job, or make a higher salary. Socially, earning a reputable MBA can signal to others that the degree holder is competent, capable, and intelligent.

The one dimension that tends to be overlooked is emotional value. In this case, a top MBA endows the graduate with a sense of accomplishment and, more importantly, security regarding their professional future. That sense of security is highly valued—especially in times of uncertainty and economic contraction, such as the one we find ourselves in now.

These three dimensions of value apply to purchases as large as a house or as small as a pack of gum. Thus, these value sources must be understood to create highly appealing and enduring products and services.

But that’s easier said than done.

Tap into the Unspoken

The problem that Ford alludes to is that most people can’t articulate what type of product they want or convey the specific kind of progress they want to make in their lives. To get at true consumer needs—especially the social and emotional ones—you have to take a more indirect route.

When people look to improve something in their lives, they’re usually thinking about three specific dimensions: functional, social, and emotional.

— David Schonthal

1. Focus on the past, not the future.

It’s tempting to ask people about the future—what they want to do or would do. Resist that impulse. It’s almost impossible for someone to tell you with certainty what they will do a month from now, but they can tell you with accuracy what they did a month ago. What products and services did they purchase to make the progress they were seeking in the past? How did they make those decisions? What were their moments of struggle? What got them past their concerns? Such questions will provide key clues to the kinds of solutions needed and how to communicate their value to buyers.

2. Exchange breadth for depth.

Go deep. Interview people for an hour each and get into as many of the “whys” behind their stories and answers as you can. The true social and emotional value people seek is not in what they choose to do (or not do) but in why they do it. And we’re not talking about large numbers here. A good researcher can learn a ton from interviewing 10–12 people for 60 minutes each. Moreover, from a group of this size, actionable patterns will begin to emerge. The key is unpacking their answers to get to the underlying meaning behind them, as below.

Them: “I’m just looking for a solution that’s more convenient than the one I’m using.”

You: “What exactly do you mean when you say ‘convenient’? Why does the current solution fall short?”

3. Reduce friction and stop adding fuel.

Innovators often spend too much time thinking about their nifty solution and not enough time about the audience they are hoping to impact. Humans will always favor what they are familiar with over something unknown (which, by definition, an innovation is). As you design new offers, make sure you also think hard about how to reduce obstacles to consumers adopting them. These frictions are often less about your new offer than about the concerns and worries of the customer.

To sharpen that point even further, when someone does not eagerly adopt our new product or service, our instinct as entrepreneurs and innovators is that we have not marketed it correctly, priced it appropriately, or included the right set of features. If we can just find the right mixture of these “fuels,” we believe, people will eventually say “yes.” Instead, aim to spend more time forecasting and removing the sources of functional, social, and emotional friction that might stand in the way of those you’re selling to.

In sum, the secret of successful innovation is focusing more on the progress people seek to achieve than on the product that gets them there. Customers can’t always tell you what they want, but they can most certainly tell you what they are hoping to accomplish. This is much easier to do when we pay attention to functional, social, and emotional value, understand the “why” behind the “what,” and reduce the friction that almost always stands in the way of adoption.

David Schonthal is an award-winning Professor of Strategy, Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management where he teaches courses on new venture creation, design thinking, healthcare innovation and creativity.

Digital Empathy: Can Virtual Interactions Create Meaningful Connections?

By DieuCam Nguyen and Emily Poon

As the cookie crumbles, three strategies for advertisers to thrive

By Kabir Ahuja

Before the advent of the internet, advertising was a rather haphazard affair. Brands sent an abundance of messages and ads into the world, hoping that a few would find their intended targets. The system worked, but it was wasteful. Then the game changed. Web-based cookies and other personal identifiers enabled companies to track people online and target their advertising to specific kinds of users. But now third-party cookies are on their way out, and the game is about to change again.

How can advertisers prepare for this new reality? Building on recent McKinsey research into the challenges facing advertisers, we have developed three strategies that will help advertising brands thrive. Brands that leverage their own customer touchpoints, share data with other companies, and experiment with targeting consumers based on context as well as interests will position themselves for higher growth and more customer acquisition.

The cookie crumbles

“Before cookies, the web was essentially private. After cookies, the web becomes a space capable of extraordinary monitoring,” said Lawrence Lessig 20 years ago.1

At the time, Lessig, a leading legal scholar and former director of the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, was a pioneer, if not a prophet. Today, privacy protection is one of the megatrends shaping the evolution of the web. In a recent McKinsey survey, 41 percent of consumers said they don’t want advertisers to use tracking cookies. In 2018, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposed strict privacy and security measures, and many more countries have introduced similar regulations since then. While these developments are welcome to many consumers, they inhibit companies’ efforts to measure—and maximize—their return on investment in advertising. Advertisers have long relied on cookies to track consumers

across the open web, displaying targeted ads based on a user’s browsing history. But now, cookies are heading toward obsolescence. Starting in mid-2023, Google’s Chrome browser is expected to block third-party cookies, which are already blocked in Safari and Firefox (see sidebar “Glossary”). Because Chrome is the leading browser in large parts of the world—its market share in Europe exceeds 60 percent—Google’s expected cookie policy will effectively put an end to cookie-based advertising.2

Even more challenging for advertisers is that other tracking methods are also coming under pressure. In the mobile-app space, Apple already requires app providers to get explicit permission from consumers before tracking them through device identifiers as part of its app-tracking-transparency (ATT) framework.3 Initial observations suggest that only around 46 percent of consumers will agree to be tracked, and the percentage could be even lower in countries in which users are particularly concerned about privacy.4 In practice, this means that app providers will be unable to track the majority of users based on device identifiers across the Apple ecosystem. Notably, both Google and Apple have said that they will neither create nor support workarounds, such as probabilistic fingerprinting, to build user-level profiles in their ecosystems.

The path forward for advertisers

Most observers believe that in the short term, the phasing out of third-party cookies and device identifiers will have a detrimental effect on advertising efficiency and thus on advertising ROI. The ban is particularly challenging for brand marketers in sectors that are removed from the customer transaction, such as consumer packaged goods, automotive, and pharmaceuticals.

That said, advertisers have several opportunities to balance the precision of targeting and impact measurement with the

privacy of consumers. In general, increasing transparency and providing value in exchange for data will be winning strategies, because many users don’t mind personalized advertising as long as they are not kept in the dark or deceived about the mechanisms that drive it. This has the positive and important side effect of building consumer trust in the respective brand.

As third-party cookies and device identifiers become obsolete, advertisers that pursue the following three strategies will gain an advantage:

use their own consumer touchpoints to collect first-party data create partnerships to leverage second-party data experiment with contextual advertising, which displays ads based on the content a user is viewing, and explore the evolution of interest-based advertising, which targets consumers based on their recent top categories of interest

Advertisers will also need to rethink how they approach measurement and attribution—the process of assessing the contribution of the advertising channels that lead customers to their website or app—given that Google’s cookie ban, Apple’s app-tracking-transparency policy, and evolving privacy-protection regulation will render some existing measurement and attribution methods obsolete (see sidebar “The future of advertising attribution”).

Use brand’s consumer touchpoints to collect first-party data

Because it is increasingly difficult to track users across the open web, brands should intensify their efforts to collect data at the consumer touchpoints they control, such as their own websites and apps, and use analytics to fill in the blanks where their data sets are incomplete.

Data that are collected passively—without the user’s direct participation but with the user’s consent—are known as first-party data. They include such information as browsing behavior, content consumption, location, device, and time of day.

While this information is valuable, it isn’t enough to understand the complete customer journey and support the development of granular user profiles, let alone customized content. To really understand to whom they are talking, companies need information about a user’s intentions, preferences, and lifestyle. A powerful way to convince users to identify themselves and share this kind of information (known as zeroparty data) is to give them something valuable in exchange. Examples include personalized product recommendations, free samples, coupons for discounts, extended warranties, and exclusive or early access to new products.

Westwing, an online-only furniture retailer based in Germany, invests the lion’s share of its marketing budget in content creation, often in collaboration with social media influencers. The resulting stories about home makeovers and interior-decorating hacks are not only entertaining but also closely tied to the company’s products. Westwing says that content-driven user engagement generates much deeper bonds and a higher return on marketing investment than

paid advertising.5

In a similar vein, the consumer-review website Yelp asks registered users for details about their dining habits to drive the relevance of restaurant recommendations. If you are registered as a vegan, restaurants offering vegan meals will feature more prominently in your search results, and you’ll see sponsored ads that match your preferences. Likewise, Procter & Gamble’s Tide brand, which makes cleaning products, posts simple surveys on its website. Users who answer three or four questions about how they do laundry are rewarded with a recommendation for the most suitable product.

The fuel that drives this kind of exchange is clarity of the value exchange, how embedded it is in the native customer experience, transparency on data storage and use, including user control, and brand trust. Brands should be open about the data they seek to collect and the benefits they will provide in return. They should also make it easy for users to understand how their information is stored, what the company is doing to keep it secure, and how a user’s consent can be changed or revoked.

Leading companies use customer data platforms (CDPs) to integrate data from multiple first-, second-, and permissible third-party sources—such as traditional customer-relationshipmanagement (CRM) systems, websites, and apps—to build unified, real-time profiles of anonymous and known users and the data-usage rights that each has granted.6 Based on this integrated platform, brands can offer a personalized user experience and targeted advertising while protecting the privacy of their users. When a user opts into (or out of) a specific service, such as push alerts for exclusive sales or special offers, this preference will automatically be reflected in companies’ outbound marketing campaign tools.

Create partnerships to leverage second-party data While first-party data are a great starting point for advertising in the postcookie era, they are not enough to enable state-ofthe-art targeting and attribution. “Unless you are Facebook, Apple, or Amazon, even analyzing all your data perfectly will only tell you about a tiny fraction of the world,” says Auren Hoffman, CEO of data company SafeGraph and former CEO of LiveRamp, a leading provider of ad-tech solutions. “The more connected a data set is to other data elements, the more valuable it is.”7 Additionally, first-party data is not sufficient to satisfy a brand’s reach aspirations.

To maximize the value of their own data, advertisers can form partnerships with other companies to exchange data that users have cleared for certain purposes. Typically, marketing data partnerships bring together two companies that are not competitors but pursue complementary interests. For example, a manufacturer of consumer products could partner with an e-commerce retailer to combine browsinghistory data with shopping-cart data. Which products did the user research on the manufacturer’s website? Which products did the user end up buying on the retailer’s? Answers to these questions can inform initiatives to increase the conversion rate and encourage repeat purchases.

Brands are allocating larger shares of their advertising

budgets to online retail media, including retailers’ websites, apps, and other digital properties. In the United States, according to data from eMarketer, 12 percent of digitaladvertising spending in 2020 went to retail media, while European retail media are still in their infancy. In the United Kingdom, for example, only 5 percent of digital-ad spending was allocated to retail media in 2020. European advertisers would do well to ramp up their efforts in this area.

As smart stores take hold, advertisers’ digital partnerships with retailers could even extend to the physical realm.8 For example, a customer who has registered with a brand could receive tailored offers through the retailer’s app while shopping at a smart brick-and-mortar store, informed by the shopper’s customer profile, past purchases, and location in the store. In other cases, advertisers may choose to partner with content providers, such as TV networks or online publishers, to reach users whose attributes match those of their existing customers, such as families with children who are interested in team sports.

A key enabler of safe data sharing is the concept of the data clean room, a construct that resembles a notary’s escrow account. In a data clean room, shared data are typically stored in the cloud by a neutral third party. While neither party has to reveal its data to its partner, both parties can access the shared data to build audience segments and for analyses. Targeting itself is done anonymously; the identity of the targeted user is not revealed to the advertising brand. A data clean room enables advertisers and media owners to expand their relationships in a way that meets privacy regulations without exposing personally identifiable information.

In addition to technologies for local identity resolution, advertisers are exploring so-called persistent identifiers. The Trade Desk, Zeotap, and other players are working to establish universal IDs, anchored by identifiers such as email addresses. Daniel Heer, founder and CEO of Zeotap, says that the “universal ID functions as a master first-party ‘cookie’ but one that is persistent and valid across all datacollection (and activation) channels. This ID can then be used for relevant second- or third-party-data enrichment and activation across a plethora of marketing channels, including the open web.”9 To be GDPR compliant, these solutions will need to ensure that consumers’ privacy choices, including explicit user consent, are respected.

Experiment with contextual advertising, and explore the evolution of interest-based targeting

If you’re working out at the gym, you may be receptive to information about a new protein shake. If you’re at a nightclub, you’re probably interested in discovering new music. And if you’re attending a fashion show, there’s a good chance that you wouldn’t mind hearing about trendy apparel, accessories, and shoes.

Marketers can learn a lot about your interests based on where you hang out, what you’re doing, or what you’re viewing, and they can use that information to send you messages that resonate. This is what contextual targeting and interest-based advertising are all about. Whereas cookie-driven approaches display ads based on a user’s browsing history and inferred interest, contextual advertising is based on the current

content that a user is viewing. Interest-based advertising still relies on data about the websites a user visits, but only to identify broad content topics in which the user is likely to be interested. Based on a visitor’s behavior, selected topics are then made available to the website to help determine which ad to show them.

Contextual advertising. As users grow increasingly wary of tracking, and tech giants limit person-level targeting online and within apps, contextual advertising is emerging as a promising way for brands to reach their target groups. It may seem like a step backward in the evolution of advertising, and it’s been criticized for inefficiency. But it could offer a viable short-term solution for advertisers, because technological advances are increasing the granularity and precision of context classification and ad matching. For example, contextual advertising has traditionally relied on keywords—but keywords often don’t reflect the full context of a web page or an app. New contextual targeting tools that rely on natural language processing and image recognition allow algorithms to grasp the sentiment of pages and apps with unprecedented speed and reliability, enabling marketers to display ads in an environment that is both highly relevant for their potential customers and safe for their brands. As the technology evolves, what at first looks like a step backward sometimes turns out to be a step in a new direction.

Interest-based targeting. A related approach, promoted by Google as an alternative to cookie-based targeting, is interest-based targeting. Google’s most recently proposed concept, Topics, replaces its controversial initial one, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC).10 The idea behind Topics is that the browser learns about users’ interests as they surf the web and shares their top interests with participating websites for advertising purposes. It does so by categorizing the websites a user visits into a limited set of around 350 broad topics, such as hair care or classic cars, excluding any sensitive topics, such as race or sexual orientation. When a user visits a website that supports the Topics API, the browser will choose up to three topics on their device from their most frequent topics of each of the last three weeks and share them with this website. The website and its advertising partners can then use these topics to determine which ads to display.11 Google claims that Topics is more private and offers greater transparency and user control than FLoC and cookie-based targeting, but many specifics of the concept were still unknown at the time of writing.12 The jury is still out on whether Topics will eventually satisfy advertisers, media owners, regulators, watchdogs, and other stakeholders.

