BrandKnew June 2020

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

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06.20#92

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Dear friends: I will really be breaking the chain if I don’t ask the preliminary, fundamental question of whether or not you and yours are safe and well. The battle against an invisible enemy marches on and it looks like we have a long haul ahead of us. Staying resilient and together in spirit is the best ammunition we can adopt at this juncture. The June issue of BrandKnew has, by design, eschewed any features or articles specific to the Covid 19 as there has been an avalanche of it in the past few weeks. But articles like ‘ Who is tomorrow’s marketer? ‘ and the ‘ Importance of Human Connection being the key to effectiveness ‘ will definitely interest our readers. Advertising has been getting relentless bad press and we take a look at Why Advertising has become crappy for exactly the same reasons. For the marketers who are devout about their social obligation and the kind of positive impact brands can have on society, the article on Marketing Meets Mission will be great fodder. We also take a look at some of the Key Learnings from the most effective marketing campaigns and how brands can look at empirical evidence and actionable intelligence from them. Online fraud, the misuse of AdTech is finding increasing resistance and therefore we featured ‘ Why don’t we ban targeted advertising ‘ in this issue. With Voice Search gaining in prominence, brands have an obligation to protect their customer’s voices. All crisis throws up bold opportunities for brands and organisations. We examine some in this edition. CSR has been at the receiving end due to the lip service that it has received but given the context and times we are in, Corporate Responsibility in the Digital Era is highly significant. Read about it in this issue. There is substantial amount of highly utilitarian content in this edition and I leave you to explore it as you deem fit.

Till the next, my very best. Stay safe. Stay well.

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Suresh Dinakaran @ISDGlobalDubai

@Brandknewmag

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Business Development Director: Rishi Mohan 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

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CONTENTS Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?

Marketing Meets Mission The future is not what it used to be: Thoughts on the shape of the next normal Who is tomorrow’s marketer?

Half of online adspend never reaches publishers,new study finds Three lessons from the most effective campaigns 5 Reasons Why Advertising Is Crappy Our Invincible Ignorance DiscoveryDriven Digital Transformation Mindful Living for Marketers: MarketingProfs Founder Allen Weiss on Marketing Smarts [Podcast] How Gary Vee, Mark Cuban, and Arianna Huffington Build Bold Opportunities In A Time Of Crisis Human connection is key to effectiveness – a neuroscience perspective Hear Lebron James And Nike’s Pep Talk To Motivate You For A Sports-Like Comeback Corporate Responsibility In The Digital Era Prepare to Protect Your Customers’ Voices Book, Line & Sinker

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Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?

By Wired Staff

From protecting privacy to saving the free press, it may be the single best way to fix the internet.

YOU PROBABLY REMEMBER this moment. It was April 2018, the peak of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and Mark Zuckerberg was testifying before an angry Congress.

Republican senator Orrin Hatch, then 84 years old, asked how Facebook could make any money by offering a free service. “Senator, we run ads,” Zuckerberg replied, breaking into a smirk. The exchange went viral as a testament to congressional ignorance—can you believe this old guy doesn’t know how Facebook works?

In fact, Hatch did know. Senators, like lawyers, often ask questions to which they already have the answer. But the moment was deeply revealing for another reason. In the nearly two years since that hearing, policy makers have been trying to figure out what to do about Facebook and other social media giants. They have argued over whether to revoke platforms’ Section 230 immunity, launched a barrage of antitrust investigations, and introduced a number of competing privacy bills into the Senate. Above all, they’ve tried to browbeat the companies into adopting better policies

around things like fact-checking, content moderation, and political ads.

What they haven’t done is question social media’s underlying business model.

Jump ahead to another hearing, this past January. Another old Republican member of Congress, Ken Buck, was questioning another young tech executive, Basecamp cofounder David Heinemeier Hansson. “I don’t really care if they tell fifteen tee-shirt companies that I’m out looking for a tee-shirt,” Buck said. “It’s another thing when you’re trying to use that information in ways that I explicitly don’t want that information used. And so, what’s the answer there?” This was nothing new: a lawmaker in Washington who took for granted that our online behavior will be shared with advertisers, only then to wonder how one might contain the damage that ensues.

But this time, his tech-world witness would reject the premise.

The solution to our privacy problems, suggested Hansson, was actually quite simple. If companies couldn’t use our data

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From that fact flowed a straightforward fix: “Ban the right of companies to use personal data for advertising targeting.”

If Hansson’s proffer—that targeted advertising is at the heart of everything wrong with the internet and should be outlawed—sounds radical, that’s because it is. It cuts to the core of how some of the most profitable companies in the world make their money. The journalist David Dayen argued a similar case in 2018, for the New Republic; and since then, the idea has quietly been gaining adherents. Now it’s taken hold in certain parts of academia, think-tank world, and Silicon Valley.

