BrandKnew October 2018

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

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Dear Friends: Fall has landed just as many Phoenixs in brand kingdom are set to rise. Since there is so much more to offer, from this edition of BrandKnew we have decided to increase an additional 4 pages of content to the issue. More and better.

We do a throwback to the iconic ‘Got Milk‘ advertising campaign that has straddled over 20 years and continues to impact and influence. We have featured a freewheeling conversation with champion writer, author, speaker Daniel Pink whilst talking about his cult release ‘When‘. That read will be a big takeaway for sure for all those wanting to understand the sense of timing and the role it plays in our success and happiness. Sometime blockchain was the buzzword and how it will effect advertising the debate but that now seems to have lost a bit of it’s fizz. Read more of it in this issue. Storytelling and narratives have been the ‘ narrative ‘ amongst brands and marketers. In the feature on ‘ Does your organization need a chief story teller ‘ we dive more into it. 6 is the new 30 in these days of scant attention. Understand what Adam Ferrier has to share on this. When it comes to understanding and realising brand leadership, Denise Lee, writer, speaker, consultant par extraordinaire, is certainly someone you can lean on.

Soak in her wisdom in the conversation that BrandKnew had with her for this edition whilst also relaying more on her latest and truly insightful book ‘Fusion‘. There is ample more top chew in on this issue and I leave you to explore and discover actionable intelligence. Till the next…

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@Brandknewmag

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For Advertising Enquiries: info@groupisd.com or call + 971 4 386 7728 All Copyright of the content in this issue rests fully & comprehensively with the respective contributors and/or media platforms at all times, as the case may be.

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Suresh Dinakaran

Brand Consultancy | Advertising | PR | Publishing Digital Media | Film Academy

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Business Development Director: Rishi Mohan Senior Hustler-Digital Marketing & Brand Development: Nikhil Thekkumkoottathil Creator: Brand Stories: Salindu Sadishan Brand Research & Creative Engagement Specialist: Anushka Kartha Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Regional Director: Krishna Chugh Country Manager, India: Vinit Chugh Business Development Director, India: Kenneth Extross Brand & Community Development Specialist: Insha Faooqi Video Content Specialist: Mikhaela Cena Content Development Specialist: Abijith Pradeep

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CONTENTS

Hit a plateau? 3 Things that might be missing from your branding Blockchain buzz among advertisers starts to fizzle To be in the Pink of…get to know your When!

Why Every Business Will Soon Be a Subscription Business Marketing Data Isn’t Just for Ads Anymore How a Twitter Audience of One Can Drive Business Playable ads and gaming: What’s next for marketers?

Got Milk? How the iconic campaign came to be, 25 years ago LEE-ading the way in brand leadership!

Does Your Company Need a Chief Storyteller?

How visual recognition is set to change advertising The advantage of Artificial Intelligence in market research Six sells – Adam Ferrier on attention, measurement and the six second ad What Marketers Are Doing Wrong in Data Analytics Uber rebrands less than two years after its last effort Book, Line & Sinker

HIT A PLATEAU? 3 THINGS THAT MIGHT BE MISSING FROM YOUR BRANDING ACCORDING TO THESE EXPERTS, THERE ARE A FEW COMMON CULPRITS BEHIND LACKLUSTER BRANDING. READ ON TO LEARN HOW TO ADDRESS THOSE GAPS, ATTACK THEM WITH GUSTO AND ADD THE HUMANITY BACK INTO YOUR BUSINESS.

By E. Napoletano

“Meh.” It’s part of the modern lexicon and means nothing good or bad is going on. You elicit zero response. And that’s not the reaction you want people to have to your branding.

If you feel you’ve hit a brand plateau, it may be time to look inside your brand. You might be missing a certain something that’s necessary to push your branding beyond “meh” back into “marvelous” territory.

If you think they are, that could be an area you can shore-up in short order.

“The first question to ask yourself is, ‘Is my brand or my branding stale?’” says speaker and strategist Tamsen Webster.

Alignment Between Brand and Branding

“Your brand is the sum of people’s experiences with your company, product or service,” Webster continues. “It’s what your brands means to people. Branding is the language and imagery you use to capture that experience—think logo, colors, advertising tag lines, etc. The two need to evolve together.”

There’s a common misconception that your brand and branding are the same. Surprise! They’re not.

If your brand is truly stagnant—and you’re not doing anything to fix it—then no amount of fancy new branding will help.

Let’s have a look at three common gaps that experts often find when branding hits a plateau.

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“The market punishes misalignment,” says Webster.

A Focus on Mindset Over Market

This might make the case for a more comprehensive rebranding, which involves a shift in the overall look and feel of your brand as well as the customer experience. But it’s not an endeavor for the faint of heart.

Think your branding has hit “meh” status? You could be missing an opportunity to shift your focus from your target market to your target market’s mindset.

“Decide if you have the corporate courage to change your brand,” says Sam Meers, vice president of finance at integrated marketing and ad company Barkely and host of the Modern Marketers podcast. “Oftentimes, CEOs and the rest of the C-suite are too scared to challenge the status quo.

Be willing to take an honest inventory and truly consider a variety of perspectives.”

That honest inventory might conclude that your brand and your branding aren’t the problem. Your “meh” brand status might be a symptom of a missing alignment elsewhere in your strategy. Read on.

Alignment Between Brand and Products Let’s say you were once a market leader, but sales have fallen off recently. It might be time to evolve your products to match your branding. When products fail to keep up with your branding (or vice versa), it’s easy for a brand to go stale.

“Find where your customers’ goals align with yours as a company and how your company can best meet those goals,” says Webster. “That may mean backing up to something deeper than product to what that product represents to your customers.”

Why? Because people don’t just buy products. They buy what those products mean to them.

“This brings us back to brand,” Webster says, “and to making sure you know exactly what your current customers think yours stands for.”

Meers offers a first step in this process: Listen to your people.

“Let them make decisions, listen to their feedback and trust their instincts as well as yours,” he says.

Both internal teams and your external customers can play important roles in bringing your products and brand back into alignment. You can probe people to see what’s resonating with your branding through customer and internal team surveys, power user groups and test markets.

How do you meet your customers’ needs?

Does your team feel there’s a disconnect with what the company wants and what they’re asked to deliver?

What do both of these audiences—internal and external— crave that you’re leaving unfulfilled?

By asking these questions, you can accumulate actionable data that can help realign your brand and products under a shared sense of purpose and direction.

You also might discover that there are noticeable differences between your target markets and what the people within those markets think, feel and want—especially from you as a brand.

“The only true plateau comes when the people you care about actually don’t still want or need what your brand stands for or your products,” says Webster. “But this is where it’s critical to go deeper into the people your brand cares about.

“It’s tempting to stop at a category—the target market or segment: moms, aged 25-34. Young men, 18-24,” she continues. “But the problem is people don’t think about those categories when they make the decision to buy. In fact, they don’t really think at all (at least, pre-purchase).”

Webster likes to think of mindsets as operating systems: lines of code that dictate how systems operates. And both brands and customers have their own code. According to Webster, those “basic commands” are: • “goals (what we want),” • “perspectives (how we look for what they want)” and • “beliefs (what we believe to be true about the world and how it works).”

“When customers and brands align,” she says, “it’s because those commands align.”

When a brand hits a plateau or goes stale, it may be because there’s a misalignment in those commands. Either the desired customer base doesn’t have the same mindset as the brand, or that base has gotten so small that it’s no longer profitable for the brand.

“If you’ve already eliminated branding and product as agitators, then there are only two solutions to what ails you: expand who your brand is for through messaging, or change who the brand is for by ‘recoding’ the brand’s operating system—and operations,” says Webster.

Which takes us back to Meers’ first point about rebranding and the call to corporate courage.

It’s easy to look at a rough spot in your company revenue and think a splashy new rebranding effort will be just what you need to charge things up again. But as both Webster and Meers have explained, there are other alignments to check for first to avoid blowing up a perfectly good brand that just needs some refocusing to get off the plateau.

“Ask yourself what you should stop doing versus what you should start doing,” offers Meers. “Oftentimes, what can rejuvenate a brand is not what you’re doing but what you should quit doing because it’s limiting your success.”

And limiting success is so very “meh.”

E. Napoletano Columnist, American Express OPEN

Blockchain buzz among advertisers starts to fizzle

By Seb Joseph

Advertisers’ love affair with all things blockchain may be cooling as they realize the technology’s potential to bring integrity back to ad buying will take time.

It’s been a year since the blockchain hype train reached advertising. The highs and lows of bitcoin’s price fluctuations in 2017 convinced many advertisers that blockchain powering it was some sort of cure-all solution to the lack of clarity around how media is bought and placed. Since then, however, the hype has faded.

Not only are advertisers split on when blockchain will be widely adopted by the industry, they’re also unsure if a technology that logs transactions between buyers and sellers in a way that doesn’t need third-party authentication will ease their concerns over undisclosed fees, ad tech taxes, fraud and opaque trading agreements. Blockchain falls somewhere between a game changer and a gimmick in the eyes of some ad industry observers now.

no firm plan for it yet, said the advertiser’s head of emerging platforms James Poulter.

“There are a few brands experimenting with blockchain on programmatic buys, but I think questions need to be asked of media agencies and whether they can come together on a shared platform that sits on something like Ethereum, for example,” said Poulter. “The problem is that everyone has to trust the system that they’re going to use and that will only happen if the industry can consolidate around some standards in terms of what [blockchain] solutions they will actually back.”

Before it even gets to that point, there are several longstanding barriers the technology has yet to hurdle.

“The application of blockchain in advertising is still very nascent, and so while it’s being explored, we’ve only had a handful of inquires about it [from advertisers],” said Eamonn Maguire, KPMG’s global lead of blockchain. “I think it will be two to three years before blockchain becomes a dominant force in advertising as right now adoption is more like a smoke signal than a burning flare.”

Blockchain evangelists boast about the technology’s ability to process thousands of transactions per second. Ad exchanges process millions of transactions per second. That scale is too much to handle for most variations of the technology.

Blockchain is also a drain on resources. As blockchains stretch to include more members and process more transactions, the cost of managing those expands too, particularly for the startups meant to be innovating the technology. It’s turned some advertisers skeptical of blockchain due to promises from solution providers over the last 18 months that have not come true.

While blockchain is on the radar for Lego’s marketers, there’s

“We’re looking at blockchain but more in terms of how it helps

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us as a distributor than an advertiser,” said Pernod Ricard’s global digital acceleration director, Pierre-Yves Calloc’h. “We are participating in discussions with the World Federation of Advertisers about the technology, but we’re not leading them. Blockchain is not the fastest technology today when it comes to the speed at which ads are traded, so we need to see it working in a real-world scenario first. The potential, however, for blockchain to be used on programmatic buys is undoubtedly there.”

few blockchain firms in the market with a genuine product.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Tech Lab announced a program last month to tackle the question by allowing its members to test technologies from blockchain startups such as MetaX, FusionSeven and Lucidity.

