BrandKnew July 2020

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

Published by

07.20#93

brandknew.groupisd.com brandknewmag.com

Dear friends: Rebellion, deja vu, complacency, compliance, resilience.. call it what you want, but the Covid 19 contagion is bringing out various shades of human character out in the open. More than anything, discipline is your biggest ammunition to combat the threat. So let’s bring that to the fore. In this issue we have highlighted some truths about the advertising business post the pandemic. We also look at both the good and the bad in communication that uses humour to convey the message during Covid 19. We take an accelerated look at where branding and logos are headed. Ever considered that the future of shopping will be on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney Plus? We show you why in this edition.This also is an opportune time for brands to depict their true colours and come out with substance. Readers will find the article on why consumers are willing to share their personal information on smartphones intriguing. We also examine in this issue why social networks are broken and how brands and organisations need to rebuild trust. Storytelling and its powers to drive B2B marketing is featured in this edition as well. How brands need to look at omni channel marketing in the Digital Age will surely excite CMOs and brand guardians. There is ample more to chew on and soak in from. With safe thoughts and well being prayers.

Till the next, my very best.

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.

www.brandknew.groupisd.com www.groupisd.com

14 16 18 20 22

32

@ISDGlobalDubai

@Brandknewmag

linkd.in/1dsjYaW

isdbranding

bit.ly/1h95tgO

isdglobaldubai

suresh@groupisd.com

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

12

28

Suresh Dinakaran

Brand Knew is published by

10

Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Business Development Director: Rishi Mohan Brand Engagement and Outreach Specialist: Anuva Madan Country Head India: Rohit Unni Research & Analysis: Meeta Pendse Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Performance Marketing Architect: Ryan Govindan Video Content Specialist: Mikhaela Cena Content Development Specialist: Abijith Pradeep Trend & Market Intelligence: Simran Thanwani Revenue Generation Specialist: Nitin Kumar

40 44 48 52 54 56 60

Download Mobile App from

62

CONTENTS

It’s time for brands to finally show their true colors!

How to Use Storytelling to Transform Your B2B Content Marketing: Bobby Lehew on Marketing Smarts [Podcast] Four Ways To Build Trust Through Social Proof Six experts reveal the post-COVID truth about the advertising business Advertisers Eye In-Game Ads As Audiences Swell In Lockdown The future of shopping will be on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney Plus I studied thousands of logos. Here’s where branding is headed next Starbucks is about to look a lot different—and COVID-19 is only part of the reason why Does The World Need A New Advertising Agency Podcast?

Omnichannel Marketing In The New Digital Age Could these 50 hot tech startups be tomorrow’s unicorns?

Social Networks Are Broken. Here’s The Secret To Rebuilding Trust Why Consumers Are Willing to Share Personal Information on Smartphones The risks and rewards of humour in COVID-19 Metaphors Matter in a Time of Pandemic How to Attract Buyers in the Modern Business-to-Business Market Book, Line & Sinker

Built right.

The world’s most creative minds need the world’s most cutting-edge workstation.

Meet the all new ThinkPad P53 from Lenovo. Outfitted with the latest Intel® processors, desktop-grade NVIDIA ® graphics, and up to 6TB of storage.

There’s nothing you can’t accomplish.

To learn more about Lenovo Workstations visit solutions.lenovo.com/workstations

Powered by Intel® CoreTM i9 vPro® processor

It’s time for brands to finally show their true colors!

By Martin Lindstrom

It’s in times of need that powerful brands are defined.

As COVID-19 swept across the world, Zappos instructed all its employees: Spend “whatever time is required” to listen, care, and empathize with the thousands of people phoning their call centers. Calls that began talking about shoes have veered off into heartfelt discussions of everything under the sun. The longest call to Zappos is reported to have lasted nearly 11 hours. Zappos’ stated mission is “to live and deliver WOW,” and they seem to have aligned their mission statement with reality. Unfortunately, Zappos is a rarity.

Most companies’ reception areas are decorated with carefully word-smithed brand purposes, but few of them truly walk the walk.

Until recently - meaning ten years ago - it was adequate for a company to issue a press release or donate some money to address a situation that called for polarizing action. In the same way, companies make a practice of donating to Republicans and Democrats simultaneously, ticking both boxes and thereby eliminating all conflicts. Job well done, right? Well, no - not anymore.

In 2020, those rules-of-play no longer apply.

No generation has ever been as cynical as the Millennials.

Born and raised with a networked screen to the world, they’ve seen it all. Their reality filter is sharper, more demanding, and more judging than any other generation. And, if promises are delivered, more appreciative.

Today’s brands don’t seem to get it. Yes, I know what a complex, threatening environment they’re operating in. Behind the scenes, the Cokes and P&Gs of the world are navigating a complex maze of bureaucracy, risk of shareholder revolt, and corporate culture tensions. And of course, with COVID-19 and the economic crisis, one retailer, airline, and hotel chain after another is collapsing.

Global brands are dying, and the brand building concept I once preached, the concept we once knew, is simply no longer relevant. In the eyes of the next generation, worldwide companies are veneer-clad images of consumption. It’s time for brands to make up their minds what they stand for - and what they don’t represent.

As the Black Lives Matter movement races through America (and increasingly through the rest of the world), brands are still making their obligatory donations and posting their supporting views. Twitter says, “To be silent is to be complicit. Black lives matter.” Amazon urges an end to “…the inequitable and brutal treatment of black people.” Starbucks says they “…will not be bystanders.”

But I’m sorry: Money and nicely crafted quotes aren’t enough. Action is required.

As my dear friend, Wendy Liebmann, said to the New York Times on Tuesday: There is no reason to make a public statement unless the company has a concrete plan to help resolve the issue of racism.

Concrete actions can’t be dreamed up in minutes. They require you to get your house in order.

Sadly, Black Lives Matter won’t be the last serious issue requiring brands to take a stand.

I urge you to revisit your core brand values, your brand purpose, and ask yourself if they provide you with a mandate so powerful, so profound, that there’ll be no need for longwinded internal debates when the next storm hits.

Don’t create a vanilla-like purpose, with no edge, no oomph, no view on the world. Those days are long gone.

Instead, craft a purpose that will make each and every one of your staff proud every morning when they wake up. Turn your customers into believers and the world into fans. Then, allocate funds to act - swiftly, boldly, and loud. As writer Greg Berlanti once said, “Sometimes bravery isn’t enough.

Sometimes the world requires us to be bold.”

Well, folks, that time is now. It’s our time to be bold.

Martin Lindstrom is the founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company, the world’s leading brand & culture transformation group, operating across five continents and more than 30 countries. TIME Magazine has named Lindstrom one of the “World’s 100 Most Influential People

How to Use Storytelling to Transform Your B2B Content Marketing: Bobby Lehew on Marketing Smarts [Podcast]

By Kerry O’Shea Gorgone

B2B marketers willing to examine their customer journey and reimagine their content to include stories will find their new content much more effective than the traditional featuresand-benefits language.

I invited storytelling expert and commonsku Chief Content Officer Bobby Lehew to record this special episode of Marketing Smarts live in our MarketingProfs PRO Facebook group two weeks ago. (If you’re a PRO member, come join us there for sneak peeks, livestreams with marketing industry stars like Chris Brogan, Jason Falls, and Ann Handley, and other exclusive content!)

In this episode, Bobby and I talk about using storytelling to power your B2B marketing content.

Here are just a few highlights from our conversation.

If you’re “e-booked out,” replenish your creativity by reading poetry (03:22) “We love poetry as storytellers and content people because it allows you to fall in love with language again. When you’re processing so much information, poetry has this ability to truncate everything down into smaller, bite-sized pieces that are richer. It really helps you with storytelling because it makes you fall in love with language.”

because your entire life has been composed of enjoying narrative or being taught through narrative.

Storytelling isn’t just for “sexy” B2C companies, it works for B2B, too (08:52) “You’ll notice with nonprofits and the B2C market that they get emotion really well. Their commercials, the stories they write, the case studies— everything is built around an emotional experience. when you think of nonprofits, a lot of them are in the business of raising money. But they don’t talk about raising money. They talk about how the money impacts its final destination.

A lot of our job in B2B is to welcome emotion into the boardroom and to talk about that. Because we’re so features and benefits oriented, we’re so pros and cons and logic. What’s fascinating as the world begins to unfold from what’s happening recently is that, I think when folks return to purchasing, say in B2B for example. Empathetic narrative is going to be more important than ever.

“Like in the Great Recession, people returned from that with a greater emphasis on [return on investment] and a greater emphasis on meaning. You’re going to see things like sustainability and purchases and the life we live is going to need to be fueled by an emotional experience and an emotional reason.”

People see themselves in stories, which is what makes stories so powerful (06:00) “When you’re looking out a window, you’ll often see in the reflection yourself, in a very dim way...a sort of shadow version of yourself looking out at the story. With storytelling, as the story unfolds, as you’re reading a novel, or a poem, you’re reading the story, you’re following the narrative. But...you’re processing it as far as what you identify with. With poetry and story...you experience a journey, you experience the world, you develop a strong sense of empathy with a character, but you do that because of what’s going on inside you.”

“If I was talking to the C-suite or to accountants that are very pro/con black and white, I like to ask them if their last big purchase was emotional or rational. Usually it’s a car or a house. And often it was an emotional purchase...but they justify it rationally. As consumers, we buy emotionally and justify rationally. So in the B2B world, we’ve had it backwards. We think we should approach the world rationally, when in fact we should unpack and spend a lot more time around emotion.

You know more about storytelling than you think (08:00) “Sometimes we go to our businesses and our work and we leave all that we know that has entertained us and moved us at the door. Then we go and do our work. And then we sit down to write a story and we’re like, ‘I don’t know how to tell a story.’ You actually have the fundamental basics

“I can’t tell you how many people have told me, ‘Bobby, I sell a very boring product.’ But when you begin to unpack what your product ends up doing for someone, you’ll find out that if you trace the emotional journey, you’ll find your story has far more meaning.”

Four Ways To Build Trust Through Social Proof

By Shep Hyken

One of your biggest assets isn’t your equipment, or your logo—or anything tangible for that matter. It’s trust—the trust your customers have in you. Any lack of trust impacts the bottom line. David Horsager of Trust Edge™ Leadership Institute says, “A lack of trust is your biggest expense.”

Trust manifests itself in many ways. It’s more important than ever and vital to the survival of any business. With social media and online reviews being read by millions of consumers, evaluating the trust that companies elicit is practically an American pastime.

As we are in a digital era of business, many of our daily decisions are made online. We look at emailed proposals and shop on retail sites for much of what we need. We research products and companies to determine if they have what we want, and more importantly, find out what others think of the products they sell and the customer experience they deliver.

I had a chance to connect with Travis Chambers of Chamber Media, a video ad agency that’s driven more than 400 million views across YouTube and Facebook, resulting in $300 million in revenue. He is entrenched in the digital world and delivers results by creating trust among his clients’ customers.

He’s done this by creating social proof, something that any

company—B2B or B2C—should do, regardless of what they sell or whether they conduct business digitally or in a more traditional way.

Before we go further, it’s important to realize that social proof is more than an online review or a YouTube testimonial, although those are very important and perhaps the main source of social proof for many businesses, especially retail.

Even B2B businesses in small industries have reputations.

There are publications and even industry forums where customers share opinions about various companies’ products and the service and experience they provide. Social proof is one of the most powerful reputation multipliers. A company that is known for quality and experience didn’t earn that reputation overnight. Chambers says, “Credibility is not a one-off action.”

Chambers shared four ways to build trust through social proof that are worth considering for any type of business. These savvy strategies are listed below followed by my comments.

1.

Collect testimonials and reviews. People trust people. I don’t know one person who hasn’t read a review for an item they were considering buying on Amazon or another retail website. A recent study indicates that the

brandknewmag.com

15

average consumer reads 10 online reviews before making a purchasing decision. In the retail and consumer world, reviews can be found online. In the B2B space, there may be product reviews or even testimonial letters in industry magazines. Chambers suggests including testimonials “everywhere,” including websites, marketing materials and more. Don’t forget the power of video. Hearing and seeing a customer talk about a product on video is a turbo-charged testimonial.

2.

Get quoted in an article. Even a one-line quote in a large article can be powerful when used the right way. A quote in a publication like Forbes or even a smaller industry publication can go a long way in creating credibility. Collect everything positive written about your company and products and feature this information in the appropriate places.

3.

Business credentials reinforce your brand’s expertise. Perhaps there is an industry designation to demonstrate a level of knowledge and proficiency that could build credibility and trust. Industry awards and major accomplishments are powerful. The J.D. Power award comes to mind. Even displaying the number of years you’ve been in business can help add to the trustworthiness of your organization.

4.

Exploit the wisdom of your colleagues, friends and family. This is also called “word of mouth” marketing and it’s perhaps the most credible type of marketing you can have. It consists of referrals from people you know and trust.

Studies have proven that recommendations from people you know are exponentially more powerful than traditional advertising and marketing.

There is an old saying that claims people like doing business with people they know, like and trust. The knowing and liking is easy. You can create an image with the right advertising and marketing. The trust part is hard. That takes time. It takes a series of experiences before the customer knows what to expect. The experiences—with your organization’s people as well as its process—must be positive, predictable and consistent. Deliver that, and your customers will know what to expect. They will not only trust their experience with you, but also your whole company. And that’s powerful.

I am the Chief Amazement Officer at Shepard Presentations. As a customer service and experience expert, I help organizations create amazing customer and employee experiences. My books have appeared on bestseller lists including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and others.

Six experts reveal the post-COVID truth about the advertising business

By JEFF BEER

Colleen DeCourcy, copresident and chief creative officer at Wieden+Kennedy, leads creative for the world’s largest remaining independent ad agency, which does work for major clients such as Nike, Ford, McDonald’s, KFC, Uber, and more.

We’ve talked about the death of irony before, but I think this could be the death of bullshit. What did [a campaign or ad] do? What did it do for the brand? What did it do for people?

We’ve Talked About The Death Of Irony Before, But I Think This Could Be The Death Of Bullshit. What Did [A Campaign Or Ad] Do? What Did It Do For The Brand? What Did It Do For People?”

Weiden+Kennedy’s Colleen Decourcy Entire companies are just getting wiped, people hitting roadblocks they just couldn’t have seen coming. It leaves [agencies] vulnerable to their business problems.

Clients’ business problems are often bigger than what advertising can fix. What I think the optimistic part of this is, the longer it goes on, the more people’s minds are going to be wiped of brand preference in many instances. That specific brand of toothpaste is going to matter to me less than just toothpaste. I think when people start to step outside again, brands will be re-proving themselves, re-introducing themselves, restating why they should be a preference. So I’m hoping, but I do think, that our clients will need us more than ever . . .

[Wieden+Kennedy cofounder Dan] Wieden had a lot of famous sayings. One that I learned when I came to the company, that I think I’ve just now begun to understand, is that chaos is the only thing that honestly wants you to grow.

I’m hanging onto that right now.

Steve Stoute, founder and CEO of Translation, has worked with major brands and sports leagues such the NFL, Brooklyn Nets, Anheuser-Busch, and State Farm. Translation was tapped in January to lead a rebrand of the New York Knicks.