The thinking goes like this. Google and Facebook, including their subsidiaries like Instagram and YouTube, make about 83 percent and 99 percent of their respective revenue from one thing: selling ads. It’s the same story with Twitter and other free sites and apps. More to the point, these companies are in the business of what’s called behavioral advertising, which allows companies to aim their marketing based on everything from users’ sexual orientations to their moods and menstrual cycles, as revealed by everything they do on their devices and every place they take them. It follows that most of the unsavory things the platforms do—boost inflammatory content, track our whereabouts, enable election manipulation, crush the news industry—stem from the goal of boosting ad revenues. Instead of trying to clean up all these messes one by one, the logic goes, why not just remove the underlying financial incentive? Targeting ads based on individual user data didn’t even really exist until the past decade. (Indeed, Google still makes many billions of dollars from ads tied to search terms, which aren’t user-specific.) What if companies simply weren’t allowed to do it anymore?

“To me, banning targeted ads is the ultimate root-cause solution when it comes to privacy,” Hansson told me.

Seemingly every week, there’s another article exposing some company’s creepy behavior. A recent European study, for example, found that the gay dating app Grindr was sharing user data, including precise location history, with 35 different third parties.

But while each revelation is disturbing, the stories shouldn’t really shock us. The behavioral advertising business model has given rise to a teeming ecosystem of adtech firms, including data brokers, that pass user information through each step of the chain between publishers and advertisers.

It’s all perfectly legal and very profitable, which explains why established companies like Adobe, Comcast, and Amazon have been getting in on the action. “The only reason that Facebook and others are collecting this data, buying this data—stealing this data—is because the data is so valuable,” Hansson said. “If you reduce the value of that data to near zero, then the entire incentive disappears.”

“Privacy” is only one way of describing the issue. Other experts blame the ad-driven business model for the proliferation of hateful and false content on social media. In a 2019 essay for the Knight First Amendment Institute, Jeff Gary and Ashkan Soltani argued that “restricting or lessening” the ability to microtarget ads would be more effective, and raise fewer free speech issues, than any law policing online discourse.

The market for such ads creates incredible demand for users’ attention on both the front and back ends: the more time you spend on Facebook, the more finely it can target you and the more ads you’ll see. Combine that with the fact that users gravitate toward provocative content, and you can see where things might go. In the past, at least, sensationseeking publications had to worry that sinking too far into the gutter would alienate their advertisers. Now the gutter is a money pit.

Then there’s politics. A 2018 study by researchers at Data and Society concluded that “today’s digital advertising infrastructure creates disturbing new opportunities for political manipulation and other forms of antidemocratic strategic communication.” Sally Hubbard, director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank, takes the argument further in a forthcoming book. “I honestly believe we are not going to solve any of the problems that we’re worried about, like election interference and disinformation, unless we ban targeted advertising,” she told me recently. Facebook, she said, has created a “manipulation machine” that can be used to discourage black voters just as easily as to sell sneakers. (Facebook didn’t reply to requests for comment.) “It’s the business model that’s the problem.”

If this nascent movement had a motto, that would be it: the business model is the problem. The task of regulating an increasingly out of control digital environment often looks like a multifront war against various enemies: privacy breaches, hate speech, disinformation, and more. What if we had a weapon that could bring all those armies to their knees?

LET’S PRETEND IT really happened. Imagine Congress passed a law tomorrow morning that banned companies from doing any ad microtargeting whatsoever. Close your eyes and picture what life would be like if the leading business model of the internet were banished from existence. How would things be different?

Many of the changes would be subtle. You could buy a pair of shoes on Amazon without Reebok ads following you for months. Perhaps you’d see some listings that you didn’t see before, for jobs or real estate. That’s especially likely if you’re African-American, or a woman, or a member of another disadvantaged group. You might come to understand that microtargeting had supercharged advertisers’ ability to discriminate, even when they weren’t trying to.

It’s true, the ads you came across while browsing might be for things you’re less inclined to buy. But a ban on targeted advertising wouldn’t mean the end of personalization. Spotify could still suggest Marvin Gaye based on your enjoyment of Sam Cooke. Bumble could still monitor your swipes to figure out your type. Netflix could still surmise that your life has felt empty ever since you finished season 7 of the Great British Baking Show, and suggest the appropriate spinoffs.

(For example.) What companies couldn’t do anymore is share their dossiers about you with adtech companies and advertisers. The geyser of behavioral data currently gathered for marketing purposes would slow to a trickle.

As a result, a lot less of your personal information would end up in the hands of data brokers and, from there, third parties like insurance companies, potential employers, or law

enforcement agencies.

With the market for our behavioral data mostly shut off, social media platforms and other free apps would have to come up with ways to replace lost ad revenues. A hard paywall for Facebook or Instagram would be unlikely, though—social networks can’t afford to kick off too many users. Instead, they might decide to add a premium option next to the existing free version. Meanwhile, if theorists like Gary and Soltani are right, your feed would slough off its most offensive, hateful content.