Calloc’h is alluding to the costs-versus-value debate advertisers must consider before pouring money into the emerging technology. Blockchain’s upside is clearer for advertisers like Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Nestle that spend so much on media that they will make the initial outlay on the technology in the savings on media costs.

Over the next 18 months, the retailer plans to work with blockchain advertising startup Lucidity and its ad tech partners AppNexus and Integral Ad Science to use the technology for all aspects of its programmatic buys including fraud detection and verification.

“The application of blockchain in programmatic is still in its infancy, and factors such as legacy contracts, preferred buying processes, and relationships mean that for many, realizing the benefits of blockchain might be slower than they like,” said Sam Fenton-Elstone, CEO of media agency Anything is Possible. “With blockchain technology in place across the ecosystem, publishers, agencies and brands will have access to centralized, scalable and efficient tracking, which puts budget holders in control again.”

There’s a growing sense among advertisers that there are

Despite reservations over the practicalities of the technology, some advertisers like GameStop think they’ve found a way to make it work.

GameStop’s advertising agency The Richards group tested the technology with its ad tech partners in June when it was able to buy fewer fraudulent impressions for a campaign via the blockchain. Having that insight also meant the retailer could block specific sites trying to peddle fraudulent impressions.

Moving forward, GameStop plans to use the platform to audit its auditors IAS by making sure the way it views clickfraud matches the way both the demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms on its media plans do. Essentially, the retailer wants to manage a private marketplace of trusted partners to trade within the blockchain.

To be in the Pink of…get to know your When!

By BrandKnew

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When you love writing and four of your books are New York Times best sellers, you can safely assume, you have a lot going for you. Yes indeed. Daniel Pink is a true champion at what he does and it’s fascinating to understand how he uses the power of behavioral science to help individuals, businesses find their true potential. To Sell is Human, Drive, A Whole New Mind, The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, Free Agent Nation, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko are the books that he has written. Read his work to better understand the puzzle of motivation and The Science of Timing. Here is a freewheeling chat with Dan. BK: Could you share a bit about your growing up days, your family etc?

DP: I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America (Columbus, Ohio). The core elements of my childhood were going to the public library, playing team sports, and watching sitcoms.

BK: What triggered your interest in writing and your experience and leanings especially towards” Behavioural Science ” ?

And do you think in an overly distracted world with a deficit of time, attention, resources and trust, this Science can/must begin to play a bigger role?

DP: I studied social science (especially linguistics and economics) pretty intensely as an undergraduate — and probably should have gone on to get a PhD. Alas, I was a too practical and risk-averse, so I went to law school instead.

I’ve also been fascinated by why people do what they do, how they interact, what makes them tick. Trouble is, right now, especially in the US, science in all its forms is under fire — from the findings on global warming to the virtues of vaccines. It’s truly scary. If science and scientists played a bigger role in our lives, we’d all be better off.

BK: It’s a bit of an unfair question but amongst the books that you have written thus far viz When, Drive, To Sell is Human, A Whole New Mind, Free Agent Nation, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko- which one would you pick as your favourite?

And why?

DP: The question isn’t unfair. But the answer is a no-brainer.

It’s like with my kids. I truly don’t have a favorite.

BK: As they certain things happen- and if your ‘ Science of Motivation ‘ Ted Talk crossed 20 Million in viewers, what would you attribute that to? Timing? Or you would want to go beyond that?

DP: I think there were two reasons: 1. I presented a coherent, science-based argument that offered a new perspective on human behavior. 2. Utter randomness.

BK: ” it’s all between the ears “, its often quoted. Tell us what motivated you to write a book like ” A Whole New Mind “?

And Oprah having given 4000 copies of the book to Students at Stanford University is now part of folklore. Could you share more on this?

DP: That book makes an argument about the economy. It used to be that the skills that got people into the middle class were logical, linear, spreadsheet skills. Think lawyers, accountants, and engineers. Today, those skills are still necessary, but they’re no longer sufficient. Why? They’re easy to outsource to low-wage providers. They’re easy to automate with artificial intelligence and machine learning.

They’re less valuable in integrating the breakthrough an abundant society demands. Now, the skills that matter most are — metaphorically — more “right brain” than “left” brain: Artistry, empathy, big picture thinking. Those are far harder to outsource or automate, so they’ve become more valuable.

BK: As an authority on Behavioural Science, where do you stand in the debate between Success follows Happiness or Happiness follows Success?

DP: I think the relationship is bi-directional rather than oneway, though we’ve underestimated how much success follows happiness and overestimated how much happiness follows success.

BK: Your recent books have very short main titles like When or Drive.. what inspired you to go that route?

DP: My own lack of imagination — though to be fair, 2/3 of my books have multi-word titles.

BK: What would be the biggest takeaway that readers would have from your book ‘ When ? ‘ DP: Be much more intentional about “when” decisions. We tend to take decisions about “what” to do quite seriously.

Most of us have a to-do list. We’re often as serious about how we do things and who we do them with. But on the topic of “when” to do things, we’re lax. We think it doesn’t matter. But the evidence is overwhelming that it does matter. It affects our creativity, our productivity, even our health. If we start making our “when” decisions in a more intelligent, strategic way, we’ll be able to work smarter and live better.

BK: Your concept of ‘ Restorative Breaks ‘ is very interesting.

In an age where busy gets confused with productivity, how

does it separate the wood from the trees?

smarter, shrewder, evidence-based “when” decisions.

DP: Once again, it’s a matter of respecting the science rather than simply following outdated social conventions. About 15 years ago, we thought people who pulled all-nighters or ignored sleep were heroes. Then the science of sleep showed us that they’re actually fools. Now the science of breaks is following the same trajectory. We should be taking more breaks. And we should be taking certain kinds of breaks: moving, outside, social, and fully detached. Most important, we need to recognize that breaks are not a deviation from performance. They are part of performance.

BK: What makes Daniel Pink go ” Wow, another day at work ?“

BK: You have mentioned that ‘ Linguistics ‘ played a key part in your life and career? Could you share more?

DP: In university, I majored in linguistics. That’s a very mathematical social science devoted to studying language in all its aspects. How do languages acquire their structure and words their meaning? What underlying rules govern the syntax, semantics, sounds, and sociology of languages? How do languages change over time or from context to context?

Much of what I studied back then turned out to be the early days of cognitive science. It’s a great field.

BK: 6 is the new 30. Shorter attention spans, vertical orientation, emerging platforms like IGTV, the potential of UGC(User Generated Content): are we moving from the overt to the covert, appealing to the sub conscious rather than the conscious? What is your take and what are the learning and lessons for brand marketers and content creators in all these?

DP: I’m no expert on this, but I think some of the lessons include: • Serve people before selling to them.

• Always go for quality — even when it’s not fully appreciated.

• Be as transparent as you can be without being foolish.

• Do less planning and more testing.

BK: Timing isn’t an art. It’s a science! Could you expand on this thought?

DP: Most of us making our timing decisions — from when in the day to do certain kids of work to when to start a project to when to quit a job — based on intuition and guesswork.

Across more than a dozen fields — economics, social psychology, endocrinology, chronobiology, cognitive science, and more — researchers are uncovering a huge batch of exciting evidence that allows us to make systematically

DP: Knowing that I haven’t finished the book I’m working on.

BK: Content extensions and diverse consumption platforms: what was the motivation behind Crowd Control that you hosted on NGC? DP: We wanted to make the science of behavior come alive and show that we could use the science to tackle public problems. So over 12 episodes, we conducted more than 30 experiments in which we tried to reduce speeding on the highway, encourage people to take the stairs rather than the elevator, and stop people from jaywalking, littering, and parking in disabled spaces. I’m thrilled to say that a few of our solutions have been picked up by cities around the world.

BK: AI, Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, Data Science etc: where do you see the human mind in the midst of all this?

DP: The skills most in demand in the future will be those that augment machine intelligence rather than compete with it.

That means many of the abilities I identified in A WHOLE NEW MIND BK: What do you enjoy doing most; Consulting, Writing, Speaking?

DP: Writing.

BK: Which are some the books that have inspired you in your career thus far and which are the ones that you look forward to reading?

DP: Like many writers, not to mention many human beings, I’m partly the product of all the books I’ve read. But a few stand out from the crowd: • Working by Studs Terkel • A Sense of Where You Are by John McPhee • Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott • Future Shock by Alvin Toffler • I Know Why The Cage Bird Sings by Maya Angelou • Animal Farm by George Orwell BK: What does Daniel Pinkdo in his spare time?

DP: I run. I read. And I drink wine with my wife.

Why Every Business Will Soon Be a Subscription Business EVERYTHING YOU PURCHASE — FROM TRANSPORTATION TO ENTERTAINMENT TO GROCERIES — WILL SOON COME WITH A MONTHLY PLAN, SAYS ZUORA CEO TIEN TZUO.

By Jenny Luna

After scrolling headlines in the New York Times, you head into the kitchen and open today’s Blue Apron box to prepare a shrimp risotto before turning on Netflix for an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. You may not have noticed, but you’re now fully enmeshed in the subscription model.

The subscription model is a booming field. In recent years, this market has grown by more than 100% a year, increasing from $57 million in sales in 2011 to $2.6 billion in 2016.

Tien Tzuo, who earned his MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1998, says the subscription model is the way of the future. In 2008, after nearly a decade at Salesforce, Tzuo founded Zuora, a software company built to aid organizations shifting to this model. In his recent book, Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company’s Future — and What to Do About It, Tzuo aims to change how executives think about their products and organizational structure in the subscription economy. “If you’re not shifting to this business model now,” Tzuo writes, “chances are that in a few years you might not have any business left to shift.”

Here, Tzuo shares more about why it’s no longer the era of the “unknown customer,” what it means to transform a business to a subscription model, and his current views on the value of an MBA.

You write a lot about the need to change our mindset. Why is this shift difficult?

Once you get in the habit of thinking this way, it becomes easier. My colleagues and I, often over dinner and wine, would challenge each other to come up with businesses that couldn’t be turned into a subscription model. We tossed out ideas like guitars, cement.

We realized it’s not about the physical product, it’s about what the customer is trying to do. And that inversion of thinking is at the root of everything.

Using cement as an example, you realize that flooring is the actual need. There’s a whole revolution of industrial carpets now. There’s a service contract, you simply pay some monthly fee plus overages, usage, etc. So you can actually subscribe to a floor.

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You call Adobe the company that provided the “textbook” to inspire others and reference how its revenue dropped drastically after the transition to subscription. How do you advise leaders to manage through that pain?

The fear is if I’m selling a guitar, instead of taking 400 bucks right now, I’m taking money over time. And so doesn’t that destroy revenue? If I just flip the switch, my revenues would plummet.