Stoute and Translation were part of the team behind State Farm’s clever ESPN ad during the Last Dance doc in April.

Brands have tried to use the humble hype, where they basically say, ‘We feel sorry for you and therefore buy this product.’

There’s been a disconnect between a need for whatever that product is and the actual consumer sentiment. So there are a lot of brands that’ve gotten slapped on the hand for that.

Then there are brands that’ve done a good job of sticking up their hand to say, ‘We understand you, we’re with you, and we’re not trying to sell you anything right now, we just want to engage.’ I think that’s the work that’s resonated the most for me. Brands with good intentions. They’re selling something at a discount that you need. They’re speaking to you in a way that seems empathetic to what you’re going through.

Let’s just deal with brass tacks. We have no idea when the [NBA] season’s going to start. We have no idea when the work [we’re doing for them] needs to launch. It’s tough to put together a cadence [for our work] without a calendar. As a marketer, these things are critical for a go-to-market strategy.

It’s completely unknown.

Let’s Just Deal With Brass Tacks.

We Have No Idea When The [Nba] Season’s Going To Start.”

Steve Stoute, Founder And Ceo Of Translation But when sports return, the appreciation of your hometown team, of your hometown hero, of the game itself, is going to be huge. And I’m going to lean into that. I guarantee you, no matter what the Knicks’ record was before the pandemic, or how you felt about the team before the pandemic, you’re going to be as excited as ever when they hit that court again.

brandknewmag.com

17

The momentum and engagement of that excitement is an opportunity for marketers like myself.

Margaret Johnson, partner and chief creative officer at Goodby Silverstein + Partners, leads creative at the awardwinning San Francisco-based agency that does work for major brands such as Doritos, Pepsi, BMW, Golden State Warriors, HP, Panera Bread, and more.

We’d just shot a commercial for Panera’s coffee subscription before the whole COVID thing hit. It was a big L.A. production, with lots of people. Now our approach couldn’t be at a more opposite end of the spectrum. We’re getting drivers to shoot themselves with their phones on their delivery routes [for upcoming Panera spots], texting us the takes, then we’re texting back notes and direction on how to do it again differently. It all seems so foreign at first, but you quickly adapt. I believe the people who haven’t really embraced this new world will be in big trouble.

I can’t even imagine a situation now where you’d spend the amount of money it takes to send eight people to a shoot out of the country. You can just as easily see takes online. I think it’s going to have a big effect not just on production, on business in general, to be honest. Are you going to send five people to fly business class to New York for a one-hour meeting? That doesn’t seem like a good use of money.

Jaime Robinson, cofounder and chief creative officer at JOAN Creative, has created work for clients that include Google, Netflix, Pillsbury, Youtube, Fiber One, and SafeAuto.

We all had the wind knocked out of us collectively. We’ve all seen the compilation of all [those] ads that look the same, and I gotta say, we did one too. We did one that was more on the nose, with, ‘In these difficult times . . .’ We’d wanted to make it a bit funnier and cheeky, but the first couple of weeks was about reaction and despair.

I think now we’ve turned a corner, and there’s a general feeling of creative optimism. Obviously this is an awful time for a lot of people, but in the context of this industry, I think this could be a moment of unprecedented creativity. The ideas our creatives and strategists are bringing in have been great.

It’s also kind of the Wild West. All the channels, the gatekeepers, have been knocked aside, and you’re seeing things in entertainment like John Krasinski basically replacing Ellen as America’s sweetheart show host. Could he have done that six months ago? Probably not. He’s used his creativity to write a good show that’s charming and of the moment . . .

What we’re trying to ask ourselves is, what are some things we can do now that we couldn’t before? Depending on how long this goes on, Hollywood’s pipeline is going to be pretty empty. This could be an opportunity for brands to consider how they can create entertainment. We’re sharing ideas for that with our clients, and they’ve been incredibly receptive to it.

You always want a brand to be in service to its audience.

Sometimes that’s utility, sometimes it’s a business innovation that provides relief, and sometimes it’s about entertaining people. We’re finding with the brands we work with that everyone’s taken that initial hit, now they’re getting back up.

Troy Ruhanen, CEO, TBWA Worldwide (which has 11,300 employees across 275 offices in 95 countries), has a client roster that includes Apple, Adidas, Gatorade, Nissan, Mountain Dew, and more.

We have this platform called Next, where we take a threeyear view of what’s coming over the horizon, and I think some of those things have really accelerated. Before it was, like, an additional thing [clients] could add. Now it’s more of a necessity. Take something like conversational marketing— anything to do with voice or AI chatbots. That’s really started to ramp up over this time, because businesses have had to rely on their virtual services more than they were previously.

Now the customer is quite comfortable having this exchange with a chatbot to get levels of services they previously had at a store.

There has been a lot of conversation around purpose-built brands over the last few years, but I think values and behavior are much more important right now. They’re connected, but a lot of people were putting out pithy words and manifestos, and right now that matters a lot less than how you behave.

We’re going to see some trends come out of this, whether around cleanliness or something else, but there will be actions you take that will actually demonstrate you give a hoot about the consumer, and it’s going to be shared and acknowledged that you’re behaving in a way that is in the interest of the consumer.

David Droga, founder and chairman at Droga5 (part of Accenture Interactive), established the agency as a leading creative shop with innovative work for brands such as Under Armour, Android, HBO, The New York Times, and more.

In April, the agency created the Facebook ad “Never Lost” under lockdown in just six days.

We’re lucky that we’re in an industry that’s mobile, in the sense that the majority of what we create and produce is thinking, and that you can do from quarantine. We don’t have a factory floor with presses, robots, laboratories.

Our Job Is To Help Our Clients Figure Out Where They Fit In All This.”

Droga5’S David Droga Every week has felt like a month, in terms of our reactions, clients’ reactions, consumer reactions. Our job is to help our clients figure out where they fit in all this. You’ve seen every brand come out with something about how they understand it’s difficult times, which is fine and appropriate, but eventually that runs out. What are you doing now?

Our industry is always one of the first to be hit in a downturn because people don’t want to spend on marketing and communications. Almost every agency has had layoffs—10%, 15% of their employees—and it’s heartbreaking. So everyone’s slightly nervous. I’m optimistic. Our job is to add value, rigor, creative thinking, and problem-solving to our clients and not lose our nerve in the process. Just because some people are now doing it in their pajama bottoms, with a six-year-old running in the background, it doesn’t change their capacity for great thinking and quality output.

ADVERTISERS EYE IN-GAME ADS AS AUDIENCES SWELL IN LOCKDOWN

By SEB JOSEPH

Gaming has always been valuable, but underutilized by advertisers — until now.

Fortnite reinvigorated casual gaming for a variety of audiences, and stay at home orders has done the same for advertisers. Whether it’s a sharp increase in Twitch viewership or a jump in esports influencers on TikTok, people are playing and watching games to keep themselves distracted during these difficult times.

“All the consumption of gaming during the lockdown has further legitimized it as a proper entertainment marketing vehicle,” said Misha Sher, Mediacom’s worldwide vp of sport and entertainment.

In particular, there’s growing interest in how to run campaigns inside of video games. In-game events, whether it’s a Travis Scott rap concert in Fortnite or a football tournament recreated in FIFA 20, are giving advertisers a better understanding of the opportunities for gaming partnerships. Unlike previous forays into in-game advertising, advertisers see current opportunities more like extensions of social media strategies than a way to get an ad on a virtual billboard.

“It’s clear that gaming is the new frontier of social media, and this groundswell around gaming drives innovation across technology, advertising, and more, and brands are eager to be a part of that future,” said Abby Long, content editor at digital agency PMG. Adidas recreated the canceled European Championship in the FIFA Playstation video game last month as a way to offset some of the inventory it lost from the live matches. Matches between 12 footballers and 12 celebrities were live-streamed across Adidas’ Facebook Live, IGTV and YouTube Live profiles in Turkey. Aside from all the players wearing Adidas-branded apparel in those broadcasts, its logo was also visible in the game thanks to it being a kit manufacturer and sponsor for many of the teams recreated in the game. In other words, Adidas turned the FIFA game into a straightforward sponsorship opportunity but found a way to amplify it across its main social networks.

So far the results have been encouraging for Adidas.

Live audiences for the virtual matches have so far been twice the size of those for Turkey’s top football league, according to Adidas. To date, the matches have generated around 1.2 million viewers who watch between 20 and 40 mins of a match. The popularity of the matches is also having a material effect on the business. Adidas shopping app downloads in Turkey have doubled since the beginning of the campaign that’s fuelled a 25% rise in daily revenue from the app, per Adidas.

Adidas’ test shows the importance of distribution in getting

advertisers to commit to in-game ads. It’s part of the reason why developers like Electronic Arts are trying to broker more deals with broadcasters to show their esports events on TV. “The value of our in-game executions goes up as the viewership of our games goes up,” said Todd Sitrin, general manager of the Competitive Gaming Division at Electronic Arts.

“We’ve been able to do greater deal value in the last six months — even in the last two months — because markers want our content because they now know it will resonate with a younger audience.”

This period of forced experimentation from advertisers is forcing a shift in the commercial ecosystem from developers and the ad tech vendors they work with. Indeed, developer Codemasters agreed to let ad tech vendor Bidstack serve native in-game ads into its upcoming 2020 racing title DIRT 5 in March. MG is already using Bidstack to serve contextually relevant ads into the developer’s older driving simulators.

Similarly, Riot Games will feature in-game ads during broadcasts of its League of Legends tournaments. The ads appear on banners dotted throughout one of the game’s most popular arenas, meaning both players and their fans will see them during the broadcast. More than 100 million viewers watched the League of Legends World Championship last year, per Riot Games. Keen to capitalize on those audiences, Mastercard and Alienware are among the first few advertisers to buy the ads. Riot plans to have different advertisers in each of its 12 regional leagues.

“These banners are going to be some of the most valuable media assets in our portfolio because of all the attention we have from viewers on the gameplay,” said Naz Aletaha, head of global esports partnerships at Riot Games. “It opens up a whole new arena for us given that these sorts of opportunities have been limited to only those fans at our in-person events.”

“We’re taking into consideration similar metrics to what you would see in other media deals like frequency and the number of impressions on offer, which varies based on how the game is played,” said Aletaha.

Despite the growing interest in gaming, measurement continues to be a barrier for many advertisers. The varying viewership statistics for the recent Travis Scott concerts are a timely reminder of just how challenging it is to measure viewership in such a virtual and social environment.

“Between dozens of live streamers attracting audiences of thousands of viewers for any single event, combined with the subsequent YouTube videos garnering millions of viewers, it’s near impossible to tally the reach of an in-game event and how it’s shared online,” said PMG’s Long

The future of shopping will be on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney Plus

By Justin Peyton

As retailers struggle and e-commerce accelerates, there’s a big opportunity for brands, consumers, and streaming services to reinvent the theater of shopping.

I know it’s hard to remember back this far, but people used to shop in physical stores.

For fun.

They went into retailers not just for masks, cans of black beans, and hardware supplies but to have an entertaining experience—even if they didn’t buy anything.

All this, of course, has been upended by social distancing, retail bankruptcies, and store closures, and no one can say if it will ever come back. At least not in the same way.

Meanwhile, more and more of us appear to be spending more time than ever watching streaming media, particularly Netflix, entertaining ourselves with tigers, Jerry Seinfeld, and at least two minutes of an action movie starring Chris Hemsworth until it’s all too hot to handle.

What if streaming services, whose core function is to entertain, took over the job that physical retail once held and made their entertainment shoppable?

Although the idea of “shoppable TV” has been around since at least the 1980s, we now not only have the technology to make it both possible and pleasurable but we also have the larger economic and societal circumstances that can allow it to be more than a niche activity.

Hear me out. Before saying that this sounds like advertising, let’s take it as a given that Netflix, Disney, or Amazon would never entertain the idea of damaging their respective images with interruptive advertising. That said, they have all shown an appetite to innovate with new ways to connect brands and entertainment. Netflix has done it with brand tie-ups on Stranger Things; Disney through its controlling stake in

Hulu, which has an advertising team focused on developing new digital ad products; and most famously, Amazon which transformed its Prime Day concert into a sales bonanza.

These were small experiments built around traditional models of brand awareness and product promotion.

Consider instead what would be possible if these brands connected the data they have from the production process all the way through to distribution and audience targeting.

SHOPPABLE ENTERTAINMENT Imagine if Netflix took all the costume and time-code data that it has for every one of its original productions and connected it with shopping functionality.

It would mean that at any given time, a viewer could find out precisely what the person on screen was wearing—or what types of pans were used in an episode of Chef’s Table, for example—and then with a click, the viewer could buy it.

Using a phone as a second screen, this type of shopping wouldn’t even have to pause the program if other people were also watching.

This type of time-coded, live-shopping experience is easy to fathom and has in fact been tested by the fashion brand TopShop through a shoppable live-stream fashion show. With full control of the production pipeline, streaming brands are well-placed to advance this type of technology. You can even imagine Amazon Prime Video pushing the concept further by suggesting alternatives from its own brands, or even similar items that “viewers like you” had previously purchased.

Just last month, Amazon along with Vogue and the Council of Fashion Designers of America, announced Common Threads:

Vogue x Amazon Fashion, a new storefront featuring 20 high-end and independent brands affected by the pandemic.

This is Amazon’s move into the luxury space, but also could lay the foundation for future partnerships.

Obviously not all of the content that the streaming brands produce is suited to the shopping experience, but the current weakness in the retail sector could spur the creation of more content that is fit for purpose. Take, for example, reality TV, which premiered in 2000 with Survivor, but saw huge growth as a result of the 2007-2008 writers’ strike and the lack of new scripted shows being produced.

Now with the retail sector looking to be in structural decline, imagine the profit potential for an Amazon or a Netflix were they to partner with Kendall Jenner (of Kardashians fame) on the launch of her long-awaited beauty brand by promoting a new reality show, about her life and business—and in so doing launching the range exclusively through its shoppable streaming format.

PROGRAMMATIC PRODUCT PLACEMENT Shoppable entertainment isn’t the only commerce opportunity available to streaming services.

In fact, Netflix gave a hint of the future potential product placement in the Bandersnatch episode of its show Black Mirror, when it gave viewers the ability to pick which cereal the characters had for breakfast. In the Bandersnatch example, the creators filmed two variants and let viewers choose which piece of film to watch, much like choosing your own adventure.

But what if instead of viewers making a conscious choice, that cereal box was just a green screen box and the type of cereal was selected programmatically based on the viewers demographics or past purchase behavior?

This option would need to be in keeping with the story so as to not cause disbelief, but it would open a wide range of

options for “embedded advertising.”

The green screen and motion-tracking technologies to make this possible are already commonly used in film production.

Combined with new graphics technologies like Unreal Engine 5, which displays near picture-perfect images rendered in real time, and with the programmatic media-buying technologies that already exist within Amazon Media Group and other media vendors, the opportunity for “embedded” or “invisible” advertising to tap into the nearly $600 billion global ad spend may be a powerful temptation for any streaming service.

Certainly, one that their existing treasure trove of viewer data would position them well for.