The emergence of device-identifier restrictions and the end of third-party cookies are sure to have a highly disruptive impact on the advertising industry—for both advertisers and other players (see sidebar “The impact on other players”). While advertisers have already had to start adapting to privacydriven changes, they should intensify experimentation with viable alternatives to third-party cookies. If they don’t make dramatic changes in their approach to advertising, they will face significantly higher acquisition costs going forward.

Each stakeholder will forge its own path to success, but the governing principle should be to create and sustain consumer relationships that produce a value exchange, while protecting the privacy of users.

Data Vs Humans

By Bob Hoffman’s

Ukraine should have lost its war with Russia by now. The data is very clear, and data doesn’t lie.

The data shows that Russia had overwhelming superiority to Ukraine in virtually every measurable area of military might.

At the beginning of the invasion Russia had about...

- Five times the number of tanks that Ukraine had

- Almost five times the number of active military personnel

- More than ten times the number of fighter planes

- Twelve Black Sea Combat vessels compared to Ukraine’s one

- Over twice as many military reserves

- Over ten times Ukraine’s military budget.

But, as of now, Russia is getting pummeled.

- They have lost almost five times as many tanks as Ukraine

- Combining all types of heavy military equipment (tanks, transport vehicles, airplanes, helicopters, etc) Russia has lost about four times as many units

- More than a third of all equipment lost by the Russians was either abandoned by their forces or captured by the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians are now using that equipment against the Russians

- And, of course, the Russians are getting their asses kicked on the ground every day

There is a point here for the data-obsessed marketing industry. I won’t insult you by spelling it out.No TikTok Account? No Problem. They’re Following You Anyway.

There are so many unknowns about online tracking that it is hard to single out one in particular. But if I had to choose one online mystery that I’d like an answer to it’s TikTok.Here’s what we know:

- TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company headquartered in Beijing.

- China has the most crushing and tyrannical surveillance system the world has ever known.

- TikTok has admitted that data collected in the US is accessible to some employees in China

- There have been credible press reports of close contact and sharing of data assets between US and Chinese teams within ByteDance

- No one in China says “no” to the government.

We have a delicate balancing act. We don’t want to be guilty of hysterical “yellow peril” nonsense, but we do want to know what the hell the Chinese government’s role is in collecting information about us. Is this just one more example of an adtech company abusing personal privacy? Or is it one of the greatest spying operations in history being conducted in broad daylight?

You don’t have to be a Google or Facebook user to have them following your every move. They use tracking pixels they place on other websites that infect you when you visit those websites. Google and Facebook follow you around and collect information about you whether you are a Facebook subscriber, Google user, or not.

BTW, TikTok recently paid a fine of $29 million in the UK for harvesting data from kids under 13. Lovely people these adtech creeps.

Worst Re-Brand in History?

This chart from The Wall Street Journal raises an interesting question. Has there ever been a more disastrous re-brand than Meta?

But the trick has not gone well. Zuckerberg now has two disreputable brands on his hands.

The month before Z-bag announced the re-brand, Facebook had reported year-over-year revenue growth over 40%. Since the announcement the company has lost about 60% of its value.

It’s pretty clear that the Facebook social media platform is in free fall, if not a death spiral. The question is, will betting the farm on the metaverse, whatever the hell that is, bail them out?

As the Journal says, “The former Facebook’s real world will long haunt its virtual one.”

Tim Cook Is Meta-Averse

As you know, Apple and Facebook are mortal enemies. According to The Verge, last week Apple CEO Tim Cook aired his skepticism about Facebook’s metaverse obsession.

“I always think it’s important that people understand what something is... And I’m really not sure the average person can tell you what the metaverse is.”

But the real way you can tell how dicey the whole metaverse thing is is to watch the marketing lemmings dive head first into the deep end. There isn’t a marketing dimwit in the known universe who isn’t finishing every sentence with the word “metaverse.” It’s this year’s crypto-NFT shiny object..

& Stephanie

Spritzer and Stephanie Cartin were pioneers when they started their social media business in 2011. Not just because the medium was relatively new, but also because they were one of the few women-owned startups in the industry. That’s why, today, they use their social media savvy to build a support network that inspires female entrepreneurs of all ages. And with Mastercard’s Digital Doors program, these Citi Small Business clients can further amplify their digital presence. So businesses like Courtney & Stephanie’s can thrive in the digital world while they’re busy impacting the real world. Because their business is much more than the services they provide.

Apple’s Missing As-A-Service Launch And Lessons For Hardware Companies Looking To Make The Move To Subscriptions

By Tien Tzuo

Like many others, I watched Apple’s annual iPhone announcement last week with great expectations. I was hoping, expecting, that the “one more thing” would be the all-inclusive Apple-as-a-Service that I wrote about before.

Sadly, I was disappointed, although I wasn’t the only one. Use your imagination: rather than spending over $1000 on your next phone, your next Macbook, or iMac, you simply paid a monthly fee and always had the latest hardware, services, and all with Apple Care insurance. If this sounds like a good idea, that’s because it is.

This would have been the perfect time to launch Apple-asa-Service. Think about it, if you’re Apple and you already have a diehard fan base that’s going to buy every new device you release, how do you grow from there? You can introduce new products, perhaps the highly rumored Apple Car, but great products simply don’t come along very easily. You can increase prices, but that’s just gatekeeping the number of new customers you can get, especially when people may be worried about the economy. Plus prices are already increasing with inflation. Creating a path for people to access the entire Apple ecosystem for a simple monthly fee surely would increase adoption of the ecosystem overall.

Ultimately, the best reason to offer Apple-as-a-Service should be giving Apple users flexibility, and that should be the goal for any consumer hardware manufacturer today looking to shift to subscriptions. When you pair hardware with services that add value to the user experience, where the maintenance, upgrade and insurance of the hardware is included, and where the subscriber can add and remove features as they please, you get the best of both worlds: “ownership” of the latest and greatest hardware paired with

a usership pass to all the best premium services.

In fact, Apple’s arch rival, Google, is doing exactly this. Their Pixel Pass is in fact, a subscription that gives you a Pixel smartphone of your choice, plus cloud storage, insurance and Google’s premium apps.

Regardless of when Apple finally takes the final plunge, here are four takeaways that any hardware manufacturer should be thinking about today.

Know your customer, break the “sell a product” mindset

A few months ago, I was having breakfast with the founder and CEO of a high-end audio hardware brand in New York City. He demonstrated a companion mobile app that allowed users to change the listening characteristics and noise-cancellation levels. It sounded useful enough. I asked the CEO if the app provided him and his team insight into their consumer’s behavior, such as how their customers use the headphones and different features within the app.

To my surprise, his response was that his company doesn’t know anything about how its users interact with their hardware’s different features. This is a missed opportunity, to truly understand the customer and learn how to drive better outcomes for a device that a customer probably uses everyday.

In the case of the audio company I mentioned, they had no idea which features customers are using the most or even dislike. To the companies and leaders still thinking like this, don’t get caught up designing what you want, rather than what your customer wants. Build the companion apps and

platforms necessary to better understand their needs and requirements. Gaining that insight drives better decisions, which ultimately can help build better products.

Focus on services, not just the hardware

Although Apple-as-a-Service did not come to be, after the event Verizon did announce an “One Unlimited iPhone” service plan, where a Verizon-connected iPhone comes with all Apple One premium subscription services, plus spots for five other users (a $480 yearly value). That’s a step in the right direction, but fundamentally is not any different from what carriers have offered for decades with subsidized pricing, which is essentially a financing plan.

The “full pass experience” idea should include the device, apps, maintenance, and insurance. Here are some solid real-world examples of flexible hardware subscriptions that have successfully launched a “full pass experience”: iRobot Select (robot vacuum, maintenance, supplies, and warranty), the Google Pixel Pass (for Pixel smartphones/paid apps/ device protection), Caterpillar (safety and maintenance of construction vehicles), Fender Play (instrument tuning and lessons), and Sonos Radio HD (lossless hi-fi audio streaming service for connected speakers). Don’t just sell the hardware itself in an old school rental model. Figure out what digital services can be best paired with the hardware.

Make it easy. Difficulty managing subscriptions is unappealing

There’s nothing more cumbersome than a subscription that refuses to let you cancel by hiding the option behind too many steps. Part of what makes usership so appealing is that it’s easy! That thinking shouldn’t change when thinking

about subscription management for the customer. Someone who is interested in Google’s Pixel Pass starts off by picking out a phone, storage, color, and if you have an old phone to trade-in. There’s no contract and you can cancel then send the phone back if you don’t like it. Simple!

If you’re already subscribed to paid Google services while using Pixel Pass, the plan automatically cancels the old subscriptions and even activates the new ones. Afterwards, you’d take your phone to your carrier of choice. A subscription for any hardware should be this simple, if not simpler. Other manufacturers should take notes.

Running Hardware-As-A-Service Must Be An Internal, Not External Effort

This part is nuanced, but also important. If you’re just starting with hardware subscriptions, I would absolutely recommend that the corporate effort to do so is kept inhouse. What you don’t want is a scenario like the Apple Card, which is actually a Goldman-Sachs card. This means creating an internal financial department, which Apple has done recently, so you can fully own the subscriber experience. You can freely iterate without having to rely on external forces, while also learning about the customer and keeping their data safe.

I’m still holding out hope that Apple-as-a-Service will be here one day, perhaps even in time for the holidays. Google has already done this, and Apple isn’t one to let its competitors get away with unique features for very long. Which full pass would you rather have: one to a chocolate factory, or one for your smartphone and all its best apps? I, for one, am excited about subscribing to a full pass for my next device.

How TikTok’s pushy watermark boosted its brand—and hurt Instagram

By Rob Walker

Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture.

As a rule, no business wants to become a distribution tool for its greatest rival.

But that’s what happened to Instagram early in its struggle to be more competitive with TikTok. Reels, its answer to TikTok, was regularly being used to repurpose videos that were not only made for TikTok, but actually included a TikTok “watermark,” consisting of a logo and user name. In effect, Instagram was promoting its competition.

Instagram-parent Meta made moves to fix this problem: It announced that the company had “heard” that “content that is visibly recycled from other apps (i.e. contains logos or watermarks) makes the Reels experience less satisfying,” and was thus making rival-branded videos “less discoverable.”

But the issue persisted and has again resurfaced, thanks to a Wall Street Journal report drawn partly from a recent, leaked internal document, “Creators x Reels State of the Union 2022.” This document noted that “nearly one-third of Reels videos are created on another platform, usually TikTok, and include a watermark or border identifying them as such,” according to The Journal. While Instagram’s algorithm “downranks” these clips, limiting their audience, recycled videos apparently remain a nagging problem. (In some cases, this involves unscrupulous users reposting other creators’ videos.)

Clearly, this just compounds Instagram’s most acute challenge these days: For some time now, it’s been roundly criticized and mocked for morphing into more and more of a shameless copycat. TikTok creators have poked fun at Reels as an also-ran format with clueless users, and famously the Instagram celebrity mega-influencers Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian endorsed a call to “make Instagram Instagram again” and “stop trying to be TikTok.” (Although TikTok has lately been doing some copycatting of its own.) So the effort to encourage original—or at least not blatantly recycled— Reels content has become increasingly crucial to protecting Instagram’s brand.

But it’s worth noting that this isn’t all just about what Instagram has done wrong. It’s also a tribute to TikTok’s success in pushing its own brand. That pushy little watermark—including a simplified version of its logo that wiggles around—stays onscreen throughout any given TikTok by default. This could have been judged annoying, given the often-busy design of many TikToks, but it seems to have been accepted without complaint. And over time, it has surely made the service’s logo one of the most recognizable

in digital culture.

After all, that internal Meta report noted that TikTok users spend a combined 197.8 million hours a day looking at videos on the app (compared to Instagram users’ 17.6 million hours viewing Reels). This reflects TikTok’s rapid growth to more than 1 billion users, with revenue estimated to hit $12 billion this year, thanks to increasing ad sales. TikTok’s watermark sticks around when a clip gets tweeted or embedded elsewhere. That’s quite a bit of exposure to a brand’s mark. And in what could be read as an acknowledgment that watermarks are a vital branding tool in the short-form video wars, YouTube recently announced that YouTube Shorts clips—that’s YouTube’s TikTok/Reels competitor—will be marked with an icon to signal its origin if it gets picked up on another platform.

Notably, the TikTok mark itself hasn’t changed much in the half-dozen years since the company was founded: The logo remains a stylized glyph resembling a music note (reflecting the app’s music-and-lip-sync roots), rendered in white with teal and red trim, lending a 3D-like effect against a black background. “The designer was inspired by a rock concert with a dark hall and a stage lit up,” according to the site of brand identity firm Logaster. The result does what may be a logo’s most important job today: stand out on the home screen of your phone. And the simple but distinct shape remains legible even in tiny, monochrome form in a watermark.

That said, much of the success of any given logo boils down to raw repetition and exposure. And the way that TikTok has executed that task has surely made things harder for Meta. It’s been widely noted that Facebook and Instagram have effectively cloned a rival format before, with what amounted to a version of Snapchat’s “stories” that the services didn’t even bother to rename. Clearly pulling off something like that again is going to be much more of a challenge this time—and those logo-ed watermarks are one reason.

Still, in a sense, TikTok has default-branded not just all the zillions of videos made and distributed through its platform, it branded an entire genre of addictive, short-form clips, in effect. That’s why the first problem Instagram has to avoid is the risk that it gets definitively branded, too—as just another place to see TikToks.

Rob Walker Writes Branded, A Weekly Column About Marketing And Branding. He Also Writes About Design, Business, And Other Subjects. His Newsletter Is The Art Of Noticing.

ADVANCE TOMORROW’S MISSION

As a key partner in government innovation, we blend unparalleled mission understanding with emerging technology to help our clients modernize their organizations and integrate, innovate, and dominate at speed.

See our ideas in action at BoozAllen.com.

Why everyone in the $127 billion sneaker business wants to work with Salehe Bembury

BY MARK WILSON

It’s impossible to walk with Salehe Bembury and not stare at everyone’s feet.