You can actually keep selling your product and sell new digital subscription services, like Fender does — its Fender Play offers access to online lessons for $19.99 a month — or, if it’s a complete switch to subscription, you can face what Thomas Lah and J.B. Wood (authors of Technology-asa-Service Playbook: How to Grow a Profitable Subscription Business) dubbed “swallowing the fish.” Costs go up and revenue drops, but after the transformation to a subscription model is complete, costs go down and revenue comes back up. (See figure below.)

We want it to be as inspiring of a story as Adobe is: They flipped the switch and revenues were down — it hadn’t

just return them the information. It’s their data. That’s pretty black and white, tends to work well, and is well-aligned to things like the General Data Protection Regulation [an EU law that regulates how companies protect citizens’ private data].

Advertising may never go away, but as subscription services become the norm, readers and publishers alike are starting to appreciate the dividends of a direct consumer relationship.

The behavioral insight that comes with membership plans and paywalls helps media companies move away from empty calories like page views toward more valuable engagement metrics like time spent.

We like the paid subscription-based business model because we think it’s a healthy dynamic between the vendor and the customer. There should be rules and regulations that the data is the customer’s data, not the vendor’s. It’s the advertising model where the vendor thinks: “Well, I think this is our data, not your data.” And my response: “Why is it your data? It’s my behavior.”

In Subscribed you dive into industries that have done this well, namely the New York Times with newspapers and Uber with ride sharing and, perhaps more surprisingly, Caterpillar with construction equipment.

What other industries can we expect to see in this market?

One that I am really excited about is airlines. Surf Air is called the “Netflix of Aviation,” and members get limitless access to flights for a monthly fee. It’s an example of building a business by starting with customer wants and needs, attacking pain points with a machete, and growing a loyal subscriber base. There are already subscription-based companies in real estate, education, finance, and pet care.

been below a billion dollars The reality is in the first quarter in like 10 years. But Adobe didn’t cut staff ownership is dead; commensurate to their revenue. now it’s really about They did some adjustments to and explained this to Wall access as the new cost Street and gave them detailed imperative. metrics. Yes, the stock dropped - Tien Tzuo when they had their earnings call, but 24 hours later, after they spent six to eight hours with the analysts, things were back up.

As more businesses move to a subscriptionbased model, should we be worried about privacy with our data?

Services can monitor your behavior. Generally, that’s a good thing because [companies are] using that knowledge to create better services for you.

But once a customer leaves a service, a company should

The reality is ownership is dead; now it’s really about access as the new imperative.

In a 2015 piece in Fortune, you said a business school education was “worthless” and recommended people don’t get an MBA. Has your view changed?

I’m still waiting for my alumni card to be rescinded — just kidding.

I don’t regret going to business school; there’s a lot of things that you learn. There’s an embedded assumption in business today that the goal of business is selling units of their product.

It’s built into how do you do marketing, it’s built into how you do finance. And this model is different.

Anybody who’s going to Stanford GSB today, I’d say it’s not that lessons in the past are not important, but try to understand there are different models. The underlying concepts are still the same — you still have to have profit and revenues — but the time dimension and the customer dimension add more nuances to the overall picture.

Marketing Data Isn’t Just for Ads Anymore WHAT THE MARKETING DEPARTMENT KNOWS CAN HELP THE WHOLE COMPANY MAKE BETTER DECISIONS By eMarketer Editors

Digital transformation has had a significant effect on nearly all companies over the past couple of years. For some marketers, it has forced them to rethink how systems, tools and team members must work together to successfully meet larger business objectives. For more advanced companies, it’s brought about an understanding that such an initiative isn’t marketing-specific but rather a companywide mandate, one that affects the company’s ability to keep and attract new customers.

Consumers today have high expectations for businesses they interact with often. A majority of US digital shoppers polled

by Medallia and Ipsos in March 2018 cited consistent levels of service across digital and physical channels (65%) and the frictionless flow of information between channels (55%) as expectations for customer experience.

that they do it well, and most admit they are far from being able to execute such an experience.

While the portion of companies capable of transforming marketing data and customer insights into actual product and merchandising decisions is small, there is no lack of innovation on this front. Retailers, quick-service retailers and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies appear to be the most active in this area, though other industries are also starting to see the value in connecting both arenas.

Advanced attribution practices and sophisticated data strategies are required to make the necessary connections and translate marketing data into actual product insights.

Interdepartmental cooperation between people, databases and tech is mandatory.

When these connections exist, companies are capable of turning marketing data into strategic insights that can help anticipate proper inventory levels for both in-store and ecommerce efforts, and even fuel new product or service ideas.

According to Katrin Zimmermann, managing director of the Americas at consulting firm TLGG, companies that are successfully moving in this direction include many of the “digital disruptors” of the past 10 years.

These companies tend to have the digital data strategies and tech stacks in place to take marketing data and use it to inform research and development, as well as product efforts.

She cited Amazon, Alibaba and even Dollar Shave Club as companies that fit this bill.

“Their data stack is integrated and collected, and it allows them to consolidate data to whatever degree of information they’ve been able to accommodate to,” she said.

Customer Experience Expectations that US Digital Shoppers Have for Brands, March 2018 (% of respondents) Frictionless, however, is hard to deliver. Only a few firms feel

eMarketer’s latest report, “Using Marketing Data for Merchandising: Optimizing Inventory Levels and Launching New Products,” examines how search and social data, as well as data a company has on its customers, can inform larger company efforts, from new product decisions to inventory pipeline decisions.

How a Twitter Audience of One Can Drive Business

By Knowledge@Wharton

Jack Kosakowski, CEO of the U.S. divisions of Creation Agency and SkillsLab (@JackKosakowski), argues in this opinion piece that Twitter sometimes can be used more effectively as a telephone than as a megaphone.

Every day, another political battle overtakes Twitter. It becomes the top trend, triggers millions of tweets and often makes news to a wider audience. But there’s a whole other side to Twitter that’s getting less attention — one that makes it crucial for businesses that are trying to avoid politics. It’s one that businesses need to learn quickly, or risk being replaced by startups overnight.

For politics, Twitter is like a megaphone. You state your views and blast them out, hoping as many people as possible will hear you. But businesses should see Twitter as more like a telephone. To do it right, avoid the noise and focus on individuals. It’s a completely different way to look at Twitter: as a chance to interact with someone you might never reach otherwise.

To some people, the concept of using Twitter to reach just one person at a time seems counterintuitive. The screaming nature of the tweets that fill feeds and news reports make it seem as though large numbers of likes and retweets are the most important metrics. But in reality, when it comes to

making sales, those metrics don’t mean much at all.

Successful B2B salespeople are figuring this out. If they’re looking to win enterprise business, they have virtually no chance of getting the CEO on the phone. But if they react to the CEO on Twitter and reach out directly, the executive is much more likely to engage, start a conversation, correspond via DM (direct messaging) and “The screaming then agree to speak by phone.

The same goes with hard to reach consumers.

Big companies like Delta and Nike have invested more money each year into interacting with individual customers on social media, particularly Twitter. To see powerful examples, just go to their Twitter pages and click “tweets & replies.”

nature of the tweets that fill feeds and news reports make it seem as though large numbers of likes and retweets are the most important metrics.”

They keep this up because it reflects their company ethos, suggesting that they care about each individual — and, ultimately, it increases conversions. We’re in what I call a

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might post about politics, but you can respond by sharing an article with them about business that somehow ties into the same issue. It’s a way into a conversation that won’t require you to take a political stand.

One of the biggest mistakes people in business make these days is trying to do both. If you express political views and reach out to do business on the same handle, you’re unlikely to get anywhere — and, in fact, it could hurt your business.

If you wish to tweet about your political views, do so from another handle. Use the handle with your professional name for business. Anyone you reach out to, if they’re interested in communicating with you, will likely check out your previous tweets and Google you, so keep your online reputation clean for business.

Sales is all about getting visible, valuable and connected.

Twitter is one way to get visible to the right people. The ideas you offer, along with the product or service you sell, make you valuable. And harnessing Twitter and other social platforms right makes you connected. It’s like being at a conference 365 days a year. You walk around the room shaking hands with individuals and getting to know them. In fact, as a study co-written by Wharton operations, information and “Successful B2B decisions professor Lorin Hitt salespeople … have found, social media activity can even help early-stage companies virtually no chance of find funding.

getting the CEO on

connection-engagement economy, where people want to get connected to leaders and brands and engage with them on an ongoing basis.

A LinkedIn study found: “Strategically leveraging social networks continues to be a powerful tactic that is resulting in meaningful impact and bridging buyer-seller gaps … 64% of B2B decision makers said they wouldn’t engage with a salesperson if the communication was not personalized. As a result 70% of sales professionals expect to invest more time leveraging social tech techniques in the next twelve months.

This is a striking increase from the 48% who felt this way in last year’s study.”

Today’s businesses need to view sales as being all about relationships. And young people especially, both as customers and as decision-makers for their businesses, view social platforms as an important part of those relationships.

Most people, no matter who they are in business, very rarely receive tweets written just for them. It’s precisely because of all the noise on Twitter that an individual message stands out and becomes memorable. Even if the person you reach out to on Twitter doesn’t respond, there’s a good chance they’ll remember you when you reach out by phone or in an email, and point out that you sent that one tweet.

It’s a matter of networking. Go where people are. Don’t let the controversial nature of Twitter scare you off. There’s nothing wrong with using the platform for business while avoiding the controversies. If you’re careful, you can sometimes even use the political tweets of your prospects as an opening. They

Because social media the phone. But if they interactions can permeate every react to the CEO on step of the sales process, there’s Twitter … the executive no easy formula to determine ROI. In separate study, Hitt, is much more likely to along with Lynn Wu, also a engage.”

Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, and Fujie Jin, a former Wharton Ph.D. student who is now a professor at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, noted that “the cost of using social media is rarely observable; by observing only the benefits but not the costs, it is difficult to evaluate whether incremental sales of a social media campaign provide an adequate return on investment.” But they found that the return on these efforts increases as organizations have more employees with data analytics skills. (Knowledge@Wharton interviewed Wu about this research.)

This makes sense. Harnessing the opportunities of social media to maximize ROI requires an ability to understand and synthesize data about its effects at each stage. This is why I recommend that businesses use technologies throughout the sales funnel that incorporate social media data — from sales acceleration platforms to CRMs (customer resource management systems) and marketing automation. By using these, organizations are better able to see the number and type of social media interactions from prospecting to conversion.

Don’t let Twitter scare you off, even in this era. Yes, it’s become more politics-heavy than ever. But it’s a big, open platform. You can make it what you want it to be. And you can make it work for you.

Playable ads and gaming: What’s next for marketers?

By Amit Dar

Playable ads have been a part of gaming recently, and there’s growing interest in playable ads among mobile marketers. In fact, according to a Mobile Marketer survey, 69% of advertisers have tested playable ad units. But do playable ads really make sense for mobile marketers outside of gaming?