This is more than just speculation. A version of the technology for shoppable TV is already being tested and rolled out

by NBCUniversal, which happens to be launching its own streaming network Peacock in the near term, and in its own words is “hell bent on owning every stage of the purchase funnel,” according to Josh Feldman, EVP and head of marketing and advertising creative for NBCU. So with $3.5 trillion being spent via e-commerce in 2019, and pre-COVID forecasts estimating this number will increase to $6.5 trillion by 2023, we just might see streaming services look to commerce as their next big growth engine.

All that said, don’t expect any of this tomorrow. Netflix has already stated that its 2020 release slate is completed or in postproduction, and we should expect the same to be true from both Disney+ and Prime Video.

But don’t be surprised to see a few experiments fast-tracked this year as retailers struggle, and the potential for streamers to scale their commerce capabilities as early as mid 2021.

Don’t worry if you used to entertain yourself by shopping.

Soon your entertainment will be shoppable.

I studied thousands of logos. Here’s where branding is headed next

By Bill Gardner

The coronavirus pandemic will usher in dramatic change. For now, let us bask in the glory of ’70s nostalgia.

brandknewmag.com

23

Each year, I write a report on logo trends, and I always look to the past before looking ahead. You can’t tell where something is going if you don’t know where it has been. There’s always a reason something goes viral or takes off—something set it in motion, good or bad. So let’s start by addressing the white elephant on the planet: COVID-19.

Crises often accelerate trends in society and design. It’s very reactive and rushed; if there were a 10-step program that we typically follow to get from point A to point B, we skipped steps six through nine to get there during a crisis. Next year, we’re probably going to see a lot of logos that emerged as a result—some will be brilliant, many more probably won’t be. No matter what, I believe the design industry is going to come out of this better than we were. Some firms will not recover. It’s going to be survival of the fittest. Having said that, we’ll see an emergence of little startups and uncover some talent we’ve never seen before. People will regroup, find their niche, and come out of this with a new resilience.

This is a shared generational experience that we’ll never forget and hopefully we’ll all learn from. Next year’s batch of logos will surely reflect this.

As for this year’s trends, we’re seeing some intriguing clusters of design innovation driven by technology and tools.

For instance, there are a lot of logos that employ variable fonts and effects filters, maybe for no other reason than we have the capabilities to do it. When new tools are introduced, designers start with the obvious effects and objectify the coolness (which gets tired after a while). Fortunately, there were many great examples by designers who took these tools to the next level, exploiting their capabilities and creating logo experiences that we’ve never seen before.

We’re also seeing two opposite trends that hearken back to the best of the 1970s. Wordmarks with big fat fonts came out roaring this year, perhaps as a counter to the minimalist sans serif aesthetic we’ve gotten used to the last five or six years.

At the same time, there are a lot of ultra-minimalist vector images with clean positive-negative fields that may have resulted from a desire to return to clarity and simplicity, a la Saul Bass and Paul Rand—the pendulum swings both ways.

There’s also a tendency toward minimalist effects using transparencies, where one surface hovers closely to another.

It’s getting tiresome, and I see a movement away from this.

On the other hand, we have what I like to call “Potter Pics,” which reference the little animated movements in some logos, like the wink of an eye. They’re subtle and clever.

Hand-drawn naïve symbols that are more crude are emerging.

They’re kind of a New Age throwback. In a similar vein, there are logos with flowers and leaves referencing organics and natural products. Expect to see more of this as the cannabis market expands in the next few years.

Gradient solutions are rampant, but they have taken on a new level, and they’re being applied in novel ways. The simple ways of washing green to blue or red to orange are tired, so now there are more fashionable applications. For instance, there are waves of purple to pink, then zooming into a black hole or interacting with colors that aren’t necessarily adjacent to each other on the color wheel. It’s quick and busy and interactive.

I never grow tired of reviewing the thousands of logos I receive every year. It’s always a fascinating study of creativity and innovation.

COUNTERS There’s no better way to endear the public to a mark than to build margin in the design for them to participate.

Recognizing the consumer’s intelligence and leaving room for discovery and the aha moment in these logos allow them to live on multiple levels. A tread forms an S, as well as a pair of arrows intersecting where diverse content joins together.

A series of parallelograms represent structures with a sunset gradient on the horizon crafting a mnemonic reminder of the letter H. These marks tend to work best when simple and relatively geometric in construction.

MAZES Whether you look at a maze as a delight, a mystery, or a punishment, it is a challenge that visually represents many of the objectives a client may wish to associate with their brand.

As a rule these marks are a continuation of the monoline aesthetic with an even distribution of positive and negative weight.

Some of these marks identify a path that enters at point A and exits at point B, while others guide you directly into a blind dead end or a goal or starting point, depending on the perspective. Either way, there is a specific pathway that leads you to a timely completion of your task. Having a guide for the journey that might otherwise be interminable is the underlying promise these marks address. As addictive as click bait, they invite consumers to visually trace their route SISTERS People like to create order. It gives us a sense of well-being.

This is all part of a bigger conversation associated with the Gestalt theory, but for the purpose of this trend, it’s driven by our comfort with symmetry. This group of logos are most often crafted from two identical elements either mirrored or rotationally nestled together after a 180-degree rotation.

It’s not uncommon for the end product to assume the shape of a letterform or be constructed by reflective letters. The symmetry of these logos creates a sense of assurance in much the same way you find harmony in a yin-yang symbol.

It conveys the idea of a strong partnership that is well suited and beneficial to both sides. Rotational pairings can easily represent a sense of motion or action that may demonstrate a positive aspect of the client’s nature. Like the siblings this trend is named for, the two distinct elements may be in perfect harmony or reference co-joined elements rife with tension.

Regardless they will work it out. After all, they are family.

CHEXMELT Sometimes an aesthetic meets it demise and no one remembered to tell it. A bit like my feelings for designs that trod out the old circuit board solder pathways careening around like a pair of Tron cycles abruptly flaring out to terminate in a silver dot cul-de-sac. That technology probably took us to the moon and back, but for designers it provided an immediate visual language we relied on and abused right up until the night we met pixels. Now in some karmic incarnation, the two

trends bore an offspring with a perfect 50-50 genetic split.

Samsung committed to this trend with their Exynos mobile processor using a mark laid out like a pixel chessboard that softly melts together with a soldered bridge at every corner.

Walk away from these marks without a sense of tech and you probably forgot to look. The checkered framework of these logos demonstrates an affinity for building links and pathways between entities. They express the idea of multiple elements coming together to create a greater good, but corner-connecting just enough to maintain modest autonomy all the while keeping their social distance in check.

BEVEL TIPS Each trend report manages to identify a shape or two that rapidly populates every designer’s kit of parts like words that enter the news cycle based on a sheet of talking points.

The best I can do to identify the cause of this eruption is to look at the previous year’s trends and designers’ affinity for the use of canted parallelograms. Those previous shapes strongly resemble this year’s crop, but these shapes have approachable, organic curves.

For each rounded bend there is a counter corner that draws to a point like the tip of a leaf. No surprise that this shape has found its home in a number of marks that are eco-centric and hope to reflect the language of nature’s building blocks.

Foliage, feathers, grain, cresting waves, or any number of other receptive contoured forms. This shape stacks, reconfigures, and pairs well with other soft shapes or blends with harsher geometrics to soften their effect. It serves as a refreshing addition on a number of stiff sans serif fonts, to add a wisp of nature and whimsy.

PETRI DISH I’ve always thought of a petri dish as a fully contained ecosystem that investigates bacteria and other phenomenon.

Those clear dishes serve as our little round window into discovery of the unknown, while sealed to protect us from their content. Exactly like these logos. These micro views of a macro world are tightly cropped shots, often framed in a simple circle or square. That cropping purposefully focuses the consumer on just enough detail to extrapolate the rest of the story.

Swimming in these pools are right angles, arcs, points, and curves—just enough to telegraph the actual contents as circles, squares, stars, or whatever the visual totem happens to be. This places faith in the public’s participation and their deductive skills at ferreting out the intended message. DanaFarber captures the arc of a D and the right angle of an F coming together to form a human with a focused Venn diagram at the intersection. Investissement Quebec crops in on its proprietary Q just enough to show a profit chart with a sweeping upward trend. You have to appreciate an entity that avoids pure literal solutions in favor of placing faith in our ability to attain our own aha moment.

VARIABLE TYPE When evaluating the liftoff thrust of any trend, success is often measured between the born-on date and the rise to critical mass. If momentum doesn’t build, you’re doomed. On the other hand, popular trends tend to burn out overnight. We find variable type on a strong pace to have an influence on logo trends for some years once we figure out how to

drive them. Just this last year, more designers embraced the basic bag of tricks generally reserved for demonstrating variable type capabilities. Diminishing or contorting type in a sequence of thick to thins or squat to tall, and even animating it as such, are eye candy but probably not the use the original developers of variable type had in mind. In fairness, these fonts weren’t created just for logo designers, but we tend to gladly appropriate shiny things.

Unfortunately, the only time variable type can be identified as such is when it’s shown in contrast or motion. Amsteldok, the WPP offices in Amsterdam, have really done an astonishing job of embracing regional and historic influence for their proprietary font, and have used the variable capabilities to create a highly flexible system. That system manages to hold together admirably but also is designed to morph and gyrate.

BLACKLETTER Hard to throw too much shade at a font that was Europe’s only choice from the 12th to the 17th century. Blackletter fonts never completely vanished and became the preferred text for Germany, which probably explains its recent resurgence with the vast array of microbrew pubs dotting corners across the globe. It’s never truly been out of mind, serving as the font of choice for nameplates on hundreds of newspapers worldwide. It even worked pretty well on your diploma and for Disneyland, but how did it make the jump to AC/DC and Snoop Dog? Now that’s some kind of flexibility!

Though it’s no friend of legibility, it will never be accused of lacking personality. That may be the reason it’s on every designer’s casting call as we investigate counter measures to the blandification of wordmarks crafted from soulless sans serif sameness. The slab and angled strokes have a sharp graphic appeal that allow for abundant customization and retooling. Plenty of Blackletter-inspired fonts are popping up with myriad weights, in-lines, swashes, ornaments, and other iterations. It’s a perfect mouthpiece for demonstrating a client’s heritage and craftsmanship—and expresses both with inspired drama.

IDROPS I like to imagine the conversations that take place in designer presentations I’m not privy to. After you’ve worked with enough clients you start to recognize some of the signs of client fatigue that lead a designer to give in on this thing or that. I picture the designer whose work has been stripped down to a company name in a lowercase bold sans serif.

Dejected and brow beaten after numerous attempts to interject some color or life, the client finally concedes a spot of color on the dot. Of course, this is pure conjecture, not having seen the actual design briefs for said projects.

After seeing too many solutions like Dimple or Medallia using the color dotted “i” only, I have tried to show a broader range of applications under this umbrella that demonstrate some of the stronger conceptual thinking. Admittedly the lower case “i” is often cast as the person in the letterform with the dot serving as the head. Often a few extra colored dots on letters that don’t really call for one, help describe the family or a team. Uplight flopped their “i” and lit their bottom, while Mitto is just burning its “i” at both ends. Clever.

HANDOUT Take a look at this beautiful array of hands that are

CL E RMONT K . Y.

U. S .

MAY YOUR YEAR-END BONUS BE WORTHY OF YOUR EFFORT.

EVERY BIT EARNED

KNOB CREEK® KENTUCKY STRAIGHT BOURBON WHISKEY AND STRAIGHT RYE WHISKEY 50% ALC./VOL. ©2019 KNOB CREEK DISTILLING COMPANY, CLERMONT, KY.

abundant this year. Dramatically different in illustration style, and beyond the hands themselves, there’s one distinct commonality: They all have something either hovering above them or we captured these elements in free fall. This may be symbolic of the magical essence of the relationship between the product and the user. Granted, the bird has reason to hover but there is some kind of special levitation going on when a bottle not only rises out of the hand but GLOWS!

isn’t that one of design’s ultimate goals—to captivate the public and create a symbol that can’t be ignored? Optical illusions often do that as do single perspective murals that shift appearance with our vantage point. We’re readily mesmerized by the sidewalk artist who creates such illusions as making it appear there’s a waterfall or a gaping canyon in the middle of a plaza that’s no more that a deceptively realistic rendering.

When a hand appears as part of a logo, it’s often to represent a human experience that’s part of the brand assurance. I think these demonstrate a receptive attitude with palms up, open and at ease. These hands impart a New Age culture and are likely to be accepted in an artisan boutique or definitely in a business-to-consumer category. Handcrafted products seem to fit this genre, but more likely these are associated with an experience with an extraordinary promise. These marks tell enchanting stories and ask the consumer to both suspend belief and to believe at the very same time.

Designers understand that there are many triggers for consumer engagement and deceptive dimension is one of them. Anytime we can extend that mental participation in what we design for our clients, we are creating neural links with their brand. We refer to these as “Cornered” because each has manufactured the illusion of space by wrapping their design around an artificial reality. These all reside on a flat plain of white that gives no hint of dimension, but that can serve as the perfect canvas for these to dimensionally exist in undefined space.

BOLTS

LETTER ILLUSIONS

A symbol is only a representation of a thing or concept. We know a human heart looks nothing like the symbol we use to represent it. Nor does a star, or fire or a cloud. The ancient Greeks used a symbol for lightning that looks nothing like our modern-day interpretation. And our interpretation looks nothing like the real thing. Even so, it was in abundant supply in this year’s crop of logos.

There are things in life that can make us feel uncomfortable or on edge but that captivate us nonetheless. It’s the old theory of a train wreck and not being able to look away.

Feeding the public’s mind with the unexpected or seemingly impossible is not just a way of creating disruption; it’s also the way of communicating a promise, achieving the impossible or scouting a path to the unobtainable.

For millenniums, lightning was almost exclusively looked at as a weapon or punishment from the gods. They were in charge of it and could release it at will. We’d not really fathomed the idea of electricity so it’s not surprising that the idea of a bolt representing energy, illumination, or a flash of brilliance is only a recent association. The Top Hat design used lightning as a small detail that’s a universal representation of action. I like to think that these phenomenon represent an inexplicably awesome event. Stick around and it may happen again.

TWINKLE Those who follow this report annually may recall a few years back we identified the expanded use of four-pointed stars to which we assigned the name Sparkle. At the time, this group was fledgling, but typically appeared as a nonaligned star avoiding jingoistic or religious connotations with more points. Four points were enough to get the idea across with minimal detail, making it ideal for logo design. Much like many of the logos from those “Sparkle” stars were primarily used in a space-filler mode to add some magical charm to an illustrative mark with a capricious attitude.

We evolve and so do the trends. That planting of seeds a few years back not only sprouted a healthy set of legs this year, it’s grown into an Olympic sprinter. Leman Jewelry laid claim for the center stroke on their letter E, where every stone has that glint. This trend has pressed forward to the obvious, which is creating a star as the negative space at the convergence of four curves. For a client, this builds a good story of coming together to create a brilliant solution or a star from many. Remove any one of the pieces, and the achievement vanishes.

CORNERED I cheer on any designer who create a product so engaging that the public becomes inextricably involved in it. I mean

Virile strains of these marks have cropped up this cycle, with many using letterforms as a mnemonic reminder of the entities name. As if lifted from the pages of a book on optical illusions, these marks range from linear outlines like you’d find with DIY instructions, to the fully illustrated with gradients, shadows and spectral light pings. The use of graphic illusion is nothing new, but the abundance this year hints at a rediscovery of miraculous problem-solving skills and a unique perspective—or possibly the ability to teach your customers how to achieve the same. And when you can’t quite explain a client’s complicated process, laying claim to a little bit of magic is a great fall-back explanation.

