BrandKnew October 2017 by Brand Knew

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Dear Friends: The October heat is on for sure and the mercury on the brand horizon is on the rise. As we head towards the close of yet another tumultuous and challenging year for brand owners and marketers, here is another issue of BrandKnew packed with distilled learnings and actionable intelligence. There has been talk about the ‘ duopoly ‘ culture that Google and Facebook has been imposing and now you can know more about how Amazon is taking these two media giants on much to the relief and excitement of many. It’s getting to be all about ‘ Six in the Ad City ‘ as more and more brands and agencies settle for 6 second ads to suit the social viewing and fatigue syndrome. In our feature on AR, you get to understand how Augmented Reality’s future is the Car and not Lenses. For all the CEOs and CMOs that are challenged in the retail eco system, the feature on how 10 brands are disrupting the retail industry will be a huge learning. From the Mecca of Creativity(Cannes), we bring you Lessons from the Cannes Lions for you to devour. As Content Marketing becomes sine qua non for marketers, the article on branded content and how it facilitates brand lift is very insightful. One can never under estimate the power of a Headline and get to understand more of those secrets in this issue. Plenty more in the BrandKnew October tank to sink your teeth into and I wish you stimulating moments as you travel through. Till the next, my very best!

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Suresh Dinakaran @sureshdinakaran

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suresh@groupisd.com Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Regional Director: Krishna Chugh Country Manager, India: Vinit Chugh Content Creation Architect: Arunima Takiar Digital Outreach & Engagement Specialist: Khaleef Mayowa Junaid Associate Brand Connect: Hasitha Fernando Creator: Brand Stories: Salindu Sadishan

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CONTENTS

Why Brands and Agencies Are Preparing for the Era of 6-Second Ads Disruptive retail – 10 brands show how it’s coming to life Does branded content drive brand lift? New research takes an in-depth look A New Marketing Royalty: Why Digital Influencers Are on the Rise Lessons From the Cannes Lions: The Creative Data Category In Pursuit of the Perfect Headline: What’s the Secret to Making Your Audience Click? Why brands will welcome Amazon’s challenge to Google and Facebook How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Design Thinking Augmented reality’s future isn’t glasses. It’s the car Is There Such a Thing as a ‘Brand Fail’ Anymore? The Magic Of An Effective Brainstorm Here’s Why Influencers Are Making Bank Book, Line & Sinker

Why Brands and Agencies Are Preparing for the Era of 6-Second Ads 2018 IS THE TURNING POINT TOWARD SNACKABLE SPOTS By Christopher Heine

Let the upcoming fourth quarter be known as the incubator phase of the six-second video ad unit, a few industry players echoed in recent days. Next year, they say, it’s go time.

Michelin this week started testing the snack-sized clips on YouTube, the Google-owned video platform that calls them bumper ads.

The format has built up buzz since Google threw its stake in the ground when the best examples of its six-second hackathon were highlighted at Sundance in January. Then in June, Fox announced it was on board with six-second video ads. And, at the end of last month, Facebook revealed it was going to work on its six-second ad game during its secondquarter earnings call. Now, brands and agencies are starting to state their motives for getting out in front of the movement.

“The format allows us to continue on our quest to reach a younger demographic,” said Candace Cluck, director of consumer experience for Michelin North America, suggesting that such spots could be ideal for reaching millennials and Gen Z consumers with shorter attention spans. “What’s so unique about this format is the way you distribute it. You have to think about these six-second videos in succession. It’s a frequency play.”

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TBWA Worldwide is leading creative for her brand’s six-second spots. “They force you to be more focused,” commented Theodor Arhio, a global director of creative and content for the Omnicom-owned agency who partook in YouTube’s previously mentioned hackathon.

brand awareness. Jake Malanoski, customer acquisition director for meals service Green Chef, said he’s recently seen positive test results from shorter-form videos across ad networks while working with DIY-minded video ads platform Steelhouse.

Another YouTube hackathon alumnus, Maud Deitch, attended the event as a creative for Mother New York and had her global-warming-minded work, called The High Diver (see below), honored. She’s since moved on to Instagram’s creative department, which she declined to go into detail about—but she had a lot to say about six-second ads’ potential.

“We tend to use seven-second spots,” Malanoski said. “Interestingly enough, if we are trying to reach someone for the first time, the shorter the better. If we are retargeting, we can play a 15 or a 30. Part of the theory there is that if somebody hasn’t heard of you, they are not going to give you the time of day.”

“You can really get to a level of poignance and a level of human connection that you cannot get to even in a 15-second spot,” Deitch explained. “It’s because you sort of have to understand your subject matter, your medium, your production tools so much more intimately in order to make use of six seconds in an effective way. I think it’s one of the most important ad formats—if not the most important ad format—that we are going to see more of.”

“Short-form is going to play a role,” added Mark Douglas, founder and CEO of Steelhouse. “Six seconds is actually a pretty decent-sized canvas to play with.”

A recent Google-led study on its bumper ads found that nine out of 10 of them drove ad recall, while 61 percent lifted

The movement toward short-form video, or “snackable content,” isn’t entirely new. In September 2013, Dunkin’ Donuts created considerable chatter by using a six-second video—made on the since-shuttered Vine app—for a Monday Night Football spot on ESPN television. The buzz around snackable content then subsided over time, but now it seems to be back in full force with industry players predicting that six-second ads will gain real traction in 2018. Seasoned marketers likely won’t be surprised if the ad units prove more viable among younger folks compared to 15and 30-second ads. “I watch the clock tick down (on longer ads), waiting for the video to be over so I can get to the content [I] want to watch,” said Mike Racic, a Gen Xer and iCrossing’s president of media operations. “Now you have to tell a concise story.” Christopher Heine is technology editor of Adweek.

Disruptive retail – 10 brands show how it’s coming to life By Cate Trotter

What makes a disruptive retailer? We’re all quite familiar with the idea of retail undergoing some upheaval as a result of new technologies like mobile, the Internet of Things (IoT) and virtual reality (VR), but the word disruptive sometimes borders on overuse.

collection and use of data).

True disruption is about doing 10 times more with 10 times less, whether that’s less space, less money, less overheads. Think about how much time, effort and resource it would take as a sole physical store in the UK to build an international business and ship products all over the world – e-commerce makes this all possible with 10 times less of all those things.

1. AWAYTOMARS

Disruptive retail challenges and interrupts the normal way of doing things, the typical buy and sell process we are all familiar with, usually through new and innovative ways of thinking, or applications of technology or other resources. Successful disruptive retail shakes up the industry and eventually becomes the adopted way of doing things – again take e-commerce as an example. Other disruptive models include subscription services, access rather than ownership, crowdsourcing, marketplaces, on-demand and free (via the

We’ve picked 10 brands that show what disruptive retail really looks like and how they’re putting some of these models into practice:

This London/Lisbon-based company is disrupting the field of fashion by crowdsourcing clothing designs and then crowdfunding their production. AWAYTOMARS’ 5000-strong community can upload their designs direct to the site, or take part in co-creation projects, for feedback from the rest of the community. Those that receive the best response are put forward for crowdfunding, and if they reach their target go into production with AWAYTOMARS and the designer splitting the profits. The community-led approach not only helps AWAYTOMARS develop exclusive designs, but allows the company to minimise risk by sharing it with its designers and gauging demand for pieces before production.

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Image Credit: Dollar Shave Club

Image Credit: Cate Trotter

2. The New Stand Having started out with just one small space in a subway station, micro retail company The New Stand now has three locations across New York. Building on the familiar concept of the newsstand, these small store spaces sell everyday items like snacks, water and gum, alongside a regularly changing selection of quirky gifts and new gadgets. What brings it together is the accompanying app-based membership programme. Customers can join for free by simply downloading the New Stand app, which gives them access to daily deals, curated articles, product recommendations and playlists. By utilising the ubiquity of smartphones to engage with its audience and drive them to visit regularly, The New Stand can operate a successful physical business from the smallest of spaces.

3. B8ta Masterminded by four former Nest employees, B8ta is all about tech. Located in San Francisco the company offers a retail-as-a-service model, driven by data, for innovators creating IoT gadgets and tech products.

Subscription models aren’t a new idea when it comes to disruptive retail, but where the Dollar Shave Club really shook things up was its connections with its customers. The company learns about its customers and then curates messaging tailored to them, which is included with every delivery. This disruptive combination of targeted content and great price has proved enough to tempt customers away from the big shaving brand names.

5. The Chapar Another company using the subscription model is The Chapar. It brings personal styling for men into the customer’s home – after signing up and filling in a profile, each customer is assigned a stylist who will chat through their tastes, work and lifestyle to build a complete picture. They then select a series of clothes that matches that profile and sends them to the customer who tries them on, keeping those they want and sending back those they don’t. The Chapar works with a huge array of leading brands in order to offer the best selection to its customers. It’s the technology-enabled personal stylist service that elevates the company above other men’s fashion subscription services. Customers don’t have to go into a store in order to get support and guidance from a real-life person, but can enjoy all the time-saving benefits of shopping online.

Companies wanting to sell through B8ta sign up to a monthly subscription that puts their products into B8ta’s physical stores for customers to interact with, find out more information on and buy. They also can access real-time conversion data and control their product’s marketing, price and inventory. It’s a truly disruptive way of getting products into physical stores within a matter of days.

4. Dollar Shave Club The premise of the Dollar Shave Club is simple – you sign-up and receive razor blades in the post every month. The name comes from the first month price of just $1 for a handle and set of blades. The company completely changed the model for the shaving industry, and as such last year was snapped up by Unilever for $1 billion.

6. Amazon Go It’s impossible to talk about disruptive retail and not mention the Amazon Go concept. Currently only available to staff,

much has been made of this innovative grocery store that has no queues, tills or check-out staff, but instead charges customers automatically for their purchases.

workplaces become connected through the IoT.