First, what is a playable ad?

It’s important to make a distinction between playable ads and interactive ads because each format requires different capabilities and accomplishes different goals. But making that distinction isn’t easy because the line between playable ads and interactive ads is often vague. After all, gameplay is interactive, but by definition, even the most basic mobile banner ads require some level of interactivity too. One simple but useful distinction is to consider the outcome of each engagement.

A playable ad is a “mini-game.” In that scenario, interactivity leads to an outcome that depends on some combination of the player’s skill and luck. Put simply, those who engage with a playable ad unit must be able to win or lose. In contrast, a purely interactive ad means users must be able to navigate each interactive aspect of the ad unit during every engagement. In other words, there’s no such thing as winning or losing within the context of an interactive ad, which means no matter how poorly the user “performs,” they must still be able to reach all available content.

Does a game make sense for your brand?

The great thing about playable ads is that they drive engagement by their very nature. If you’re playing, you’re engaged. By that logic, it’s easy to see why all mobile marketers would find playable ad units appealing. But marketers shouldn’t chase engagement for its own sake.

Would playing a game drive someone to fill out a mortgage application, or visit a car dealership? Probably not. The reason is simple: people who are in the market for a mortgage or a new car don’t want to play games. In fact, pushing a game in front of someone who is looking for a mortgage would be off-putting.

However, that’s not to say that playable ads are without merit for non-gaming marketers. An entertainment brand, for example, could use a game to build awareness for a new

television show. A travel brand might consider a playable ad unit as an alternative to a contest. Likewise, it’s possible to imagine a retailer finding a way to gamify the shopping experience.

Determining whether a playable ad unit is appropriate isn’t a matter of category. The question marketers must ask is whether a game makes sense for their brand. If words like “fun” or “playful” are part of your brand’s identity, there might be something to the idea of investing in a playable ad unit. But if gaming isn’t highly correlated to your brand, playable ads probably aren’t a good fit.

Game on!

Assuming a playable ad is right for your brand, two important considerations remain.

First, it’s important to understand that a lot of resources go into creating a mobile game. By one estimate, the mobile game industry is expected to reach $70 billion in revenue this year. While the category is often referred to as “casual” games, development, promotion and distribution of those games is a very serious business. Playable ad units represent a significant investment for mobile marketers, but they also require strong mobile chops. Realistically, there’s no point in creating a playable ad unit for mobile if your brand isn’t already generating mobile-first creatives. Bottom line: if your brand’s mobile capabilities are still a work in progress, then playable ad units are out of your reach.

Second, even if your brand has excellent mobile skills, you need to be realistic about the amount of inventory there is to work with. Many publishers have the capability to run playable ads, but that’s not the same as saying there’s enough supply to meet every level of demand. Remember, playable ads are hot right now; however, they still hold a relatively niche place within the larger market for mobile inventory. It’s critical for marketers to gauge supply before investing time and resources into creating playable ad units.

Remember, success with playable ads, like anything else in mobile marketing, depends on setting realistic goals, knowing your brand’s capabilities, and understanding the overall market. Playable ads probably aren’t the next big thing for mobile marketing, but if gaming correlates highly to your brand and your team has strong capabilities and realistic expectations, there’s a good case for getting in the game.

Amit Dar is General Manager, US, at Taptica, a global end-to-end mobile advertising platform for brand advertisers and agencies. In this role, Amit is responsible for directing all US activity, including engaging strategic partners on both the demand and supply sides, and helping them utilize Taptica’s technology and data for mobile marketing efforts.

Got Milk? How the iconic campaign came to be, 25 years ago IT’S BEEN A QUARTER CENTURY SINCE THOSE TWO LITTLE WORDS ENTERED PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS. HERE’S THE STORY OF ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS AD CAMPAIGNS IN HISTORY.

By MATTHEW DADDONA

In 1993, a focus group headed by Jon Steel, a partner at the San Francisco-based advertising firm Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, asked respondents not to consume milk for a week prior to participating in the study. Steel’s aim was to gather information about milk habits that would inform his pitch to a new client, the California Milk Processor Board, which was looking for creative strategies to boost sales.

When the respondents showed up, they were a little anxious about being deprived of the household staple. One man relayed his experience of coming downstairs to the kitchen in the morning before work, pouring out his cereal, slicing bananas on top of it, and then remembering his promise of abstinence. An ethical dilemma arose, the man later admitted to Steel. Would he use milk and simply lie to the rest of focus group? Or would he throw out the cereal? Worse yet, would he eat the cereal without milk?

A conversation snowballed in the room, and it became clear from others’ testimonials that consumers felt an emotional connection to an everyday product. The absence of milk became noticeable, like a tear in a perfect canvas. Steel had a hunch he was onto something seismic. That hunch led to one of the most iconic ad campaigns of all time.

A perfect encapsulation of the ’90s, Got Milk? is an indelible piece of advertising-turned-pop culture. If the ’90s were the decade that saw celebrity culture reach a new apex, the campaign is its holy grail. It was a wellspring of stars of film, TV, sports, and politics–a swap meet of high and low, where Bill Clinton and Bob Dole occupy the same advertising universe as Van Halen and Dennis Rodman, and The Simpsons are as potent a reference as Diane Arbus. During the two

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decades that Got Milk? dominated the public consciousness, more than 70 commercials ran on television in California alone, and some 350 milk mustache ads ran nationally in print and on TV—at a time when those two media were still all powerful. Any given day, an estimated 80% of all U.S. consumers came into contact with that innocent little question: Got Milk? The campaign won multiple top industry awards. It was parodied and copied. At the height of the craze, the slogan was as ubiquitous as the very stuff it was selling.

“There was something so perfectly hip about it,” says Edward Wasserman, the dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. “They start with a product with no personality, which, if anything, was forced upon generations of children, which very few adults drank or would admit to drinking, whose health benefits are questionable, whose environmental impact is dubious, and they turned it into something that had a kind of panache. They had a concession of unlikely subjects and had them pose in a way that most people would have deemed a self-parody or ludicrous. And yet, it worked.”

Twenty-five years later, the success of Got Milk? remains unmatched in the ad world. Fast Company spoke with key players about how it all came together.

Winkler scribbled those words—question mark included—on a piece of foam core that hung on a wall. Staring at it during the meeting, Goodby imagined early ideas for commercials that ended with, as he calls it, “this crazy, little bonsai tagline.” In one fantasy, a cookie truck and a milk truck are in high pursuit on the highway. As the chase progresses, it’s revealed that the man driving the cookie truck has his mouth full of cookies. He needs milk. “I had lots of these lost dog stories that went all over the place and that ended with the lynchpin,” Goodby says.

These early brainstorming sessions planted the seeds of the Got Milk? campaign’s novel approach: deprivation marketing. Instead of selling the product to consumers, Goodby and his team would sell the lack of a product.

“Milk does a body good” had become the beverage’s catchphrase during the 1980s, built on the idea that drinking milk promotes healthy bones and brawny muscles. Deprivation marketing was the opposite. It didn’t matter whether it was good for you; what mattered was that all food paled in taste without it. This difference made the premise of pitching milk more enticing, because hardly anyone else at the agency was excited about pitching this ancient commodity. Why pitch milk when you could pitch, say, Sega?

Goodby, Silverstein, and Steel decided to put their focusgroup findings into action right in the office. Silverstein emptied the cartons of milk from the firm’s refrigerator and installed a hidden camera at the back of it to capture people’s responses to finding themselves without milk to pour into their morning coffees. The employees fumbled around the kitchen in frustration, which provided Goodby, Silverstein, and Steel with concrete evidence to present to the California Milk Processor Board.

But wait . . . the tagline! As Goodby says, “The lesson is, sometimes, if you listen to the world around you, it tells you what to do, you know?”

“Great taglines are clumsy,” says Silverstein. “[Nike’s] ‘Just Do It’ was a dorky line. The fact that ‘Got Milk?’ made it into the lexicon, well, who would’ve thought?”

The first fruits of the Got Milk? project arrived in 1993, with “Aaron Burr,” which has become an ad-world cultural touchstone the way Michal Jordan’s 1998 foul-line slamdunk versus Dominique Wilkins has become sports legend:

The origin of the Got Milk? slogan is almost comically banal.

After Jon Steel relayed the results from the focus group to his partners Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein, they held a meeting to plan next steps. A colleague, Tara Winkler, asked Goodby what he’d like to call that part of the meeting.

“I don’t know, it’s about running out of milk,” Goodby recalls saying. “Why don’t we call it ‘Got milk?’—with the question mark.”

bold, original, never before attempted, and never successfully remastered.

The commercial opens inside a warehouse in which random collectibles and old-timey objects are housed—think your grandfather’s garage if he were prepping for an episode of Antiques Roadshow. A wispy history buff (played by Sean Whalen) slathers peanut butter on white bread, just as the radio announces a contest: “And now let’s make that random call with today’s $10,000 question,” the host says. “It’s a tough one: Who shot Alexander Hamilton in that famous duel?” An antique rifle goes off, while a painting of the famous duel stares at the sandwich eater from across the room. His phone rings. Hearing the question again, he confidently (and correctly) answers, “Aaron Burr.” But the host can’t understand the answer because the man’s mouth is coated with peanut butter. “Aaron Burr!” he yells again.

When he reaches for his carton of milk, he finds it empty.

a Damian-like, clairvoyant kid refuses to eat the chocolate cake . . . because he foresees there will be no milk to wash it down.

The creatives talk about how these ads flipped the script of what advertising at the time was capable of relaying. They have a dark mood that hurls the viewer face-first into stories that don’t explicitly reveal the product being sold until the final seconds, suggesting that the story we tell ourselves about milk is more important than milk itself.

No $10,000 prize. No milk. That “little bonsai tagline” that Goodby had dreamed up appears, read aloud for the first time in a baritone, near-mocking tone.

“There was a big fight in the agency at the time between the other creatives and me and Goodby,” Silverstein recalls.

“They said, ‘You old farts, you can’t say ‘Got Milk?’ at the end!’ And we said, ‘No, no, you have to say it!’

The commercial was directed by a recent film graduate of the Art Center College of Design, Michael Bay (yes, Transformers Michael Bay), who was brought in by his former classmate and the ad’s art director, Erich Joiner.

“He was helpful in making the thing visually unforgettable,” Goodby says of Bay. “The idea of having this guy live in a warehouse or whatever the hell it is was certainly his idea. I said to him at one point, ‘Why? Why does he have a car in his house?’ And he said to me, ‘No, do it, do it, it’s going to be funny. People won’t forget this.’ The mixture of history and weirdness is just terrific.”