CHISELED SHADOW Demonstrating dimensionality of form is a foundational way of shifting a flat image from second to at least third gear.

Finding that hybrid between committing to gradient tone and graphic surfaces that imbue reality and a simple vector outline really only offers up a handful of tricks. Shadow has long been a staple of the designer to convey space in a flat graphic. They are less about the absence of light than they are about defining a light source. Harsh shadows on these marks can help to communicate a client’s desire to be under the focus of a spotlight and open for complete inspection with nothing to hide.

What differentiate this group from other shadow marks are the 45-degree angular cuts that would ordinarily be cast if the surface it appears on is a separate plain angling away.

This is modestly troublesome in trying to actually model the realism of the light conditions. I’m convinced these designs are less about crafting reality than they are about creating a dramatic fictional dimension, embellished by stark shadows with flexible rules. The mass appearance of this effect is mostly played out on sans serif letterforms and tends to hearken to the angled effect of a serif, excised from the letters in a chiseled dimensional form.

Starbucks is about to look a lot different—and COVID-19 is only part of the reason why

By Mark Wilson

STARBUCKS HAD STORE TRANSFORMATION PLANS IN PLACE FOR 2025.

THOSE JUST GOT MOVED UP. As COVID-19 began to crest in mid-March, Starbucks’s stock plummeted alongside the rest of the market. After all, Starbucks has 15,000 stores in the U.S. and another 4,000 stores in China, and it closed cafes across both countries.

How could it survive with the world under quarantine? But thanks to a successful front end of the quarter, in addition to app ordering, drive-throughs, and delivery, Starbucks’s revenue only dropped 5% in the first three months of 2020.

Starbucks survived, the stock has largely rebounded, and it’s considered by some to be one of the safest investments to make today (although it expects results from the current quarter to be much worse).

It’s more than the global need for a caffeine fix that’s kept Starbucks afloat—though that certainly helped. The company has been investing in mobile ordering and easy pickups for years as a strategic counterpoint to being the cozy “third place” to hang out away from work and home. And now, anticipating that COVID-19 isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, the company is doubling down on convenient coffee buying. Its entire digital order and pickup strategy that was slated for rollout between 2023 and 2025 has been fasttracked. And as a result, over the course of the next 18 months, Starbucks will begin to look a lot different.

groupisd.com

29

“One thing to know, even before COVID set into place, our business was roughly over 80% grab and go,” explains Starbucks COO Roz Brewer. “But we were [already] doing some other work . . . looking at the future of retail and work and trying to decide where are the best places to place our stores.”

In the third week of January, as COVID-19 was sweeping through China, the Starbucks crisis team began considering store closures and how to make operations safer.

EMBRACING CAR CULTURE A big component is the drive-through. Whereas about onethird of Starbucks locations in the U.S. have drive-through today, 60% of the locations in the pipeline will have drivethroughs. Plus you’ll see more drive-throughs installed in older buildings through retrofitting.

people hanging out inside). The company will expand its grab-and-go stores, which consist of little more than a line and a place to get your drink. And those that reintroduce cafe seating will do so conservatively. A lot of furniture has been removed from cafes for the time being, and the company is trying to determine if customers can be trusted to social distance on their own.

BEHIND THE BAR But some of Starbucks’s biggest updates are those you might not even notice and are happening behind the bar, where baristas work. Here, there will be a focus on automation, though not in the sense of robotic coffee brewers.

Even if you don’t technically drive through, you still might not leave your car. Starbucks will be expanding the curbside pickup options it launched in response to COVID-19 with new digital capabilities and real estate deals. The company is actually negotiating more parking spots at many of its cafes, so that customers can order ahead with the app, park in a spot the app decides, then get coffee brought to their window. (This strategy will sound familiar to anyone who has done curbside pickup at Walmart.)

Instead, a new labeling system automatically imports orders from Uber Eats, the drive-through, or the Starbucks app, funneling them into one queue to streamline processing.

Meanwhile, baristas will pull shots with a new espresso machine, the Mastrena II, that Starbucks has been rolling out since last year. The updated rig, which Starbucks helped design, combines multiple bean hoppers and automatic grind adjustments into one machine, so baristas don’t need to hop from machine to machine depending on the order.

Additionally, these new machines are equipped with sensors that track how many shots have been pulled and when it’s time for maintenance.

As for inside, many Starbucks cafes will adopt walk-up windows (think of this as a walk-up drive-through to avoid

These updates may seem small, but they should expedite how fast baristas can work, which is especially important in the

morning crunch hours—and when people are waiting in line with their cars instead of in the store. Anecdotally, I’ve seen how my local drive-through Starbucks has had cars lining up out onto the nearby street. Speed can help mitigate that issue.

THE DEATH OF THE THIRD PLACE? For Starbucks, this shift to convenience leans into a competitive advantage that the coffee juggernaut has—namely, countless locations and a digital app infrastructure. But for the past few decades, Starbucks has invested considerably in its cafe experience. From the leather armchairs to the artwork on the walls, the company developed a system to scale the sensation of being inside a local coffee shop anywhere in the world.

This investment was key to creating what Starbucks refers to as “the third place“—somewhere that isn’t home, and it isn’t work. It’s where you go when you want a break from both.

While Starbucks might push back on this idea, it does seem like this prioritization of convenience, by nature, lowers the importance of the cafe experience. When I ask Brewer about where the third place is going, she says it’s being redefined. “We’re learning that our customers really feel that

experience isn’t just sitting in the store. It’s when you hand off that beverage, and the interaction between the barista [and customer] . . . that can happen at the drive-through, or the entryway pickup. We feel like we’re creating a third place, just in a different venue.” It’s an idea that Starbucks has been validating, too—studying “customer connection scores,” or researching how customers feel about the Starbucks brand now that it’s more convenient than experiential.

Only time will tell how the Starbucks brand evolves, when Starbucks is less about a place than it is an app and a latte.

Then again, like so much of the chain food industry, Starbucks has been on this trajectory for years anyway, moving toward digitization in the name of efficiency. And it took COVID-19 to fast forward us to that future: a time when brick-andmortar restaurants are really just an extension of an app, unless they are a giant, experiential extravaganza.

Mark Wilson is a senior writer at Fast Company who has written about design, technology, and culture for almost 15 years. His work has appeared at Gizmodo, Kotaku, PopMech, PopSci, Esquire, American Photo and Lucky Peach

brandknewmag.com

31

EVERY LIT TLE THING EVERY LIT TLE THING IS EVERY THING. EVERY LIT TLE THING IS EVERY THING. IS EVERY THING.

10th Gen Intel® Core™ i7 processor

The new XPS 13.

Call a Dell Technologies Advisor at 855-341-5261 or learn more at The new XPS 13.

Dell.com/SB/XPS Call Dell XPS Technologies Advisor at 855-341-5261 or learn more at Theanew 13.

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Copyright © 2019 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries.

Dell.com/SB/XPS Call Dell Dell Technologies Advisor attrademarks 855-341-5261 more at All Rightsa Reserved.

Technologies, Dell, EMC, Dell EMC and other are trademarks of Dellor Inc. learn or its subsidiaries.

347260 Dell.com/SB/XPS Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Copyright © 2019 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries.

All Rights Reserved. Dell Technologies, Dell, EMC, Dell EMC and other trademarks are trademarks of Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. 347260 Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Copyright © 2019 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries.

All Rights Reserved. Dell Technologies, Dell, EMC, Dell EMC and other trademarks are trademarks of Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. 347260

10th Gen Intel® Core™ i7 processor® 10th Gen Intel Core™ i7 processor

Does The World Need A New Advertising Agency Podcast?

By Peter

The big question… Should an advertising agency create and publish a podcast – now, in 2020? Read this before you launch your new advertising agency podcast.

I’ll try to get to the heart of the decision – using me as an example.

My first podcast series was launched in 2006. I was a bit early. Ya think? But, the podcast did support my advertising agency’s brand and helped us to market the agency. After all, it showed the world of prospective clients that we were ahead of the curve.

The podcast was The 360 View, the agency, at that time, Ralston360 (‘360’ = very 2006). I interviewed a range of people including an AOL exec; Rob Walsh the podcasting genius from Podcast 411 (now of Libsyn); a Saatchi & Saatchi president; a major agency search consultant and an ADWEEK editor on what was coming in digital marketing. I also included me just talking about marketing. The show was professionally produced. I’ll be adding a couple of the old audio shows to my new series. Nice to take a look back to what people were thinking in 2006.

Should An Advertising Agency Podcast?

I could go nuts on building a long list of “why you should” for you. But, I am just going to keep this advertising agency help section brief. It is based on my own decision-making criteria.

Why Publish A Podcast?

Podcasting is booming. 32% of Americans are podcast listeners. There are currently over 750,000 or so shows – and growing fast.

But, there are still far fewer podcasts than bloated blogging and YouTube channels. It is easier to make a dent in the podcasting universe that producing another blog.

Important — podcasting makes an emotional connection between the host, guests, and the listener.

Oh, I added the copy from a 2006 show on podcasting at the bottom of this blog post. I admit it, a good history lesson.

Need another reason to consider podcasting? I’ll just mention the name Joe Rogan.

My New Podcast – Advertising Stories

Podcasting is relatively easy and low cost. I think the first year of my new podcast, equipment, hosting, and marketing (not including my time marketing) should come in at under $500.

I am not including cocktail ingredients and coffee to help make me glib.

My new podcast series launched this week. Go here to see what Advertising Stories will be talking about.

Its 2020 @home… No more “professional” production as I am recording myself by myself from my home office in my Mexican house. I am currently getting listed on all of the podcasting platforms (that takes up to two weeks) and I am recording a bunch of early series episodes so I launch with some bulk. More on what it is and the launch later. However, my personal activity does bring up the question:

Should advertising agencies podcast?

Which brings me to this…

I Have A Clear Objective and KPIs Me: The objective of my podcast is to grow awareness of my advertising agency business development consultancy practice. I aim to not be another look-a-like advertising podcast.

I am adding the power of ‘voice’ to my well-read blog – this one. Why bother doing the podcast too? Because people absorb information differently. Some via words, as in a blog; some via images aka Instagram; some via video and now,

brandknewmag.com

33 my podcast audience via voice. Some use all three. Like the guys from Marketing School.

and start recording. Do you need more? No. It is easy.

Even for a lone wolf like me.

Now you: Your advertising agency has to ask itself why it wants to do a podcast. Awareness, sure. But to whom? Is it everyone? Will you target a highly select group – say a health care marketing podcast? Or, one aimed at the eCommerce industry? Or go deeper, like the athletic shoe category.

Producing a me-too podcast about advertising or how to do social media, um, nope. Be the expert that people want to listen to. Aim to be both super content and entertaining. Be Unignorable.

• I use Zoom for recording long-distance interviews on two tracks.

If you want to compete doing a marketing and media-based podcast, it should be at least as good as the Marketing School podcast from Neil Patel and Eric Siu or The Marketing Book Podcast from Douglas Burdett of the agency Artillery.

Douglas ‘borrows’ the interest of his book writers. Ok, also check out Little Bird Marketing. This links to a particularly brilliant episode. Priscilla is also a very good multi-channel podcast marketer. Worth emulating.

OK, OK…. one more, I really like the name… Disrupter Series.

This one from Rob Schwartz of TBWAChiatDay NY. The title works on two levels. We all like or need a bit of disruption and the title actually reflects the agency’s positioning (these guys even register the word ‘disruption” which is a bit cheeky):

We don’t follow cultural and market conventions — we overturn them. We anticipate future trends to determine what could lift a brand higher, and then define a Disruption® platform to get them there.

OK, yup, an observation. This podcast series only has 20 iTunes ratings. Considering the size of TBWAChiatDay, you’d think that they would have mustered some internal muscle to drive up this important metric. For comparison, little agency Little Bird Marketing’s Ponderings From The Perch (just mentioned as a good example) has 42.

Go: 12 Steps To Developing A Winner Advertising Agency Podcast The Internet is packed with audio, print, and YouTube-based podcasting advice. You’ll find out how to be successful.

However, to get the juices flowing, here is a checklist.

• Yes, have a clear business objective.

• Have a Creative Brief. Need a sample? Give me a shout.

• Understand your podcast strategy. news? Reviews?

Interviews? Ranting?

• Know your agency’s ‘voice’.

• Develop a “must’ listen to set of well-targeted topics. Use SEO to help you figure this out.

• Have a production process and calendar. Process!

• Buy the mic, stand, and windscreen. Plug into GarageBand

• Find a hosting company like Buzzsprout.

• Get the graphic and description that will be uploaded to the players like iTunes, Google Podcast, and Spotify.

There are more. I listen to podcasts on Pocket Casts. I like the UI. • If you want, create an intro and outro. I use the truly fantastic, fast, and very affordable VO company Audiobag. Very pro. I have a long intro and a short one.

No outro. I use a variable message.

• Build your marketing plan. Think through how to create organic and paid (if you need to) awareness; hit up all your friends, family, and clients; use your email and LinkedIn lists; interview influentials; ask for reviews.

Build out your website support – pages for each podcast, show notes, add in a show podcast player, maybe a video player too, etc. You can use the video across your marketing.

Need an agency to emulate? Man, I have not really found a deep bench of great advertising agency podcasts (though, I mentioned a couple above). At least an agency podcast that is going to keep me from listening to my favorite podcasts including Pivot; six pixels of separation; Masters In Business; TechMeme (every day) and Business casual – listen to that one.

Question: Do you know of a good advertising agency podcast? Please let me know. Thanks.

OK. Back To My 2006 Advertising Agency Podcast.

This is the copy from one of my 360 View podcasts. it will give you some advertising agency podcast history. For agency marketing purposes, we published the audio podcast using a professional producer and then wrote a white paper for digital and paper-based distribution. This all supported our business development program.

It is all about business development, right?

October 2006 Welcome to the Podcast of 360 View.

360 View is a Blog and series of Podcasts dedicated to regional, national and international marketers who are creating marketing programs in today’s ever more complex marketing environment.

This week’s show is about Podcasting.

In case you didn’t know it, Podcasting” is the 2005 Word of the Year according to the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary and we think that Podcasting will become an important part of many marketer’s Internet strategies.

On to Podcasting: Folks the Pod has landed….

Yes, a new generation of “Pod People” has landed. And unlike the screeching zombies of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, these modern-day Podsters are not content to take over bodies at the behest of the mother ship. Oh no. These Pod People, freshly hatched from the Internet, want to capture that rarest of modern treasures: content they want, when they want it. They’re poised to topple the bastions of traditional media with nothing more than a pair of iPod ear-buds and a single bone-chilling request: “Take me to your Podcast.”

Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating. A little. But something exciting is going on in the communications industry. You guessed it: Podcasting.

I’ve seen Internet ideas sweep the virtual landscape before, but Podcasting is moving across the online marketing terrain with exceptional velocity. In October 2004, there were 24 hit results on Google for the word “Podcast.” In November it was 60 million. Today, it’s 83 million.