The asphalt is stick-to-your-soles hot as Bembury, one of the most famous shoe designers on the planet, threads his way through the stalls of Pasadena, California’s legendary Rose Bowl Flea Market where, once a month for the last 50 years, designers like Christian Louboutin have gone elbowto-elbow with bargain hunters in search of unique treasures. The thousands of stalls filled with millions of knickknacks feel, in many ways, more oppressive than the blacktop, a seemingly endless array of faded Yu-Ghi-Oh tees and frayed Lakers jerseys, mid-century dining tables, and 35 mm-era Olympus point-and-shoots. But as we walk, a quick glance beneath the card tables reveals a whole other world, a tacit language gestured through our footwear.

Gen Z goths and Gen X home-improvement types rock the same black Vans Old Skools (though in the latter case, they’re bruised and ripped at the seams). The millennialswith-a-job wear stock Air Max 90s and Yeezy 350s. Then there are the hypebeasts who have chosen something quirkier to signal their elevated taste. When we turn a corner, three young men are waiting—wearing, respectively, mintcondition Midnight Navy Nike Dunks, Off-White x Jordan 5 SP “Sails,” and turquoise New Balance “Water Be the Guide” sneakers—and that’s when I realize that this group isn’t here by coincidence.

I’m a professional design writer, and I can’t tell you who designed my car, my couch, my refrigerator, my home. But I do know that the 6-foot-3 man standing next to me created those shaggy-textured New Balances, as does everyone else in that group. They can also tell you that it’s the second most sought-after color combination of his reinterpretation of New Balance’s 2002R shoe, meaning it’ll run you about $300 on a resale site. The most coveted version—Bembury’s

Peace Be the Journey, which captures the golden hues of Antelope Canyon—can fetch more than double that.

Bembury’s fans are the freshest dorks the eye has ever seen. They don’t ask, “Are you Salehe Bembury?!?” before sheepishly requesting a selfie because they already know— recognizing Bembury from his Instagram posts, where he’s grown his follower count from virtually a standing start to more than 541,000 in the past two years, and confirming his celebrity by the shoes he’s wearing. Not just his impossibleto-get Crocs Pollex, but Pollex in the black “Sasquatch” colorway, which at this moment, haven’t yet shipped to the public. (Another tell: Bembury is conspicuously holding a just-purchased, single size 22 high-top that was made for the one person who could wear it, Shaquille O’Neal.)

Bembury, who carries himself with a contemplative presence, perks up, smiles, and leans in for some photos. Only afterward does he confess to me how uncomfortable he is with his new recognizability, how the only time strangers usually come up to you to talk is when they’re drunk on Halloween.

“I low-key became famous during COVID. So it went from, like, no one knows who I was to, oh, lockdown is over, suddenly we can go outside again. And everyone’s like, ‘Salehe?’” Bembury says. “I’ve got a good poker face, but it just throws me because I’m not that far removed from being that person. I remember being at the Rose Bowl four or five years ago and seeing Jeremy Scott!”

Shoes are the only piece of apparel that keep their shape after you take them off—meaning sneakers are as much sculptures as they are clothing. Yet, as far as art goes, they’re relatively affordable, which is why sneakers have become such a democratizing cultural force of our era, driving a $127 billion global market. Constructed of high-

performance materials that stretch around and support various parts of the foot with pinpoint accuracy, sneakers are also featherweight marvels of biomechanical physics. Whereas creatives of the 1960s dreamed of designing a chair, and in the 1990s and 2000s they strove to mold plastic and aluminum around consumer electronics, today they aspire to stamp their name on a sneaker. Bembury is the perfect embodiment of this new kind of celebrity industrial designer, as fluent in fashion as function.

To understand the significance of Bembury’s contributions to footwear, you need to understand how sneakers are made. The bottom of the shoe is generally created from molded foam, for bounce, while the top is crafted from one of countless types of stitched and woven textiles (necessary to conform to your rounded foot). To change a colorway— altering the hue of the fabric upper—is simple for most shoe companies. But to change a silhouette requires going back to the last (the technical term for a foot form) to fashion the upper, while developing new molds for the bottom “outsole.” This is a major undertaking within industrial production because it requires retooling an assembly line and making a four-to-five-figure investment for each individual size that’s offered, simply to build injection molds for each size of outsole. From a financial standpoint, the lazier a sneaker collab, the better for a company—especially because most sneaker collaborators are either fashion designers or celebrities: people who don’t actually know how to build a shoe in the first place.

Bembury has created new molds at Crocs and New Balance over the past few years, and his slate of 2022 collaborations includes other iconic or cult brands such as Vans and Brandblack. But Bembury’s ambition extends far beyond creating new silhouettes across the industry. While most industrial designers are inept when it comes to fashion (consider that Apple, the preeminent industrial-design firm, makes just one fashion-oriented product, the Apple Watch), Bembury is not, allowing him to turn the model of success inside out. Sneakers aren’t his reward for fame in another field but rather his foundation, his muse—from which he’s growing into outdoor gear, home goods, and high fashion. (The first work from his partnership with Moncler is slated for 2023.) “I think I’m always gonna introduce myself as a footwear designer, no matter what I make,” Bembury tells me, reflecting the primacy that sneakers hold in popular culture. “Yeah, there’s something nice about that.”

Slipping on Bembury’s Crocs Pollex is a strange sensation. The undulating, ridged mules, which he designed for the $2 billion–plus footwear brand and initially released in December 2021, feel less like wearing brand-new shoes made overseas than a fresh pair of feet shipped from another planet. The aesthetic invites the world to comment on your feet—and boy, do they comment.

Only when you walk through something forgiving—sand, water, a high-pile carpet—do you realize the degree to which Bembury has put his signature on the shoe. The Pollex’s impression left in your wake clearly resembles a thumbprint. Bembury’s, to be precise, for those in the know. So you’re not just making your own mark on the trails you blaze but you’re spreading Bembury’s. (Technically, the

design is a combination of three of his fingertips, so you cannot hold up a Pollex to unlock Bembury’s iPhone.)

At the same time, the form of the Pollex contains its function. Bembury beefed up the Crocs’s treads to offer a surprising amount of grip, and reinforced its heel and toe with rubber to stand up better to wear. He chose a nylon strap for durability, and redesigned its connection joints like vintage military clips, a nod to the Pollex’s utilitarian function. He even tweaked the ventilation holes to ensure the wearer’s three smaller toes remain covered in the shoe. He went so far as to draw a diagram of the human foot to convince Crocs of this necessity, demonstrating that people’s first two toes are generally the most attractive, whereas the other three are often bent and unkempt.

“I don’t want to design this beautiful thing, and then the most raisin pinky toes are popping out of one of the holes,” he says, laughing, before noting that it’s a serious concern because a single bad photo of the Pollex could turn into a trend-killing meme on Instagram. When I point out that it sounds absurd for a shoe to be designed with the specific function to look good on the internet, Bembury doesn’t budge: “I would argue that you might actually pick up your phone before you look at your feet when you wake up.”

Since Crocs launched, in 2002, it has relied upon the same Danish clog mold—and Bembury was the first external designer offered the license to change it. But what few people realize is that Crocs are a uniquely made shoe: They’re created from molded EVA foam that eschews

stitching and fabrics for cheap and easy injection-molded production. Not until Bembury’s former employer Yeezy debuted the landmark Foam Runner—three years after Bembury left Yeezy and almost 20 years after the original Croc debuted—did anyone take that technology and create a significant new silhouette that would be impossible to produce through other production methods.

Once the industry went to foam, shoes became clay, and no designer has seized on the opportunity created by this revolution more than Bembury. No shoe has encapsulated that fact better than the Pollex, which followed Ye’s streamlined, future-forward design with that biological ripple inspired by his fingerprints. Whereas the Foam Runner counterintuitively popularized Crocs, doubling the company’s revenue since 2019, the Pollex popularized a new wave of organic clogs in 2022.

That is, in fact, the Shaquille O’Neal shoe on top of Bembury’s cubbies. [Photo: Obidigbo Nzeribe]

During the reporting of this story this spring and summer, I watched the impact that the Pollex had on the market. Half a dozen imitative products cropped up from shameless shoe labels—even Crocs itself. “[It’s] like they gave it to an associate designer, and they’re like, ‘Hey, design a Croc that’s inspired by the Pollex, but it doesn’t look like the Pollex,’” says Bembury. “I was like, ‘Holy shit, they just took my design identity and, like, bastardized it.’”

Instead of stewing, Bembury confronted Crocs brand president Michelle Poole directly, later telling a fan who asked about the similarities on Instagram that “I recently spoke to [her]about it privately.” Crocs declined to make an executive available for this article, but a spokesperson offered a statement from Poole praising Bembury for “embracing innovation.” Ultimately, Bembury found peace, recognizing that Crocs is promoting his shoe more than the knockoff.

Bembury was obsessed with objects from an early age. He recalls being besotted by one of the first “As Seen on TV” products: the Penalli Pen Set, a plebeian fountain and ballpoint pen kit bundled with replacement parts that he bought with his own money. “Surely no teenager was buying pens!” Bembury exclaims. “That was some shit that only a designer would do.”

Coming of age in 1990s New York City—Bembury grew up in Tribeca, with a father who was a photographer and mother who, despite working in the corporate world, “really aggressively encouraged individuality and creativity”— sneakers were naturally his favorite. At the time, shoe fanatics existed in a speakeasy streetwear culture, tracking down hidden storefronts that sold deadstock or that served as proto pop-up stores selling limited-edition offerings. But Bembury didn’t just want to collect the shoes; he wanted to make them.

With the aspiration to one day become an anonymous associate designer at Nike, Bembury majored in industrial design at Syracuse University, learning how to create goods for mass production. The first object he ever designed was for his senior thesis: the whimsically named “U-shi Sushi knives.” He lathed the blades by hand, and built a handle that allowed a sushi chef to change its texture, weight, and color.

Bembury was ecstatic when he landed his first job designing shoes at Payless in 2009. He then did stints at the direct-toconsumer brand Greats and Yeezy, before spending three years building Versace’s sneaker business from scratch. Bembury landed the job after reaching out to the company on LinkedIn, and working with just a single assistant, he went on to release dozens of Versace sneakers—including the haute Chain Reaction (2018), which featured a marshmallowy outsole imprinted with a Cuban link chain that GQ lauded as “the waviest sneaker of the year.”

As the world went into pandemic-induced lockdown in 2020, Bembury, like many others, had time to assess his life. He’d always loved hiking, but now he made it a ritual, traversing the hills of Los Angeles, frequently alone, to meditate. He lost 50 pounds, started spending more time chronicling his work on Instagram, and launched his own side project in December 2020, called Spunge, to make clothing, accessories, and even a throw pillow.

His lifestyle changes informed his perspective as a designer who, despite licking the cupcake frosting off the biggest brands in footwear, developed a style that would soon became instantly recognizable for its rugged, organic designs that embrace outdoor activity. “I often joke that if I didn’t hike, I don’t know what my design inspiration would be!” he says.

“So much of the streetwear world has been dominated by ultramasculine figures, and a toughness,” says Brendon Babenzien, who led design at Supreme for more than a decade and is now the creative director for J.Crew’s menswear. That hard edge, in Supreme’s case, was born from the brutal sport of skateboarding, which forces you to endure pain and explore gritty parts of the city to participate. But Bembury designs streetwear that is inspired by nature and function, with products that can, in true made-for-TV fashion, be both clever and self-aware. “His approachability and that whimsy seem to go hand in hand,” Babenzien says.

A majestic mountain man has just stepped out of his nomadic tent on what’s clearly a soundstage. It’s actor Jesse Williams—best known for playing the tightly buzzed Dr. Jackson Avery on Grey’s Anatomy—fit with a foot-long beard and dressed as a spitting image of Bembury himself.

His voice echoes through the space, which has been transformed into a wilderness, complete with moss, rocks, grass, and the sherbet colors of sunset. That’s when YouTube beauty influencer Kim Johansson snaps to attention, hearing the call at her own campsite. She leaps to her feet, holds the back of her shoe to her lips, and in a dramatic gesture, responds by blowing a whistle embedded into the shoe’s heel.

This is the playful commercial for Bembury’s New Balance Yurt sneaker, released in October 2021, and his third collaboration with the $4 billion footwear and apparel company. For Bembury, everything constructed around a design is just as important as the shoe: a campaign, a feeling, a sensibility that, in the case of the Yurt, framed the emergency device as a fanciful expression instead of a disquieting safety tool. “If the work is sound, you can have fun with marketing and just make people laugh,” says Bembury. A year later, fans are still surprising people around them by blowing into the back of their Yurts, and then sharing the videos on Instagram.

Bembury, pictured with the Takashi Murakami-inspired shoes he designed in 2018 for a custom sneaker art installation for ComplexCon [Photo: Obidigbo Nzeribe; groomer: Arlen Jeremy at Celestine Agency]

When Bembury first met with Joe Grondin, New Balance’s senior manager of global collaborations, Bembury impressed him with his distinct approach. “He worked backward,” says Grondin, recalling their work on what became 2020’s Peace Be the Journey. “He had the whole storytelling campaign, in-store merchandising, rough materialization, and color palette—everything about how he wanted to do it,” says Grondin. “But he didn’t have a shoe.”

Bembury went on to serve as the Yurt’s creative director, and he even designed its packaging, creating rich illustrations reminiscent of WPA National Parks posters for the brown paper shoebox—matching the style of his earlier collaborations with New Balance. Bembury makes many of his creative decisions quickly, choosing his colorways in minutes, but the Yurt took longer to develop because it required New Balance to break a mold. In a typical collaboration deal, shoe designers receive a onetime fee, but Bembury has negotiated ongoing revenue shares on several of his releases. “It’d be in poor taste to share numbers,” he says. “Kanye left Nike because they wouldn’t give him royalties, and the fact that I now receive them from multiple companies shows how the space has evolved.”

The Yurt’s whistle was actually inspired by a pair of Nike Vomero running shoes. Bembury owns two pairs of this particular model, a collab with the ready-to-wear luxury brand A-Cold-Wall, which features a large plastic block on the heel. While Bembury was attracted to the design aesthetic, he was bothered that the heel chunk was purely

decorative. As he thought about what he’d do instead, he cut a hole in an old New Balance, stuck in a whistle, and hot glued it in. To pitch it to the New Balance team, he pulled out his homemade shoe in the boardroom, blew into it, and instantly sold the idea.

I mention to Bembury at the Rose Bowl Flea that the Yurt appeared to be a response to Nike’s work. By giving the Vomero purpose, he offered the world’s largest sneaker company a sort of correction.

Bembury is amused by the idea, and a little dismissive. But hours later, as we cruise back to L.A. in his car together, he returns to it.

“I think it’s interesting how you thought . . . you saw [the Yurt]as, like, an edit,” he says.

“Do you not?” I ask.