That weirdness was just the beginning. The commercials that followed “Aaron Burr” were tonally wicked snippets of black comedy. In “Heaven,” a man who fires his employee via phone gets hit by a truck and wakes up in “Eternity,” where he discovers chocolate chip cookies the size of boulders and a fridge full of empty milk cartons. In “The Birthday Cake Commercial,” an Edwardian celebration turns ominous when

Instrumental in the success of Got Milk? was Jeff Manning, who was the executive director of the California Milk Processor Board. (Now a marketing strategist and speaker, his current website is, without irony, www.gotmanning.com.)

Manning went to bat for Goodby and Silverstein’s deprivation strategy because the tagline made milk a brand, not just a commodity. “Nothing else except milk works,” Manning says.

“Soda doesn’t work, Gatorade doesn’t work, water doesn’t work. The only thing that works in that bowl of Cheerios is milk.”

After the first round of commercials, Manning pushed to get the Milk Processing Board to license the slogan to food brands like Oreo and Cheerios free of charge. “Why don’t we work with these food companies?” Manning remembers telling the board. “The dairy industry would never do that because milk was on a ‘good for you’ strategy at that time.

Well, if they’re on this strategy, you don’t work with Oreos.

We did. Nabisco eventually marketed a Got Milk? Oreo,

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where Got Milk? was embossed on a cookie.” Girl Scout cookies were next, followed by a massive brand of an entirely different order. “Mattel, who manufactured Barbies, got on board. Think about that. Mattel manufacturing millions of Barbies . . . for us!”

Eventually, the CMPB landed no less an icon than Cookie Monster, even after Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit company (then known as the Children’s Television Workshop) that produces Sesame Street, had told Manning that the organization didn’t promote brands.

Ever.

“Now, I know I had been marketing Got Milk? as a brand, but what we said here was, ‘Got Milk? isn’t a brand.

This is a category.

This is milk. This is what makes bones strong, this is what is good for kids.’

And they said, ‘You know what? You’re right. Let’s run with it.’”

By 1995, the Milk Processor Education Program (MilkPEP), the national arm of milk processors, decided it was time to do some messaging of its own. The group hired the agency Bozell, which dreamed up what became known as the milk mustache campaign, a nationwide effort that launched that same year with a print ad featuring Naomi Campbell and the tagline ‘Milk, What a Surprise!’ But soon, MilkPEP licensed Goody and Silverstein’s hugely popular slogan and the campaigns became, unofficially, two sides of the same coin.

MilkPEP’s aim was to put—pardon the pun—pep back in milk, to educate the consumer about its benefits. Research on kids at the time showed that they viewed milk as a ubiquitous, boring staple. The milk mustache campaign was designed to make milk more interesting and to emphasize its wholesomeness. It was the same strategy that had existed for decades before deprivation marketing came along. Now it had fresh faces and a nationally recognized catchphrase.

Former Bozell creatives Sal Taibi and Bernie Hogya, who worked on the campaign (and later published two books on it), were instrumental in wrangling the celebrities who appeared in the ads. Among the A-list gets: Harrison Ford, Britney Spears, Kate Moss, Dennis Rodman (photographed nude), Kristi Yamaguchi, Patrick Ewing, Joan Rivers, Hanson, The Simpsons, and Kermit the Frog. Sarah Michelle Gellar, at peak Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame, posed as her demon-dusting alter ego. “To follow in the footsteps of so many legends was truly an honor,” she says via email. “It

really started a national conversation about drinking milk, something I don’t believe people gave much thought to, other than for coffee and dunking cookies.”

Annie Leibovitz photographed more than 180 of the ads.

Back then, when magazine ad spending peaked at 9.4% of all U.S. advertising dollars (compared to 6.5% in 2015), and one ad might appear in a dozen different magazines the same month, the photographer sensed how huge the campaign’s reach could be. “Annie sent a note back to us saying that not only did she want to do it, but she wanted to make sure nobody else could,” says Hogya, then Bozell’s art director. “She saw the power of what this was going to be.

At a time when print magazines were very big, she thought that if she were to make the photos really special, they would be everywhere. You couldn’t get away from this campaign.”

Leibovitz’s then-partner, Susan Sontag, tagged along one day just so she could meet Kermit.

The same day Kermit was photographed, WWF wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin arrived for his shoot with Leibovitz feeling uncomfortable that he wasn’t in prime physical shape. “I was standing there and something wasn’t quite right, and she didn’t like what she was seeing,” he says. “She handed me another glass of milk and made me hold them at waist level.

She made me look 10 times better than I did before, because what she did was completely block out my waist, my love handles. She made me look like a Greek god.” Hogya has a slightly different memory: “I think the idea back then was to play off the image of crushing two beer cans,” he says with a laugh. “But maybe Steve’s right.”

There was no shortage of celebrities willing to participate in the campaign, but there was one small catch: All subjects had to be milk drinkers.

Taibi, who was director of client services at Bozell, explains that MilkPEP was only paying $25,000 per ad, a fraction of what these stars normally charged for commercials.

(Most donated the fee to charity.)

So if money was not the motivating factor for participation, the concept had to be. And this took people like Whoopi Goldberg, who is lactose intolerant, out of the running. “I really wanted to do it, but I was told you had to be a milk drinker, so I couldn’t do it the first time around,” she says. But when the milk producers planned an ad for lactose-free milk, the comedian was the first person they called.

Goldberg was especially interested in being a part of the campaign because it reminded her of an ad for Levy’s rye bread she used to see as a kid, whose memorable tagline was, “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.” That ad featured kids of all races and ethnicities, much like the milk mustache campaign. Similarly, NBA star Dwight Howard saw the connection between childhood dreams and the campaign’s inclusive properties. He remembered drinking milk as a kid, and ultimately, wanted his ad to connect to a younger audience, to make those who saw his ad feel like they could achieve something. “It’s a very simple, yet engaging message that just happens to have an inherent call to action,” he tells Fast Company via email. “The execution leveraged well-known athletes that were larger than life or heroes for all kinds of people.”

Leibowitz was prescient in her belief that the mustache campaign would make waves, but no one predicted just how massive its impact would be. For the last two decades, Manning has kept a running list of the hundreds of taglines that were adopted from Got Milk?, including Got Ice? Got Lice? Got Porn? Got Identity? The two-word tagline is now public domain.

And yet, statistical data indicates that the Milk Mustache campaign didn’t influence long-term behavior. According to a report by CoBank, over a 30-year period from 1970-2010, milk consumption has declined nationally from 28.6 gallons to 20.9 gallons. Even in California, where the dairy industry is a multibillion-dollar business, milk sales are dwindling.

There are many reasons for this—competition from nondairy alternatives and healthier lifestyle choices chief among

them—but it also suggests that the tagline became more memorable than effective. When asked if this is the case, the Got Milk? execs seem to agree, albeit without admitting that the campaign failed to sell more milk. Manning, for instance, is adamant that Got Milk? was representative of a perfect time and place, now long gone. “That milk [consumption] continues to go down is not a fundamental problem with marketing,” he says. “It’s a change in how America eats and drinks. White milk just doesn’t play the role it used to play.”

In 2014, MilkPEP retired “Got Milk?” and replaced it with its current tagline, “Milk Life.” Gone are the milk-mustachioed celebrities, replaced with Olympians’ mothers, who narrate memories of their children’s work ethic. “I think that celebrities started taking on a different meaning for Americans,” says Julia Kadison, the current CEO of MilkPEP. “We heard from our focus groups, that, well, any celebrity is going to shill for a product. The other thing that was happening is people were so focused on the next milk mustache celebrity that they weren’t taking away the message of the ad. We needed to shake things up.”

Ann Ocana, the chief marketing officer of Shamrock Foods Company, which worked on behalf of the milk processors during the new campaign, underscores the need for a shift in image. “When you look at that milk beverage case, it’s a visual battleground now,” she says, alluding to the growth of beverages made of hemp, oat, almonds, and soy. “The Got Milk? campaign was the foundation that helped us create the attitude. We’re just overlaying on top of it now.”

“Milk Life” might never enter the zeitgeist the way its predecessor did. In this age of fleeting virality, few things do. But those two words live on, emblematic of a time that in retrospect seems simpler.

Got nostalgia?

LEE-ading the way in brand leadership!

Prolific Writer, Speaker, Consultant. Denise Lee Yohn has over the years dismantled conventional norms and articulated her own code on how to achieve true brand leadership. Her two books ‘ What Great Brands Do ‘ and her new one ‘ Fusion ‘ bears comprehensive testimony to her understanding of the brand building space. In a freewheeling chat, here she deep dives further and shares with BrandKnew her views on culture, brand building, business building and much more.

BK: You have contributed to some of the world’s leading publications. What triggered your interest in writing?

DLY: I’ve always loved to write – I consider it a craft and I’m always honing my writing skills.

By BrandKnew

BK: What triggered your first book ‘ What Great Brands Do’? And what has been your learnings from that book that you have leveraged over time?

DLY: I decided to write What Great Brands Do for two primary reasons. The first was that it seemed there was – and still is – a lot of misperceptions about how great brands are built and I wanted to set the record straight. The second was that I knew I needed to have a published book to establish myself as a professional speaker, so I chose to write about my passion and my primary keynote topic, brand-building.

BK: You have been on both brand side with the likes of Sony and on the agency side for brands like Land Rover and Burger King. How has the integrated experience helped you professionally?

DLY: I understand the challenges experienced by people on both sides of the table – and the misalignment between the two groups that can arise. Moreover, the positions I held at companies honed my research, analytical, product management, and culture-building skills, while at advertising agencies I learned about creative communications. The combination of all these disciplines has served me well in my work building brands.

BK: There is an oft used cliché saying ‘ Culture eats strategy for breakfast ‘- what are your thoughts on it?

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BK: What according to you should come first in terms of priority in an organization- Brand or Culture? Why? DLY: Both are equally important – and as I write in FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies, they must be mutually reinforcing and tightly aligned.

BK: Could you take us through what motivated you in writing your book Fusion?

DLY: I’ve always believed that brandbuilding starts inside, meaning that if you want to build a strong, valuable brand, you must start by cultivating a strong brand-led culture inside your organization. I wrote about this principle in the first chapter of What Great Brands Do and I head from many folks who wanted to learn more about it.

Also, there seems to be a culture crisis in the business world today.

So many companies struggle with issues of diversity, equality, and sexual harassment while fighting a fierce war for talent — and so many employees are not engaged at work.

But there were few resources that explained how to cultivate a healthy, effective, sustainable culture and so I wanted to crack the code on culture-building the same way I had done on brandbuilding with my first book.

BK: Don’t you think Mission Statements are grossly over rated and most cases don’t go beyond lip service? Is it herd mentality at work here? Or culture has a part to play?

DLY: Most Mission Statements are too generic and onesidedly focused on shareholders that they don’t provide guidance and inspiration for the organization, its employees, its brand development, and its customers. That’s why in FUSION, I recommend crafting an overarching purpose that embodies what drives the organization as a business as well as a brand.

BK: What in your scheme of things will the pecking order look like: Brand Building or Business Building? And where exactly does Culture of an organization intersect in these?