Consider “Pod Climber” and “Formula Pod,” two audio Podcasts run out of a simple recording studio in Bend, Oregon about rock climbing and Formula 1 racing. Pod Climber has a monthly audience of 54,000 listeners To put this audience number in perspective, consider that the monthly circulation of Climbing Magazine, the industry leader, is 34,000.

Climbing Magazine is 34 years old. “Pod Climber” is only seven months old. Yeah. Wow. So what is Podcasting and why should you care?

Glad you asked.

“Podcasting.” In the dictionary, right next to “zowie.”

Podcasting is a means of distributing audio programs via the Internet. Users subscribe to a number of programs, and then listen to or view the material at a time that they choose.

Translation: Podcasts are audio shows of various lengths that are sent directly to your computer via syndication.

Like a newspaper subscription delivered daily to your lawn, Podcasts are delivered right to your computer. You don’t have to remember to visit specific websites to get updates giving you time to do other things. Like read my white papers.

Today, the great majority of Podcasts are free. All of them let you get the audio programming you want, when you want it with very minimal effort.

By the way, the name Podcast comes from the combination of Pod from the iPod, the most often used MP3 player, and broadcasting. But you probably already figured that out.

It is time for a little history lesson: Podcasting was a minor media player in 2004 and early 2005 as the technology employed to deliver the programs, Really Simple Syndication or RSS, became standardized and gained distribution. RSS allows Internet users to subscribe to websites that have provided RSS feeds. These are typically sites that change or add content regularly. Still with me?

At first, RSS gave the builders of text-based Blogs the opportunity to distribute new text postings directly to interested readers. The same technology used for text delivery allows Podcast program subscribers to get their audio Podcasts delivered.

While RSS was clearly a good idea, it is simply too difficult to use unless you are a dedicated web user with a “be the first on your block” (or Blog) technology mind-set. To make all of this magic work, you needed to download one of at least 45 popular and somewhat geeky RSS feed readers or aggregators and figure out how to make it do its magic. This is a bit too Palo Alto for most of us (I am not talking to the tech-cognoscenti here.) However, in the past year Google, Yahoo! and MSN have helped us out by adding user-friendly RSS to their personalized sections. Everyday users do not have to download anything and do not have to read a RSS user manual to subscribe to the feeds they want – RSS becomes invisible just like HTML. They have no need to ever hear the RSS name again. Some say, RSS will be so baked into your programs and websites that you will never hear these three letters again.

The world of Podcasting dramatically changed in May 2005 with the introduction of audio Podcasting programs to Apple’s iTunes 30 million music store customers. Apple once again revolutionized the Internet landscape and took the not-sosimple Really Simple Syndication and made it, well, really, really simple. With one click, iTunes 4.9 made it possible for us to subscribe to different audio feeds and have them automatically delivered to iTunes and then transferred to your iPod (or if you prefer, just to your computer).

Apple allows Podcast producers to add their listings for free and added a comprehensive user-friendly directory. This is very important because you could be the next Podcast producer just like our friends at Pod Climber.

Audio Podcasting recently gained additional energy with the birth of Yahoo! Podcasts. Yes, more one-click ease and a directory of hundreds of Podcasts. Beautiful.

The Pod People cometh.

“Pod People” jokes aside, the power of Podcasting lies in its ability to give consumers the information and entertainment they want, when they want it, which will ultimately help marketers reach and influence audiences in new ways.

I’m not the only one to notice this. Podcasting is getting hot. You know something is up when Katie and Matt, the quintessential two-peas-in-a-pod, discuss Podcasting on the TODAY Show.

In fact, according to April 2005’s PEW Internet Study, one of the most reliable predictors of growth, by the end of 2006 there will be 10 million Podcast users. I am convinced that they may be off by at least 50%.

Why? Two days after the release of Podcasting on iTunes, Apple reported one million Podcast subscriptions. Two…days!

According to Business Week (May 16, 2005): “Over the past six months, the number of Podcasts has jumped 25-fold to 5,302 feeds in mid-May.” Uh, that was before iTunes and Yahoo! democratized Podcasting.

From last July: “Researchers at The Diffusion Group predicted this week that the U.S. Podcast audience will climb from 840,000 last year to 56 million by 2010. By that time, threequarters of all people who own portable digital music players will listen to Podcasts, up from less than 15 percent last year,” the digital entertainment research group said.

CAPITALISM IS BROKEN. Green Swans is a manifesto for system change designed to serve people, planet, and prosperity.

GREEN SWANS THE COMING BOOM IN R E G E N E R AT I V E C A P I TA L I S M

BY J O H N ELK IN GTO N

If Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swans are problems that take us exponentially toward breakdown, Green Swans are solutions that take us exponentially toward breakthrough.

Our success—and survival—now depends on how we rein in the Black Swans and accelerate the Green Swans.

J O H N E L K I N G TON.COM

VO L A N S.COM

“J OH N E L K I N G T ON H A S ON CE A G A I N P R O V EN HIS S TA TU S A S ON E OF T H E G RE A T T H I N K E RS OF OU R TIME. ” – PAU L P O LMAN,

Former CEO of Unilever, Co-Founder and Chair of

IMAGINE, Chair of the International Chamber of Commerce, The B Team, and the Saïd Business School

AVA I L A B L E N O W

EVERYWHERE BOOKS ARE SOLD

Additional insights come from Yahoo!’s October 2005 white paper “RSS – Crossing into the Mainstream,” which states that 28% of Internet users are aware of Podcasting, but only 2% currently subscribe to Podcasts, pointing to a clear growth area for publishers and marketers.

OK, here is a prediction. I think that we will soon see SERIUS and XM Satellite radio figure out how to deliver Podcasting to their 7, or is it 8 million subscribers. Hey, I just bout a new car and getting satellite radio is as easy as getting hub caps.

Yes, Pod People are indeed everywhere and those who haven’t been assimilated yet, will be. This, as it turns it, is a good thing.

You see, lots of different people use Podcasts. The current ticket to Podcast membership is the desire to listen to the spoken word and the money to own a MP3 player to take your Podcasts with you. Today’s Podcast users are older and more educated than you might imagine. But don’t take my word for it.

According to Billboard Radio Monitor (August 19, 2005): “A survey of over 8,000 American consumers by pollsters CLX has revealed that Podcasting is most popular with those over 45, with 21 percent of those questioned listening to Podcasts.

This compares to just 13 percent of 15 to 24-year olds.”

Okay, so now you know what Podcasting is. Here’s why you should care.

Like the Digital Video Recorders (think TiVo) that came before it, Podcasting gives people the ability to control their media consumption. This shift from passive consumption to consumer control is important to any marketer who uses media to reach and win the minds and hearts of consumers.

Just like TiVo and TV, people opt-in to receive the Podcasts that interest them, wait for these Podcasts to be delivered, then listen or watch when they want to.

With TiVo I can avoid commercials and time-shift my viewing for my personal convenience. Podcasting gives me the same freedom and now portability. I no longer have to listen to terrestrial radio or watch airline movies when traveling on business. I can readily—and aurally—digest the information I need with fresh Podcasts that keep me up to speed with latest thinkers in Silicon Valley (“InfoTalk”), tune me into my old hometown (WNYC’s Brian Leher), provide a preview on my upcoming travels (“Three Minutes in Shanghai”) and gives me the scoop on what’s popular in pop culture (Slate Magazine).

I can create my very own personal programming with a single click. It seems that Do It Yourself-ism isn’t confined to the aisles of the local Home Depot.

Whoa, wait…. It gets better.

Apple just cranked Podcasting up another major notch with the introduction of iTunes Videocasting and its new crop of video-capable iPods that allow users to play videos, listen to music and display photos.

I actually used this technology last week while stuck in a mountain pass traffic jam for two hours. (Don’t ask.) I was out of radio and cell range, but lo and behold! My trusty iPod was loaded with the latest episode of “Desperate Housewives,” courtesy of an iTunes Videocast. Talk about better living through technology.

At the time of this Podcast, there are only 78 Videocasts on iTunes. These are a combination of the somewhat technoid DV “GearTalk” and the now-famous “Rocketboom.”

Jeff Jarvis of the famous Blog Buzzmachine suggests that despite this modest beginning, Videocasting is poised for great things. “I point out all the things Rocketboom doesn’t have: expensive studios, equipment, staff, lawyers, deals, marketing budgets,” Jarvis said three weeks before Apple introduced the easiest way to get Videocasts. “But they do have an audience. Rocketboom serves at least 60,000 downloads a day. Compare that with Crossfire’s audience on CNN: 150,000. So Rocketboom has more than a third of the big network show’s audience at a fraction of the cost. And, by the way, CNN’s audience is near retirement age, while Rocketboom’s fans (excluding me) are young enough to be CNN viewers’ grandchildren.”

Don’t worry. More Videocasts are on the way. This is a very hot space with new, mostly re-purposed shows like NBC Nightly News and Nightline and personal I-want-to-be-Scorsese mini-films on the horizon. The options—and opportunities— are limitless.

It’s a brave new marketing world.

There’s no denying that the Podcasting invasion is in full swing. So what’s a marketing professional to do?

Of course, “How to Use Podcasting and Videocasting to Reach Vast Vertical Markets” merits its very own white paper, but here is the top line of what you should know and do. Yes, it’s still early. Just think of this as Podcasting’s spring training.

First, the opportunity: People are very busy. If you can give them a way to get “home delivery” so they can watch or listen to your message when they want, everyone wins. To put it another way, direct personal delivery to a constituency that has actively asked for your message is good. Very good.

Audio and video programming will take on a new life as Podcasting allows them to be delivered with greater ease.

Podcasting provides a delivery tool that works harder, and actually gets through better, than email. Let’s face it. E-mail newsletters so 2004.

People have unique entertainment and business information needs. Narrowcasting works to deliver a targeted message to a wide array of very interested markets.

Now, how to use.

Here are a few examples of how marketers can use Podcasting to reach external markets and to speak with internal constituencies: On the simplest level, just sponsor a couple of targeted Podcasts and Videocasts. Lexus now sponsors KCRW’s Podcasts. Shouldn’t Robert Mondavi sponsor Grape Radio?

C’mon folks this is the easy way for you to tell your boss that you are on the cutting edge of Podom. And, it isn’t like these shows can’t pull large audiences. This Week In Tech, arguably the number one Podcast, has over 200,000 weekly listeners.

Produce your own category-specific audio and video shows.

Take advantage of what’s essentially the newest broadcast medium. IBM has created a series of Podcasts now running on iTunes including “IBM and the Future of Shopping.”

Whirlpool created “The American Family.” What could you produce?

OK, I think that both IBM are onto something here – they have become the content providers,. We can argue about the value of their programs. But the bottom line is that THEY are doing it Are You? Here is another idea: Create a new form of active audio and video collateral materials. Why are there so many paper-based brochures?

This is another nail in the ink and paper coffin.

Deliver audio and video press releases that have life to them.

The big players will. Why shouldn’t you?

Do video demos of new products and send them to your Evangelists and the bored press.

Make your CEO, COO or CTO a star. I see a raise coming.

Talk directly with shareholders via the delivery of Podcasting news events.

Ah the conclusion.

They come in peace.

And it’s time to get a piece of the action.

Despite the fact that the acronym RSS will quickly die away, the syndication of Podcasts is here to stay and will begin to play an increasingly important role in marketing programs.

Just as we discussed a couple of years ago in our white paper on the TiVo effect, consumer control of the media and personalization is a good thing for marketers.

Moreover, it is a great thing for forward-thinking marketers with a vision and the desire to try the new.

This vision will require marketers to start to think more like editors and journalists. More like producers than ad-builders.

More about conversations than lecturers. More two-way than one-way. More niche than mass.

The tough-love reality is that unlike push media (TV and even Web 1.0), syndication and Podcasting requires a new breed of marketers with the skill-sets to create marketing messages that consumers will actually choose to consume. I’ve got to tell you folks, it is more difficult to create content that people choose to listen to than it is to force-feed messaging via hit and run commercials. That said; imagine hitting RSS and Podcasting’s sweet spot. We will go from having a large percentage of our messages ignored to having them be anticipated. What a concept.

No this is not the death of old media.

In fact we believe that it is imperative that old media (which still dominates in audience reach by the way) and these new technologies work seamlessly together in a perfect 360º world. Whew, I knew I had to get that in.

Now if you think that my thoughts on Podcasting are the empty words so often sprouted by agency CEO’s then listen up. My partner Kevin and I just gave brand new video IPods to all of our staff for Christmas. Our goal is to instill the idea that things are changing R E A L fast.

So, get out there and Podcast.

The 360 View is produced by Ralston360 …. A 20-yearold advertising agency with offices in Bend Oregon and San Francisco California.

OMNICHANNEL MARKETING IN THE NEW DIGITAL AGE

By Kent Lewis

The pandemic and resulting economic impact have dramatically impacted how businesses are being run and how marketers are approaching a more distributed, remote workforce. Consumers are shopping on screens from home, as are working professionals, increasing the importance of digital channels as part of the customer journey.

website, email, social media, direct response (mail or email), advertising, public relations and events. Omnichannel, by comparison, focuses on creating a seamless experience across those channels, particularly digitally, where you can more readily identify the recipient by a unique identifier to personalize the message or action.

Despite an expedited shift towards digital, marketers cannot ignore the importance of a holistic view of the path to purchase, which will still include offline elements. In this article, we explore how to create an effective omnichannel marketing program in a post-COVID-19 world.

Omnichannel fundamentals

The goal of smart marketers is to target prospects and customers with the right message in the right place at the right time to maximize brand awareness, positive perception and ultimately, sales. With the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, laptops and social media platforms, it is becoming increasingly challenging for brands to craft and digitally syndicate a message that will achieve that goal.

One solution to the challenge is omnichannel marketing, defined as a multichannel approach to sales (and marketing) that seeks to provide customers with a seamless shopping experience, whether they’re shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone or in a brick-and-mortar store.

Multichannel vs. omnichannel marketing Before we go too far down the rabbit hole of omnichannel marketing, we first need to differentiate the term from a related, but distinctly different phrase, multichannel marketing. If you know your Latin, the phrase “omni” means all, whereas “multi” means many.

Consider multichannel as an umbrella term relating to the distribution of marketing messages across multiple channels, which commonly include, but are not limited to:

For those newer to the concept of omnichannel marketing, it may be helpful to provide a bit of background. According to statistics from the recent Marketing Automation Statistics Reports by Omnisend, there are distinct and powerful advantages to omnichannel, as compared to single-channel approaches to marketing: • Brands experience a 287% higher purchase rate when using three or more channels.

• Brands also see a 48% higher conversion rate when involving SMS (text messaging).

• The average SMS ROI is 2,755%.

• Purchase frequency is 250% higher on omnichannel vs. single channel.

• The average order value is 13% more per order on omnichannel vs. single channel.

• Customer retention rates are 90% higher for omnichannel vs. single channel.

Omnichannel marketing relies heavily on technology to accurately target recipients with personalized messaging. Key omnichannel marketing strategy components typically consist of a single sign-in (which may be powered by an email, phone number, loyalty program number or app), a robust customer relationship management (CRM) platform, personalization, location data and integrated customer service.