“But then, could you say that Pollex was an edit of the Foam Runner?” Bembury asks. “Because I thought that was the start of the conversation.”

Nike. The road untraveled. If Bembury always dreamed of working for Nike, why wasn’t he working with the company now? He has been asked this question countless times over the years but only recently had an experience that enabled him to formulate a proper answer.

Months ago, Bembury says he was invited to Nike’s secretive Innovation Kitchen, the design lab run by Tinker Hatfield, the company’s iconic sneaker designer. He was offered an opportunity to work together. The keys to the kingdom? Not quite, he says, but “very attractive keys.” Nike declined to comment on the offer.

Bembury brought his visitor’s pass home with him to keep as a memento. “I framed it in the most obnoxious, ornate gold frame. When I sent it in to get framed, that represented

“It’s a nice, newish element to see in the space.”

“Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurt!”

Science is resilient.

It can overcome diseases, create cures, and, yes, even beat pandemics.

It has the methodology and the rigor to withstand even the most arduous scrutiny.

It keeps asking questions and, until there’s a breakthrough, it isn’t done.

That’s why, when the world needs answers, we turn to science. Because in the end, Science will win. Breakthroughs that change patients’ lives

Learn more at www.pfizer.com

the day that I accomplished the thing I most wanted in my entire life,” he says. “But then, seven weeks later, when I got it back? It represented the day that I accomplished the thing I’ve wanted my entire life that I didn’t take—which almost made [the pass]that much more powerful.” Ultimately, Bembury wanted to preserve his rare role as an auteur in shoe design, and New Balance felt like the better partner for that than Nike.

Remembering that moment, Bembury says, “If anyone ever told me that Nike would offer me attractive keys at 36 years of age and I would tell them no, I would put all my money on the fact that I would say yes. It just shows you that growth is real, and you can gain perspective.”

After Bembury and I leave the Rose Bowl Flea, we head to his cool concrete design studio, hidden inside a faceless building in L.A.’s fashion district. Near the front door is Bembury’s wall of inspiration, which includes cubbies filled with his greatest hits and his collection of pop art objects like Be@rbricks. Bembury doesn’t waste any time in finding a home for the Shaq shoe for which he gleefully paid $75. In one smooth motion, he elbows one piece out of the way to give his white leather trophy a prominent spot.

In a digital world—and yes, Bembury shared his purchase with his Instagram followers in near real time—Shaq’s shoe pops off the screen in the same spirit as Bembury’s designs, urging viewers to touch the textures, don his garments, go outside. His fans actively seek out adventures in which they can feature their Bembury-designed shoes. His New Balances pose in the overhead bin of a plane; his Crocs hang lazily off a kayak near a teacup-size island; his webby hiking shoes for Anta sit on a stump next to a campfire in Quebec’s Opémican National Park. These are only a few examples, all posted within a single 24-hour period during Paris Fashion Week in June, as Bembury fans swarmed the streets near his Crocs pop-up store.

If Bembury is most proud of anything, it’s the actions that his creations inspire. “I guarantee you the products that I have made have positively affected people’s lives,” he says, “in regards to their relationship with nature and provoking [people]to explore the park in their neighborhood.”

That direct connection with his audience drives Bembury to continue betting on himself rather than work full time for anyone else. “I’m just riding a wave, a very unexpected wave,” he says. Spunge, which Bembury started as a kickaround brand to launch whatever he wanted, signifies “the most valuable thing you can be . . . a sponge constantly absorbing.” It quietly became a $4-million-a-year business last year, with virtually no promotion. (Its Instagram feed has accrued 40,000 followers despite having never shared a single post.) As he plans a serious expansion of his label this year, Bembury tells me that he will be opening a second studio just two blocks from his own—a spot he casually calls the Spunge Space before chuckling at his own alliteration and instantly declaring that the official name. He also plans to hire a five-person staff for the first time.

Bembury is loosely modeling Spunge on the late designer Virgil Abloh’s label Off-White. Abloh released his own products, collaborated with powerhouse brands including Nike, Ikea, and Evian, and served as men’s director at Louis Vuitton. Likewise, Bembury leverages Spunge for his shoe collabs: He recently released three new Vans, plus apparel

he designed, on Spunge. As his fans sign up to be notified of the latest drops, he can also introduce them to even more of his work. “There’s an opportunity for people of color in the outdoors, there’s an opportunity for females in the outdoors. That can translate into homeware,” Bembury says. A few weeks before we met, he released a pillow in collaboration with the designer Alex Proba. (It immediately sold out.) For one of his Crocs releases, he created a plant pot inspired by the Pollex design—literally molding clay the way he has fashioned foam for footwear—and distributed it in the friends-and-family packs Crocs sent out to build buzz.

The planter wasn’t on Spunge, but it reveals the blueprint for his thinking. “It’s almost like I want to get my Black Martha Stewart on,” he says. “I want to get my Black REI [on].” But Bembury does not want to be considered a designer with a Black asterisk. “With the types of people that I cast and the aesthetic of everything, you will know it is Black-owned, but that is not going to be the messaging.”

At 7 a.m. on a Monday morning, the day after the Rose Bowl Flea, I wait for Bembury near the trailhead of one of his favorite short hikes in L.A., holding the one thing he told me to bring: a large bottle of water. The sky is gray, and a chilly moisture hangs in the air, taunting the succulents. He hops out of his car and slips on a new pair of hiking shoes he’s about to drop for Brandblack, with a heat-welded upper that reminds me of tree frog toes.

Bembury darts up the path with practiced footing, but he’s still pushing himself, carrying on a conversation while climbing. For the first time, I see him sweat; a bead drops right off his nose into the dirt.

Bembury hikes alone in the service of his health and creativity. He hikes with other people to try to get to the heart of the matter. At this moment, it’s his limited partnerships with Versace and Moncler, which he still feels don’t reflect the attention he deserves from capital-F fashion. “I think what I said [yesterday], about what I’ve accomplished in high fashion single-handedly, and then not really getting any looks in high fashion, is relevant. I don’t like being a race-baiting person or [saying that]if I don’t receive an opportunity, that’s automatically racism. I’m not saying that. But that has been very interesting to me,” he says. “I know other people who have done a shoe in an insignificant situation, and all of a sudden, they’re at Balenciaga! But then me, [at Versace]I literally created a business at a fashion house. I gave them cultural moments. There’s a fucking laundry list of things that I did there—by myself. And for me not to have gotten any calls or opportunities in that space [afterward]? It just makes me raise my eyebrow like 10 heads high.”

Reaching his meditation spot on the summit, Bembury stands overlooking the grand view of L.A. He could be a character in a Salehe Bembury ad, his eyes focused toward his next adventure. Whatever he was sweating has already soaked into the dusty trail. The earth. His sponge.

Mark Wilson is a writer who started Philanthroper.com, a simple way to give back every day. His work has also appeared at Gizmodo, Kotaku, PopMech, PopSci, Esquire, American Photo and Lucky Peach.

Top brands come to SCAD seeking new ideas, inventions, and business strategies for a changing world. SCADpro delivers.

Tap into our talent bank. scad.edu/scadpro

These free tools will give you nice sounds while you work

By Jeremy Caplan

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.

Listening to minimalist music helps me get into a working groove. In this post I’m sharing some of my favorite free listening resources. They don’t require you to register, download or buy anything.

GET INTO A WORK RHYTHM WITH NATURE SOUNDS

• Defonic lets you play nature sounds in a browser tab as background for your work. Listen to rain, birds, fire, forest, or evening crickets. Pick one or create your own combination. Defonic’s Ocean Noise Generator has watery soothing sounds like seagulls and waves. Avoid the distracting seal and whale noise.

• A Soft Murmur also offers a range of sounds. It also lets you set timers and save sound mixes you like. Here’s my waves, wind and white noise mix.

WORK AS IF YOU’RE IN A CAFE, WITHOUT LEAVING YOUR OFFICE

• MyNoise Cafe Restaurant gives you “the noise without the social distraction.” You can even adjust the volume of chatter vs. the amount of kitchen noise.

• Coffitivity lets you pick a morning murmur, lunchtime lounge or other such coffeeshop atmosphere. The site links to research in the Journal of Consumer Research published by Oxford University Press about how “a moderate level of ambient noise is conducive to creative cognition.”

• Coffee Shop Sounds is a YouTube video you play in a background browser tab while you work. It’s one of many from the Nomadic Ambience channel, which also has sounds of Iceland, Japan, and rain.

Work as if you’re in an office, without leaving home

• The Sound of Colleagues lets you aurally simulate a corporate workplace without the commute. It was created in response to the pandemic work-from-home period in Sweden. I like the simple sliders for adjusting the audio mix.

TAKE A BREAK BY MAKING MUSIC

• Paratap gives you a micro musical work break. Just tap the screen to make your own sounds. I find it oddly relaxing and it beats doom-scrolling or refreshing my inbox.

• Sampulator puts 40 different sounds and instruments on the screen, mapped to your keyboard. You can tap keys to mix sounds. Each key you press makes a different sound. Someone made this little song (press play after clicking the link). Think of Ferris Bueller’s sickness keyboard, but without the coughing noises.

• Chrome Music Lab has 14 delightful music games. I like Kandinsky, which lets you paint onscreen, rendering your strokes as musical sounds. Song Maker is also great. You compose a little song just by dragging the mouse across a grid. Brilliantly simple.

SEND SOMEONE A MUSICAL SMILE

• Jazz Keys turns a short message you type into a little melody you can send a friend or colleague. Here’s my message today for you.

• Typatone lets you send someone a little message with bell-like sounds. Here’s a little tune I typed for you. You can also listen to brief musical messages others have recently added. Here’s how the makers describe their idea: “The act of writing has always been an art. Now it can be an act of music. Each letter you type corresponds to a specific musical note putting a new spin to your composition.”

How an empowered creator economy is challenging marketers

By Jessica Deyo

Earlier this month, the D’Amelio family, famous for having a combined 200 million-plus followers on TikTok, announced the launch of D’Amelio Brands, a venture that will build off the family’s experience marketing to consumers to create brands of their own. The family — Marc, Heidi, Charli and Dixie — said they’re slated to launch two brands by the end of this year, with plans to expand in 2023.

“I would be concerned if I were in any category that the D’Amelio’s decide to go after with their new brand development fund,” said Dylan Conroy, chief revenue officer at The Social Standard in an email. “They have a combined audience of 300M viewers across social media, that’s 3x the size of the Super Bowl audience every time they post. Brand building takes time, but they have a massive advantage in any category they launch into.”

The D’Amelio family’s ability to create a business, which has recruited execs including Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, is a far cry from the family’s media presence just a few years ago. The marketing machine that is the D’Amelio’s began with Charli and Dixie, both who joined TikTok in 2019, taking to the Byte Danceowned platform to film dancing tutorials and lip-syncing videos. Over time, they’ve repped brands including Prada, Hollister, Dunkin’ and Amazon, to name a few. Before long, posts that were earning them about $50 rose to six figures a piece, according to details Marc D’Amelio shared with CNBC.

In 2021, Charli and Dixie earned $17.5 million and $10 million in branding and endorsement deals, respectively —

making the two the highest earning TikTok creators in the world. In exchange, brands unlocked key customer insights from their following.

But as the D’Amelio’s lay the groundwork for other influencers to perhaps round out their efforts via namesake enterprises, marketers run the risk of losing access to the data points that so often make influencer marketing worth the steep spend — a total predicted to reach $5 billion, a 28% growth from the year prior, according to Insider Intelligence.

Authenticity sells

There’s no one reason the D’Amelio’s have become so successful, but their ability to relate to and connect with an audience has certainly never hurt. As the sisters and other influencers began taking to social media around the COVID-19 timeframe, a period that begged empathy across the board, influencer marketing took a shift away from standard marketing scripts and instead relied on forming relationships.

Followers and likes have increasingly mattered less, with marketers instead looking at the revenue creators are generating for them. The shift has made it vital for influencers to center in on the interests and desires of their following, and for marketers, it’s meant ditching the script, said Nicolette Trebing, director of influencers and talent partnerships at agency Movers + Shakers.

“What actually resonates much better with audiences is if you come to the influencer, and you’re saying, ‘We

know you’re a fan of our brand, we’d really like to build something with you, here’s our ideas, what do you have in mind?’” Trebing added.

The competitive edge of relatability is clear — 73% of consumers age 18-40 in the U.S. trust product reviews from people who “seem like them,” according to a study by Whalar. Further, 70% of consumers enjoy and feel loyal to creators.

Following the trend, brands are increasingly forming entire collaborations around influencers who have managed to capture the eyes of their target audiences. In March, e.l.f. Cosmetics and Dunkin’ created a themed makeup collection and enlisted creator Mikayla Nogueira, a makeup-obsessed influencer with 13.5 million and 2.4 million followers on TikTok and Instagram, respectively, at the time of publication. A native of Massachusetts, Dunkin’s home state, Nogueira had previously posted about loving the chain on her own. To date, the campaign has made over one billion impressions.

Similarly, Nature Valley enlisted sustainability-driven influencers Stephen “tWitch” Boss and Allison Holker-Boss to help boost their #ReTokForNature challenge, which invited users on TikTok to share their sustainable efforts using the hashtag for a chance to win free back-to-school gear from like-minded brands.

Fueling the creator economy

Despite the buoyancy of the creator economy, the social platforms that support influencer marketing are facing

losses. In the second quarter this year, Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, saw its first-ever revenue downturn. Pinterest also reported in August its slowest growth in two years.

But influencer marketing remains a bright spot: Instagram is set this year to maintain its spot as the top platform for influencer marketing, with marketers set to spend $2.23 billion to activate the tactic on the platform, per estimates by Insider Intelligence shared with Marketing Dive. Behind it is Google’s YouTube at $948 million and $774.8 on TikTok, the platform expected to overtake Facebook this year and YouTube by 2024, per the estimates.

Of the most expensive platforms to activate influencer marketing, Instagram is the front runner, and influencers frequently have lower rates for content produced for TikTok, Conroy said.

“Instagram is still ten times more expensive than TikTok. And there’s no good reason,” Conroy added. “Other than the fact that it’s been around for awhile, it’s people’s aspirational lives versus their more authentic lives — which I think TikTok provides.”

The platforms are changing, even if the consumer wants something different from them.

Lauren Lyons, Senior strategist, PSFK

Despite seemingly holding its own, Instagram has increasingly taken tricks from TikTok’s playbook. Most recently, it received scrutiny for copying TikTok with more video-driven tools, including a change to its algorithm that deluged users’ feeds with videos — a feature it rolled back after criticism. Still, it kept its Reels platform despite the backlash, having recently expanded its time limit to 90 seconds versus 60. The move showcased how brands may be less receptive to consumer commentary as they shift to what is most popular.