DLY: In What Great Brands Do, I explain the brand-asbusiness management approach, in which your brand is your business and vice versa. You can’t build one without the other and you really shouldn’t distinguish between them.

That means that brand-building is a strategic management responsibility that starts with cultivating a brand-led culture and involves using your brand as a filter for everything you do as an organization.

BK: Undoubtedly there is an over emphasis(atleast on paper)

at brands on ‘ customer experience ‘. Do you think ‘ employee experience ‘ should come before customer experience?

DLY: Again, the two need to be aligned and integrated. You should determine the customer experience that will deliver on your brand values, attributes, and positioning, and then design an employee experience that enables your employees to develop and execute that experience.

BK: At ISD Global we have patented a concept called the UFP(Unique Feelings Proposition)and how that is more important than USP( Unique Selling Proposition– which in this over commoditized world is passe). Where do you see your views going towards on this?

DLY: It makes a lot of sense for two reasons. First, it puts the emphasis on the customer – instead of focusing on what we want the company to do, it is about what we want the customer to do. Second, it speaks to the fact that humans are emotional beings, so we make product and brand decisions based on how they make us feel. So, great brands succeed by creating an emotional connection with customers.

BK: You have been working with a lot of Blue chip brands over the years. Which brand/s in your opinion have really got their ‘ culture act ‘ absolutely spot on?

DLY: I have not worked with Amazon, but all my research on that company indicates that its culture is powerful and productive – it aligns and unifies all employees with the company’s overarching purpose, which in turns produces phenomenal results.

BK: In your book Fusion you talk about ‘ Integrating Brand and Culture ‘ for stupendous results- could you elaborate on that?

DLY: Most business leaders consider brand and culture as two separate things — and they delegate brand-building to the marketing department and culture-building to the human resources department. But if you fuse the two—create an interdependent and mutually reinforcing relationship between how your organization thinks and acts on the inside and how it is perceived and experienced on the outside—you unleash power that isn’t possible by simply cultivating one or the other alone.

With brand-culture fusion, you future-proof your business because culture and brand are only going to increase in importance, as the need to unify and align diverse and dispersed employees is only going to grow as companies continue to globalize, workforces continue to diversify, and the pace of business continues to accelerate — and brand power is only going to become more important in the fight against commoditizing product categories, shrinking attention spans, and consolidating channels.

Fusing brand and culture also enables you to pass the high standard of authenticity that customers and employees judge companies against and every part of your business is aligned so you avoid dangerous disconnects.

And by aligning and integrating your brand and culture, you create value for customers and employees that your competitors can’t rip off or undercut because it is unique to your organization.

Does Your Company Need a Chief Storyteller?

FROM A HOBBY BLOGGER TO THE HEAD OF STORYTELLING AT MICROSOFT, STEVE CLAYTON CHARTS HIS UNLIKELY CAREER RISE AND SHARES HOW STORIES ABOUT PEOPLE CAN BRING REAL VALUE TO A COMPANY.

By Matt McCue

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One day eight years ago, Microsoft Chief Storyteller Steve Clayton figured he was going to get fired. In his time at Microsoft he had moved up from a systems engineer to the Director, Cloud Strategy based in London. There was a Microsoft blog back then that covered what Microsoft brought to the world, but Clayton saw the chance to tell stories about what was unfolding inside the company. So he started doing just that as a hobby. He was a pretty honest judge and that fair and balanced approach attracted an audience, including some Microsoft Communications team members who would say, “What are you doing? You’re not the official spokesperson for the company.”

But nobody told Clayton to stop so he kept right on writing because he had a passion for it. Fast forward four years and Microsoft’s head of communications finally said “We need to talk about your blog.” “And that was the day I thought I was getting fired,” recalls Clayton. Instead, the head of communications complimented Clayton on all of his work and asked if he’d like to move from London to Seattle and tell stories about Microsoft in an official capacity.

earlier and showed us all what longform storytelling on the web could be. “88 Acres” was a story about a guy who worked in a real estate and facilities department – not an obvious place for a compelling story But someone in our real estate department told me he had a great story about the person who oversees the 125 buildings on the Microsoft campus. And I thought that doesn’t really have the hallmark of a great story. Buildings. But nonetheless I went and met Darrell, who in the year prior had helped to build this capability for all our of buildings to be integrated, so it became a bigger story about big data and the Internet of Things. It had the hallmarks of a good story: this central character Darrell who went on a journey, and had a breakthrough and was successful.

“When I arrived in Seattle I didn’t have much of a clue about what I was supposed to do,” says Clayton. But it became clear that the job was to tell stories about the company that start to drive changing perception around this company.” To start, the public relations team asked Clayton what his title should be. “I said a blogger. I blog at Microsoft. And they said, well we can’t call you a blogger because everyone is a blogger,” remembers Clayton, “They said they’d call me chief storyteller…the title came by accident.”

Today, Clayton manages a 30-person team that is responsible for telling Microsoft’s culture story, which includes everything from highlighting internal culture innovations on the Microsoft Story Lab blog, to developing the company’s AI communications strategy, to building tech demos for CEO Satya Nadella. He recently spoke with 99U about how good stories can result in good business.

At corporations, storytelling has typically rolled up into marketing. What’s the difference between what you do as a chief storyteller and a marketer or someone in publications relations?

I’m not precious about the job title “chief storyteller,” but I’m precious about storytelling. I think it’s become a term that people want to hear and sometimes I see a great advertisement or media campaign and people say ‘oh that’s storytelling.’ I admire those creative executions, but I know that wasn’t storytelling. This is probably too binary of a definition, but I tend to think storytelling has people involved.

When I think about the storytelling that I’m most proud of that we’ve done over the last few years, it’s been about how our technology impacted someone in the world and made a difference in their lives and is much more around people, than it is around products.

Give us an example of what that looks like.

Sure. Yeah, we started this platform about five years ago called Microsoft Stories and the first story we did was called “88 Acres”—the codename for Microsoft’s original campus in Redmond, Washington. We shamelessly copied The New York Times “Snowfall” story that had published a few months

We pitched it to a few media outlets and they passed on it, so we published story ourselves told over multiple chapters and, even though we weren’t selling a software product in it, the story generated real business. We had customers who wrote us saying they wanted to buy the software. We didn’t even sell it as a product back then but we turned it into a product. In 3,000 words, there is one single sentence in the entire story that mentioned the product by name, yet the day after we had a very big name customer calling up and saying I want to buy that thing.

A couple of weeks after that we had another product team came to us and said, “Wow, we loved what you did with that story. We’d love to do a similar thing with our product.” And we said, “Well great, let’s tell a story, what are the central characters, what’s the journey?’ And they said, ‘No we just want to tell a really good story about this product.” And we said, ‘Yeah, we get that, but what’s the story?’. As I mentioned earlier, that’s the difference with storytelling – it really does need to be about people.

Another story you’ve done is Empowering Kenya and the World with High-Speed, Low-Cost Internet that explores how Microsoft has helped bring the Internet to rural Africa. How do you strike that balance between covering an idea that transcends Microsoft Corp. with highlighting the effort of Microsoft, which isn’t mentioned until the eight paragraph in the piece?

The balance is actually easy to find if you set aside the typical motives of telling a story about the company or product and tell the story about people and impact. Readers are smart—

they know if it’s Microsoft telling the story there is going to be something about our involvement in it—which means we can put that in the background as it’s already in the back of their minds.

necessarily page views, conversions, and moving product units.

When I read a great story by a company, it doesn’t necessarily make me want to go buy their product right then. But it makes me feel better about the company because it shows they care about their craft, and creating something that is beautiful, so I start to assume that they put that same purpose into making their products.

I speak to lots of people at Microsoft who are in the business of selling our products. The job of my team is to sell Microsoft, and how does the work contribute to the brand of Microsoft and make people feel better about the company as a brand.

Companies typically have Chief Finance Officers or Chief Marketing Officer, but there are very few Chief Storytellers out there. With more and more brands starting to develop their own content, do you think we’ll see more Chief Storytellers?

Whereas product success can be determined by, say, number of units sold in a certain amount of time, it can be trickier to articulate the value of stories, and creative endeavors more broadly. How do you convey the value of stories at Microsoft?

I don’t think there’s any clear answer. On the one hand you can say, ‘Yes, this piece had a million page views’ but that doesn’t really do it for me. We love to see people picking up the assets from our stories, our web videos and photography, and those being shared.

The other thing is a bit more fluffy: Does the story make me feel proud to work for the company? Is it likely that other people who in the company will feel proud to share that story in their professional networks. And so we do some measurements how these stories make people feel about our company—we don’t measure them on a story by story basis, but more so people saying, “That was a great story, I want to share it.”

So the value is the emotional connection with customers, not

I remember about three weeks into having this job title, Fortune Magazine got in touch with our PR agency and said, “Hey, you’ve got a guy called chief storyteller. We’d love to interview him because we’re doing this piece in the magazine around people who have impressive job titles.” When they published a few weeks later, but instead of it being interesting jobs titles, it was people with wacky job titles.

Then last week a friend of mine sent me a note that said someone on the BBC talked about how he just found out that Microsoft has this guy with the job title called chief storyteller and that seems liked a ridiculous job title.

Some people clearly think we don’t. But on the other hand, I did a piece on Cheddar TV last week, and they said they loved the job title. What it does is it gets people’s attention.

They say what is that, do we need one? I do think we’ll see more Chief Storytellers as we move into the era of brands and companies talking about their mission and purpose— purpose over product—they will be inclined to take on more of their own storytelling about the company.

Matt McCue is the Editor-in-Chief of 99U. He lives in New York City, but he is willing to travel long distances for a good meal.

How visual recognition is set to change advertising ADVERTISERS ARE BEGINNING TO EXPLORE THE POSSIBILITIES OF TECHNOLOGIES THAT IDENTIFY THE CONTENT OF IMAGES AND VIDEOS.

By Justin Freid

Ad relevancy is key to moving a customer down their purchase path. The consumer profiles we build on each individual user provide insight into their needs, brand biases, social stances and much, much more. When done correctly, we are able to better understand a prospect, allowing us to place a relevant ad in front of a person who is actively shopping for our brands or products.

To be even more successful, we need to go beyond what that individual wants at that specific moment. Behavioral economics has shown that consistent touch points over a period of time allow us to influence potential customers when they are activated to make a purchase decision at a later date. Being there throughout the funnel, not just at the bottom of the funnel, is key to increasing your pool of qualified customers.

One way to get a more complete picture of a customer is to perform textual and sentiment analysis on the words they share on social media. The technology to do this kind of thing has been around for a while, which is why innovators are taking such analyses to the next level. Now, visual recognition software is helping develop a deeper understanding of consumers in a similar way. (Note: The industry doesn’t seem to have settled on a single name for this technology. Besides

visual recognition, it’s is also known as computer vision, image recognition and image analysis.)