It does this through the use of sophisticated sensor technology. Customers enter the space by scanning the Amazon Go app on their smartphone. They can then pick up (and put back) any products they want, with everything tracked by the Just Walk Out Technology in a virtual shopping cart. When done the customer simply walks out and the total is billed to their Amazon account. In terms of massively overhauling the shopping experience as we know it, if the technology becomes widely rolled out it could be a real game-changer.

Rent The Runway is one of the best examples of access-overownership in retail today. It lets its customers rent items from a selection of 20,000 plus designer fashions from more than 400 designers. Customers can pay per item or sign up to one of Rent The Runway’s subscription models, which includes unlimited rentals. When they’re done they just send the item back via courier or to one of Rent The Runway’s stores – no need to clean it.

7. The Food Assembly The Food Assembly is a social and collaborative initiative that started life in France and is now present across much of Europe. Acting as a marketplace for local food suppliers, the enterprise connects shoppers with producers to give them the best quality products. There are more than 900 Assemblies at present. Each acts as its own project in its local area with members able to place orders online for a choice of products offered by local producers, which they then collect at the weekly Assembly pick-up held in their area. With food quality, organic produce and local shopping increasingly in demand, The Food Assembly makes it easier for customers to buy all their local products in one place, and gives local producers an e-commerce element to their business.

Image Credit: IFTTT

9. Rent The Runway

The company acts as a means for customers to rent and wear items that they may not be able to afford to buy outright, or may have no need of as permanent items in their wardrobe. The high prices of the luxury sector makes it ripe for the access model, and with physical stores for customers to make use of in trying on and returning clothes Rent The Runway offers a taste of that exclusive experience.

10. Adidas Knit For You Adidas recently trialled mass product customisation in-store with a Berlin pop-up that let customers purchase a custommade knitted sweater on-demand. For Euro 200 shoppers can direct all elements of the design process, which starts by entering a blacked-out room where different designs and patterns are projected onto them. Once they have chosen their favourite, they can use touchscreens to change up the colours, and even have a 3D scan to get the size exactly right. Once the order is placed it takes just four hours for it to be machine knitted in-store, hand-finished, washed, dried and packaged up for collection. Although not a permanent fixture yet, Adidas is assessing the response to the initiative with an eye to implementing it elsewhere. It’s certainly a game-changer in terms of how we buy personalised products and could very well disrupt the fashion industry if it catches on.

8. Tesco IFTTT/Do Button If This Then That (IFTTT) has been shaking up the connected device and IoT world for some time with its ability to combine different services (or Channels) to interact with one another (via Recipes). Tesco is one brand that has embraced the service enabling shoppers to automate their buying based on different criteria. Recipes involving Tesco include adding milk to their online basket every Thursday, buying burgers when the weather is sunny or stocking up on prosecco when the price drops below a certain level. It’s a new way for customers to shop how they want, when they want, based on the criteria that’s important to them, with Tesco able to tap into this data to better understand its audience. This type of automation will become increasingly disruptive as more of our homes and

Image Credit: Adidas

Does branded content drive brand lift? New research takes an in-depth look PETER MINNIUM DIVES INTO THE RESULTS FROM A STUDY SHOWING THAT BRANDED CONTENT TRULY WORKS AND HAS A POSITIVE IMPACT BOTH ON CONSUMERS’ BRAND AWARENESS AND THEIR PURCHASE INTENT. By Peter Minnium

Most of us today can recall a time before the internet, or even the widespread availability of personal computers. Ads embedded in videos and banners sprawling across web pages — holdovers from the print and television era — are familiar, if somewhat obtrusive, accompaniments to content. Aside from the occasional grumbling, we accept these as natural fixtures of content — be it print, video or web-based. We are witnessing the maturation of a generation born with the world at their fingertips — one that is far more demanding of publishers and marketers alike. If today’s internet users are increasingly picky about the content they consume, and the form it takes, tomorrow’s users will be positively demanding. They have come to expect an ever more cohesive and connected virtual world, and marketers have responded with new ways of integrating advertising more thoroughly into the user’s content experience. The new forms of brand content delivery are often haphazardly lumped together under the term “native advertising,” which is

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now used to describe any digital marketing content that is not clearly distinct from its environment. This was a convenient solution for marketers seeking a categorization that would describe the new forms in their infancy, but today it threatens to flatten the robust set of marketing tools that have been developed since.

Native advertising is now just one component of a holistic marketing experience spanning a range from sponsored “Top 10” lists to custom videos and mini-games. These new tools act at all stages of the marketing funnel, with upper-funnel display advertising and light sponsorship setting the stage by improving brand or product awareness, while video-heavy lower-funnel tools add a richness and energy that converts that awareness into purchase interest. It’s easy to get lost in the flurry of new tools and metrics, and marketers are often left asking, “What is branded content, and does it work?” The short, and encouraging, answer is yes. To get to the bottom of this question, Ipsos Connect (my employer) teamed up with Polar to conduct a study aimed at measuring branded content performance. While the results themselves are illuminating, the study structure also brings order to the field of branded content, making the new forms more approachable for brands and marketers alike.

For the study, a set of actual branded content representative of the broad range of content forms and styles was selected. Participants were brought to a live website where their interactions and responses to content were considered in terms

of four dimensions: content form, accompanying ads, level of brand integration and delivery device. Text, video and imagebased content were equally represented, both accompanied and unaccompanied by companion ads. Perhaps most importantly, brand integration into content was categorized as light, medium or heavy — ranging from pure sponsored editorial (light) to publisher-produced content with the brand included (medium) to marketer-controlled custom content (heavy.)

Branded content works Overall, branded content had a clearly positive impact on brand awareness and purchase intent, regardless of form or delivery. After engaging with branded content, users’ average unaided awareness was 69 percent, and purchase intent was 51 percent. Notably, branded content outperformed averages in key descriptors including believability, uniqueness and entertainment. Internet users responded more strongly to these ads, which enhance, rather than disrupt, the consumer’s experience of digital content. The freedom to choose what content to read, view or watch —

based on the users’ own interest in the brand or product — is in line with the values of a new generation of internet users, providing marketers with an elegant solution to the challenges of ad blocking and banner blindness. Through better integration and a more targeted approach, publishers provide marketers the freedom to offer relevant and engaging content, and respond more directly to user needs

and interests, while offering brands a more effective way of delivering their message. Users’ demands for a more cohesive content environment have made many marketers reluctant to include companion advertisements alongside branded content. They fear that the companion ads may be confusing to users or, worse yet, may dampen the consumers’ enjoyment of their experience. Interestingly, the study revealed that while users favor less disruptive content, companion advertisements are not only consistent with this mission, but also improve audience response to branded content. When interacting with content accompanied by companion display ads, users demonstrated 17 percent more purchase intent than those exposed to the content alone. They also found content with companion ads to be no more confusing, putting to rest any fears marketers might have on that front.

The results also challenged the conventional wisdom on the triumph of video. While high-budget video and interactive content are indisputably effective, infographics and galleries were 7 percent more successful than video content in improving user interest, and 9 percent more effective in improving opinion. It takes an elevated degree of focus for the audience to apprehend the immediate meaning of the moving image, while simultaneously relating it to the story they are crafting in their minds.

Mobile vs. desktop Study participants were exposed to content either on mobile or desktop devices, in an effort to isolate the impact of screen size and style of interaction. After all, while a user might dedicate hours to a casual jaunt through the internet, use of mobile devices is much more fragmented and demands a more precise and impactful content delivery. These factors proved to be more important than the overall time spent with and on mobile devices, and, while Polar’s most recent (Q1-2017) benchmarks (registration required) attributed 43 percent of branded content interaction to mobile devices, this study showed purchase intent to be over 17 percent stronger on desktops. To me, this simply suggests that there is plenty of room for the maturation of mobile branded content, and marketers that curate content with mobile in mind will find themselves successful in an increasingly mobile age.

The effect of brand integration on content performance is perhaps most surprising. It’s commonly accepted that the brand’s presence in content is a driving factor in improving consumer response to the brand. Our data suggests that users may not need that reinforcement, as editorial content was over 10 percent more effective than custom content at generating user interest. When it comes to branded content, less is indeed more, with increases in user opinion and interest inversely correlated to level of integration. This is not to say that custom content is ineffective, just as the power of still images does not upend the value of video. Branded content had a significant impact on brand lift at all levels of integration, with heavily integrated custom content driving purchase intent at over 51 percent. The results of this study should be encouraging to marketers and will hopefully provide an effective means of weighing the relative values of the tools they now have at their disposal. It’s clear that branded content is an extremely effective way of driving brand lift. The question, then, is not whether to use branded content, but what kind to use, and how.

Images, in contrast, are simple but potent means of content delivery, particularly in an era of ever-shrinking attention spans and screen sizes. Marketers should see this as an opportunity to develop ever more precise ways of encoding and delivering content.

Peter Minnium is President of Ipsos Connect, where he leads the US team in helping companies measure and amplify how media, brands, and consumers connect through compelling content and great communications.

A New Marketing Royalty: Why Digital Influencers Are on the Rise By knowledge@wharton

As online platforms become cluttered with ads, marketers are challenged to find new ways to connect with their customers. One rising trend they should pay attention to is “influencer marketing,” or using the power of popular people to reach your target market, according to this opinion piece by Aprajita Jain, a brand marketing evangelist at Google. You are in your mid-30s, single, sipping a coffee at your favorite coffee shop. Suddenly a stranger approaches your table and asks if he can sit with you. Instinctively drawing your purse a little closer, you make an excuse and leave. A month later your best friend tells you about someone she wants you to meet and gives you a very unbiased opinion on his virtues and vices. Knowing your friend has the best of intentions, you agree to meeting this person. As you walk into the restaurant you see the coffee shop guy sitting at a table waiting for you! This time your guard is down because you have the endorsement of someone you deeply trust. Brands are learning from this real-life psychological hack. Instead of getting in your face with their own message about their greatness they are letting ‘influencers’ — people you trust — tell you why you should pay attention to their products and services through a voice that sounds far more authentic. The influencer is that mutual friend between a brand and their consumers. Influencers are well-connected. They are authoritative. They have active minds and they are trendsetters.