“The platforms are changing, even if the consumer wants something different from them,” said Lauren Lyons, senior strategist at research company PSFK. “We’re already so ingrained on that platform that we’re going to change with it, whether we really want to right now or not.”

However, Instagram Reels is no match for TikTok, seemingly. A document recently reviewed by The Wall Street Journal revealed Instagram users cumulatively spending 17.6 million hours each day watching Reels, a vast difference compared to the 197.8 million hours TikTok users are spending on the app per day.

Reels and other shoppable content formats have seen a lean-in by marketers as they pull in influencers to show off products via video and livestream and reach target millennial, Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities.

Brands have seen success using influencers to promote partnerships from their own page, said Trebing, and then the brand will often use their own page to host a live stream tied to an event with a shopping link tied below the live feed, offering both the brand and influencer a chance to expand their reach.

Subsequently, various platforms have taken a few more tips from TikTok and its success with short videos. For example, Facebook in October will shut down its live shopping feature in favor of short-form video, while YouTube added a shortform video offering in June. TikTok also added three new shopping formats in August.

Everybody can be an influencer

No matter the platform, partnering with a major influencer tasks advertisers with restructuring their budgets. To become more cost efficient, they’re increasingly relying on the use of micro- and nano-influencers. Spend on nano-influencers, or those with fewer than 5,000 followers, makes up the fastest growing segment of spend on influencer marketing this year with an increased spend of 220.5%, per Insider Intelligence findings. The research company has previously noted that micro influencers have between 1,000 to 10,000 followers, though others have defined the category as having between 10,000 to 100,000 followers.

Besides being more cost effective than hiring an influencer with a much larger social following, a micro- or nanoinfluencer offers the opportunity to tap into niche audiences with higher odds of actually relating to their small but dedicated following, which is more likely to be family and friends, friends of friends, or people who feel a connection based on shared interests. Marketers may also have more power with such partnerships, Conroy said.

“Micro-influencers tend to be a little bit more willing to give brands the ability to either own the content that they create

from an influencer campaign outright, which is an extremely important asset nowadays,” Conroy added. “If you run a campaign and take $100,000 that would normally go to one influencer, and you pay $1,000 to 100 influencers, you get much more engagement and return on investment.”

In an attempt to strengthen relationships with influencers, some brands are even creating educational resources to help influencers grow their following and learn how to market themselves better. Of course, funding such an effort also unlocks the potential to have readily available influencers who already know the brand.

In its Influencer Marketing Landscape report, PSFK called out Nivea, a lotion brand that created an influencer marketing academy in India for college-aged students, particularly women, looking to get into the career, Lyons said. The program offers educational courses, resources, and a one-year ambassadorship with the brand.

“It’s things like this that are going to get us closer to that true partnership,” she added.

Virtual characters aren’t faultless

As with partnering with any human, influencers can be a liability risk for brands if there’s a misstep or troubled history. In response, some are utilizing virtual influencers to craft the ideal image of what the influencer would look like and what they would support. Fifty-eight percent of people follow at least one virtual influencer, according to a survey by agency The Influencer Marketing Factory. However, only 35% of those surveyed reported having purchased something promoted by one. For instance, Pacsun recently collaborated with top CGI influencer Miquela to support its back-to-school and holiday campaigns.

Virtual influencers may let brands control what consumers see, but they face skepticism for their lack of authenticity. For example, Miquela, created by software company Brud, caught criticism for sharing a vlog about being sexually assaulted, with many arguing that the real-world issue shouldn’t be scripted in a virtual world. Some influencers also support social causes, like Black Lives Matter, but leave consumers wondering how and in what ways.

“There has rightly been some pushback about like, how is this authentic?” Lyons said. “They say that they support certain things, but there’s no real person behind it. It can get a little bit murky as far as how authentic or how personable you can really be with these types of influencers.” Still, gaming and the metaverse offer emerging opportunities for virtual influencers, Trebing said.

“We have a lot of interest in brands to open spaces in Meta and have influencers attend events or visit a location,” Trebing said. “So there is sort of an opportunity there to take real influencers and place them in virtual worlds. I’d say right now that’s more the trend rather than creating fictional characters or even inviting existing virtual influencers into spaces.”

Jess Deyo is an editor with Marketing Dive. An Ohio native, she graduated from Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism in 2020. Before joining Marketing Dive, she was an associate editor at a regional business magazine. She enjoys staying active outdoors and expanding her collection of plants.

Purpose is a twoway street

By Chaitali Mukherjee and Julia Lamm

As

We live in different corners of the world, in India and the United States, where we work to help companies in our respective countries assess and redesign their talent strategies. We live and work in vastly different economic, social, and cultural contexts. And so, you might think the client challenges we come across would be quite different. But, over the years, we’ve been amazed by the similarity of the issues we encounter with clients, whether in Bangor or Bangalore. More recently, as the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have continued to play out, these commonalities have converged even more.

For example, we’re both seeing mass employee attrition—on

a scale not evident for a very long time. PwC US’s recent pulse survey of executive leadership found that 88% of employers are experiencing turnover that is higher than normal, and 65% of employees are looking for jobs. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs in February. Many Indian IT firms are reporting soaring attrition rates, in some cases double normal levels. Similar levels of employee mobility are arising in countries across the globe, leaving companies struggling to fill roles.

The pandemic has played a big part, heaping long hours, stress, and isolation onto the workforce, and, unfortunately, sometimes causing burnout. In addition, it has fractured the

connection between employees and employers. If you’ve never been in the office where you’re supposed to bond with colleagues, work relationships can feel transactional—and you’re more likely to jump ship for a better offer.

The good news? Businesses can take proactive steps to fight the “great resignation.” They can work harder to be truly flexible, emphasize the connection between work and societal purpose, and expand the conversation surrounding career paths. These efforts will ensure that employees feel they are valued. They all point to thinking of employees not as workers but as whole human beings, with their own individual purpose that the business itself needs to reflect and support.

Redefining flexibility

In the last few years, many companies have instituted hybrid work arrangements, allowing for more time off when needed—whether to care for sick family members or simply take a break. But many are also narrowly defining flexibility as the number of days workers are required to spend in the office and making regimented requests that everyone come in for that specific number of days, regardless of their role. A better approach is to rethink how and why teams come together instead of mandating a set number of days.

Definitions of flexibility may vary widely. In India, for example, employees are focused on workplace design and the ability to continue to work remotely. Because of these variations, companies need to extend their vision when it comes to flexibility. People are seeking flexibility not simply in the way they are rewarded or how frequently they come to the office. Rather, they are seeking flexibility in how their current role aligns with longer-term career aspirations, shortterm life goals, passions outside of work, and their sense of belonging.

Connecting work and purpose

Around the world, people seek employers whose purpose mirrors their own values. A strong commitment to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues is now seen as a baseline requirement. But purpose needs to be a two-way street. Because every employee’s personal purpose is unique, an organization needs to be sufficiently flexible to accommodate multiple purposes.

Take the hiring process. We’re seeing more and more clients’ hiring discussions and decisions take into account a candidate’s life goals and desired experiences, and how the organization—and its purpose—can help the individual achieve them. Instead of asking, “What can you do for us at work?” employers are asking, “What do you want out of life?” Companies are reengineering the recruiting process to place the candidate at the center and to train managers in the ability to share genuine, compelling stories about the employee experience and meaningful work.

For their part, potential recruits, even those keen on joining an organization, are no longer shy about saying that they’re not looking to spend the rest of their career at the organization they’re about to join. One of us recently interviewed a

24-year-old potential joiner—who openly stated that he wanted to be a CEO elsewhere by 34 and to retire at 40. Accordingly, he was seeking skills and experiences that would provide him with a stepping-stone toward that goal. Though he was attracted by PwC’s purpose, he wanted us to respect and accommodate his own purpose in return. Because we did so, our recruitment was successful.

Companies can also demonstrate their purpose by inviting candidates to get to know their business and culture more intimately during the hiring process. When one of our clients, a tech startup, was seeking to hire a brilliant individual, it didn’t just hold formal interviews. Rather, the startup enabled him to meet with potential future colleagues, business partners, and distribution channels to get a feel for how they operate and deliver on their promise. It worked. After three weeks, the candidate accepted the offer.

Creating clusters of experiences

There’s a broader redefinition of purpose that’s underway both for organizations and individuals. Today, people don’t have just one single career in a lifetime but five or six—and their goals and purpose vary at each stage. At the same time, organizations can’t address or engage with the broad range of stakeholders they deal with through just one single purpose. In combination, these shifts are ushering in the concept of purpose as a “cluster” of goals and experiences, with different aspects resonating with different stakeholders (including employees) at different times.

These shifts are ushering in the concept of purpose as a ‘cluster’ of goals and experiences, with different aspects resonating with different stakeholders (including employees) at different times.

The same cluster concept holds true for career paths. It is vital to expand the conversation about the varied, unique options people have to fulfill their goals. Companies must strive to make those options more transparent, more individualized, and more flexible, and less linear. For today’s employees, the point of a career path is not necessarily to climb a ladder with a particular end-state in mind but to gain experience and pursue the individual’s purpose—a purpose that may shift and evolve over time. To that end, it may make sense for organizations to create paths that allow employees to move within and across, and even outside, an organization—not just up—to achieve their goals.

The mantra that people are a business’s greatest asset has never been truer than it is today. As organizations face up to the challenge of the “great resignation,” it’s time to protect and nurture that asset. The result will be hiring and career conversations that are more nuanced, more personalized— and more likely to produce the mutual alignment of values that will keep employees on board.

Web3 beyond the hype

By Anutosh Banerjee, Robert Byrne, Ian De Bode, and Matt Higginson

he past few months have been a rough awakening for many Web3 enthusiasts: the market prices of major cryptocurrencies have declined significantly, the trading volume of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has slowed, and, most importantly, some pioneers of the space have declared bankruptcy because of failed risk management and misuse of consumer funds. Yet even as the debris continues to fly, business leaders shouldn’t confuse market fluctuations or bad actors with the potential uses of digital assets and the technologies that underlie them.

While there are very real risks from this nascent technology and its uses, applications for the next generation of the internet continue to spring up in a growing number of industries with potentially transformative effects.

The financial-services industry has largely led the way in adopting some of these nascent digital technologies and assets—at its peak, the daily volume of transactions processed on so-called decentralized-finance exchanges exceeded $10 billion.1 Volume has since dropped to about $2 billion, largely in line with asset prices. Learnings from the financial-services experience—both the ups and the downs—are helping to inform usage in other sectors, which now include real estate, gaming, carbon markets, and art, among others.

How far and how fast these technologies and their uses will spread remains to be seen; the journey is proving bumpy, with ongoing challenges ranging from poor user experience to fraud. Crucially, the regulatory picture for Web3 remains

unsettled, with calls for greater clarity on some assets and more consumer protection for funds held in custody. Yet understanding the core features of this new digital wave and the potential disruption it could bring remains important for business leaders in a wide range of sectors. To that end, this article is a primer on the fundamentals of Web3: what it is, the pillars on which it is built, what it can and cannot yet do, the significant risks and challenges it needs to overcome, and the implications for stakeholders as it continues to evolve. Future articles will look at more specific aspects and use cases in greater depth.

Understanding the disruptive potential of Web3

The core distinctive feature of Web3 is the decentralization of business models. To that extent, it marks a third phase of the internet (hence “Web3”) and a reversal of the current status quo for users. While the first incarnation of the web in the 1980s consisted of open protocols on which anyone could build—and from which user data was barely captured—it soon morphed into the second iteration: a more centralized model in which user data, such as identity, transaction history, and credit scores, are captured, aggregated, and often resold. Applications are developed, delivered, and monetized in a proprietary way; all decisions related to their functionality and governance are concentrated in a few hands, and revenues are distributed to management and shareholders.

Web3, the next iteration, potentially upends that power structure with a shift back to users. Open standards and

protocols could make their return. The intent is that control is no longer centralized in large platforms and aggregators, but rather is widely distributed through “permissionless” decentralized blockchains and smart contracts, which we explain later in this article. Governance—and this is one of the trickiest aspects of Web3—is meant to take place in the community rather than behind closed doors. Revenues can be given back to creators and users with some incentives to finance user acquisition and growth.

What does this mean in practice? Essentially, it could mark a paradigm shift in the business model for digital applications by making disintermediation a core element. Intermediaries may no longer be required with respect to data, functionality, and value. Users and creators could gain the upper hand and, through open-source rather than proprietary applications, would have incentives to innovate, test, build, and scale.

The building blocks of Web3

The disruptive premise of Web3 is built on three fundamentals: the blockchain that stores all data on asset ownership and the history of conducted transactions; “smart” contracts that represent application logic and can execute specific tasks independently; and digital assets that can represent anything of value and engage with smart contracts to become “programmable.” Each of these three fundamentals has layers of complexity and nuance, and each is evolving in an effort to overcome startup troubles and structural weaknesses. In this primer, we mainly cover the high-level aspects of these fundamentals (Exhibit 1):

Blockchains as open-data structures. In Web3, application data are no longer stored in private databases but rather on an open-data structure that anyone can write to and read from. This open-data structure is the blockchain.

Blockchains operate as public databases that store and secure all relevant and transactional data. They are often referred to as “distributed digital ledgers,” meaning that the core databases are duplicated and spread among multiple participants in a network of computer servers called “nodes.”

The “blocks” in blockchain are individual segments of data that are interlinked or chained together. As new data are added to the network, a new block is created and attached permanently to the chain. All nodes are then updated to reflect the change. The lack of central data storage is a

critical differentiator from traditional databases. Among other advantages, this means that the system is not subject to a single point of failure or a single point of control or censorship. User data are no longer fragmented across platforms, nor are they proprietary or for sale.

Smart contracts as disintermediated functionality. Smart contracts are software programs stored on the blockchain that automatically execute a verified transaction based on predefined and agreed parameters. They require careful preparation and setup because they are often deployed as immutable programs, but once in place, they can be executed rapidly and cost-efficiently without the need for intermediaries and their extractive revenues. The logic of an application is predetermined in the contract and can be difficult to change once deployed. These applications are often governed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), a form of collective governance by users of the application who own governance tokens of the smart contract. If the DAO is set up correctly, no company can unilaterally decide to change the parameters of the application. This stands in stark contrast to Web2 applications, which give companies sole discretion over specific parameters like pricing.