The images and videos a person shares or likes via social media provide insights not only into what products they like, but can also give marketers a window into many other elements of a potential customer’s lifestyle. Powered by machine learning, algorithms can quickly identify unique elements of images that can help power the marketing machine that determines what ad should be delivered to whom for the best result.

“We do expect multimedia posts to become the predominant type of post on social media. Even the text that accompanies those posts is getting shorter and shorter. … It becomes increasingly important for companies to be able to understand what’s going on in those images,” Gartner VP of Research Jenny Sussin was quoted as saying in a post on Crimson Hexagon’s site.

Advances in visual recognition Many companies such as IBM, Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook continue to push the envelope when it comes to image recognition. Google’s advances in image search continue to evolve, while Facebook can spot almost anyone

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in Europe, companies like Facebook are constantly having their innovation in facial recognition questioned and stymied there due to associated privacy concerns.

How visual recognition will be applied to advertising It seems likely, though, that visual recognition will eventually become a part of the digital landscape in some form and, even without faces, it offers a lot of potential opportunities. Within many images users upload onto social media there are hundreds, if not thousands of elements that can now be identified through visual recognition software.

in a crowd of an uploaded image. IBM continues to evolve within its Watson platform, using machine learning to identify various elements within the image. IBM is going beyond the people in the picture. Their visual recognition capabilities allow for the identification of scenes, objects, faces, colors, food, text and much more.

And with the use of APIs, these technologies are ready to be tapped and integrated into any number of martech tools.

Amazon is aggressively marketing its Rekognition service, which makes powerful image and video analysis available.

Google, too, has made available its Cloud Video Intelligence and Vision APIs along with the Cloud AutoML Vision machine learning service. Additionally, some social media analytics players like Brandwatch, Crimson Hexagon and Netbase are already touting their own capabilities.

As quickly as it is advancing, image or visual recognition software faces a challenge on the consumer side, where many fear the privacy consequences of having such a technology widely deployed. Think back to when Apple released Face ID — a biometric security measure — with its iPhone X in 2017, and how news about its inaccuracy and general “creepiness” dominated the tech headline.

It may seem like a picture of you and your friends at a bar, but it is so much more. Of course, standard elements like location, tagged individuals and the hashtag used are all up for grabs. But visual recognition analyzes everything within an image. It can tell if you are drinking whiskey or vodka based on the color of the liquor in your glass. It can determine the fabric of your shirt and the brand of your jeans. It can read the sign in the background and the name of the restaurant from the menu sitting on your table.

This type of information provides deep insight into who we are as consumers and is extremely valuable to advertisers.

For example, if a picture someone shares on social media includes them holding a glass of high-end whiskey while also wearing a Gucci belt, chances are they are a good target for luxury retail goods. Compare that with someone holding a low-end beer brand and a shirt with an Old Navy logo on it.

By looking back through the various images shared on an individual’s profiles, the deep-learning algorithm can determine if luxury goods are a common part of this person’s lifestyle. Affinities toward brands and/or products can be used in real time to purchase programmatic inventory across display, video and even addressable TV. Being able to analyze images to this level enables us to go from targeting people by what companies they “like” or “follow” on social media to targeting them based on the products and brands they actually buy and use, leading to more relevant ads and ultimately a better-targeted customer.

As advertisers, we are just beginning to reap the benefits of leveraging visual recognition capabilities. As we move forward and the capability becomes more widespread and adopted, it will become a key asset.

And with the more recent privacy discussion sparked by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) pushing forward

Justin Freid is a digital marketing veteran with over 12 years of experience helping some of the largest brands in the world leverage the digital landscape to connect with their target audiences. Currently leading the SEM, SEO and social media teams at CMI Media, a WPP Company.

The advantage of Artificial Intelligence in market research

By Andrew Konya

An issue across every sector, from market research to employee engagement and government relations, is how to truly understand large groups of people across political, geographical, and cultural divides and amplify their collective voice. This problem is intensified when challenging issues arise and sending out a survey doesn’t provide the opportunity to discover what you don’t know to ask. On the other hand, focus groups don’t represent enough people to justify action.

We’ve come a long way in learning how to better understand massive groups of people utilizing artificial intelligence (AI).

This piece outlines key advantages of AI in market research resulting from my work with a number of organizations facing the challenge of transitioning from traditional market research to modern representative intelligence; that is intelligence capable of engaging, understanding and authentically representing massive groups of stakeholders (customer, employees, citizens, etc.).

AI helps direct you to hidden truths much faster In the city of Cornwall, England, members of the local community are battling an issue of loneliness. More than half of their residents over 75 will go more than a month at a time without speaking to a friend. So the Cornwall Council launched a program to find a solution and understand how its citizens interact with one another. They partnered with Deloitte to host a live online conversation focused on thought provoking open-ended questions and used artificial intelligence to collect active data from 200 participants, in real-time. As a result, they were able to learn, in just minutes, how local communities can best intervene, what local programs are already making a difference, and how they can come together to bring about positive change. The voices of Cornwall were heard and understood, ultimately empowering the community to improve social care throughout Cornwall.

People are more than data points It’s important we address why facilitating open-ended questions that provide active data are important to accurately understand a group of people. Active data is the type of data you get from a person when you actively engage them, talk to them, and get to know what’s on their mind. Thus, active data gives you a clear insight into how someone thinks.

In other words, passive data gives the “what” while active data gives the “why.” In addition, when you only observe behaviors passively, you paint a picture about someone as they currently behave - and you never understand their motivations, inspirations, and who they’re striving to become. People are more than data points - it’s crucial to engage with people and collect more than yes or no answers.

Artificial intelligence helps you better segment, analyze, and understand this free-form, qualitative data on a deeper level with the right tools.

AI combines quantitative and qualitative research Artificial intelligence is re-writing the way we derive insights.

It does the most important part of cleansing, consolidating, and, most importantly, analyzing data for in-depth analysis.

AI market research tools help encode large quantities of complex qualitative data, and look at them en masse in order to determine statistical significance. Before AI, your focus group of 10 people gave you plenty of qualitative info about their feelings about something, but there was no way of knowing if this truly represented your audience. Additionally, your quantitative survey told you that there was a feeling towards a product/event/issue but not why. In combining these two, technology that utilizes AI can help researchers understand their audience on a much deeper level that has a higher likelihood of representing the population they’re looking at.

The market advantage of AI An AI-centric world is one that is evolving at a rapid pace.

Business leaders should prepare for it by implementing business processes and employee cultures that are designed to thrive in a state of continuous evolution. Winners will be those who can understand customers and react to that understanding the fastest, and early adopters of tools and paradigms that enable this will realize a decisive market advantage.

Andrew Konya is the CEO of Remesh, the software company utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to transition organizations from traditional market research to modern representative intelligence.

Six sells – Adam Ferrier on attention, measurement and the six second ad TO CLEAR UP A YEAR OF EXPERIMENTATION WITH AD FORMATS, MARKETING SPEAKS WITH ADAM FERRIER ABOUT SIX-SECOND ADS – HOW THEY FIT INTO A WORLD OF MEASUREMENT, WHY THEY WORK, AND WHEN.

By Ben Ice

At June’s World of Unmissable event, consumer psychologist and Thinkerbell founder Adam Ferrier delivered an introductory presentation on six-second advertisements and films, as well as other marketing comms that deliver impact in limited amounts of engagement and time.

Why six seconds? “Very often it’s all you have,” he said.

According to Ferrier, “every single piece of creative we create is all about trying to change people’s behaviour,” and there are only two ways to do it: increase their motivation, or make it easier for them to do it.

“Motivation is creating a desire that someone is likely to act upon. Ease is around creating mental and physical availability and making it easier for your brand to be chosen over the other.”

For those in the audience, he offered a reality check: “99.9% of the time your consumer does not give a flying rats about

your brand. They don’t care, they’re thinking about something else completely.” This is the ‘passive consideration’ stage.

“Then something happens. There’s a trigger. The trigger doesn’t occur for your brand. The trigger occurs for the category: I need a drink, I want a new car, I’m hungry, I need nappies, I want a home loan.”

The role of 99.9% of communications, he said, is to get the brand and message stuck into their head at this stage.

“What we need to do from most of our media buy is grab mental availability, so the brand sticks into their head when the category needs get hit and then, hopefully, to make it easier for them to buy your brand over somebody else.”

“Six seconds – or less – is probably enough to do that,” he said.

“If you constantly want to be in their head, you can take a second and a half, you could take a few milliseconds.”

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Ferrier paraphrased Byron Sharp’s recommended use and spread of an annual media budget. “You should take your media budget, divide it by 12, and spend approximately one twelfth of your media budget every month. Sophisticated, hey?

“That’s how to make things easier. Be in people’s heads.

Create saliency. Whenever the category needs get triggered, your brand is available.”

Marketing speaks with Ferrier about how short and simple communications fit into marketing, and what’s going on in the six-second landscape.

Marketing: What are the strengths and weaknesses of long and short form content?

Adam Ferrier: There’s a fair amount of evidence that lots of advertising works via what’s roughly called ‘low involvement processing’, where you don’t have to be consciously engaged with the communications in order for the communications to have an effect.

Marketers, I guess at some level, have known this for a long time. It’s about getting impressions in the consumer’s mind.

And so, back in the day when media was very, very cheap, most ads were 60 seconds long and they were effective.

Then, TV advertising was able to chop that down to 30 and to 15, and both of those are effective as well.

What has been interesting with digital video and where that’s heading, is stretching how short an ad can be versus the level of effectiveness it has. If you take on board the idea that lots of advertising works via low involvement processing, then the ad that we’re seeing can be pretty short in order to still have an impact.

In an analogue media world, these conversations would not have been had, because it was just really hard to have an ad under 15 seconds play out and then be researched. Apart from a few rare ‘stunty’ kinds of thing, they weren’t the norm.

It feels like technology is catching up to the science a little bit and starting to investigate – and it’s certainly still early days – but it looks like shorter form ads can have similar effectiveness at doing a certain job in the communications mix than longer form ads.

Can short form ads work on their own, or should they form part of a media mix?

Byron Sharp talks about laws of marketing, and I still can’t quite get my head around something as complicated and nebulous as marketing and human behaviour having hard and fast laws that apply under all conditions. The context of every marketing challenge is so different.

It kind of depends on what your current brand is, who’s consuming your brand, the relationship they have with it, and so on. So, I wouldn’t necessarily subscribe to saying there’s one way to do things, but what I do find useful is the whole concept of people having passive consideration for your brand when they’re not really in the market and active consideration for your brand when they’re evaluating it.

After that it becomes a matter of looking at ways of building retention, where once they’ve purchased they want to keep on purchasing your brand, and dividing things into those three clusters.

I think the concept of low involvement processing, or topping up salience in the mind is probably most effective at the passive consideration stage, which is where people spend 99 percent of their time – when most people, most of the time are not thinking about you.