Why are influencers so much more effective for marketing than self-promotion by a company? Let’s examine the trifecta of good influencer marketing: Attention equals currency. Influencer marketing allows targeted exposure to the right kind of consumer, one who is already interested in a category that you operate in and will likely pay attention. In a world where TV ads have become background noise and consumers are becoming immune to traditional digital advertising, being on-target is crucial. Just take a look at the rampant rise of ad blockers — last year alone, usage surged by 30% globally (PageFair 2017 Adblock Report). Only 6% of display ads are ever clicked on. Further proliferation of mobile phones, video content and social media, are turning influencers into constant companions of your audience. To get their attention, brands have to work with the people they listen to. Creativity and organic content has become the expectation. Remember Jared Fogle, the ‘the Subway guy?’ He served as the brand’s spokesperson for 15 years until his fall from grace. Today, it is no longer enough to hire a spokesperson and have them endorse your brand. While there is some overlap between celebrity endorsements and influencer marketing campaigns, the latter are designed to speak to an existing community of highly engaged followers. Influencers are the masters of their niches, and have established a high level of trust and two-way communication

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with their followers. They know how to incorporate a brand’s products and services into content people are watching and they do it very seamlessly, instead of taking away attention from what they really want to watch. The reason their followers keep coming back to them is because they regularly offer new and creative content to them. Followers have come to expect that. Over are the days of hammering the same message into your consumers’ heads for months, maybe even years. Social media has no prime time window — it is prime time. Any consumer behavior study worth its ink will tell you that consumers are shifting towards social at the cost of TV. While marketers chased prime time spots on TV in the past, social is prime time 24/7. The truth is, when a social media personality you follow day in and day out wears something, drinks something, shows you something, you pay attention to it. And the key word here is attention. How to win your customer’s attention is quickly changing, and the brands that fail to adapt are going to get left in the dust by their competitors.

“Influencers are the masters of their niches, and have established a high level of trust and two-way communication with their followers.”

In God we trust. Everyone else bring data. Why should you believe me when I say that influencer marketing is on the rise and more effective than many other popular marketing channels? • A poll conducted by Tomoson found that 59% of marketers are planning to increase their influencer marketing budgets year-over-year. It is also the most cost-effective and fastest-growing online customer acquisition channel, outpacing organic search, paid search and email marketing. • In an advertising landscape where returns on ad spend (ROAS) of $2 for every $1 spent are considered a success, influencer marketing delivers an average return of $6.50, with the top 13% of marketers making $20 or more. • It’s not just about the quantity, quality matters too — 51% of marketers believe customers acquired through influencer marketing are of better quality because they spend more money and are more likely to spread the word to family and friends. • According to a Think with Google study, 70% of teenage YouTube subscribers say they relate to YouTubers more than to traditional celebrities — and you can bet that is not just happening on YouTube. Casey Neistat versus Jennifer Aniston for Emirates. This is the story of a brand that had a few hit videos last year — Emirates Airline. It launched a campaign to show off the airline’s luxurious amenities and decided to spend $5 million of their total $20 million budget to hire Hollywood actress Jennifer Aniston to play the part of world traveler. The company made a series of short ads for YouTube with her that did quite well. Here is one of the videos they made together, which debuted last October. To date, this video has more than 6 million views. Not bad at less than $1 per view.

However, let us compare the Aniston spot to this video. An incredibly smart person over at the Emirates marketing team decided to give mega-YouTuber/influencer Casey Neistat premiere status on their airline, for free. They didn’t ask anything in return but hoped that if he enjoyed his flight he would share it with his fans. And he did. Twice, in fact. In addition to this first video, he also (of his own accord) created a second video that to date has another 11.5 million views — 52 million views — for free. Find me a marketer who doesn’t love free advertising. Casey caters to a younger audience but he is also a technology startup founder followed by many entrepreneurs aspiring to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or (Snap CEO) Evan Spiegel. While it’s hard to immediately measure the direct ROAS on a splashy campaign like this, Emirates had its brand featured in best-in-class media outlets such as GQ, Maxim, Adweek, Mashable and the Huffington Post. In addition to all the free press, the brand also got amplified on social media through Casey’s posts that received thousands of likes and retweets. Not only did Emirates raise awareness among a new demographic and received lots of free PR, they positioned their brand as forward-thinking and digital-first. Pretty Little Thing, a fashion company built on pop-culture, created a global clothing and accessories brand mimicking what influencers and celebrities are wearing. In fact, while they closely work with influencers, they essentially have taken the influencer marketing model and flipped it on its head — which more and more companies are likely to follow. Instead of going to an influencer and asking them to make a certain piece of clothing popular, they watch what these influencers are already wearing and then create matching, cost-effective products. They boast a solid 1.9 million followers on Instagram and have rapidly expanded from shipping from 20 orders per week four years ago to more than 20,000 orders per day today. Last December, the founder sold a 66% stake of his holdings to a larger fashion brand for 3.3 million pounds sterling with revenue quickly approaching 20 million pounds. ‘My Tales of Whisky’ The most mind-boggling example of influencer success comes from beverages giant Diageo, the parent company of Scottish whiskey brands Lagavulin and Oban. One of its video spots was awarded a Shorty Award for Best Influencer Marketing Campaign for this video starring NBC’s “Parks and Recreation” TV sitcom star Nick Offerman. The one-shot video called “My Tales of Whisky” shows Offerman sitting by a crackling fireplace — called a yule log according to European Christmas tradition — ironically in complete silence, staring “According to a Think broodingly into the camera for with Google study, 45 minutes, and occasionally 70% of teenage savoring a sip of his drink. YouTube subscribers Thanks to the simple seasonal premise and Offerman’s unique say they relate to brand, the video was a viral hit. YouTubers more On the day of launch, ‘yule than to traditional log’ was a trending topic on celebrities.” Facebook and more than 175 stories were written about it, earning the brand a lot of free

media mentions. As the campaign rapidly gained momentum in social conversations and got further amplified by streams through Sony, Tumblr and GoDaddy, the team behind it created a 10-hour loop for holiday gatherings. In the first two days alone, the video garnered 1.1 million YouTube views, growing to 2 million in just one week before any paid media was activated. The brand’s channel subscribers skyrocketed from 5,500 to 23,000.

•

Adding More Juice Influencer marketing isn’t just for the big brands. It is quite popular because companies of any size can benefit from it. Naked Juice, a smaller juice and smoothie company that started in the 1980s in Santa Monica, Calif., collaborated with young influencer Beth Norton. They sought her out on Instagram to promote their juices and smoothies to people on the go, whether they are running errands or planning projects. They also entered the beauty, fashion, and health scene on Instagram with help from lifestyle blogger Kate La Vie, who shares sponsored posts featuring images of her daily outfits and beauty essentials — including a strategically placed Naked Juice in the mix. Accompanied by other marketing channel strategies, this influencer campaign allowed Naked Juice to defend its position in the premium juice category by establishing itself in the minds and hearts of their core audience — known as ‘Bare Believers.’ Naked Juice now commands a market share of 58%, far ahead of any competitors, and saw an eight-fold increase in consumer social engagement.

Second, decide which pricing model is the best fit for your brand. The four most common pricing models are: •

Pay-per-post or flat-rate pricing: This is the most common method, with 68% of marketers choosing it. The influencer is paid a flat fee per piece of sponsored content they create, whether it’s a photo, tweet, pin, video or blog post. Depending on who you are working with, prices can range from as little as $50 per piece to as much as $250,000 for top-tier influencers.

•

Product compensation: Some influencers can be wooed with free products or services. This type of compensation is commonly used by travel brands as influencers can creatively endorse their personal travel stories. This model is ideal for smaller campaigns or for brands looking to establish a brand ambassador group.

•

Pay-per-click: In this model, influencers are compensated for how well their content performs. The key metric is number of clicks to a brand’s site. Because influencers rely a lot more on audience interaction in this performance-based model, they are motivated to create larger volumes of content.

•

Pay-per-acquisition: Here, influencers are rewarded for the number of purchases, actions or sign-ups driven by their content. It is the least common payment model because consumers rarely purchase or sign up for something the first time they get introduced to a product or service. Often, repeat exposure is required. The first introduction usually needs to be followed up by discovery, research and validation before resulting in a purchase or conversion.

Taking Action How does one get started in this form of marketing? How do you find influencers and measure the impact of your efforts? Eighty-four percent of marketers manually search social media platforms to find influencers that may be right for their brand. Many rely on recommendations, social media monitoring tools or attending events and conferences. It is one of the most challenging and time-consuming steps to take as you are getting started with this new medium of advertising, but today there is a plethora of influencer marketplaces that can make this much easier, such as Famebit by YouTube. These online platforms can be used to quickly search for influencers based on specific criteria (follower count, demographics, interests, etc.), to negotiate deals with them as well as give them a clear brief to stay ‘on brand.’ A marketplace makes it easier to not only negotiate a fair price but also find influencers that you may have not heard of before. First, consider these three criteria when choosing influencers: •

•

Context: Who has the largest overlap between their followers and your target audience? Keep in mind this is one of the very few — if not the only — type of advertising that works in an ‘opt-in’ model. Influencers don’t force themselves on their audience. Their audience actively subscribes to them. As a result, the audience is far more engaged than on other channels. Reach: How large is their following? Just like you choose a TV ad spot based on its reach, you can look at how many followers a certain influencer caters to.