Digital assets and tokens as decentralized ownership. Digital assets are intangible digital items with ownership rights. As such, they are supposed to represent verifiable and ownable digital values—although in many geographies, the legal framework surrounding these digital assets and their ownership rights is not sufficiently clear yet. These assets exist on the blockchain across applications and can engage with smart contracts. Broadly speaking, there are currently five types of digital assets:

• native tokens, which are the monetary incentives used to compensate nodes for maintaining and updating the respective blockchain

• stablecoins, which are supposed to represent cash on the blockchain and are pegged to fiat currencies like the US dollar, or central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), which are regulated by a central bank 2

• governance tokens, which are tokens that represent voting rights on the functional parameters of smart contracts

• non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are a unique, indivisible digital asset with provable ownership

• digital assets that represent claims on real-world assets such as commodities, real estate, or intellectual property, and are “tokenized” into divisible digital assets on the blockchain

While each digital asset has a specific functionality, asset ownership information is no longer stored on private, regulated ledgers (such as those of a bank) but on the blockchain, enabling user-owned value that can be stored, verified, and transacted independently of third parties. In addition, these assets can engage with smart contracts and be put to “productive” use—for example, earning yield for their owners as they are autonomously deployed by these

contracts.

Bringing Web3 to life: Automated lending as an example of what may change

To illustrate the disruptive potential of Web3, it is best to start with the use case where Web3 found its first product-market fit: financial services. Remittances, asset swaps, trade finance, and insurance have all begun to employ smart contracts to achieve automation efficiencies. Lending may demonstrate one of the most compelling implementations of Web3 to date.

In today’s legacy financial services, lending relies on the bank as the trusted intermediary to safeguard funds and originate loans (Exhibit 2). Depositors provide funds in return for a small amount of interest. The bank then performs record keeping on a private ledger and assembles information about potential borrowers to determine their creditworthiness and the price of their loan. Additional fees charged to borrowers fund these activities and provide

predetermined by the logic in the smart contract and are available transparently to all participants. Borrowers still pay interest rates on their loans, but these interest rates no longer accrue to management and shareholders. In this instance, the contract has neither management nor shareholders; it is governed by a DAO that often has no claim on any of the revenues. The interest on loans is paid into the smart contract and disbursed back to the original depositors of the liquidity. Credit risk is minimized because of overcollateralization requirements and automatic liquidations. More than $200 billion in loans was disbursed last year from the largest Web3 lending platforms—and cumulative bad debt is currently roughly $1 million, despite significant volatility.3 Web3 lending platforms continued to operate even during the market turmoil. No deposits were lost or frozen, and withdrawals continued to occur. One prominent failed crypto lender even continued to pay back its loans on Web3 platforms to regain its collateral after it filed for bankruptcy.

This example underscores how the role of the bank as a custodian, central ledger, and credit decisioning engine can be disintermediated. The traditional interest payment revenues associated with this service accrue to the depositors, rather than to the bank’s management and its shareholders. The smart contract itself often accrues zero revenue, but sometimes will accrue a small spread used for insuring funds. And in recent months, as the price of the underlying loan collateral has fallen, loan liquidations have been triggered automatically by each smart contract without creating delinquencies associated with each loan.

Web3 effectively enables traditional revenue streams to accrue to the users of a platform, enhancing the user value proposition relative to their Web2 equivalents. The lending example also shows how Web3 may enable services to be delivered more cost-effectively and 24/7 through shared infrastructure, compliance, and automation.4

revenues to the bank’s management. In recent years, however, with rates at historic lows, very little interest was returned to depositors.

With Web3, depositors still seek to earn interest on their deposits, but instead of entrusting their funds to a bank or nonregulated platform, they themselves hold their funds in a noncustodial wallet that represents an account on the blockchain. All ownership and transaction data reside on the blockchain rather than with the bank or nonregulated entity. Customers no longer entrust their funds to a company to lend them out; instead, they can deposit their funds as liquidity into a smart contract. The smart contract effectively escrows these funds and only disburses them when preestablished conditions are met. Borrowers still look for loans but can only receive funds from the smart contract (which were originally provided by the depositors) after the borrower has posted sufficient collateral. By taking out a loan against collateral, borrowers can still enjoy potential price appreciation of the collateral and create liquidity without incurring a taxable event (which would occur when selling).

All terms of the loan, including the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio, interest paid, and liquidation thresholds, are

Web3 effectively enables traditional revenue streams to accrue to the users of a platform, enhancing the user value proposition relative to their Web2 equivalents.

While deposits and loans were one of the first examples with product-market fit, other decentralized finance (DeFi) use cases have emerged, most notably swaps. A similar logic applies here: the Web3 implementation enables traditional revenues in the form of trading fees to accrue to depositors (in other words, liquidity providers) of the smart contract instead of the traditional central-exchange company. Liquidity providers for some of the most popular swap pairs (such as Ethereum and USD Coin) were averaging a trading-fee revenue of 30 to 70 percent of the capital provided last year.5 Once again, the DAO that governs the smart contract earns no revenue; all revenue accrues to depositors rather than to the management of a central exchange. While past returns were relatively high, consider the return on equity that organizations could make if they were able to materially reduce trading administration costs through a smart contract and outsourced their infrastructure costs through blockchain, not including essential risk-

management and compliance professionals. Web3 could lead to pricing-power compression (in other words, lower fees) due to the open-source nature of the protocols and automation.

Product market uses have in some cases been primarily speculative. Yet the growing range of applications in financial services is indicative of the meaningful innovation that Web3 can generate. Before the recent market downturn, more than $250 billion was actively put to use in smart contracts, yielding autonomous returns for its depositors.6

As such, in DeFi, automated and programmable smart contracts for lending, trading, derivatives, and insurance, among others, have begun competing with traditional intermediaries, including banks, brokers, and insurance agents. In some cases, they offer solutions to challenging features of traditional finance such as counterparty risk, high transaction fees, long settlement times, the large share of value captured by intermediaries, system opacity, and a lack of interoperability. If businesses currently provide services that can be coded into an automated smart contract, they would do well to take notice.

Finally, despite the recent market downturn, the speed of innovation is unlikely to slow. Thousands of new developers are joining the Web3 movement every month.7 Given the open-source nature of the technology, developers can easily develop new applications by building on established programs that have been battle-tested and proved under severe market conditions. It may be hard for even the largest organizations to compete with this scale of global developer base and innovation, and the speed could accelerate as more users and developers join.

Risks and challenges of Web3 that still need to be addressed Web3 is now spreading into many other sectors, including the social sector and carbon markets, art, real estate, gaming, and more. It is also a building block for an interoperable metaverse, an entirely virtual parallel universe under construction that is attracting massive investment from consumer companies and venture capitalists, among others.8 As with any new technologies billed as disruptive, it remains to be seen just how revolutionary blockchain, smart contracts, and digital assets will prove to be. While skepticism is significant among some parts of the public, especially following the steep declines in the valuation of digital assets and the recent bankruptcies of some funds and consumer deposit companies, user interest remains high and engagement is growing, especially for younger generations. In a recent McKinsey survey of 35,000 active online users in some of the largest digital-asset markets— India, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States—20 percent of respondents age 25 to 44 said they own digital assets. Two-thirds of those had already made payments using digital assets (presumably for peer-to-peer payments or Web3 commerce) and just over half had used NFTs as a form of digital identity or performed play-to-earn activities with digital assets.

Before it can fully establish itself,

Web3 will need to overcome continuing challenges, obstacles, and risks for both consumers and institutional participants.

Web3 will nonetheless need to overcome continuing challenges, obstacles, and risks for both consumers and institutional participants before it can fully establish itself.

The chief challenge is regulatory scrutiny and outlooks. Regulators in many countries are looking to issue new guidance for Web3 that balances the risks and the innovative potential, but the picture remains unsettled. For now, there is a lack of clarity—and jurisdictional consistency—about classifying these assets, services, and governance models. For example, smart contracts are not yet legally enforceable. This in turn limits the potential for institutional adoption, especially by heavily regulated entities. Governance remains a work in progress, and the integrity of decentralized autonomous organizations—the collective community mechanisms that are supposed to oversee this new decentralized world—varies widely and is often not yet rock-solid (as some recent examples in DeFi have shown), although it is evolving.

Furthermore, the user experience in this new ecosystem is not yet ready for mainstream adoption. Interfaces are often poorly designed, and the underlying technology is still too cumbersome for users to have a seamless experience. Security is also a concern: until users have peace of mind, they will likely not adopt this technology en masse. Fraud continues to be a risk, with a variety of “rug pulls,” Ponzi schemes, and social-engineering scams dogging the nascent sector, while know-your-customer and anti–money laundering procedures are often lacking. While Web3 ultimately will put the user value proposition front and center, the current state of consumer protection is clearly insufficient.

Indeed, a prominently featured concern is that users engaged in Web3 may not fully understand the risks of decentralized technology, thus expecting the same type of protections they are used to from centralized (and often regulated) entities. For example, transactions on the blockchain, by their very nature, are irreversible, so the concept of clawbacks or user fund retrieval does not currently exist (although it is technically possible).

The technology itself may not be ready for mainstream adoption. Data privacy in the current system is arguably lacking. For example, while wallets are initially anonymous, existing tools are getting better at attributing wallet identity based on transaction history. Once anonymity is lost, all transactions can potentially be viewed anywhere in the world. While this public nature can be beneficial, users will likely need to have access to on-demand privacy for the technology to have mainstream appeal.

Last, transaction cost is also a factor, making some of the technology protocols too expensive to use at present. For example, fees paid to complete and record a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain (so-called gas fees) could

be prohibitive for users in large parts of the world, while cheaper and faster alternatives do not typically have the same level of resilience or operational uptime that is needed for mainstream adoption. Smart-contract resilience is unproven, with new exploits of weaknesses in new code or “logic hacks” happening weekly, and the accuracy of “oracles”—that is, information feeds that are used in decisioning by smart contracts—continues to be a work in progress. Web3 infrastructure needs to continue to evolve to become more robust—many critical services are often too centralized or too sensitive to failure. Finally, given their environmental footprint, proof-of-work blockchains could present specific adoption challenges for users, corporations, and regulators at a time of growing attention to environmental, social, and governance issues, although the footprint of proof-of-work blockchains is continuously evolving, and there is ongoing work to reduce it.

Imagining the Web3 endgame

The above examples highlight both Web3’s disruptive potential and its still-nascent implementation. Regulatory oversight, user experience, and the underlying technology will all need to further mature for mainstream adoption to occur. Leading Web3 players and others who are starting to use the technology are aware of these challenges and are actively working to address them, often funded by extensive venture capital (VC). Indeed, VC investments in Web3 exceeded $18 billion in the first half of 2022,9 remaining on track to top the full-year total VC investments of $32.4 billion in 2021. Despite these early challenges, adoption of Web3 applications has occurred at an exponential pace,10 driven by the enhanced user value proposition and disintermediated business models.

The above examples highlight both Web3’s disruptive potential and its still-nascent implementation. Regulatory oversight, user experience, and the underlying technology will all need to further mature for mainstream adoption to occur.

For all the technical complexity and unanswered questions, Web3 remains an important internet trend to watch, and C-suite executives across a range of sectors may want to keep it on their radar, if only because of the potential for rapid disruption that it represents. Executives could develop a deliberate strategy by asking how Web3 native companies could disrupt their industry and what challenges and opportunities this might present.

If the disruption does take place, it and other associated opportunities for incumbents (depending on their risk appetite) are likely to happen across three levels: assets, infrastructure, and services (Exhibit 3).

Assets. Novel and unexplored assets (including stablecoins, CBDCs, governance tokens, NFTs, and tokenized real estate, among others) could continue to form, driven by new use cases and expanding latent retail and corporate demand. Certain assets could also continue to tokenize, indicating that for many assets—including bonds and commodities— both their traditional and tokenized versions may coexist. As such, the opportunity for corporations would be to facilitate access to new Web3 assets such as NFTs or look to bring existing assets into a Web3 ecosystem. This could be done by using tokenization services to bring realworld assets, such as bonds, music, or art, into Web3 environments. Infrastructure. As new assets emerge, core infrastructure will likely continue to evolve and mature to support them. There is a need for more infrastructure related to custody and asset servicing, clearing and settlement, tokenization and issuance, risk and compliance, and wallets and identity, to name just a few areas that are currently insufficiently addressed by legacy players. Incumbent banks and others have an opportunity to partner with Web3 native companies to innovate their own offerings and support the maturation of the Web3 infrastructure that is needed for mainstream adoption.

Services. As the infrastructure to support Web3 native assets matures and the technology continues to evolve, new Web3 native equivalents that replicate some of the functionality of existing services could emerge. We are already starting to see the emergence of Web3 native marketplaces, payment networks, and deposit and loan platforms. Many expect the emergence of Web3 gaming, social, and media platforms—the Web3 metaverse—to be next. While it may be hard to predict which use cases will scale fastest, multiple platforms, both traditional and Web3, may coexist to deliver similar functionality. Each, however, may have a different value proposition: the traditional service may have higher consumer protection and better user experience, while the native Web3 version may have better economics for the user or operate around the clock. Incumbents may increasingly partner with Web3 disruptors that serve as a bridge to deliver or tap into new services. The winners of this trend may figure out how to bring new and enhanced value propositions to their existing user base while retaining some of the economics and robust compliance and consumer protections of traditional services.

Web3 is still a world in the throes of creation. Many issues, including questions around regulation, will need to be resolved before it convincingly scales up to reach mass adoption. Yet the value proposition for consumers at the heart of it—one that unifies data, functionality, and value, and in doing so creates opportunities for new and more efficient forms of applications and asset ownership—is a powerful one. If history is any guide, companies large and small, as well as the public and social sectors, may want to take note of the inroads Web3 is already making and start thinking about responsible ways to interact with it. Incumbents that fail to do so may suddenly find themselves overtaken by a fast-moving set of new technologies, new assets, and new ways of doing business.

When

by Claire Zulkey

That’s the key finding from a new study that examines how employees perceive managers who assume that less is more when it comes to communicating at work.

After reviewing thousands of 360-degree leadership

assessments in MBA and executive education classes, Francis Flynn noted that complaints about managers’ communication were common, and often harsh. “More than just about any other leadership skill, people are fiercely criticized for poor communication,” says Flynn, a professor of organizational

behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. “The higher up you get, the more brutal that criticism becomes.” Noting this, he and doctoral candidate Chelsea Lide saw an opportunity to examine the quantity and quality of communication between managers and the people they supervise.

In a recent paper, Flynn and Lide examine the concept of “communication calibration.” They find that employees often see their leaders miscalibrating the amount they communicate. Indeed, they write, “leaders are often seen by their employees as undercommunicating rather than overcommunicating.”