Despite the need for an extensive investment in a marketing technology (martech) stack, the end goal is to create a seamless experience for the end user. According to the Simplicity Index, 64% of consumers are willing to pay more for a simplified user experience.

In other words, reduce friction and increase your sales. For example, don’t offer up a sales pitch disguised as help. If a customer or prospect asks for help, provide it in the most convenient way possible, whether it be via phone, email, website, social platform or text. A Zendesk study found 50 percent of customers want to be able to fix their own problems, so be sure to build out an extensive frequently asked questions (FAQ) database.

Creating an omnichannel strategy With the fundamental framework in place, the next step is to develop an overarching omnichannel marketing plan, complete with key strategies and supporting tactics. Here are a few best practices to consider when developing your omnichannel marketing program: 1. Take the customer journey. Walk a mile in your customer (and prospects) shoes. Gain insights into major milestones, roadblocks and messaging opportunities to reduce friction and maximize engagement.

2. Measure twice, cut once. Every step of the customer journey creates an opportunity to generate insightful data, whether by end user, message or channel. Ensure

all data is being captured for future analysis.

3. Segment your end users. Utilize the data you’ve collected to create and refine buyer personas that can then be messaged to by channel, seamlessly.

4. Create compelling content. This is perhaps the most challenging step in any marketing program. To target recipients based on behavior, you must create messages that elicit behaviors and actions that can be measured and analyzed.

5. Listen, learn and act. Monitor all primary channels for insights and quickly answer questions to reduce friction.

Prioritize channels based on preference and usage to maximize efficiency.

6. Expand beyond sales and marketing. Leverage the data to create insights across the organization, including market research, product development, customer service and merchandising.

While transitioning to a digitally centered marketing program can be expensive and time-consuming, it provides greater tracking, flexibility and long-term cost efficacy. While omnichannel programs should cover all forms of digital (text, website, search, social, email and virtual events), savvy brands will incorporate offline touchpoints as part of the customer journey. By following the steps outlined above, your business can adapt and adopt a more effective and holistic marketing program that is more recession and virus-resistant.

Get more done with an all-in-one Marketing Platform.

Using Mailchimp is like having four arms (for marketing).

See how we can help get your business up and running with websites, CRM, social, email, ads, analytics, and more.

Learn more at mailchimp.com

Could these 50 hot tech startups be tomorrow’s unicorns?

By Mark Sullivan

The next crop of billion-dollar phenoms may be dominated by companies that quietly help other companies get business done, not splashy consumer brands.

Startup companies can be black boxes—opaque operations with few public disclosure requirements. That makes it hard to see tomorrow’s standouts today. So the research firm CB

in one of the tech industry’s favorite buzzwords, unicorns.

CB Insights calls this algorithm Mosaic, and in the past, it has

Insights, with the support of the National Science Foundation,

indeed pinpointed promising startups that went on to achieve

set out to build an algorithm to discern the health of startups

unicorn status. For the company’s 2015 Future Unicorns list,

through their publicly available data, and even identify ones

for instance, it identified restaurant delivery Postmates as a

that could grow to a billion-dollar valuation—making them,

contender. The on-demand delivery service is valued at $2.5

brandknewmag.com

45

billion today. Also on that list was Dollar Shave Club, which Unilever acquired for a cool billion the following year. The Berlin-based meal kit delivery company HelloFresh, another 2015 future unicorn, went on to a $1.7 billion after its late 2017 IPO, and its stock price has tripled since then.

Mosaic’s past success is one of the reasons the strikingly different makeup of this year’s Future Unicorns list—which you can read in its entirety at CB Insights’ site—is so intriguing.

Postmates, Dollar Shave Club, and HelloFresh caught the last of the wave of consumer-focused e-commerce mania, but that wave is long gone in 2020. Most of the companies on CB Insights’ 2020 list cater to the needs of corporations, not consumers. In fact, 37 out of the 50 companies on the list have no consumer-facing products at all.

“There’s a lot of big companies that are looking for technology solutions and there’s a lot of startup companies that are building for them,” CB Insights cofounder and CEO Anand Sanwal told me. “From a revenue perspective, these are companies that have a repeatable, understandable subscription model. So you’re seeing less of these consumerdriven, hit-based businesses.”

SPOTTING UNICORNS The Mosaic algorithm sifts through data on 280,000 tech startups tracked in CB Insights’ database, looking for traits shared by movers and shakers. These factors include how much investment money the startup has attracted—and how quickly it seems to be burning through it—as well as at the pedigree of the company’s investors and board members. It also looks for signs of momentum in customer growth, media coverage, and social media sentiment.

Mosaic’s unicorn-spotting skills certainly aren’t perfect, as CB Insights is quick to acknowledge. Along the way, some of the companies it’s identified as high flyers have turned out to be duds or even downright disasters. It picked the peer-to-peer used-car marketplace Beepi in 2015 and the startup crashed and burned the next year, for example.

Still, along with serving as an early-detection system for unicorns, the list is a snapshot of the demographics of the

startup economy, for better or worse. Though it’s global, 35 of the 50 companies on this year’s edition are U.S.-based, and 30 of those are from either the Bay Area or New York City. Dominated by companies started by white and Asian men, it also reflects the tech industry’s dismal record on diversity. No women are among the the founders, and black entrepreneurs are almost as poorly represented.

“We have a serious lack of racial and gender diversity in tech, and this just emphasizes how far we have to go,” says Aileen Lee, the Cowboy Ventures partner who famously coined the unicorn term back in 2013. “At a time when there’s increased awareness about systemic, deep-rooted injustice, I hope this is a call to action for founders and investors. When you’re thinking about starting a company, be purposeful in the composition of your founding team,” Lee says. “And when you’re investing, play a role in the composition of the team.”

QUIET COMPANIES This year, the Future Unicorns list comes out right in the middle of the worst public health crisis and accompanying financial downturn in a century. That means this year’s would-be unicorns are survivors, insulated from the current economic trauma by their business models, by the deep-pocketed faith of their investors, or by the industries they play in.

Cockroach Labs, for instance, sells an IT product that works behind data center walls where banks of computers serve up the distance-learning, remote-working, binge-watching, and teleconferencing services we’re now depending on.

Cockroach’s product, a database architecture that can “survive data center-scale outages,” is used by big companies such as Comcast, Baidu, and Bose. The New York company is backed by some high-profile VCs including Google Ventures and Benchmark.

Enterprise-focused startups such as Cockroach Labs make up the biggest chunk of the Future Unicorns list. This is driven in part by the increasing power of developers within large companies, and by shifting philosophies on how they should spend their time.

“Many Fortune 1000 companies are transitioning to cloud-

based technologies, and we’re seeing a greater willingness to purchase best-of-breed developer platforms and tools to solve problems rather than build homegrown solutions, freeing developers from noncore tasks,” says Ethan Kurzweil, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. Kurzweil adds that developers can devote the hours they regain to work on projects that more directly improve the company’s core product or service offerings.

For instance, developers can devote full attention to perfecting an app they provide to customers, but rely on a third-party platform to report and analyze crashes. One of the companies on the list, San Francisco-based Sentry, provides just such a platform, which its customers can either self-host or run from the cloud. The startup, which has raised $65 million in venture capital and is valued at $100 million, says a million developers at 50,000 companies–including Microsoft, Disney, and Symantec–use its product.

Search is another app or website feature that might be better provided by a dedicated third party like Algolia. The San Francisco-based company puts a Google-caliber search engine in its customers’ websites or apps that let users call up the customer’s product or other information easily and quickly. It also offers voice-based and location-based search.

That kind of functionality would be expensive and timeconsuming to build internally. That may be why Algolia has 8,500 customers, and has already amassed $184 million in funding.

“A generation of new platforms and tools like Sentry, Cockroach Labs, and Algolia [are] solving highly acute pain points for developers and allowing their customers to be more innovative, agile, and quick to adapt,” Kurzweil points out.

THE BANK IS OPEN Some industries–such as the retail and travel–have entered the digital age with relative ease. Venerable tech companies such as Amazon and Expedia have played major roles in those transitions. Now more startups and investors are focusing their efforts on harder-to-digitize industries such as healthcare and financial services—areas that are more attached to old workflows and systems, and more tightly regulated.

Financial technology (fintech) companies are the secondbest represented group among CB Insights’ future unicorns.

Most of them are riding the “open banking” wave, which has banks melding their internal systems and data with third-party services via application programming interfaces (APIs), allowing them to create new offerings for tech-savvy customers.

“These institutions figured out that you can outsource your R&D and get something purpose-built for your needs by a startup that might have access to capital and access to talent that they don’t,” says Sanwal. One example from the CB Insights list is Stockholm-based Tink, which partners with European banks to build apps that offer users financial planning features and the ability to see all their accounts in one place.

Other fintech startups build for the needs of businesses. Lehi, Utah-based Divvy built an expense management platform that allows companies to more easily issue and manage corporate credit cards. Expense reports go away because all purchases are done with the card and tracked through the platform.

DAYLIGHT FOR DIGITAL HEALTH? Digital health startups haven’t had an easy time finding their footing within the greater healthcare industry during the past 10 years.

“The delivery of healthcare in the U.S. is a very large ecosystem with enormous inefficiencies, cross incentives, and entrenched interests,” says Bryan Roberts, a partner at Venrock, a top-shelf investor in digital health companies.

Along With Opening Up New Possibilities, The Pandemic Has Introduced Uncertainty That The Algorithm Has Never Seen Before.

Despite these challenges, health is an increasingly tantalizing space for tech entrepreneurs. “A huge, inefficient, and important sector of the economy is often fertile ground for disruption by innovative startups,” Roberts says. Healthcare not only offers startups a shot at building the next unicorn, but also a chance a playing a role in fixing one of society’s biggest problems. The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified existing problems in the healthcare system, and highlighted the need for tech approaches to long-standing issues.

One area of reinvention immediately opened up by the virus is telemedicine, as millions of people stuck at home have accessed health services remotely for the first time. One potential unicorn, Doctor on Demand, which provides virtual visits with its network of primary care doctors, has seen rapid growth in demand since March. Two other startups on the list, Omada Health, which specializes in managing chronic health conditions, and Lyra, which offers mental health services, each moved quickly to video visits during the pandemic. Yet another company, New York City-based Capsule, saw its prescription delivery service flourish as people found a new need to avoid brick-and-mortar pharmacies.

Along with opening up new possibilities for startups, the pandemic has introduced a level of uncertainty that CB Insights’ Mosaic algorithm has never seen before. For all the lessons it can draw from past startup successes, it has no way of predicting all the direct and indirect effects on startups during the uncertain recovery ahead. This batch of potential unicorns must follow through on their promise even as the world has turned upside down around them—and that means that an even greater number of surprises than usual surely lies ahead.

Fast Company Senior Writer Mark Sullivan covers emerging technology, politics, artificial intelligence, large tech companies, and misinformation. An awardwinning San Francisco-based journalist, Sullivan’s work has appeared in Wired, Al Jazeera, CNN, ABC News, CNET, and many others.

groupisd.com

47

SOCIAL NETWORKS ARE BROKEN. HERE’S THE SECRET TO REBUILDING TRUST

By Ram Fish

Facebook and Twitter can do much more to make their platforms trustworthy.

Clear labeling—not mass deletions of dicey content—is key.

After Facebook employees led a rare revolt over the company’s refusal to take down misleading and violencepromoting posts by Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday that the company would rethink the way it moderates such content. This, Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post, will include looking at new approaches other than “binary leaveit-up or take-it-down decisions.”

Facebook may have been led in this direction after Twitter took the lead last week by labeling two Donald Trump misinformation tweets with links to fact-check information.

By choosing to augment–not delete–the Trump tweets, Twitter may have pointed the way forward for moderating political content in a world where much of our political and social

discourse, for better or for worse, takes place on social media.

In the same way we rely on labels to instill confidence in our food, medicine, and other consumer goods, we need a similar labeling system to instill trust in the news, video, people, and organizations we encounter in social networks. I propose the following system to help social media companies get started down that road.

ENABLING TRUST IN NEWS ITEMS While Twitter was right to label Donald Trump’s tweets, its action wasn’t perfect. The company also unilaterally decided which tweets to augment, and how to augment them.

brandknewmag.com

49

That approach risks turning social media companies into publishers that make editorial decisions, and this could invite a new and far more invasive kind of regulatory regime.

There is a way for social networks to promote trust in news and information on their platforms without themselves acting as “arbiters of truth,” as Zuckerberg puts it.

For any media published, platforms should overlay the results (if available) of third-party fact-checks. This overlay should include the fact checker’s identity, and an assessment (on a 1-5 scale) of the media’s accuracy. It should an easy way for the user to review a more detailed fact check report.

If a fact checker finds a post to be mostly misleading or false, the social media platform should notify any user who viewed the media of the assessment.

FIGHTING DEEPFAKE VIDEO In the era of deep fakes and “cheap fakes” we can no longer trust videos or images to reflect reality. Detecting and quickly deleting fakes on a social network is a major technical challenge for tech companies. A more workable solution might be to develop a content authentication system that could assure users that a video or image is genuine.

Such a system would depend on the creators of images or video to “sign” their content with a unique hashtag to prevent unauthorized alteration. If the system detects the hashtag it will label the video “signed,” which would assure users of its authenticity. If the system detects that the hashtag isn’t present or has been altered, it would label the video “unsigned,” which might signal to the user to watch with somewhat more skepticism. Like this:

If no fact-checking information is available for an item, the platform should allow users to request a fact check. When media is first displayed to the users, a button would appear that allows consumers to ask for verification.

Traditional media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News are the most likely to embrace such a system. It would benefit viewers and build trust in their content. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and others might then be forced by competitive pressures to follow.

If enough people request a fact-check, or if the story was shared enough times, the story would be submitted to an independent fact checker (such as Factchecker.org) for review.

In a few hours, after the fact checker has finished its review and delivered its assessment, the post would be updated with a label that would become visible on the story to all users.

Importantly, if a news story is found to be false, the social media company should send a notification of that fact to any users who had already read it.

With this system in place, users would be less likely to believe, and share, an item that’s been labeled false. It might also reduce the incentive for bloggers, media sites, or politician pages to publish misinformation. A publisher whose name was routinely associated with a “false” label on stories might lose any trust readers had in it. And since the fact-check label is interactive, it might encourage users to click through and read opposing viewpoints on a given subject.

Facebook has developed a labeling system for posts, and it does the right thing by relying on third-party fact checkers and the International Fact-Checkers Association industry group.

But its current system is lacking in three ways. It applies fact checks only to news stories, leaving misinformation in political ads and posts by politicians unchecked and unlabeled. Its rating system is binary; news stories are either “disputed” or not, while many news stories fall within the gray area between completely true and completely false. And Facebook’s system has no way of informing users that they read a story that later was proved false.

ACCOUNT VERIFICATION FOR EVERYONE Knowing if you are communicating with a real person, a bot, or an anonymous user is crucial to how we treat information and absorb it. So social media platforms should give every individual the option to verify their identity. Platforms should then always make a clear and visible distinction between verified and unverified identities.

Users could have as many unverified identities as they like, but they would be limited to having only one verified account on a platform.

Today, we don’t know if posts by George Sears are coming from a real person or not. Once George Sears verifies his account, his name will always be presented with a verification badge: Twitter “paused” account verification for public figures in 2018. Facebook continues to offer verified pages and profiles for politicians, entertainers, and journalists. But there is absolutely no reason not to offer verification for all users.