Actionability: This is “Influencer marketing the influencer’s ability to delivers an average cause action and likely the most subtle, yet important, return of $6.50 (per selection criteria to get dollar spent), with the right. The more skilled an top 13% of marketers influencer is at convincing making $20 or more.” their followers to take action related to your product or service the higher your conversion rate will be.

Lastly, know what success means by defining your measurement criteria. Half of all marketers see sales increases and lead generation as the top goals of influencer marketing. Forty percent look for brand engagement such as clicks and social shares. However, success can also be correlated with spikes in web traffic or higher conversions in concurrent ad campaigns. A little less measurable, yet very effective, is the value of earned media as you saw with Emirates. Also, marketers often forget to take into account less tangible metrics, such as overall brand sentiment. Look at the whole picture and — as with all things in digital marketing — don’t ignore the cross-channel impact of influencer marketing on other channels. Influencer marketing is clearly here to stay. Its impact is palpable. Brands are using it to establish credibility in the market, create a social conversation around their brand and drive online and in-store sales. The brands that make this part of their always-on strategy are the ones that win the most desired eyeballs.

Lessons From the Cannes Lions: The Creative Data Category By John Lucker and Jim Caruso

What’s the state of data-driven creative, and how can marketers improve their efforts to drive sophisticated, relevant campaigns that resonate with consumers? Two judges for the Cannes Lions Awards—John Lucker, advisory principal and global advanced analytics market leader at Deloitte & Touche LLP, and Jim Caruso, chief product officer at Anomaly—share their thoughts. Marketers are often quick to talk about the importance of data and how insights can help brands target audiences with personalized, timely ad creative that rises above the din of competing messages. However, for all the discourse about

marketing as a blend of art and science, for many marketers, achieving a symbiotic relationship between numbers and ideas isn’t easy. The evolving dynamic between data and creative is very evident at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. For the past several years, ad tech and digital media companies have descended on the Riviera for the weeklong event, expanding the focus beyond creative. But in Cannes, as elsewhere, it’s not always clear how well creative directors and data scientists are working together. As judges for the festival’s Lions Innovation Creative Data

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award category this year, we saw impressive campaigns, but also many that revealed creatives’ uncertainty about how to use data effectively. We evaluated approximately 800 entries for the category, which celebrates campaigns enhanced or driven by the creative use of data. The group included 11 subcategories, among them data storytelling, data visualization, and use of real-time data. What insights did this exercise provide into the state of creative data? Overall, some marketers are making significant headway in this area, but many others are still falling short. Across the entire category, some common themes emerged among the best entries, offering lessons for marketers: Use data subtly and unobtrusively. Campaigns that use data in an obvious way—sending overly specific messages to just a few people, for example—can be off-putting to the audience, for a few reasons. Such efforts can trigger privacy concerns among consumers, fail ‘For marketers, it to align with the brand message, or appear gimmicky rather than can be a challenge useful. For marketers, it can a challenge to use data in to use data in be a measured, thoughtful, and a measured, tactful—not creepy—way.

thoughtful, and tactful—not creepy—way.’

View the customer holistically. Many marketers still limit themselves to siloed data gathered from one channel or division of an organization. Even if companies have an integrated view of the customer based on information from different functions within their own organization, they often neglect to integrate information from external sources—for example, point-of-sale, social media, or credit card data. Many of the campaigns that most creatively use data do so with a comprehensive, nuanced understanding of the target audience. These marketers develop unique ways to connect with customers and prospects, often drawing insights from their previous behavior. Use insights to fuel and optimize a core creative idea. Developing a powerful creative idea using behavioral data is often just the beginning. Many of the most effective campaigns continue to use such information to iterate, improve, and amplify the initial strategy. Many marketers claim they are using data to drive creative and communication plans, but often they are simply looking for the numbers that corroborate an existing idea or strategy. By considering data and creative in unison at the beginning stages of the effort, marketers are more likely to connect with the audience.

Engage consumers in a two-way conversation. For social media campaigns, many marketers rely on influencers, brand-sponsored posts, or generic one-to-many messaging. At Cannes Lions, however, many of the campaigns that employed social data most skillfully did so by approaching social media platforms as a way to create and continue dialogue directly with consumers through evolving and useful interactions. These exchanges were relevant because they used information provided by the audience, either in the social environment or when combined with external data, to provide a utility to consumers or delight them with unexpected help, instead of just serving them another advertisement. Leverage data for real-time targeting. Many marketers are already using data to better target consumers—for example, by using programmatic buying—but few marketers are pushing the limits when it comes to creating dynamic and relevant messaging outside of remarketing. Leveraging data can present a tremendous innovation opportunity for marketers to better target consumers, but doing so will likely require the high-quality data needed to create precise messaging. Prioritize data accuracy. Data can be surprisingly inaccurate, and marketers who use significantly flawed information can risk driving customers and prospects away rather than bringing them closer. A major issue for marketers and brands remains the difficulty of determining whether the data in which they’ve invested is accurate or valuable. Many of the marketers who are seeing strong results aren’t operating on hunches; they rely on sound data governance and data science practices to help ensure the information they use is reliable, timely, and evolving. Faulty insights can doom a campaign from the earliest stages. ***** This year’s Cannes Lions festival is now a memory, and next year’s is still many months away. For marketers, however, the questions we asked ourselves as judges are likely worth asking about all creative data efforts. What problem is the campaign solving? What data is it applying? How is the campaign gathering, assimilating, analyzing, and interpreting data in a creative way or in support of ad creative? These questions likely will be increasingly important for marketers to discuss with both analytics and creative talent at the table. Just as at Cannes Lions, the answers are likely to be compelling, challenging, promising—and critical to defining what makes a marketing effort effective. John Lucker, advisory principal and global advanced analytics market leader, Deloitte & Touche LLP; and Jim Caruso, chief product officer, Anomaly

In Pursuit of the Perfect Headline: What’s the Secret to Making Your Audience Click? By Steve Rayson

What is the secret to an engaging headline? Everyone has an opinion... but what does the data say? At BuzzSumo, we analyzed 100 million headlines published in 2017 to see what insights, if any, we could gain to improve our headlines and ensure they resonate with our audience. We published our detailed findings in a lengthy, 4,000-word post. But the essence of an engaging headline comes down to just a few core principles, we found.

The Data: The Most-Engaging Facebook Headline Phrases Our research found that the three-word phrases (trigrams) that gained the most Facebook engagements—likes, shares, comments—were the following:

The Implications: The Essence of an Engaging Headline The danger of this type of research is that people simply copy or reuse top phrases that have worked previously. I know it is tempting, but at least avoid “will make you”; I already feel bad that the research unleashed dozens of these headlines on the world in the few days after the publication of the research. The true value of the research lies in helping us to understand the formats and principles that underpin a good headline. The research suggests that engaging headlines... 1. Focus on why the reader should care 2. Have clarity and promise 3. Include emotional hooks 4. Provoke curiosity 5. Provide explanations 6. Appeal to a tribe Let’s look at these in a little more detail. 1. Make the Reader Care In our sample, the most powerful three-word phrase used in a headline was will make you. Linking phrases such as “will make you” can be an elegant and effective way of connecting your content to the reader and why they should care. This format makes explicit the linkage between the content and the potential impact on the reader. For example: “8 Habits That Will Make You More Productive” The other key feature of “will make you” headlines is the promise: There is a clear promise that the content will make you productive or happy or sad or... Which brings us to the next principle.

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2. Clarity and Promise Readers like to know what they will get when clicking through to your post. I think this is why list posts work well. The reader knows exactly what they are going to get... For example: “10 Pictures That Show What Pollution Has Done to Delhi” This form of headline has clarity and a promise; in this case, you will see the effects of pollution in 10 pictures. The nature of the promise can be more expansive, however. For example: “27 Amazing Charts That Will Turn You Into a Baking Whiz” Of course, the content must live up the promise; otherwise, your credibility will be shot. In this case, I really don’t think any charts will make me a baking whiz, but I was probably not the target audience. Over 900,000 people shared this post. (We will talk more about the importance of the audience later.) 3. Emotional Hooks In consumer content, we were not surprised to find that emotional words and phrases have impact. Well-shared headlines included phrases such as the following:

These emotional headlines were used far less in B2B headlines, and they didn’t appear in the top trigrams for LinkedIn or Twitter. However, certain keywords can have a similar emotional impact in B2B headlines. For example, words such as “success” or “successful” in a LinkedIn headline typically get a lot more shares than the average. 4. Curiosity Curiosity is powerful. There are some things we can’t resist. It is part of that classic narrative arc of an unfolding mystery: We want to find out “who did it.” I am disappointed to report that “what happened next” was a top phrase that plays on our curiosity. Clickbait headlines containing that phrase typically show disrespect to the reader, and they are far removed from the traditional journalistic practice of summarizing the important details in the headline. On the positive side, Facebook now categorizes headlines that withhold information as clickbait, and demotes them. There are ways to provoke curiosity in your headlines without resorting to “what happened next” clickbait. 5. Explanations

• Melt your heart

“This is why” was the No. 2 best-performing phrase in our sample of 100 million posts. Explanation posts can use headlines to provoke curiosity as well as provide answers. For example:

• Most beautiful

• “This Is Why You Should Never Drink Water With Ice”

• Can’t stop laughing

• “This Is Why You Should Be Sleeping On Your Left Side”

• Tears of joy • Make you cry

Explanations backed by research or science appear to do particularly well. A whole new “genre” of “science says” and “according to science” posts has emerged recently.

My sense of these phrases is that they are typically more negative in tone. For example, among these phrases are “the risks of,” “don’t forget to” and “how much will.”

6. Tribalism

The Importance of Context

One of the unfortunate things about recent political developments has been the increased tribalism in politics, which has in turn led to more polemical headlines that are widely shared by supporters of one political viewpoint or another.