Do you lean towards the long form or short form format?

I lean towards a mix of both. One of the things that’s troubled me is I’ve always believed that action changes attitude faster than attitude changes action, and if you can get people to act or interact or talk or pass on a certain message… You know, you can loosely call that ‘fame-based’ communications that generates its own sense of momentum in the media.

That’s the Holy Grail, but I think in and of itself it’s hard to do that continually, day in, day out, en masse. That kind of communications needs to be supported with doing the simple stuff and maintaining saliency for as long as possible, through being always on or always visible or audible to the consumer. So, a lot of the time, having a combination of the two seems to work well.

Many believe attention spans are declining.

Are these short form communications more likely to work as we try to secure the attention of a disengaging audience, or has there always been potential?

I don’t think there’s much evidence to suggest we have a lowering attention span. I think our attention spans are pretty much what they’ve always been, but it’s a pretty hard thing to measure. What’s interesting is there’s so much data available now. It’s kind of like data is a little bell that keeps ringing and getting your attention, and then we keep on focusing on optimising on stuff that has a direct response or a measurable response.

This leads us into one form of communications, which is response-driven communications, where you can measure if it’s working and who’s responding or not. Then we try to spend a lot of our time optimising that, potentially at the expense of broadcast communications that are harder to measure.

If you believe the likes of Byron Sharp and so on – that the value of broadcast communications in maintaining saliency with the mass market – then it feels like that is being forgotten about with the obsession over data and performance-based media. But this is a complicated thing.

You can get simple and wonderful into six seconds or less.

What’s interesting is that everyone’s well and truly aware of the value of static media, but also, where outdoor as a concept is heading, and how it can be even more contextually relevant and create value for the consumer in current, contemporary, relevant situations is interesting.

What Marketers Are Doing Wrong in Data Analytics

By Knowledge@Wharton

Companies gather and analyze data to fine-tune their operations, whether it’s to help them figure out which webpage design works best for customers or what features to include in their product or service to boost sales. Marketers, in particular, use data analytics to answer questions like this: To put people in a shopping mood, is it better to make the webpage banner blue or yellow? Or do these colors not matter? Getting the answer right could mean the difference between higher sales or losing to the competition.

But new Wharton research shows that 57% of marketers are incorrectly crunching the data and potentially getting the wrong answer — and perhaps costing companies a lot of money. “We expected business experimenters [to make this error], but I was nevertheless surprised that so many of them do so,” said Wharton marketing professor Christophe Van den Bulte, who coauthored the study. Wharton marketing professor Ron Berman, another of the study’s authors, agreed: “This was a pretty common phenomenon that we observed.” (Listen to a podcast interview with Berman about the research at the top of this page.)

Their paper, “p-Hacking and False Discovery in A/B Testing,” which was popularly downloaded and widely cited in social media, looked at the A/B testing practices of marketers who used the online platform Optimizely before the platform added safeguards against potential mistakes. In A/B testing, two or more versions of a webpage are tested to see which one resonates more with users. For example, half of a company’s customers would see webpage version A and the other half version B. “Imagine one version says something about the brand of your product and the other version says something about the technical abilities of your product,” Berman said.

“You want to determine which one makes consumers respond

better, to buy more of your products.”

Berman and Van den Bulte — along with Leonid Pekelis, a data scientist at Opendoor, and Facebook research scientist Aisling Scott — analyzed more than 2,100 experiments in 2014 from nearly 1,000 accounts, comprising a total of 76,215 daily data. This level of granularity is unique, the researchers write, allowing them to essentially “look over the shoulder” of marketers and draw “stronger” conclusions about their behavior. What they found was that marketers were making an error in the statistics process called “p-hacking.”

Berman said p-hacking is like “peeking.” It is the practice of checking the experiment before it is over and stopping it when one sees the desired results.

The problem is that if marketers don’t run the experiment all the way through, they won’t know if the initial results will change. For example, if the experiment is supposed to run for four to five weeks, 57% of marketers look at initial results daily and stop the test when it reaches 90% significance.

“Experimenters cheat themselves, their bosses or their clients,” said Van den Bulte. Berman added: “What people shouldn’t do, and this is what many of them were doing, is wait until the first time [the experiment] hits this 90% threshold and stop. The reason it is a mistake is because if you waited a bit longer, you might go below 90%, and below 70% and fluctuate again because it is a “Experimenters random process.”

While 70% might still sound high, that confidence level actually means there is no meaningful difference whether one uses webpage version A or

cheat themselves, their bosses or their clients.”

–Christophe Van den Bulte

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B. “The great majority of commercial A/B tests … involve tweaks and changes that have no effect whatsoever,” Van den Bulte said. That’s because it is hard to come up with good ideas that will actually make a significant enough impact, Berman added. “If someone tells you, ‘Let’s design a website and test 10 different colors on the website,’ actually seven out of these 10 will make no difference … unless one of them is very ugly or something [else is wrong]. So it is pretty hard to find variations or changes in the websites that are actually expected to yield a big gain. Most of them will do nothing.”

But there is a definite downside when marketers engage in p-hacking: It leads to more wrong results. “If no one p-hacked, about 30% of the tests claiming to be statistically significant findings would actually be false discoveries,” Van den Bulte said. With p-hacking, that number increases to 42%. “P-hacking boosts the probability that an effect declared significant is actually a null effect … [and] doing so greatly harms the diagnosticity of commercial A/B tests,” according to the paper.

Costs of p-Hacking P-hacking has real — and potentially costly — consequences for companies. Berman said firms can incur the cost of commission and also of omission in p-hacking. In the cost of commission, the company commits to the wrong strategy because it relied on incorrect results from the A/B test. For example, a company decides to test whether it would drum up higher sales by offering two-day free shipping versus 10 days. If the p-hacked result pointed to two days, “you are going to change all of your shipping processes and procedures to allow for two-day free shipping,” Berman said.

“It is going to be very, very costly, and in the end you’re not going to make extra revenue.”

In the cost of omission, the company incorrectly thinks it has the optimal result and stops looking for a better option.

“Because you have now incorrectly thought that A is better than B (although A is not better than B), you are going to basically ignore the version C that you could have tested,” Berman noted. The researchers estimate the cost of commission in terms of “lift” or gain. For example, if webpage version A leads to 50% of visitors buying a product and version B results in 55% becoming buyers, the lift of version B over A is 10%. The lift that is lost in the cost of omission is 2%, the paper said.

“It sounds little, 2%. But in our data in total, the average experiment gets an 11% lift,” Berman said. “This is the average value. So you could have gotten an extra 2% over this 11% if you just ran another experiment. And what we also find is that 76% of our experiments have a lift gain of less than 2%, which means that 2% is a pretty high improvement that you are missing out on because of this p-hacking.”

Berman first saw the practice of p-hacking in academia, where researchers were under pressure to show statistically significant results and so would game their experiments. He said his colleagues at Wharton — Uri Simonsohn and Joe Simmons — and U.C. Berkeley’s Leif Nelson actually became well-known for developing a method to catch p-hackers in academic research. But when Berman looked at p-hackers in the business world, he was perplexed. They have every

motivation to get the correct result, otherwise it could cost the company a lot of money. Still, the majority of marketers were p-hacking. Why? The authors believe there are two main reasons why marketers p-hack. One is poor statistical skills. “Many experimenters do not have the background or experience to validly interpret “What people the statistical results provided by a platform,” the paper shouldn’t do … is said. The second reason is the marketer has incentives wait until the first to produce significant results. time [the experiment] For example, if an ad agency is asked by the client to hits this 90% test the effectiveness of two campaigns, it is under pressure threshold and stop.” to show one of them has –Ron Berman significantly positive results. In another instance, an employee in charge of running the A/B test might feel pressure to report good results to his boss — one version is clearly more beneficial than the other version.

There is also a difference among sectors. The authors discovered that those in the media industry were more likely to p-hack, while those in tech were not. “We suspected this second motive [of wanting to produce the desired results] is more pronounced for media businesses and advertising agencies that stand to gain commercially, at least in the short run, from running a campaign or rolling out a new idea even if it does not really boost business performance,” Van den Bulte said. “That does not mean they do it knowingly. But our findings do suggest that one should be extra cautious about the validity of A/B tests run by third parties.”

The authors offer some possible solutions to address p-hacking. One is to make statistically significant results harder to achieve on the platform. Another is for the platform itself to protect against p-hacking, which is what Optimizely did. Van den Bulte said companies should instill a “just don’t do it” culture among managers and analysts — but concedes this alone is not enough.

A more drastic option is to shift from “null hypothesis” testing — where the baseline is to assume there is no statistically significant difference among the choices or groups being observed — toward decision-theretic tools, where marketers don’t merely look at, say, the engagement levels of A and B, but find out which choice optimizes the firm’s goals, like increasing revenue. “That makes sense since the purpose of commercial A/B testing is not to know whether the outcomes in A are really different from B, but to decide whether to roll out A or B,” Van den Bulte said.

Finally, Berman recommends that marketers do a follow-up after the experiment. “You should probably continue to run with a small control group afterwards,” he said. If the A/B testing shows that version A is better, it would be useful to have a small group still getting version B “to make sure this difference is actually maintained over time … and was not just a fluke of the test.” Also, people and their responses change. “You want to see that your version is consistently better than the other one,” he said.

Uber rebrands less than two years after its last effort

By John Glenday

Ride-hailing app Uber’s attempts to improve its public image have now extended to yet another full rebrand of the business, including a new logo which ditches the all-caps look for a simple ‘Uber’ written in a custom-designed typeface.

In a statement, an Uber spokesperson told Mashable: “We’re excited to unveil a new, simplified logo for the Uber app that brings back the U, is easily recognizable, and is scalable across the 660 plus cities we serve.”

The clean new appearance seeks to place past travails firmly in Uber’s wing mirror and will sprout everywhere that the Uber icon currently appears such as its Twitter account, website and mobile app.

Uber’s new look also reflects a desire for it to be known as a ‘platform of mobility’ by ending current confusion sown by a symbol on the current Uber app which most customers fail to associate with the firm.

To harmonise its estate of Uber will also rebadge its Uber Eats division with the same lower-case look in the Uber Move font, championing the capitalised ‘U’ to signify the business at a glance while retaining the familiar jet-black backdrop.

It last rebranded in February 2016 to show it is a “fundamentally different company”. Now it appears to be doing that again. Below is the old branding. twitter share button facebook share button pinterest share button

The redesign process took nine months to conclude and was aided by brand consultancy Wolff Olins together with type foundry MCKL. Earlier this summer Uber appointed its first chief privacy officer as it continued efforts to clean up its brand.

John Glenday is responsible for compiling The Drum’s daily morning bulletin and ensuring that overnight breaking news is covered while you’re still brushing your teeth. Can also make a mean cup of tea.

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