The marginal costs of verifying an identity are zero—it can be done by software. So why limit it?

The limit of one verified account per person is crucial to keeping online communication credible. Tying our online identity to our real identity means that online lying, profanity, and harassment are all linked back to our real identity and reputation. Users shouldn’t be able to get a new identity after they trash the reputation of a previous one.

At the same time, people should be allowed to have multiple,

anonymous, fictional or non-verified identities. And by labeling those differently, readers are enabled to decide how to treat the information presented from those accounts. The social media platform wouldn’t have to remove any accounts, so there would be little financial impact.

ESTABLISHING TRUST IN ORGANIZATIONS Just like individuals, reputation matters to organizations.

Social media platforms should give every corporation or nonprofit the option to verify its corporate details by registering and providing basic information about the organization. Any posts by those groups would then include the group’s name and indicators for group type, and country of origin.

The platforms could find clear and visible ways of differentiating between content from verified organizations versus unverified ones. Like this:

This basic information helps consumers decide how much

credibility they should assign to posts from a group or page.

Platforms should also include a trust indicator adjacent to the content, indicating the platform’s internal assessment— based on AI, user feedback, or the organization’s history—of the organization’s reputation. Social networks may be able to differentiate themselves from other platforms based on the quality of their trust indicator.

We’ve prized the internet for its freedom, and freedom from regulation, but social networks have proved that in a wild west atmosphere, where actions are divorced from identities, the poorer aspects of our character can come out. And yet blocking speech is inherently contradictory to the U.S.’s liberal interpretation of free speech as expressed in the First Amendment.

This has led to our social media platforms restricting only the most extreme content. Others have suggested that a better solution is to limit the “amplification” of a piece of harmful content so that less people see it. This might be better because there is no “right” to having one’s speech promoted. But the amplification algorithms are a complicated proprietary, technology and therefore not easily regulated.

Both approaches–blocking and amplification–are practically non-starters when it comes to moderating content that falls in the gray area between harmless and harmful.

That’s why social networks must begin building their own trust and verification systems. Implementing the four approaches described above would be a very good start.

Why Consumers Are Willing to Share Personal Information on Smartphones

By Wharton Staff

Wharton Business Daily: Can you give us the backstory about this specific research and why you think it is important?

Shiri Melumad: I’m generally interested in how this increased integration of different technologies into our daily lives is changing the way that we think, the way we feel and the way that we behave. In a lot of my research, I look at how the way we express ourselves and communicate differs depending on the particular device that we use. For example, if I’m writing a review on my phone versus my computer, do I express myself differently?

Specifically, the inspiration for this paper is something that I noticed in my own behavior, which is that when I’m writing an email or I’m messaging with a friend, I tend to be less censored when I’m doing it on my phone than on my computer. I was interested in understanding what might be going on there.

WBD: What is driving this difference between the smartphone and the home computer? Wharton Business Daily: Can you give us the backstory about this specific research and why you think it is important?

Shiri Melumad: I’m generally interested in how this increased integration of different technologies into our daily lives is changing the way that we think, the way we feel and the way that we behave. In a lot of my research, I look at how the way we express ourselves and communicate differs depending on the particular device that we use. For example, if I’m writing a review on my phone versus my computer, do I express myself differently?

Specifically, the inspiration for this paper is something that I noticed in my own behavior, which is that when I’m writing an email or I’m messaging with a friend, I tend to be less censored when I’m doing it on my phone than on my

brandknewmag.com

53 computer. I was interested in understanding what might be going on there.

WBD: What is driving this difference between the smartphone and the home computer?

Melumad: What we show in this paper is that there are two parallel explanations. In another paper of mine, I showed that our phone tends to act like an adult pacifier for us, relative to using our laptops. One implication of our phone acting like an adult pacifier is that when we engage in a certain task on our phone, it makes us feel more psychologically comforted than when we engage in the exact same task on our laptops. And when I feel more psychologically comforted, I’m more willing to share information that is more intimate or personal. So, that’s one factor that’s driving this.

The other factor has to do more with the device. It’s harder to engage in certain tasks on our phone because it has a smaller keyboard and screen, right? Because it’s harder to complete a task on our phone, we tend to have to devote more cognitive resources to whatever we’re doing, narrowing our attention more intently on whatever task we’re doing on the device. That means we also tend to simultaneously block out any distracting thoughts or external factors in our environment that might otherwise inhibit us from disclosing — for example, concerns about how others might react to what we’re sharing.

“When we engage in a certain task on our phone, it makes us feel more psychologically comforted than when we engage in the exact same task on our laptops.”

If you’ve ever ridden on a subway or bus, you’ve probably seen people completely engrossed on their phones, and they’re often engaging in very personal activities, as if there’s no one else around them. That’s sort of the phenomenon that I’m describing.

WBD: Our smartphones have become an extension of our selves. Most of us have them either in our hands or our pockets at all times. There’s an automatic connection to them, don’t you think?

Melumad: Yes. Coming back to the paper I alluded to, where I show that our phone acts sort of like an adult pacifier for us, the reason that happens is precisely what you’re saying.

Our phone is virtually always with us, and we tend to use it for very personal activities; for example, I’m keeping in constant touch with my friends and keeping in constant touch with work. It’s really the interaction of the ways in which we tend to use our phone and the fact that it’s almost always accessible to us that makes it such a personal device for us.

WBD: What are the takeaways for marketers? You also think that this research could be helpful in the current coronavirus pandemic. Could you explain that?

Melumad: Our findings have a number of important implications for marketers. First, our findings suggest that smartphone-generated content may be more diagnostic

of how consumers actually think and feel. For example, in one study in the paper, we look at restaurant reviews from Tripadvisor. If you think of this in the context of restaurant reviews, to the extent that restaurants want to understand their customers’ true preferences and opinions, our findings imply they should really focus on smartphone-generated reviews in particular. Another important implication again has to do with our analysis of the restaurant reviews that we looked at: We found that this greater self-disclosure in smartphonegenerated reviews results in content that’s more persuasive to other customers. This implies that firms can identify which posts are more likely to influence other customers simply by identifying which device the posts were written on.

“Our findings suggest that smartphone-generated content may be more diagnostic of how consumers actually think and feel.”

Finally, our findings also suggest that marketers and firms may want to encourage customers to provide certain types of information or to respond to certain types of sensitive questions on their phones in particular. We can think of this in our current context; for instance, lately there has been increased discussion about contact tracing, or asking people who test positive for COVID-19 to disclose the list of people they’ve come in physical contact with. Our findings suggest that the CDC and other organizations may want to encourage people to disclose this information through a smartphone app, specifically.

WBD: What about data privacy concerns for smartphone users?

Melumad: Logically, our privacy concerns should be similar across devices. Yet here I’m showing that something as seemingly benign as the device we’re using can actually change our willingness to disclose.

I want to just take a step back and say that we’re finding this effect in certain contexts. Specifically, all the disclosures that we’re looking at are pretty low-stakes disclosures.

The types of data we’re looking at are responses to survey questions like, “Admit to an embarrassing product that you’ve purchased,” or customer-generated restaurant reviews. This isn’t to say that in terms of disclosures that are higher-stakes, we would necessarily see this difference; for example, I don’t have any empirical evidence to suggest that if I’m asked for my Social Security number, I’m going to be more willing to disclose it on my phone. I think that’s a very important caveat to these findings.

WBD: Do you expect that we’re going to see companies want to push the consumer to do more on their smartphones?

Melumad: Absolutely. I think the reality is we’re already seeing that happening. For instance, we’re seeing many platforms shifting towards mobile-first or even mobile-only strategies, and this makes a lot of sense: Not only does most of the world own a smartphone, but our phones are an increasingly ubiquitous part of our daily lives. So, yes, I do think we should expect to see companies increasingly asking us to do more on our smartphones.

The risks and rewards of humour in COVID-19

By Chris Arning

Humour hasn’t been the first option for most brands approaching their communications at this time, but Chris Arning suggests that humour effectively executed can yield great rewards.

brandknewmag.com

55 I’ve been asked to think about what role humour has played during the pandemic so far. There are traditionally three humour schools.

First, there’s the Superiority School, based on the idea of humour establishing hierarchy in aggressive display.

The Incongruity School is based on the idea of humour seeking to resolve the surprising, peculiar or unusual which causes amusement.

Finally, the Relief School is based on both emotional arousal and the release of our anxiety through mirth.

It is worth remembering that physiologically, laughter isn’t just provoked by mirth - we laugh involuntarily when we feel threatened or are faced with aggression either overt and covert. Jordan Peele, protagonist in hit comedy Key and Peele and director of critically acclaimed box office horror hits Get Out and Us made the move from comedy to horror and said that whether scares or laughs, both genres are “about building tension and releasing it”.

We know that gallows humour thrives in conditions of war – sometimes laughing at misfortune is a way of taking the sting out of things. Incidentally, The Blindness by José Saramago, an allegory for epidemics that has come back into fashion in Covid-19 is ultimately a sort of black comedy.

Even before Covid (BC), humour was already becoming an antidote to what has become a ‘new normal’ of uncertainty across the sphere: economic precarity, social atomisation, and political polarisation. Laughter increases happiness and dissolves stress. This is a key reason for the pervasiveness of humorous content: it is a drug that we increasingly cannot do without.

The stress conditions and undercurrent of anxiety unleashed by the Corona virus lockdown the perfect breeding ground for shared humour – it is a fertile time for the right sort of humour.

In terms of memes and viral videos that are doing the rounds, we see an assortment of humour types. There is a lot of humour based on Incongruity – e.g. life now versus before lockdown – juxtaposition of social distancing rules into historical scenarios, (the sort of stuff Cold War Steve excels at) and parodies of what politicians say versus what they do. There is some Superiority humour, mostly scorning politicians and mocking brands who get it wrong and of course the obligatory, cringe-inducing Zoom mishap videos for instance.

But mostly it is light, feel good stuff based on the Relief School of humour, in various ways: a lot of spoof songs or silliness about how we stave off boredom, which often help channel emotional hysteria as a way to fight against the tedium.

In the UK there is a rich vein of bathos/crapness – think a David Shrigley sketch. It’s a humour about the extent of resourcefulness, which also shows that it’s okay to be below par at this tough time.

Brands So what of the humour response from brands then? Ramesh Naranchandran in Creative Review, (Humour Issue, Feb

2018) wrote in the article On why brands stopped being funny: “These are comic times. And yet brands are reluctant to explore the comedy. It will take brave brands who are ready to leap over the earnestness of their sector.”

The context we find ourselves in presents brands with a quandary. People need connection more than ever. As Victor Borge once put it: “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people”.

Yet there’s a trade-off between our need to be connected through humour and our need to respect the somber, difficult context. As a result, humour done right makes a bigger impact, while the misfires fail all the more painfully. For this reason most brands seem to be playing it safe by adopting similar strategies with palpable code convergence in their ads.

This convergence recalls post-crash banking ads of 20082009. Most banks did a complete volte-face in their communications: ditching the whimsical, or phantasmagorical spots and opting for communication patterned on what we in the semiotics field called the 5 Cs: communitarianism, continuity, comfort, conviviality, and of course the conviction that we would all eventually ‘get through this together’ with more co-operation. The result, of course, was a carnival of cliché, a flattening of brand identity and homogeneity.

There are some notable exceptions: Burger King France show their fans how to re-create a Whopper during quarantine.

KFC gently mocked scrappy attempts to find substitutes for their products, saying they’ll now be ‘taking over from here’. Ikea encouraged us to ‘Explore the Great Indoors’ and Ikea Russia showed their shoppers how to recreate dens and fortresses at home. Then you’ve got PornHub doing a campaign on The Cleanest Porn Ever offering rules for keeping clean and sanitized around sex – part self-irony, part social responsibility.

Channel 4 have been the most daring in their humour. Rather than conforming to an earnest, concerned tone of voice, they have stayed true to their roots by showing how their fans beat tedium by spotlighting ordinary chores and elevating slobbishness to heroism. “Britain; we need your buttocks, clenched together”.

I hesitate to offer ‘rules’ for deploying Covid-19 humour, but if I had to boil it down, it would probably be: 1. Show empathy, 2. Be yourself, 3. Offer value. All the brands above do that well. Ikea is a good example, though the spot isn’t ‘funny’, it builds rapport and warmth.

One misconception about humour, and its use in brand communications, is that it’s about being entertaining or wacky: anything to make people laugh. Humour is subtler than that, shrewder.

Humour is always about building rapport, connection and showing empathy. It is the smartest way to show selfknowledge, wisdom and avoid sanctimony and earnestness.

When we push the boundaries we show who we are and become more of ourselves, when we draw attention to our shortcomings, we show our vulnerability. That takes confidence. Viewers will recognise that.

Metaphors Matter in a Time of Pandemic

By Virginia Heffernan

Warfare may be a rousing way to speechify, but it’s perilous when used to describe disasters from hurricanes to viral outbreaks.

VIBRATING, NEAR-HALLUCINATORY, THE Manú National Park in Peru is among the most biodiverse places on earth.

Just about every one of the park’s 4.3 million acres, where the Tropical Andes meet the Amazon Basin, seethes with raw biology—at least 1,300 species of butterflies and 650 of beetles; numberless white-lipped peccaries, tufted capuchins, green anacondas, turquoise tanagers. Flora and fauna to infinity.

It’s also the zoomed-out version of a landscape closer to hand: the one that runs up our noses and through our twisted

guts. What human flesh lacks in jaguars, it makes up for in microorganisms of every stripe: 10 to 100 trillion swarming creatures, thousands of distinct species of bacteria, viruses, fungi, archaea, and protozoa, which means our bodies at any given minute may contain tens of millions of foreign genes.

Why go through all this again, the hideous miracle of the human microbiota? Because our teeming abdominal and nasal rain forests are of course contending with a stranger: SARS-CoV-2. The virus has upset the human microbiome in

an epochal act of strategic surprise.

Almost instantly, that shock generated a set of metaphors drawn from warfare. This may be inevitable in a time of great fear. But more useful models for confronting a pandemic may come from the microbiome itself—and from the mechanisms, from human care to life-extending machines, used to give our immune systems time to learn the signatures of a new virus. In hypermagnified vanity portraits, the coronavirus that stopped humanity in its tracks this winter looks like the fearsome head of a medieval morning star, fit to kill in a gory blunt-force-

puncture attack. SARS-CoV-2, like all viruses, is a biological entity, but it is, many virologists contend, something less than alive; it contains genetic information, but it can’t reproduce.

Zania Stamataki, a viral immunologist at the University of Birmingham in the UK, likens viruses to robots.

The image of maces or robots bearing spikes and cracking open our cells does at first conjure a military attack. Indeed Bill Gates has said we ought to have prepared for a pandemic as if for armed conflict. In March, Donald Trump dubbed himself a “wartime president.” More recently, military veterans have

urged people enduring the Covid-19 contagion to think like prisoners of war.

virus into its repertoire, the way the mind, with study, might absorb a difficult foreign word into its vocabulary.