It was interesting to see how poorly phrases some phrases, such as “on a budget,” performed on Facebook. That may be due to the context: On Facebook, people are looking for more inspirational or amusing content than practical content.

People widely share content to show they are part of a tribe and to support their tribe.

By contrast, the phrase “on a budget” appears to work well on Pinterest for DIY topics, because the context is different. See these examples:

This sort of tribalism extends well beyond politics. Headlines and content designed to appeal to a specific group of people can frequently benefit from tribal loyalty. For example: • “25 Things Only Teachers Will Understand” • “Science Says the First Born Child Is the Most Intelligent” • “10 Must Read Books for Marketing Professionals”

Learning From the Phrases That Fail to Engage We also looked at the commonly used phrases in headlines that receive the lowest Facebook engagement. In some ways, this exercise was more insightful than the top engaging phrases.

Context, then, is important: Phrases that work well in one context may work far less well in another, the research found. For example, we found that in the health category “need to know” was a powerful phrase. However, in a marketing context, it can be far less effective, such as a post on “10 Things You Need to Know About BuzzSumo.” The health context is what gives the phrase personal impact.

The Secret to Engaging Headlines? Understanding Context and Research Our research may provoke many ideas about headline words and phrases, but it has more value in drawing out the fundamental characteristics of engaging headlines. To repeat, they typically include one or more of the following: • A focus on why the reader should care • Clarity and promise • Emotional hooks • Provoke curiosity • Provide explanations • Appeal to a tribe The research also reinforces the importance of context and emphasizes why you need to research what works in your specific context: namely, your audience, your industry, your topics, and your social networks. Note: We looked only at phrases or trigrams that were used on a minimum of 100 domains. Accordingly, there are clearly worse-performing phrases; but these are the worstperforming commonly used phrases.

Steve Rayson is director at BuzzSumo, which provides social insights for content marketing and SEO campaigns.

Why brands will welcome Amazonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s challenge to Google and Facebook By Andy Vogel

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AMAZON IS SET TO EQUAL FACEBOOK AS A MEANS OF INFLUENCING CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR, AND CHALLENGE GOOGLE IN DELIVERING CUSTOMER UNDERSTANDING, WRITES NEWBASE’S GLOBAL HEAD OF DIGITAL PRODUCTS. Amazon is an unstoppable growth engine that is showing no signs of slowing. From the success of its core e-commerce business, to newer ventures such as Prime, and its acquisition of Whole Foods, there is scarcely a sector that has not been touched by the company. Now Amazon is training its sights on the advertising business. Many marketers are likely to welcome Amazon’s intent to become a significant advertising player, not least given the rising concerns about the so-called ‘duopoly’ dominance that Facebook and Google exerts over the digital ad market. However, Amazon uniquely can see the whole consumer journey, right through the funnel, and it is increasingly important as a product search engine. In the US, Amazon is now the default shopping search engine, with double Google’s product searches, and brands are reacting accordingly, cosmetics giant L’Oréal announced that it is allocating a portion of its search budget to Amazon.

Mascara could be served ads/promotions for these or other holiday-related products. Consumers already consider Amazon’s recommendations to be helpful, appropriate and natural. Done well, this will be a natural evolution and it offers the chance for brands to be weaned off the habitual retargeting of the same audience, which when repeated too often – as well we all know from experience – can be irritating and off-putting. It also helps to alleviate the dependence many brands have developed on Facebook when it comes to finding new consumers. Amazon’s new self-serve platform, Advertiser Audiences, was rolled out earlier this summer, and is proving transformative in how brands seek out new audiences. Advertisers are able to anonymously match a list of their customers with Amazon shoppers and find “lookalike” targets that may be interested in, say, a specific type of shoe, but had not yet shown any intention of shopping for that item.

With millions of UK and US households enjoying the tones of Amazon Echo’s Alexa AI assistant, this search evolution is likely to accelerate in the direction of voice – something that will further benefit Amazon.

Beyond all this ad tech, Amazon also recognised that there was a gap in its brand offer, until recently some brands were reluctant to appear on the site as they did not have enough control over the experience, so it has just launched brand stores.

It shows that something more profound than a shift in ad dollars is afoot. Amazon has traditionally been viewed as important in the last stage of the consumer purchase journey, meaning any ad investment would reflect that stage in the funnel. Now, with Amazon playing an active role in shaping consumer perceptions, it offers another route by which brands can understand their target consumers, and their purchase motivations.

Amazon’s strength is plain to see, with hundreds of millions of active customers, and as it’s a buying environment, this is what will drive brands to invest with Amazon. However, Amazon won’t be the best home for all ad dollars; it’s not geared towards creating a brand, marketers with highly limited adspend will be better off using other tactics to establish and build a brand.

A new avenue is also opening in the pursuit of influencing consumer behaviour. Amazon’s unrivalled customer data and suite of powerful ad tech tools open up new possibilities for brands. As the world’s marketplace, it knows what people have bought in the past, are buying now, and are likely to buy in the future – with the latter insights derived from people’s searches. It has years and years of data on repeat consumers; these are not window shoppers, these are people who buy. This enables far better predictions and targeting, and increases Amazon’s ability to provide useful advertising solutions that help brands to encounter new customers rather than simply re-targeting existing ones. Amazon understands that the moment people start searching for a specific brand that they could be directed towards similar products. This means Amazon’s ad tech will appreciate that someone searching for waterproof mascara in July might also be in the market for flip-flops, a bikini and a trashy novel. Then Ms

Over the next five years Amazon will be a significant advertising player – even more so if it launches its own phone; a real game-changer for accessing customer data and usage habits – and will probably come to equal Facebook in terms of both its targeting ability and as a platform to influence consumer behaviour. However, it’s not a zero sum game; it’s likely to be new spend that targets Amazon rather than moved from Google or Facebook. For marketers, this rising opportunity can only be a good thing. Google and Facebook will remain vitally important components of most digital media strategies, and their influence in the industry will remain great. However, with Amazon emerging as a third force, the dependency on those two players will be diminished – allowing brands to develop more sophisticated and more influential marketing campaigns. Andy Vogel is global head of digital products at NewBase

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Design Thinking By Jon Feagain

When I first heard about Design Thinking, I thought it was a clever rebranding effort by IDEO to charge twice as much for user-centered design. What can I say, I’m an old fart of a designer, and when I read about design thinking, I didn’t really see the big whup. And I wasn’t alone. But over time I’ve discovered that the oft-parodied approach to Design Thinking — a lot of post-its and a lot of prototyping — works better than nearly any other approach to product and service innovation.

Let me break each of these ideas down:

Distributed Cognition Distributed Cognition (or embodied cognition) is the most current understanding of how cognition works. It states that rather than thinking only with our brains, we think with our environments. For example, imagine you are playing scrabble.

Why? Do designers truly think in a different way? The key is the word “thinking.” I want to make an argument that Design Thinking is a kind of thinking based on three key cognition theories: • Distributed Cognition • Expertise Thinking • Iterative World Modeling

What if you couldn’t rearrange the tiles? Would this slow you down? Would you make lower scoring words?

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Any scrabble player would tell you yes. Any poker or bridge player would tell you they always arrange the cards in their hands to support their strategy. Anyone doing long division would prefer to do it with a pencil and paper than in their head. A designer trying to understand how to organize content would prefer to do it with post-its. (or index cards. As long as it’s modular.)

Distributed cognition is a very simple idea: Thinking with your brain and objects in the world is not a better way to think; it’s natural. Humans aren’t just tool users. We are tool thinkers. Distributed cognition helps everyone think better. Agile Practitioners use kanban boards as a combination memory enhancer and strategy accelerator. My financial planner just had me create a mindmap to see where my money is and where it goes. Getting Things Done demands you move your task lists out of your head and onto paper so you can think through harder problems. These are all distributed cognition strategies. So if everyone uses distributed cognition, what makes Design Thinking Design Thinking?

Design Thinking as Expertise Thinking We all use the world as an extension of our mind. As we do so, we get better at it. We discover tools and develop techniques, and we get higher and higher returns as we get better at these tools. Different professions use different approaches, and thus develop different ways to think about a given problem. Photo by Danielle Forward

When you see a workshop teaching Design Thinking, it usually leverages three easy-to-learn distributed cognition tools:

For example, let’s call the way that chefs work, Chef Thinking(TM). Chefs have a class of problems (preparing food) and a body of skills to combine into a set of solutions. Three of the key ones:

• Making information modular so it can be manipulated (tl;dr put data on post-its so you can rearrange it) • Modeling existing and proposed systems via sketching. Mindmaps and storyboards are two examples. • Prototyping potential solutions for understanding and evaluation. This can be as simple as bodystorming or as complex as 3D printing.

• Knifework. If you take a knife skills class, you begin to understand that knives cut, but they also saw, slice, smash, poke and more. The knife becomes an extension of your body (called a transparent instrument in the literature.) Mind Map from Andrew Reid created to understand water pollution.

All of these Design Thinking techniques are distributed cognition techniques that: • Move memory out of your head into the world, freeing up processing power. • Allow you to see connections and relationships you can’t easily visualize in your head. • Create a shared understanding for teams. Now your team can be part of that distributed world you think with.

• Managing Fire. Sure you can put a pan on the fire, but you can also make it into a steamer, a oven, or even offset it to create hot spots and cool. • Ingredients. A chef knows how to make poor ingredients taste nice, how to show off great ingredients, and how to combine ingredients into flavor profiles that evoke Japan, Mexico or Italy. Chefs also have standard methodologies, like mise en place or the brigade. Over time, a chef does not have to look up what spice to use, or how to bone a fish. She is only thinking

about how to use the salmon before it goes bad, and the techniques to do so are invisible to her conscious mind. After I went to culinary school, knife and fire became extensions of myself. I can open any fridge and cook something. Hunger is a problem I solve with Chef Thinking(TM).