The importance of how much leaders communicate became apparent during the pandemic, Lide says. “It brought into sharp relief just how important communication was, not only in terms of the message being communicated, but also how often people are checking in with one another and exactly how detailed leaders are being in their communication to employees.”

Flynn and Lide’s research shows that employees’ preference for too many versus too few messages stems from the perception that even if an overcommunicating leader can’t communicate the ideal amount, at least they mean well. Overcommunicators “may be given the benefit of the doubt by their employees, who might view them as trying to meet their needs, even if they are not necessarily succeeding,” Lide says. Making an effort can give the impression of empathy, whereas undercommunicators are “not really seen as trying at all. Instead, they tend to be seen as really missing the mark in terms of meeting the needs of their employees.”

Flynn says that these results contrast with prior research that found that information overload hurts employee performance. “Overcommunication may be seen as annoying and a nuisance, but it’s not seen as a damning flaw for a leader, partly because a leader’s overcommunication is seen as an attempt to benefit you, even if it is misguided, as opposed to an attempt to undermine you or simply ignore you.”

Communicating Concern

The authors conducted four studies to test their hypotheses that employees identify undercommunication as a leadership weakness more often than overcommunication and perceive undercommunicating managers as having relatively less concern and compassion. “Communication” was limited to task-related messages — not small talk or office chatter.

More than just about any other leadership skill, people are fiercely criticized for poor communication. The higher up you get, the more brutal that criticism becomes.

Francis Flynn

Flynn and Lide examined qualitative comments from more

than 2,700 archived leadership assessments. Less than a quarter of employees rated their manager as a wellcalibrated communicator. Leaders who miscalibrated their communication were nearly 10 times more likely to be criticized for undercommunicating than overcommunicating. The assessments also showed that perceived empathy was significantly lower for undercommunicating leaders than for well-calibrated and overcommunicating leaders.

The researchers then tested their model’s robustness in a real-world setting, surveying employees on the perceived quantity of communication they had received from their managers and how much they’d prefer to receive. The results confirmed a lack of congruence between perceived and preferred communication; employees judged their undercommunicating leaders as lacking empathy and, in turn, leadership ability.

The Strong, Unsilent Type

Based on their findings, Flynn and Lide offer advice for leaders: Ask employees about their personal communication preferences, and when in doubt, increase the amount of task-related communication “to send a stronger message of caring and concern.”

Flynn says that many leaders falsely believe they are communicating the correct amount. “It might be that what they need at the start of their relationship with a direct report or any kind of project management role is to suss out the preferences that others have. Figuring that out upfront is going to serve them well down the line to make sure that others’ silence isn’t misinterpreted as a sign of success, when in fact, it’s a sign of struggle.”

If perfect calibration is an unrealistic goal, err on the side of overcommunicating, which relays a desire to see your employees succeed. When a leader overcommunicates, Flynn says, “you might not be very effective at helping, but at least you are not also coming across as completely unfeeling. When you’re undercommunicating, there’s no evidence of any pro-social motivation to go along with an apparent lack of helpfulness.”

These insights may seem counterintuitive to managers who believe in giving employees independence and letting them figure things out for themselves. “It seems to align with the trope of ‘You are your own startup,’” Lide says. “It’s very popular, especially in certain industries, to sell the narrative of complete autonomy. For that reason, I think managers might be biased toward leaving people to their own devices, whether that’s in the employees’ best interests or not.”

Instead, she says, leaders who want to send a strong signal of empathic concern should try to check in more frequently or add a few more bullets to an email, both to provide guidance and show support. And there may be a time and place for undercommunication, if used strategically. “You might suffer in terms of being perceived as a leader who engages in tough love, but if that ultimately helps your employees’ development, that might be a trade-off a manager has to make for the benefit of the people who work with them.”

From Echo to Astro, what Amazon’s device strategy is really all about

By Sabrina Ortiz

It may be best-known as an online retailer, but Amazon has also grown into a giant of the tech world with a vast portfolio of devices, from e-readers to video doorbells and everything in between.

The Amazon Echo line, the family of smart speakers that houses the Alexa voice assistant, has made its way to millions of homes across the country, after effectively creating a new device market and kickstarting the smart home category. In 2021 alone, Amazon shipped 21.9 million smart speakers in the United States, according to a report by research firm Omnia, and there are probably nearly 100 million in use across the country.

And the tech giant’s product ambitions keep growing. On Sept. 28, Amazon is likely to add a new wave of devices to its portfolio, as it’s holding a virtual event during which a number of new and updated devices are expected to be unveiled.

Amazon’s strategy is to create products for every single aspect of your life, to facilitate everyday tasks. By creating products

to fill even more niches, it cements consumers into its product ecosystem.

“Our research shows that most consumers prefer to buy smart home devices from a single vendor or brand, rather than mixing and matching from multiple brands,” Adam Wright, research manager at tech analyst IDC, tells ZDNET.

“Part of this is driven by brand loyalty and trust – consumers that have a positive experience with a brand that provides smart home devices and services are more likely to trust that brand and seek out additional products and services from that brand rather than risk using a different brand that is unfamiliar.”

When it launched, Alexa didn’t go far beyond the scope of answering a question about the weather or playing a song. However, Amazon has embraced ambient computing and continues to grow the scope of what its voice assistants do to build an integrated smart home.

“We want to make customers’ lives more convenient and offer peace of mind through ambient experiences,” an

Amazon spokesperson tells ZDNET. “To us, this means delivering experiences that are easy to use, helpful, and always available. It also means building technology that understands you and adapts accordingly, is there when you need it, and fades away when you don’t.”

Amazon has developed a wide range of devices that you can command via Alexa to clean your house, turn on the lights, or order items delivered to your door. There are smart lightbulbs, doorbell cameras, alarm systems, smart plugs, thermometers, air purifiers, photo frames, pet feeders, vacuums, toaster ovens and e-readers that all connect to its digital infrastructure.

“For Amazon, there is value in getting its products into more households and it can do this by offering a wide range of device types at different price points,” says David Watkins, VP of media and intelligent home at tech analyst Strategy Analytics.

“The more consumers that use its products on a regular basis, the more data it can collect to help drive its e-commerce

business through greater personalization, supply chain efficiencies, and speed,” he says.

The devices that make up Amazon’s selection are not limited to smart home devices – Amazon is expanding into the automobile space and wearables market, too.

The tech giant has acquired other brands that can add to its seamless product environment. In the last five years, Amazon acquired the security camera company Blink Home, for an undisclosed amount, as well as the camera doorbell company Ring for approximately $1 billion. Amazon is also in the process of buying robot vacuum cleaner company iRobot in a deal valued at roughly $1.7 billion.

Think you know all the devices that Amazon makes? You might be surprised to see how extensive that portfolio has grown:

• Fire Tablets

• Fire Kids Tablets

• Fire TVs

• Fire TV sticks

• Kindle E-readers

• Echo speakers

• Echo smart displays

• Echo Auto

• Echo Buds

• Echo Frames

• Echo Link (a device that allows you to connect streaming music to your stereo system)

• Echo Glow (multicolor smart lamp)

• Amazon Smart Plug

• Amazon Halo Band (health and wellness band)

• Amazon Smart Thermostat

• Amazon Astro (Household robot)

• Amazon Smart Air Quality Monitor

• Amazon Eero (Wi-Fi system)

• Amazon smart soap dispenser

• Ring doorbell, lighting and security systems

• Blink doorbell and security systems

In addition to these products, third-party manufacturers and developers have created a lineup of hundreds of thousands of non-Amazon devices that also connect to Alexa. Last year Amazon said more than 900,000 registered Alexa developers had built 130,000 Alexa skills and hundreds of Alexa Built-in products across categories like PC’s, wearables, smart home devices, and cars. Around 140,000 smart home products are now compatible with Alexa.

Of course, a huge motivator behind Amazon’s product buildout is the desire to get people to subscribe to its paid services through the use of its devices. Along with its most mainstream service, Amazon Prime, Amazon offers hundreds of services that it profits from, like Audible, Prime Gaming, Prime Video, Amazon Music, and Amazon Fresh.

“In the smart home market, devices are merely vehicles for services delivery, and Amazon seems happy to forgo some of the revenue on the devices themselves in favor of the boost in services revenue,” Wright says.

The potential is vast, he adds, “ranging from a subscription to Amazon Music through a smart speaker, a subscription to Echo Guard services also through smart speakers and other devices with a microphone, up to home monitoring and security services through Ring devices, and much more.”

Other major tech companies such as Google and Samsung have jumped into the smart home market with similar strategies. Still, because of the vastness of its range of devices, and the strength of its ecommerce brand and other services, Amazon remains far in the lead.

Also: I put the Apple Watch Ultra through the Tough Mudder

“When the smart home market just started several years ago, most brands focused on a single device or category. But most vendors quickly realized they needed to leverage their existing technologies or build or acquire new ones to remain competitive,” says Wright.

Google has developed a series of devices under the Google Nest brands, including speakers, displays, smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, security cameras, and doorbells. But in comparison with how many devices Amazon has, Google only puts a dent in the smart home scene.

In addition to leading the smart home market, Amazon is also at the forefront of voice assistant technology, with no assistants being quite as popular as Alexa.

“Amazon is also well placed to be the default provider of voice commerce solutions having established Alexa as the leading voice assistant in the home,” says Watkins. “Voice commerce is still in its infancy but Amazon is making a big bet on it becoming a major commerce platform in the future.”

So where does Amazon go from here? We can expect Amazon to refine its current technology and develop new ways to improve the user’s overall experience in the smart home.

For example, Amazon can work on building consumer trust by developing better security and privacy protocols. We can also expect to see upgrades to Alexa Hunches and Alexa Routines, as well as other steps to improve Alexa’s accuracy in carrying out and predicting tasks.

“I think they will continue to double down on innovating around experiences that are more personalized, contextualized, automated, and proactive, and this requires data generation, collection, and analysis – indeed, smart home devices by their very nature need to generate and analyze data to function,” says Wright. “That’s what’s lost in most conversation about privacy in the smart home.”

There is, however, one big gap in Amazon’s portfolio – one that’s going to be hard to fill. If it’s too complicated for voice demands, then you need a smartphone to control your smart home. Amazon tried to launch a smartphone back in 2015, its “3D” Fire Phone, but despite Amazon spending vast sums on the project the phone failed to generate much interest and was quickly discontinued.

“Amazon does not have a smartphone presence and so it needs to develop multiple hardware solutions in order to compete for consumer attention, either in the home, [or] t particularly when they are out and about,” says Watkins. “Smartphones are the center of the universe for most people today and Amazon’s status outside of the home environment will always be weakened as long as smartphones remain top dog.”

Jess Deyo is an editor with Marketing Dive. An Ohio native, she graduated from Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism in 2020. Before joining Marketing Dive, she was an associate editor at a regional business magazine. She enjoys staying active outdoors and expanding her collection of plants.

How to Formulate a More Effective Approach to TikTok Marketing [Infographic]

By Andrew Hutchinson

ooking to develop an effective approach to TikTok marketing?

So how do you make best use of the platform for marketing purposes?

Some of it is fairly general social media marketing advice, but

there are some valuable notes that could help you formulate a more effective, TikTok-specific strategy. You can read more tips from TikTok here, or check out the infographic overview below.

Why Wikipedia wants a ‘sound logo’

BY ROB WALKER

More brands are creating audio branding, including Wikipedia, which wants to create the ‘sound of all human knowledge.’

Wikipedia is arguably one of the most well-known brands in the world. Which means you’ve most likely seen its unfinished-jigsaw-puzzle-of-a-globe logo. But what does Wikipedia sound like?

The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation recently announced that it is, in effect, looking for an answer to that question,

issuing an open call for submissions for a “sound logo” that will identify content from Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia Foundation projects) “when visual logos are not an option— for example, when virtual voice assistants answer queries.”

Associating a brand with a sound is hardly a new idea: Jingles have been a staple of broadcast advertising from

the beginning, and before that, traveling medicine shows were heavily musical. But in the past five years or so, audio branding has expanded. That’s partly because, for many years, the digital era was so intensely visual that we reached a kind of “saturation point,” says Scott Simonelli, cofounder and CEO of Veritonic, an audio analytics and research firm. “Now that kind of colonization of the eyes, if you will, has peaked.”

Meanwhile there’s been plenty of sonic innovation, from smart speakers to AirPods and the steady rise of the podcast industry. And sound has become more recognizably important to business identity—and goes way beyond jingles. Think about the familiar Netflix “ta-dum,” for example. Or the little tappy sound of a new Slack message. Earlier examples range from HBO’s static overture to Intel’s fivenote bong to the Apple computer startup chime to the THX “Deep Note.” Jingles still abound, but in more recent years they have come to include bite-size attempted earworms that last just a couple of seconds, like McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It,” or even nonmusical variations like Little Caesars’ “Pizza pizza” or Aflac’s shrill duck-blurted name.

More broadly, Simonelli argues, a brand now needs a sort of sonic “palette,” the same way its visual identity is anchored in a particular color palette. “We’re getting to a place where if you don’t have an audio strategy,” he says, “you’re missing a huge part of the market, and you’re really missing the zeitgeist.”

Technically, the Wikimedia callout is seeking one audio logo for all its iterations, which includes many projects other than its flagship crowdsourced encyclopedia. This may be a challenge. “It’s hard enough to do logo work— visual or sonic—and harder still when the organization you’re doing the work for is amorphous,” observes Marc Weidenbaum, a music critic who writes the “This Week in Sound” newsletter and also works in branding (and, full disclosure, is a longtime friend). “Wikimedia’s contest is broad,” he says, both in terms of topic (“the sound of all human knowledge”) and audience (presumably: everyone on the planet?). Sometimes, he suggests, constraints can be helpful.

That said, Weidenbaum made the Wikimedia sonic logo request a prompt for a regular online sound-maker challenge he runs called Disquiet Junto; and some of the submissions are pretty fun. (While that particular experiment has closed, those inclined to submit an audio logo to Wikimedia itself have until October 10.)

But the truth is—as with a visual logo—the real power of a sonic mark comes via the familiarity that only repeated exposure can create. Veritonic publishes an annual Audio Logo Index, evaluating which sonic identities in various categories are the most “effective.” (This is based on a combination of logo recall, “creative resonance,” and other factors, culled from survey responses and crossmatched against Veritonic’s internal data.) Some of the top performers—Folger’s, Liberty Mutual, KFC—don’t exactly ring out as works of sonic brilliance. The 2022 index “found consistency to be one of the most influential parameters for success in sonic branding,” the report says. “Think listening

to a song you wouldn’t be able to sing even the most catchy of tunes after just one or two listens!”