But Scott Knowles, a disaster expert who runs the history department at Drexel, is wary of martial language. Warfare may be a rousing way to speechify, he has written, but it’s perilous when used to describe disasters from Hurricane Katrina to pandemics. For one, if we’re at war, we expect commandand-control rather than the spontaneous volunteerism we’ve seen with self-isolation and self-quarantine. War rhetoric also suggests that sacrificial casualties ought to be sustained in the name of patriotism. And, finally, it allows for bad or even inhumane decisions excused as a consequence of the “fog of war.”

To pull this off, unsuspecting human organisms are compelled not to contract in a defensive crouch but to expand. Once the bug is inside us, its spikes attach to cell membranes.

The virus fuses with the subjugated cell, sheds its spikes, and releases nucleotides inscribed with hijackers’ demands.

Make more like this, the orders go. And here’s how: a cup of protein, a cup of lipids, and a tablespoon of nucleotides.

(Measurements not to scale.) Our physiologies are now forced, on pain of death, to respond to this violent guest.

We can’t now lock the virus out, as if it were an invader. But nor can we throw open our arms to it, as if it were a friend.

As Stamataki grimly notes, humans did indeed welcome the virus in—to our habitats, our houses, and our noses. Our bodies must make overtures to it that combine the microbial version of suspicion, curiosity, and detachment. We have to become doormen to the virus, not doormats.

“We have another set of metaphors at hand,” Knowles told me by email. “They’re tailor-made for our moment: the metaphors of science and medicine. Doctors, nurses, and support staff work with urgency, but their goal is life, not death. Their mandate is not to save the nation but rather to support humanity.” The language of instruction, practice, and the “do no harm” principle could have more explanatory and even predictive power than those drawn from war.

Humanity is externally heterogeneous, of course, and responses to the pandemic must be shared among nations. But each of us is internally heterogeneous also, filled with Manúcaliber biodiversity that defies the us-and-them rhetoric of war.

“Support”—as in life support, which extends the resources of an individual with community and technology—carries that plural with it. A single human must indeed pluralize, as she sounds an alarm, makes a 911 call, to multiply her resources with human community and medical professionals, who expand her body’s capacities with everything from words of comfort to Tylenol to IV hydration. When nurses and doctors further use ventilators and dialysis with a Covid-19 patient, the machines serve as supplementary lungs and kidneys to give her immune system time to get sorted.

Our bodies must make overtures that combine the microbial version of suspicion, curiosity, and detachment.

We have to become doormen to the virus, not doormats.

As unlikely as it seems in the thick of this pandemic, one day the new coronavirus will be priced into public health and economic calculations. The American health care system will never again be caught so short of protective gear, ventilators, and hospital beds. And then there’s the fate of the virus itself, which will join the swarm of microbes in which humans exist.

If a vaccine arrives, we’ll deliberately take it in, in small inoculating doses.

In wartime, an enemy army must be styled as hostile to allow for its destruction, but an insensate, nonliving virus has no such valence. Human bodies don’t aim to murder a new virus. “Viruses aren’t alive,” Janelle Ayres, a molecular and systems physiologist at the Salk Institute, put it in an email.

“So it doesn’t make sense to discuss them in terms of killing them.” Instead, immunologists speak of neutralization. The immune system can sometimes incorporate an initially alien

Certain patients seem to have cells that are easier to open and more readily forced into compliance with the nucleotides. But if their bodies hustle too obediently to satisfy the demands of the virus, before immune cells announce the breach, vital organs might be overrun. The virus has been accommodated, but at the expense of the organs of the host. In some patients, according to Randy Cron, a rheumatologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, an immune system might rev too high, oversupplying molecules called cytokines that, though usually protective, can attack and destroy vital organs. Some Covid-19 patients may die of the virus; others die of their own excessively aggressive immune response.

In some 97 percent of international cases, according to a preliminary estimate in The Lancet in February, the new coronavirus is said to “resolve.” What of the coronavirus particles—the ones whose spikes have been rendered impotent by antibodies—that persist in the bodies of those who outlive the siege? They’re neutralized—and bounced out. Now their image is on a blacklist: If the body encounters Covid-19’s face, the virus, it seems, is rapidly disarmed.

When and if a vaccine is developed, it will also likely teach the body, more quickly and at lower cost to our cells, what to look out for. This isn’t war. It’s enlightenment.

Rookies, once initiated, are often asked to do the worst chores.

So too the new antibody, with its powerful memory, will have to play bouncer, spotting and neutralizing chaos agents at a glance. And there will be more breaches. There will likely be another Covid season, and another, and another. But the virus will be known and seen—familiar as a regular, if troublesome, visitor to the jungle of bugs inside us.

Once we learn a particular operation—in math, say—we can recognize and solve problems that require it when they surface the next time, with decreasing effort. We’ll recognize this pathogen when it comes around again. During the vertigo of the quarantine spring of 2020, one of the few consolations is that this coronavirus will never be novel again.

She is the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. She is also a cohost of Trumpcast, an op-ed columnist at the Los Angeles Times, and a frequent contributor to Politico. Before coming to WIRED she was a staff writer at the New York Times—first a TV critic, then a magazine columnist, and then an opinion writer.

How to Attract Buyers in the Modern Business-to-Business Market

By Brady Behrman

Business-to-business sales and marketing have evolved rapidly over recent years as digitization has transformed the way buyers research and procure products and services.

Buyers are more conscious of the need to extract the maximum

That’s true of buyers of any size, from business units in global

value from the supply chain, mainly because digitization has

corporations to small local companies.

provided platforms and tools that allow them to collect and analyze more supply chain and procurement data than ever before.

Buyers also have access to richer and more diverse product

What can B2B suppliers do to ensure that buyers have access to the information they expect?

E-Commerce Is No Longer Optional

and supplier information than in the past: Google is now a

Not too long ago, B2B sellers could rely on a prospective

primary research tool for procurement professionals.

buyer to pick up the phone early in the vendor selection

In short, there is an information revolution at all levels of the B2B market. Sellers no longer have control over the flow of information to buyers, and buyers are intolerant of systems and processes that attempt to limit their access to information: They expect relevant and detailed information to be available to them at their convenience, and they are wary of having to go through the gatekeeper of a seller’s sales department.

process. Today, buyers get much deeper into the purchase funnel before they make contact with a seller’s sales department. They often want to talk to a salesperson at some point in the sales process, but initial vendor selection is based on independent research informed by company and product information that can be found online.

Today, when a buyer can’t find sufficient information online,

groupisd.com

61 their next step is not to contact the vendor’s sales team but to drop the vendor from consideration altogether. That’s most likely the case in highly competitive sectors.

In short, if several suppliers are acceptable to a buyer, those that provide the most useful data online stand a greater chance of making it through the initial selection stages.

E-commerce is perhaps the most effective way of ensuring that adequate information is available online. Modern e-commerce applications are designed for presenting products and services with rich details in the areas that buyers care most about, particularly product specifications and pricing. They are, essentially, content management systems built for selling, making them more effective at information presentation than the less sophisticated catalog or listing solutions of the past.

E-commerce applications also include features designed for B2B sales. Those more focused on consumer retail such as Magento and WooCommerce can be enhanced with extensions and plugins to adapt them to B2B. Meanwhile, enterprise B2B platforms such as IBM Websphere and Oracle’s Netsuite SuiteCommerce come with bulk ordering, customer-specific catalogs, and other business-to-business sales features.

E-commerce is also essential for search engine optimization.

Most business buyers start the research process with Google.

There’s nothing particularly surprising about that; it’s the natural starting point for any research. But, because so many business buyers rely on Google, sellers that don’t rank well are at a considerable disadvantage relative to competitors with e-commerce pages that rank in Google for relevant queries. If your products don’t have a prominent spot on Google searches, your buyers may never know they exist.

Purchase Decisions Aren’t Purely Rational We expect business buyers to be more rational than consumers. Few procurement professionals make spurof-the-moment decisions, and there is often a long list of criteria that a seller should comply with to be considered.

Nevertheless, nonrational factors can have a surprising impact on procurement decisions.

In “The B2B Elements of Value,” management consultants Bain & Company offer a hierarchical breakdown of the factors that influence B2B buyers—organized as a pyramid.

The foundations are what you would expect: meeting specifications, acceptable prices, scalability, and quality, among others. Beyond those basic requirements, Bain lists less-concrete factors, including personal factors such as good design and reduced anxiety, and career factors such as reputational assurance.

Design and aesthetics are interesting factors because they’re not something B2B businesses have focused on in the past.

You may be familiar with the “design” qualities of older enterprise software and catalog sites. But, the prevalence

of SaaS software, the elegant design of modern online retail stores, and a general improvement in online design have conditioned us to expect something better than traditional enterprise design.

The aesthetics of online information sources have an important, if unconscious, influence on business buyers’ decisions.

Once again, e-commerce plays an important role here.

The best modern B2B e-commerce platforms have learned many lessons from consumer retail, and it’s easy today to construct an e-commerce presence that is both visually and functionally impressive.

Integration and Automation As part of a push to exert greater control over spending and procurement, businesses have widely adopted e-procurement and spend-management platforms. SAP Ariba, Coupa, Jaggaer, and similar platforms allow businesses to enforce procurement policies and automate workflows.

E-procurement is far more effective when procurement data can be automatically gathered from suppliers and when tasks such as the generation and communication of requisition orders, purchase orders, and invoices happen automatically.

To make full use of their e-procurement platform, buyers also benefit from punchout catalogs, which allow them to access supplier catalogs from within the e-procurement system.

This type of automation is only possible if suppliers support integration with their buyer’s e-procurement platform, and, once again, e-commerce is the simplest way to meet the buyer’s need for integration. Via new Cloud integration gateways, it is possible to integrate any e-procurement platform with any e-commerce application.

Earlier, we referred Bain’s B2B Elements of Value pyramid.

We mentioned only a few of the elements that go into a B2B buyer’s decision. Others include time savings, reduced effort, and decreased hassle, along with information, transparency, connection, and integration. It’s easy to see why buyers are enthusiastic about working with sellers who can offer integration and automation.

Conclusion The B2B market has evolved at a slower pace than the consumer retail market, but we see many of the same pressures: the desire for transparency, superior user experiences, self-service, and automation. B2B suppliers who leverage eCommerce and other digital tools will flourish, and those who don’t will be challenged as buyers seek partners who can better fulfill their needs.

Brady Behrman is the CEO and a founding partner of PunchOut2Go, provider of punchout catalog solutions for suppliers, order-to-invoice automation, and B2B e-procurement solutions.

Book,

&

Line

Sinker

Hello, My Name Is Awesome: How to Create Brand Names That Stick Paperback – September 15, 2014

Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands 1st Edition

by Alexandra Watkins Every year, 6 million companies and more than 100,000 products are launched. They all need an awesome name, but many (such as Xobni, Svbtle, and Doostang) look like the results of a drunken Scrabble game.

“When everybody zigs, zag,” says Marty Neumeier in this fresh view of brand strategy. ZAG follows the ultra-clear “whiteboard overview” style of the author’s first book, THE BRAND GAP, but drills deeper into the question of how brands can harness the power of differentiation.

Creative Strategy and the Business of Design Paperback – June 14, 2016

Logo Modernism (English, French and German Edition) (German) Hardcover – September 3, 2019

By Marty Neumeier

By Douglas Davis

By Jens Müller, R. Roger Remington

Remaining relevant as a creative professional takes more than creativity--you need to understand the language of business. The problem is that design school doesn’t teach the strategic language that is now essential to getting your job done.

Modernist aesthetics in architecture, art, and product design are familiar to many. we recognize a time of vast technological advance which affirmed the power of human beings to reshape their environment and to break, radically, from the conventions or constraints of the past. Less wellknown, but no less fascinating, is the distillation of modernism in graphic design.

Thinking with Type, 2nd revised and expanded edition: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students

Careerkred: 4 Simple Steps to Build Your Digital Brand and Boost Credibility in Your Career Paperback – 4 April 2017

By Charles Doyle

By Ryan Holiday Are you looking to change your career but have been told: “You don’t have the experience?” If so, CareerKred provides you with the step-by-step guide you need to build a brand online that will help you demonstrate your expertise online and boost credibility in your career.

Our all time best selling book is now available in a revised and expanded second edition.

Thinking with Type is the definitive guide to using typography in visual communication, from the printed page to the computer screen

Branding: In Five and a Half Steps

By Michael Johnson Michael Johnson is one of the world’s leading graphic designers and brand consultants. His studio, johnson banks, is responsible for the rebranding of many notable clients, including Virgin Atlantic, Think London, BFI, Christian Aid, and MORE TH>N, and he has garnered a plethora of awards in the process.

Identity Designed: The Definitive Guide to Visual Branding Hardcover – January 22, 2019

By David Airey Ideal for students of design, independent designers, and entrepreneurs who want to expand their understanding of effective design in business, Identity Designed is the definitive guide to visual branding.

brandknewmag.com

63

Build Your Brand Mania: How to Transform Yourself Into an Authoritative Brand That Will Attract Your Ideal Customers

Influencer Fast Track: From Zero to Influencer in the next 6 Months!:

By David Meerman Scott

YOU = INFLUENCER!! - Have a passion project you want to share with world? - Something amazing you always wanted to do, but don’t know how to reach an audience?

In this book, Matt Bertram reveals tactics and strategies to quickly build authority and create “trusted advisor status” in your market to dramatically gain mindshare with your prospects as well as increase your web presence...

Book of Branding: a guide to creating brand identity for startups and beyond Paperback – Illustrated, 11 November 2019

By Radim Malinic Book of Branding is a creative guide for new businesses, start-ups and individuals, which puts visual identity at the heart of brand strategy. The conversational, jargon free, tone of the book helps the reader to understand essential elements of the brand identity process.

Wally Olins. Brand New.: The Shape of Brands to Come Paperback – 1 March 2014

By Wally Olins Wally Olins’s fascinating book looks at every aspect of the world of branding. With his customary flair and no-nonsense prose, he analyzes the problems facing today’s organizations, praises those companies who seem to be building and sustaining brands successfully in our brave new world, and predicts the future of branding.

By Gundi Gabrielle, SassyZenGirl

Design is Storytelling Paperback – 16 November 2017

By Ellen Lupton A playbook for creative thinking, created for contemporary students and practitioners working across the fields of graphic design, product design, service design and user experience.

Design is Storytelling is a guide to thinking and making created for contemporary students and practitioners working across the fields of graphic design, product design, service design, and user experience.

Rise of the Youpreneur: The Definitive Guide to Becoming the Go-To Leader in Your Industry and Building a Future-Proof Business Paperback – 20 February 2018

By Ray Edwards In late 2014, internationally acclaimed blogger and podcaster Chris Ducker coined the term “Youpreneur” to describe the rise of the personal brand entrepreneur, a new business model that very few people saw coming.

By Karen Kang

Pop!: Create the Perfect Pitch, Title, and Tagline for Anything Paperback – 3 February 2009

Globalization and social media have made the world smaller, more connected and infinitely more competitive. The world has changed. Have you? If you dont have the package that will take you to the next level of your career, you need to reinvent your personal brand.

Why do some ideas break out and others fade away? What causes people to become so excited about a product that they can’t wait to tell their friends? How can an idea be communicated so that it catches fire in people’s imaginations?

Brandingpays Hardcover – 15 January 2013

by Sam Horn