For example, a non-designer “ideates” by thinking up an idea.

Let’s return to design thinking. Over time designers have built up their own body of approaches to solving classes of problems. While architecture and graphic design are almost as old as cooking, interactive product design is emergent and thus pretty untidy. But here are a few classes of problems and collections of how designers solve them: • Context analysis: Interviews, empathy, contextual inquiry, listening sessions, diary studies as all tools for getting a fresh understanding of the context in which one will be designing. And there are way more. • Sensemaking: When you have too many ideas, too much information, how do you find insights? Well, there are always Post-its. See Needfinding for Disruptive Innovation. • Idea generation. Mature designers know that even if your first idea is brilliant, you’ll never know unless you come up with 20 more. Sprints and Charettes are techniques for finding and refining potential solutions. • Product definition: Conceptual models, sitemaps, flowcharts, wireflows, use cases, user stories… so many ways to ask engineers to “build this.”

Brian Gulassa, Toy Designer, ideates massive numbers of ideas before fleshing them out.

A designer thinks up dozens, exploring the good, the bad and the weird, sketches them, combines them, critiques them, refines them, develops them, remixes them and only then moves on to prototyping them. It’s the same for Define or Test. Each one of those hexes represents a dozen techniques and years of practice. Young designers fresh from school are equipped with a subset of these tools, but it takes time to gain mastery. As you can see by the list above, there are a LOT of ways to solve problems, and part of being an expert is knowing which tools to use when to get the best result.

Participatory Roadmaps, from my Creative Founder class.

• Idea Validation. Part of thinking with the world is working with the world of users. From participatory design to usability testing, effective designers find ways to evaluate the quality of their thinking with the people who really pay the bills: customers Look closely at my list and you’ll see it maps to the d.School’s definition of Design Thinking (more or less.) The diagram looks facile, but each hexagon represents huge bodies of experiential learning.

Sure you can take a weekend workshop on design thinking or knifeskills, and it will help you be better at what you are trying to accomplish. But only practice turns those skills into a habit, then a transparent instrument, and finally give you the mastery you need to solve wicked problems.

Iterative World Modeling A long time ago, when I was a manager of a team of 80 designers at Yahoo!, I wondered, “what is design’s unique capability?” What did design do for the business that product management, research, marketing and engineer couldn’t? I decided it was Design work is two kinds of world modeling work: 1. Modeling the world as it is. 2. Modeling the world as it could be.

I would pay 100 bucks to anyone right now who could get the d.School to replace empathize with context. Or even contextualize, if you really love verbs.

Designers create mental models and system models to document the current state of their corner of the world. Designers model both the object of the design challenge and the ecosystem it resides in. Design Thinking is

“Design makes ideas tangible so that they can be understood and evaluated before committing them to reality.”

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Systems Thinking. Then designers make concept models, site maps, flow diagrams and more to model the future desired state. (I’ve written a lot on working with models.) Designers don’t necessarily build that new version of the world — engineers, contractors, printers and many others play their parts — but they do show the path forward for change. This is more powerful than most realize. I have seen a executive look at a mock and suddenly see a path forward for his company. I’ve seen an engineer say, “that’s not feasible,” and the exec reply, “But it’s right there.” The exec saw it, and now must have it. And it gets made. Seeing really is believing. Because models work to well for both understanding and planning, senior designers, such as Dave Gray, often use them to design organizations as well as products. Business strategists such as Alex Osterwalder and lean startup coaches such as David Bland create models in order to create understanding and lead change. Image result for dave gray team

services are emerging. Agile helps engineers build the right things at the right time. Lean Startup helps business owners build the right things at the right time. These techniques are not only successful, but transferable. People do stand-up with their families, they publish books using lean, even approach Thanksgiving dinner as if it were an engineering project. Agile and Lean Startup aren’t just methodologies; they are a way to work through complex systems toward a desired result. Design Thinking has recently been adopted by the Lean and Agile communities as another way to build the right thing at the right time. There has been some anxiety from old fart designers (ok, like me) that product managers and business owners will take a design thinking class and think they are designers. I haven’t seen that. What I’ve seen is a greater desire for design literacy — including learning how to use Design Thinking — and that leads to a greater desire to hire designers. (Your mileage may vary. I’m sure there will be plenty of responses to the contrary.) Design Thinking is not design, no more than Agile is engineering or Lean is business management. Everyone should learn Agile, but engineers still write the code. Everyone should learn Lean, but business people and product managers still design the business model (and solve pricing, and do customer acquisition, and sales, and watch metrics, etc etc. I know you’re tired.). Everyone should learn Design Thinking. But also remember that a mature designer has the mastery — the expertise — to effectively envision the world as it could be, and make a plan for how to get there. As Design Thinking gains greater acceptance as a powerful tool for innovation, I think we’ll see more people who are design literate. They will understand both Design Thinking and Design Doing: what it takes to design something great. And they’ll realize it’s hard, and takes training and practice.

A prototype (see the hexes) is just a higher fidelity model. It is still a cheaper-than-making-the-real-thing way to understand and evaluate. A prototype is a way to see the future and judge if it’s worth building. When designers model the world as it is, they create understanding. When they model the world as it could be, they create inspiration.

When companies become design literate, they’ll use design thinking to solve problems such as improving team dynamics or coming up with a product line extension. Design Thinking is a terrific approach for coming up with viable ideas for innovative improvement. But design itself is much more. Design is the art of the making the complex clear, the disordered ordered, the unusable usable. So when companies run into a truly intractable challenge such as a complex tool menu that needs sorting out, or integrating an algorithm that doesn’t make sense to users, or finding a market application for a crazy bit of new technology… the first they’ll want to do is a hire a good designer.

To think like a designer is to see the world as it is, and find a path forward to what it could be.

Design Thinking as a Way As tech matures, approaches to creating digital product and

Christina Wodtke Designing business, and the business of design.

Augmented reality’s future isn’t glasses. It’s the car By Vitaly Ponomarev

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35 In the next seven years, true augmented reality will likely not become mainstream anywhere, except the automotive industry — and here are the reasons why. By “true” augmented reality” we mean AR that shows virtual objects to be actually integrated with the real environment and visible on various depths, not only on a screen’s surface. Despite explosive growth, AR software and content is now mostly created for small-screen devices like smartphones and tablets. True AR remains out of reach, but cars will reach it first.

All eyes on hardware For true AR to hit mass market, the industry needs a rich app and content ecosystem and hero device(s) capable of handling it. That hardware is nowhere near ready. Developers rely on the smartphone screen as the main (if not only) means to deliver AR. Wearables are not really an option either, as it’s almost impossible to shove the high rendering performance, convenience, and good quality wide-angled picture into a small form factor. Platforms like Apple’s iOS-centered ARKit only demonstrate the lack of advanced hardware for the true augmented reality. If smartphones, tablets, and wearables are not ready for true AR, non-wearable gadgets will emerge. What gadget has the most potential to deeply integrating the virtual objects in the surroundings? The answer is automotives: Cars already have enough transparent surface to become a hardware platform for the true AR in the windshield, and the rise of driverless cars will create the demand.

New transportation paradigm Sooner or later, the global automotive industry will be dominated by MaaS (mobility-as-a-service) companies. Uber, Lyft, Didi, and others are already making money on transportation rather than car sales. With driverless solutions on the way, we predict car manufacturers will continue to lose ground as they are able to offer nothing more than commodity. The share of vehicle electronics in a car’s value is growing fast. I believe that in the next few years AR will become a key driver of this share getting larger.

How AR can benefit automobiles Thousands of developers are already committed to deliver rich and immersive AR experiences through the Apple App Store and Google Play. However, many of those applications aren’t applicable in real-life situations, serving as entertainment for its own sake. In the automotive industry, AR can open unlimited opportunities for location-based content serving specific business purposes, such as: • New navigation and geolocation features which adjust the experience to the real time environmental conditions • New types of relevant and time-conscious ads • Gamification of transportation processes and in-car entertainment • New types of social networks — the functionality that Waze is already exploring

At WayRay, we already work in that direction by developing AR navigation and visualizing advanced driver assistance systems. The question is — what if the impact of AR in automotive goes beyond new business models?

Moving toward driverless future At the current pace, car manufacturers aim to increase the level of self-driving capabilities by one point every two years. Audi recently introduced the A8 – a model with level 3 driverless capabilities (At level 3, “drivers are still necessary … but are able to completely shift “safety-critical functions” to the vehicle, under certain traffic or environmental conditions), and other car manufacturers have committed to reach that milestone by 2018. With fully driverless cars expected to be available to regular consumers by 2025, AR will be playing an important social role by helping users to adjust to the new reality. During the transition, people will have to learn to trust driverless cars. A passenger should at any time be aware of what is happening in the car: why it chooses the specific lane, which cars are around, how busy one or another road is, how the route is being calculated. Let’s not forget about the simple curiosity — most passengers will be keen to see how exactly a robot does the job better than a human. Augmented reality is a natural way to visualize the decision processes in the car so the passenger feels safer and more comfortable. Automotive AR could use a combiner glass with a holographic film on it, which work as a lens and reflects only certain wavelengths. People will look through the combiner glass in front of the windshield and see the projected video or interactive interface. Of course, a few challenges will emerge — for example, we’ll have to change one of the essential drivers’ habits to look in the mirrors. And developers still have to prove that AR provides better and more precise experience.

Future of true AR As cars evolve, we’ll see a variety of applications and implementations for augmented reality in the industry. At the same time, AR has a potential to look ahead of the market depending on the availability of the aftermarket devices with over-the-air updates. In any case, it becomes more and more obvious that the market will soon need a universal platform for any car-related AR content. Eventually, I think, a standard will be created for AR content in transportation. That requires building an ARled ecosystem for the manufacturers, software developers, content creators, and — maybe most importantly — for drivers and passengers. To sum up, automotive industry gives the true AR the most opportunities hardware-wise. On the other hand, AR has a potential to support the market in the smooth transition towards driverless transportation. It means that augmented reality in automotive is a trend that will only grow bigger and pave the way for the true AR in other industries. Vitaly Ponomarev is the Founder and CEO of WayRay, an AR auto company.