Simonelli points to an example such as MasterCard, which has a “really sophisticated and cool” audio logo. But it has yet to perform particularly well in Veritonic’s ratings. It may be that it simply hasn’t had time, or enough consistent exposure. Then again, it turns out “I’m Lovin’ It” has lately not performed quite as well as it used to, in Verotonic’s annual ranking. Perhaps even familiar sonic identities need to be refreshed—as with Nationwide enlisting the unlikely pair of Brad Paisley and Peyton Manning to noodle over its audio branding.

Naturally the actual sound matters. “You have to put the horsepower behind it, but you also have to have something that sonically works,” Simonelli adds. “As much as you play it for somebody, if it’s not memorable, it’s gonna have a diminished effect.” And both Simonelli and Weidenbaum note that this can get complicated for a truly global brand like Wikipedia—sounds that may be appealing in one part of the world may grate elsewhere.

Interestingly, Weidenbaum points out that there is already a “sound of Wikipedia,” of sorts: a site called Listen To Wikipedia, which converts edits into notes. “Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions,” the site explains. “Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note.” The result is a kind of ambient score, made wholly by participants in Wikipedia itself. A thoughtful sequence of sounds from that site could be “a really strong sonic logo for Wikimedia,” he suggests. “It would connect with a legacy of sonic activity in a meaningful way, rather than grafting on something new.”

Maybe so, but you can imagine why Wikimedia is casting a wide net. Wikipedia’s visual logo came about through a very similar open call, with an original concept that was gradually refined over years to fix missteps. For the details, I refer you to Wikipedia, but the point is that the open call format is not only on brand, but also it has a precedent.

And the anybody-can-do-it spirit, waving away traditional versions of expertise, seems important, even if it feels a little unlikely. In connection with the open call, music agency MassiveMusic, which is consulting with Wikimedia on the project, has offered a rather harried half-hour video that attempts to capture the basics of sound logos, from core music terminology to software options to a production overview, apparently on the premise that someone with absolutely no music-making background whatsoever could dive right in. That approach, intentionally or not, echoes the cockeyed optimism that made Wikipedia one of the Web’s true success stories. Maybe that, more than the sound of “all human knowledge,” is what the Wikimedia audio logo ought to capture.

ROB WALKER WRITES BRANDED, A WEEKLY COLUMN ABOUT MARKETING AND BRANDING. HE ALSO WRITES ABOUT DESIGN, BUSINESS, AND OTHER SUBJECTS. HIS NEWSLETTER IS THE ART OF NOTICING.

Why You Need a Branded Podcast (And How to Create and Brand Yours)

By Phil Caplin

Podcasts are among the fastest-growing forms of popular media, and branded podcasts are no exception. Immersive and intimate, they constitute a rare opportunity for businesses to connect with listeners without being too invasive.

In branded podcasts, the branding stands out from its surrounding content, helping to land the messaging better than global radio benchmarks, where brand mentions score 5% lower on average, a BBC study found. Brand mentions in branded podcasts deliver, on average, 16% higher engagement and 12% higher memory encoding than the adjacent content.

So, branded podcasts are a proven and effective way to achieve more brand awareness and grow your audience successfully.

But where should you start? What exactly is a branded podcast, what are the benefits, and where do you start with branding one? This article will tell you what you need to know about branded podcasts.

What Is a Branded Podcast?

In 2018, Fast Company described branded podcasts as “the ads people actually want to listen to.”

As the name suggests, a branded podcast is—drum roll please—the official podcast of a brand.

In other words, a business or company decided to launch its own podcast in which it is likely to discuss relevant industry topics and insights and mention its own brand, products, or services from time to time.

Why Start a Branded Podcast?

In the US, many families have incorporated podcasts into their everyday routines, and the use of the medium is set to grow

over the coming years. Therefore, considering a branded podcast as part of your marketing strategy is a logical idea.

If you don’t do so, your competitors surely will—and they are likely to attract more customers and conversions for their company.

A full 75% of podcast listeners respond to the sponsored messages they hear in a podcast, including the branded messages, NPR has reported. That is significant because it shows that podcast promotions can sound natural and that potential customers are willing to act on them.

How to Brand a Podcast

1. Define your goal or objective for your branded podcast

Business podcasts usually exist to create a positive impression of that business, which means that subscriptions, downloads, or chart positions might not be as important as KPIs that consider brand awareness, engagement, and authority. You might want your podcast to work as a tool to gain vital feedback, or you could use it to become a thought leader in your industry, or perhaps secure a dream guest that will generate value for your listeners.

2. Establish your ideal branded podcast audience

Like a customer persona, an ideal listener is the one person who represents your listeners, and you should outline the person’s age, occupation, gender, location, job, and interests.

Suppose your overall goal is brand elevation, and your

target audience is female CEOs age 35-45. In that case, you’ll create a branded podcast that is hyper-focused on that specific audience’s interests.

3. Establish your branding

In other words, why are you here? Podcasters rely heavily on their audio, but first impressions matter when branding is the concern.

Consider nonaudio elements: strong and visually powerful podcast elements are vital for getting your podcast noticed in the first place. That might include colorful fonts, quirky descriptions, and an inimitable tone of voice.

Use your brand guidelines to ensure you are getting branding right. If you are a legal advice company, you will likely want a professional and serious tone of voice, whereas a makeup brand is likely to want something more personable and fun. Jingles can also help distinguish a podcast at the start and end of an episode.

Research your competitors’ cover art and note which ones would attract you to listen. With 700,000+ podcasts out there, it’s never been more important to stand out from the crowd—and a large part of that comes down to unique and compelling branding.

The Benefits of a Branded Podcast

The nature of podcasting is precisely what makes it so beneficial for a brand: The conversational and intimate way the content is conveyed helps create an optimum environment for engagement and brand awareness.

The BBC report referenced earlier found that there are many benefits of a branded podcast:

• They achieve unique cut-through with ad avoiders. Users

who tend to avoid ads were 22% more engaged with podcast brand mentions than those on TV.

• Their listeners are active. A full 94% of listeners consume podcasts while doing something else, whether driving, exercising, or housework. Strangely enough, that activity makes listeners more receptive to brand messaging. The other activity helps keep the brain occupied, which enhances its ability to absorb information at a level of “low-involvement processing,” meaning the messaging is retained for much longer.

• They encourage positive association. Listeners create subconscious associations with brands based on words they hear in their podcasts. For example, if the word “innovative” is used repeatedly, listeners are likely to refer to the sponsor as “innovative” too, showing that they instinctively link the brand with the message.

• They offer additional airtime for brands. People consume podcasts during windows of time when they would not usually be available to traditional advertising. That is an enviable commercial opportunity, as it adds a new target to the media mix.

To elaborate further on that last point: only 20% of audiences read an entire blog article; and although videos around the 2-minute mark receive 70% engagement, that dramatically drops at the 6-minute mark to 50%, and below 50% after the 10-minute mark.

Although 70% is a good consumption rate, the length of content across which you can maintain user attention is minimal. The average length of a podcast is 28.5 minutes; it can hold the listener’s attention for 14 times longer—an impressive length and engagement rate for any branded content.

A Letter to the Industry: Why Advertising Matters

By Mike Barrett

Dear advertising industry—clients, potential clients, partners, collaborators, creatives, strategists, brand marketers and everyone else who reads Muse by Clio:

Right now it feels like advertising is broadly disdained, even by the people who make it. Everywhere from Fishbowl to LinkedIn to recent surveys, advertising professionals are over it all. Among advertising professionals, more than half of us think that “advertising is a waste of time.” Two-thirds (66 percent) believe that “brands who express views on political or social issues are just trying to exploit them.” I could go on, but you get the point. Right now, we have a very low opinion of what we do.

And yet, what we do is important. Advertising is part of the critical infrastructure of modern life. Arguably one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure there is. Advertising is indispensable to capitalism, which for all its flaws remains the best source of social mobility in the U.S. and around the world. If capitalism is the engine of social mobility, advertising is the gasoline that it runs on.

Beyond that, advertising supports the free flow of information on the internet—if you like The New York Times, you like advertising. If you like the internet in general, you like advertising. The entire operating system that runs modern life, runs on advertising. In fact, the average consumer spends roughly 13 hours a day interacting with ad-supported media. Advertising either directly funds or heavily subsidizes the majority of sources that people use to decide everything from who they should vote for, to what they think about a range of social issues, to what they should do with their money.

It should alarm us all, then, that advertising is in as rough shape as it is. The people who make it don’t respect it, the consumers who watch it by and large don’t enjoy it, and the clients who fund it are increasingly frustrated with it. These are the problems we, collectively, need to address.

If advertising is to thrive, it needs to be better overall. Easier to make, so that the industry doesn’t turn over 30 percent of its employees every single year. More effective, so that clients are more able to make the business case for it. And above all, more enjoyable for the people who watch it, so they tune it out less.

But how can we make advertising better? Knowing that if some companies, leaders and innovators don’t start changing how we think and work now that the industry as we know it will die, we’re investing in technology. And in order for us to go a step further and embrace technology, it will need to be made by creative people. The industry is littered with companies who have made a technology solution that will work for creative people who adapt their process to the technology. These technologies fail because they are fundamentally backwards. We have to adapt the technology to the people, if we expect them to use it.

Together, we need to build technology for creative people, by creative people, to make the industry we work in a little bit better. Because advertising matters, not just for the people who make it, but for the free flow of information on the internet. We can’t let something so important to our everyday lives and something we really do love continue to struggle because we’re not willing to change.

& Book, Line Sinker

Hello, My Name Is Awesome:

How

to Create Brand Names That Stick by Alexandra Watkins

Too many new companies and products have names that look like the results of a drunken Scrabble game (Xobni, Svbtle, Doostang). In this entertaining and engaging book, ace naming consultant Alexandra Watkins explains how anyone—even noncreative types—can create memorable and effective brand names. No degree in linguistics required.

Bigger Than This: How to Turn Any Venture Into an Admired Brand

by Fabian Geyrhalter

Following the success of his #1 bestselling book, “How to Launch a Brand,” acclaimed brand strategist Fabian Geyrhalter is back with an enlightening new book that digs deep into today’s new world of brand creation. “Bigger Than This” challenges companies – from startups to Fortune 100s – to (re)discover their spark and connect with today’s consumers on a deeper level.

Generation Brand: Controlling Your Life-Brand for Likes, Loves and Career Advancement

by Irina Soriano

Right this minute, you are the proud owner of a library full of content. And congratulations, it’s all about you! Cute, rambunctious, smart, or downright unflattering photos, videos, phrases, behaviors, what and who you like and love, where you’ve been, and what elicits your frown or thumbs down.

Branding that Means Business: How to Build Enduring Bonds between Brands, Consumers and Markets (Economist Books)

By Matt Johnson

A brand is either beloved, or it’s noise. We live in a fast-paced world of immediate gratification where consumers can listen to any song, watch any movie, or read any article

How to Launch a Brand (2nd Edition): Your Step-by-Step Guide to Crafting a Brand: From Positioning to Naming And Brand Identity

by Fabian Geyrhalter

Most entrepreneurs, even seasoned brand managers, launch first and then work on slowly transforming the new offering into a brand. A logical progression, I would agree. offering—you have no legacy or advocates?

How Cool Brands Stay Hot: Branding to Generations Y and Z by Joeri Van Den Bergh

Berry-AMA Book Award 2012 (1st edition)

WINNER: Expert Marketing Magazine’s Marketing Book of the Year Award 2011 (1st edition) How Cool Brands Stay Hot analyses Generations Y and Z, the most marketing savvy and advertisingcritical generations yet.

The Future of Purpose-Driven Branding: Signature Programs that Impact & Inspire Both Business and Society by David Aaker

As an influential voice in branding and market connection, David Aaker examines how businesses can adapt their approaches for social betterment in, The Future of Purpose-Driven Branding: Signature Programs that Impact & Inspire Both Business and Society.

Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brains

by Matt Johnson

Every time you purchase, swipe, or click, marketers are able to more accurately predict your behavior. These days, brands know more about you than you know about yourself. Blindsight is here to change that.

Myths of Branding: Dispel the Misconceptions and Become

a Brand Expert (Business Myths) by

Myths of Branding, written by renowned branding experts Andy Milligan and Simon Bailey, explores the huge number of misguided, mistaken and blatantly false myths that abound in the branding arena. From the belief that developing brands is nothing more than fiddling with logos, to the perception that it’s a ‘soft’ area of marketing that doesn’t go beyond

Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World

By Brendan Kane

Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World, by out of the box thinker Brendan Kane, breaks down the most effective strategies to generate new opportunities, innovate and scale your business, and create a compelling brand— both online and off—so you can thrive in the new micro-attention world in which we live.

Podcasting Made Simple: The Step by Step Guide on How to Start a Successful Podcast from the Ground up by

Daniel Larson

‘The medium of podcasting and the personal nature of it, the relationship you build with your listeners and the relationship they have with you - they could be just sitting there, chuckling and listening... there’s nothing like that’ - Marc Maron Podcasting is the expressional medium with

Unleash the Power of Storytelling: Win Hearts, Change Minds, Get Results

By Rob Biesenbach

Unleash the Power of Storytelling offers a practical roadmap to crafting and delivering more powerful, persuasive stories that you can use to get more of what you want out of your career and your life.

Lights, Camera, Impact: Storytelling, Branding, and Production Tips for Engaging Corporate Videos by

Uncover and reveal your company’s stories to create great results-using corporate videos. Whether you are in marketing or internal communications, it’s crucial to tell your company’s story in a digital media world that can’t get enough video content.

I Love It Here

Influencer: How To Stand Out Amongst The Social Media Noise by Myra E. Looring (Author)

Being all shiny and new, it steals the community you’ve worked so hard to create, and you’re forced to continue promoting your business on a dying platform or start all over again.

If you’re tired of watching your amazing brand fall deeper and deeper in the black hole that is social media, not getting the attention it deserves (or even noticed), you’ve come to the right place.

Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less by

Jim VandeHei

This is the guiding principle of Smart Brevity, a communication formula built by Axios journalists to prioritize essential news and information, explain its impact and deliver it in a concise and visual format. Now, the co-founders of Axios have created an essential guide for communicating effectively and efficiently using Smart Brevity— think Strunk and White’s Elements of Style for the digital age.

Tony Gnau

Emmy Award-winning speaker Clint Pulver― aka the Undercover Millennial―shares insights gleaned from thousands of undercover interviews with employees across the country, revealing the best methods for identifying talent, building a sense of ownership, and developing a successful workplace culture that employees will love.

By Clint Pulver

Simon Bailey