Is There Such a Thing as a ‘Brand Fail’ Anymore? By Dan Brotzel

When Saturday Night Live devotes an entire sketch to lampooning your new ad, it’s a sign that you’ve messed up in a pretty heinous way. That was the fate that befell Diet Pepsi in April, when the company attracted widespread derision for an ad depicting supermodel and reality TV star Kendall Jenner joining an absurdly comprehensive line-up of diversely beautiful young people in a fake protest event. The point of the march is vague; we see only slogans like “Join the conversation” and stylized CND symbols, but many saw in it unfavourable echoes of Black Lives Matter. And the ad ends with Jenner defusing tensions by offering a Diet Pepsi to a dishy police officer who, you know, just can’t help enjoying the taste. Cut to cheering young people, and harmony among all nations, creeds, and genders. Slogan: “Live bolder.” The uproar of criticism and ridicule can perhaps be best encapsulated in a single tweet, written by the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., and accompanied by a photo of her father in a scene that’s disturbingly similar to the Pepsi payoff. Bernice A. King tweeted: “If only Daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi.”

Consult: “In contrast to the social media furor, 44% of poll respondents said they had a more favorable view of Pepsi after watching the video, compared to a quarter who said it gave them a less favorable view. And 32% of Americans said the ad made them more likely to buy Pepsi products, versus 20% who were less likely.” Another recent so-called brand fail was the Burger Kind ad that triggered voice-activated Google Home devices to read out the Wikipedia entry about the Whopper. The Whopper’s ingredient list was rapidly doctored in less than wholesome ways, and Google ended up blocking the ad. Another brand fail? Apparently not, as Burger King launched more versions of the ad, and in the process made itself the focus of lots of conversation, both online and offline, about the Internet of Things. There aren’t that many Google Home-enabled households out there yet. And maybe getting banned by Google got Burger King some cachet that tipped the sympathy vote its way. But the main thing was that the whole campaign gained lots of publicity.

Disastrous, no? Embarrassing? Tone-deaf? Insensitive? On social media, it was hard to find anyone with a good word to say about the ad. So did sales plummet? Was the Pepsi reputation ruined? Was there an immediate hit where brands hurt most—in the bottom line?

Let’s take one more so-called brand fiasco—the role of PwC in the mix-up of the Best Film announcement at this year’s Oscars. “Experts say the lasting brand damage for the New York-based firm, the world’s second largest by revenue, could be severe for a company that has built its reputation on accuracy,” AdAge reported.

Er, no. It’s more likely the ad had a positive impact on brand awareness and purchase preference, according to Morning

Mark Ritson, the outspoken Marketing Week columnist, thought otherwise: “Are you telling me that [the morning

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after Oscar night] all over London there are clients sitting in large corporate offices having urgent meetings because some bloke from accounting got a bit dizzy and picked up the wrong envelope and now, well, we are just not sure that we want to continue with that audit from PwC?”

And all the while, the brand is getting airtime, exposure, publicity. The hypnotic, drip-drip, broadcasting effect can end up placing a product further at the forefront of people’s minds so that they’re more likely to recall the name, long after they’ve forgotten why they were cross with it.

Success From Failure: Virtue-Signaling and Cinnamon Buns

Brand Fails That Are Really Fails: United Airlines and BP

How, then, are we to account for the fact that those so-called fails are likely to have had little or no effect on the businesses attached to those brands?

Not all brand fails are the same, of course. United Airlines’ forcible eviction of a rightfully seated passenger had knocked $770 million off the company’s market valuation by the end of its first PR week from hell. And there is talk of a new voucher compensation scheme potentially costing the company millions more.

For one thing, outrage is easy, but these days it may not last long or go very deep. Brand-shaming has become a widespread behavior on social media. Someone points out that a new ad is tacky or exploitative or insensitive in some way—Cinnabon’s witty tribute to Carrie Fisher is a good example—and there will always be a cohort of people who are ready to jump on to the virtue-signaling bandwagon. But there’s just so much content to browse these days, and another juicy brand fail is no doubt right around the corner. Today’s waves of outrage are often mere faddish displays of social compliance. As for the Cinnabon ad, there were plenty of people who argued that the famously funny Fisher would have enjoyed the tribute, and that the furor was just an echo chamber created by right-on, killjoy social justice warriors. (An SJW, as defined by Urban Dictionary, is “a pejorative term for an individual who repeatedly and vehemently engages in arguments...often in a shallow or not well-thought-out way, for the purpose of raising their own personal reputation. An SJW does not necessarily strongly believe all that they say, or even care about the groups they are fighting on behalf of.... They are very sure to adopt stances that are “correct” in their social circle.”) The official media need contentious stuff to talk about, too, and so there can be news value in manufacturing a row from a few grumpy tweets. As Ritson puts it: “It has become the fashion when any major company makes a goof that... the brand in question is ‘plunged’ into catastrophe, the crisis management clichés are quickly trotted out and every manner of brand expert duly informs a rabid media of the untold damage that this crisis will immediately have on brand equity, reputation and the bottom line.” Other factors in the surprising ineffectiveness of brand fails might include our famous admiration for authenticity: What can be more authentically human than to cock up, after all? Not to mention our innate consumer inertia: “OK, so the ad was lame,” some might think. “But I always drink Pepsi, I just do.” Perhaps, too, many consumers actually think most ads from big corporates are kind of lame anyway, and this one was just a bit more obviously so. And some may just not remember to make the association between their disapproval of the ad and their choice of drink at the till, either because of messaging fatigue or because their shopping choices are made almost unconsciously.

And as of July 2016, British Petroleum estimated, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill—which resulted in 11 deaths and triggered one of the world’s worst ever environmental disasters—would cost the company $61.6 billion. BP settled massive civil penalties and compensation claims, BP shares tanked, forecourt sales nose-dived, and BP endured a level of public disapproval that completely undermined years of earlier work to present itself as a corporate social responsibility (CSR) leader. Similarly, the emissions scandal hit profits and shares at Volkswagen. Perhaps the difference here is that in these cases the brand signally failed to do what it’s supposed to do—make cars honestly, fly people home who have plane tickets, run an oil rig safely, and not try to pass the buck when things go wrong, etc.—rather than just messed up its marketing. And yet...

No Such Thing as Bad Publicity? VW and The Donald And yet, by January 2017, VW had ridden out the storm and taken the title of the world’s biggest car seller for the first time. It even retained its place (just) in the Reputation Institute’s Top 100 most reputable companies for 2017. The list also contains several other brands—among them Google, Adidas, Amazon, and, yes, PepsiCo—which have received their fair share of stringent CSR criticism in recent months and years. And a newly slimmed-down, chastened BP is back in profit now, and you wouldn’t bet against United’s turning things round eventually, too. Perhaps, then, there really is only one thing worse than being talked about. “Attention,” “cut-through,” “standing out from the noise”—these elusive qualities are more in demand than ever, and outrage, mess-ups, and controversy are one, often very potent, way to achieve them. They worked for The Donald, after all. Dan Brotzel is content director and a co-founder of Sticky Content, a UK-based marketing content and creative agency. In 2013, it was acquired by the Press Association, the UK’s national press agency, and operates as an autonomous brand within the PA family of companies.

The Magic Of An Effective Brainstorm By Lisa Kent

When innovation became a key factor in my compensation and my then employer, Johnson & Johnson, tracked the revenue gains I generated, a sage manager warned me that this would be the hardest job of my life. He said that a concern was that nobody could just sit down and generate big ideas, brainstorms never worked, and that I would struggle to achieve the stretch goals that had been set for me. I wasn’t just being asked for one big idea but had to deliver dozens of them, each one global and each one significant in incremental opportunity. They had to be breakthrough and test well with consumers and stakeholders. He was right about some things – it was one of the hardest jobs in my life. However, he was wrong about brainstorms. Structured correctly, brainstorms generate strong results and I learned fast to ensure that they did. By now, I have planned and led over 200 brainstorms. Today at Luminations, we run our trademarked Lightning Strike® brainstorms with the benefit of these tenets. They can be a physical get together, sessions that pull cross-functional partners together for an all-day workshop, or they can be done virtually with a virtual whiteboard and Webex.

Here are my top 10 points to power your brainstorms. 1. Ground everyone in data, information and the hypotheses you already have. Do the necessary background work and be sure to share it in simplified form with those participating in your brainstorm. Lead with this foundational learning to ensure everyone has a

similar level of basic knowledge and all can participate. 2. Make the parameters and deliverables crystal clear. Let everyone know upfront what the expectations and goals are. Acknowledge any naysayers or obstacles but move on. If asked, everyone attending should be able to articulate what we want to accomplish in this specific brainstorm. 3. Leverage experts, trained professionals and outside thinkers. There is tremendous value in outside thinking. It is so easy to become insulated and to develop blinders in a category, channel, industry or other areas. Bringing in outsiders helps eliminate this issue. They ask questions and bring examples and precedents from other disciplines. They view a prospective consumer, customer or patient from a different angle. And they bring associative logic. 4. Facilitate with finesse. If possible, use an outside facilitator to enable all team members to step back, participate and keep the ideating on track. The day or discussion should be explicitly choreographed to maximize results. Make the group aware that their presence, when in the room/conference call, is required – this means no electronic distractions. We often collect phones and iPads at the beginning of our sessions and redistribute during break times. Once people get over the uncomfortable feeling of not having their phone at hand, they usually participate with gusto. 5. Develop stimuli and exercises that move the group toward the desired outcomes. Don’t sit still

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– make sure to plan exercises that get people up and moving. Physically moving around helps stimulate the brain. Use stimuli to advance thinking – photos, ads, quotes, products (not always in the current category) and even toys to keep the hands occupied while thinking. 6. Go in with thought-starters. While we inevitably get the juices flowing, sometimes it takes a little while to get ideas up on the board. Do a pre-planning session for each exercise that enables you to come in with some thought starters. 7. Document, document, document. Lots of valuable ideas will crop up; be sure to capture them all, even if you cannot see right now how they might apply. Discussion, disagreement, questions, concerns and obstacles voiced are also important to document as they may be the genesis of an idea. 8. Keep asking why to get to the insight behind an idea. When we teach insight identification, we gently push students to keep asking why to get to the bottom of the motivation for a decision. Challenging assumptions and probing on behaviors often leads to the underlying drivers, an important facet of any brainstorm. 9. Acknowledge that different participants bring different strengths and leverage them. With any session comes a mix of background, experience, motivation and knowledge. Be sure you understand who will be in the room (or on the call) and think about how best to leverage her skills and background.

10. Deliver a “finished” framework. Don’t let the end of the brainstorm be the end. It’s easy to walk away inspired and energized with no actionable next steps. Be sure to put together an organized summary of themes, key idea platforms and questions for the future. Don’t leave the session without alignment on what the team’s next steps are and who owns which initiative. Brainstorming can work as an in-person session, a virtual session facilitated by new technologies that allow sharing of materials and whiteboards, and the process also works to ideate on your own. It can be daunting to sit down with a blank sheet of paper pressuring yourself to generate ideas for new baby products – so don’t. Instead, watch a mom diaper, feed, bathe and get a baby ready for bed. Listen to a caregiver talk about things she wishes were easier. Whenever we think about products for babies we also think about products for pets; after all, the actual consumer cannot articulate his or her wants or needs so the “parent” decides on their behalf. After you’ve steeped yourself in the experience of babies, start to jot down your ideas. When structured correctly, a properly executed brainstorm can be immensely rewarding. Just be prepared to dive deep into the subject matter, engross yourself in the experience, and let the ideation begin.

Founder and president of The Luminations Group, a business solution and marketing strategy agency.

Here’s Why Influencers Are Making Bank AND DRIVING UP ENGAGEMENT LEVELS FOR BRANDS IN THE PROCESS By Monica Melton

Influencers are driving engagement with brands on Instagram at levels well beyond those seen by companies’ own posts on the Facebook-owned social media platform. According to a June 2017 study of influencers on Instagram from NewsWhip, paid posts made by influencers dwarfed engagement levels of owned posts made by the brands themselves. For example, JetBlue averaged 2,363 engagements in June on its owned posts, while influencer posts garnered an average of 241,226 engagements. That was more than 100 times the engagement level from the brand’s own posts.

influencer marketing. Nearly all the PR and marketing professionals worldwide polled in the survey described influencer marketing as at least somewhat effective at raising awareness about their company or its products. Effectiveness of Influencer Marketing According to PR/ Marketing Professionals Worldwide, by Objective, Nov 2016 (% of respondents)

Influencers working for Wendy’s also saw a similar gap between engagement levels garnered by influencer posts and those generated by the company itself. The difference was just as staggering for smaller brands as well. For instance, logistics company Postmates averaged far fewer than 1,000 engagements on posts in June, while influencer posts garnered an average of nearly 27,000 engagements. Among the brands examined, cosmetics firm Urban Decay had the smallest gap in engagements between its own posts and those generated by influencers, but it was still sizeable: 66,440 vs. 101,408. “Consumers have always been more likely to engage with other consumers than with brands; social media has just brought that to the forefront of digital,” said eMarketer analyst Nicole Perrin. NewsWhip also reported that Italian businesswoman and social media maven Chiara Ferragni topped its list of Instagram influencers worldwide, as measured by “likes” and comments on sponsored posts. She was followed by soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo and fashion figure Gigi Hadid. NewsWhip’s findings seem to mirror a November 2016 study from Launchmetrics that measured the effectiveness of

Almost as many, 87%, indicated that influencer marketing was at least somewhat effective at driving sales. But there are reasons for brands to be cautious when working with influencers. “Brands risk losing control of their message and getting into serious brand safety issues. The brand can’t really try to control the influencer too much, or you risk losing the ‘authenticity’ and risk the relationship itself,” said Perrin. Perrin also noted that brands must take their time to vet potential influencers before moving forward. “A big risk here has been marketers rushing in, thinking, ‘Everyone has an influencer, I need an influencer.’ When you really need to keep brand safety in mind,” she said.

Book,

Line

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

Sinker Business Branding: Expert Marketing Techniques For Building A Captivating Brand, Attracting Customers and Reinventing Your Image In The Digital Age (Entrepreneurship, Small Business, Networking) Kindle Edition By New Familiar Publishing

Kellogg on Branding: The Marketing Faculty of The Kellogg School of Management

Aaker on Branding: 20 Principles That Drive Success

By Tim Calkins (Editor), Alice Tybout (Editor), Philio Kotler (Foreword)

“Aaker on Branding” presents in a compact form the twenty essential principles of branding that will lead to the creation of strong brands. Culled from the six David Aaker brand books and related publications, these principles provide the broad understanding of brands, brand strategy, brand portfolios, and brand building that all business, marketing, and brand strategists should know.

This is the first book on branding from the faculty of the Kellogg School, the respected resource for dynamic marketing information for today’s everchanging and challenging environment. Kellogg is the brand that executives and marketing managers trust for definitive information on proven approaches for solving marketing dilemmas and seizing marketing opportunities.

Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy By Martin Lindstrom (Author), Morgan Spurlock (Foreword) Marketing visionary Martin Lindstrom has been on the front lines of the branding wars for over twenty years. Here, he turns the spotlight on his own industry, drawing on all he has witnessed behind closed doors, exposing for the first time the full extent of the psychological tricks and traps that companies devise to win our hard-earned dollars.

By David Aaker

The End of Advertising: Why It Had to Die, and the Creative Resurrection to Come Kindle Edition By Andrew Essex In The End of Advertising, Essex gives a brief and pungent history of the rise and fall of Adland—a story populated by snake-oil salesmen, slicksters, and search-engine optimizers. But his book is no eulogy. Instead, he boldly challenges global marketers to innovate their way to a better adfree future.

AdWords Workbook: 2017 Edition: Advertising on Google AdWords, YouTube, and the Display Network Kindle Edition

SEO Fitness Workbook: 2017 Edition: The Seven Steps to Search Engine Optimization Success on Google Kindle Edition

By Jason McDonald

Learn AdWords in Plain English - Step by Step! Buy the Workbook Used by Jason McDonald to Teach Google AdWords Advertising.

Learn SEO in Plain English - Step by Step! Buy the Workbook Used at Stanford Continuing Studies to Teach Search Engine Optimization

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Experiential Marketing: How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act, Relate

Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

By Bernd H. Schmitt

Youngme Moon’s Different, a book for “people who don’t read business books.” Actually, it’s more like a personal conversation with a friend who has thought deeply about how the world works … and who gets you to see that world in a completely new light. If there is one strain of conventional wisdom pervading every company in every industry, it’s the absolute importance of “competing like crazy.” Youngme Moon’s message is simply “Get off this treadmill that’s taking you nowhere.

Moving beyond traditional “features-andbenefits” marketing, Schmitt presents a revolutionary approach to marketing for the branding and information age. Schmitt shows how managers can create holistic experiences for their customers through brands that provide sensory, affective, and creative associations as well as lifestyle marketing and social identity campaigns.

By Youngme Moon

Brand Real: How Smart Companies Live Their Brand Promise and Inspire Fierce Customer Loyalty

INSIGHTS: Reflections From 101 of Yale’s Most Successful Entrepreneurs

By Laurence Vincent Brand Real is a business strategy guide for making a brand’s promise stand up at every customer touch point. Packed with proven, repeatable management practices, the book shows how to establish a clean brand architecture while avoiding the needless complexity that has tripped up many promising companies.

INSIGHTS grants you access to some of Yale’s leading entrepreneurs and the key learnings they’ve collected on their own entrepreneurial journeys. From founders of Fortune 500 companies such as FedEx, to the next generation of entrepreneurs like Thiel Fellows, to early investors in Apple, Cisco, Facebook, and other billion dollar startups, INSIGHTS is a collection of the best advice offered by a diverse group of leaders and innovators.

Friction: Passion Brands in the Age of Disruption

A NEW Marketer: How to Inspire b2b Sales Acceleration with Insight Marketing Kindle Edition

By Jeff Rosenblum, Jordan Berg

By Chris LoPresti

Friction argues that brands don’t simply need clever messages or new, shiny technologies. They need a fundamental change in strategy. Friction provides a system for embracing transparency, engaging audiences, creating evangelists, and unleashing unprecedented growth. The authors of Friction have worked on some of the industry’s most innovative assignments for the world’s most successful brands.

By Maneesh Sah

Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profit-Hungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

Beyond Advertising: Creating Value Through All Customer Touchpoints

By Michael Farmer Madison Avenue Manslaughter outlines the hows and whys of steadily declining fees, increased workloads, diminishing industry morale, kickback scandals and opacity characterizing relationships among advertisers, holding companies, media buying companies and creative ad agencies.

It’s no secret we live in a world of intense competition to win new business, retain clients and grow revenues. Because of this cutthroat environment, a new shift in the world of marketing is happening right now. Built on the “3I” Framework, this book teaches you a simple system for adapting to this New Shift in marketing so you can reach more people, build new raving fans and explode your bottom line.

By Yoram (Jerry) Wind, Catharine Findiesen Hays This book offers a concrete set of principles, including The All Touchpoint Value Creation Model, designed to lift us out of reactive thinking and encourage the co-creation of a future better for business, better for people, and better for society.