You’d probably be able to read about all these changes in a revived news media. The past decade has been devastating for journalism, with waves of job losses year after year. The rise of behavioral advertising isn’t the sole culprit, but it’s a big one. Newspaper ad revenue, steadily climbing until 2006, has plunged ever since. Where have advertisers taken their budgets instead? Overwhelmingly, to Facebook and Google and the advertising infrastructure they control. Take away their targeting advantage, and marketers would have to shift back to paying publications to reach their audiences, socalled “contextual advertising.” Getting rid of microtargeting wouldn’t singlehandedly restore journalism to its glory days, but it could help—a lot.

The proponents of a behavioral advertising ban paint a rosy picture: less discrimination, better civic discourse, a rejuvenated news media. What’s not to like?

“NOBODY LIKES ADVERTISING,” says John Deighton, a Harvard business professor who has studied the economic benefits of microtargeting. “They just like what they get for free as a result of it.” For Deighton, the existence of the

internet as we know it depends on behavioral advertising.

“The simple rejoinder to anyone who doesn’t like it,” he says, is that any viable alternative would leave you with either less content overall, or a vast network of subscription walls.

Other defenders of the status quo go further, suggesting that we would be forlorn without the steady companionship of our “relevant” online ads. “I think that relevant ads enhance the consumer experience,” said Dave Grimaldi, executive vice president of public policy at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the leading industry trade group. “I think they help serve the right ads to the right people at the right time.”

It’s possible that consumers are happy to have the most minute details of their lives surveilled and monetized in return for seeing ads they might want to click on. This is a hard theory to test, because very few people even know they’re making the trade. However, one organization recently tried to find out.

After the European Union’s landmark privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, went into effect in 2018, a Dutch public broadcasting agency started prompting all visitors to its website to choose, in a clear and straightforward manner, whether they wanted their data shared with advertisers. The result? Ninety percent opted out, and the agency abandoned behavioral advertising altogether. (A Google spokesperson notes that all users can opt out of personalized ads, and that Google has long prohibited personalized advertising based on sensitive information.)

Meanwhile, according to Google and others in the industry, microtargeting actually helps publishers to survive. Instead of siphoning off money, behavioral ads boost publishers’ bottom lines by providing their advertisers with more expensive, higher-value opportunities. “Data shows personalized ads

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are valuable for the entire digital advertising ecosystem: users prefer relevant ads and publishers make significantly more money from personalized advertising,” the company said in an emailed statement. Elsewhere, Google has argued that publishers would lose more than half their revenue if they stopped using the technique. Deighton has made similar findings, in a study commissioned by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

But recent academic research suggests that the effect is actually quite modest. Professors Veronica Marotta, Vibhanshu Abhishek, and Alessandro Acquisti compared a major online publisher’s revenue from ads served to users who had cookies enabled—meaning they could be targeted— against revenue from ads served to users who couldn’t be targeted. (Their paper is still in draft form.) After controlling for a variety of other factors, they found that the presence of the cookie alone accounted for a 4 percent average increase in revenue, or 0.00008 cents per click. That’s not nothing, but it’s a lot less than what Google claims—and it has to be weighed against what publishers could be making if the market weren’t dominated by the Facebook-Google duopoly.

And here’s a piece of anecdotal evidence: in 2019, the New York Times stopped running behavioral ads in Europe.

Revenues were unaffected.

Meanwhile, the ability to track users wherever they go tends to shift ad revenue from higher quality sites to less reputable ones. “The way the adtech system works is, it follows the reader from Wired.com all the way down to the cheapest possible place, the basement bottom-feeders on the internet, and will serve you the ads there,” explained Nandini Jammi, a former product marketer and co-founder of Sleeping Giants, which pressures brands not to advertise on sites that promote hate or bigotry. Jammi pointed me to worldlifestyle. com, whose homepage features a random jumble of yearsold articles on celebrities, self-help, and cute animals. It’s a content farm: a site designed not for human eyes, but to make money by harvesting ad clicks from bots.

Proponents of the business model claim, finally, that behavioral targeting is good for the little guy. Mark Zuckerberg even brought this up in Facebook’s most recent earnings call, committing himself to “standing up for giving small businesses more opportunity and sophisticated tools against those who say targeted advertising is a problem.”

Many small businesses, especially direct-to-consumer, do use behavioral ads to build their customer base. David Heinemeier Hansson told me his company, Basecamp, had success with a Facebook ad campaign in 2017. “Compared to everything else we did online, they were the most effective,” he said. “Targeted advertising works.” (Hansson added that he gave up on Facebook advertising anyway because he finds it objectionable.)

And yet, if behavioral advertising were such a boon to entrepreneurship, you might expect it to have spurred a wave of startup growth. Even more than a decade since the recession, though, both the startup rate and the share of Americans working for small businesses are at historic lows— in large part thanks to the rise of monopolistic companies like Facebook and Google, according to many experts.

Microtargeting might help some small enterprises get ahead, but that doesn’t mean it’s a boon overall. As with any business strategy, there are both winners and losers.

Entrepreneurs aren’t the only small fish who use targeting.

Political candidates who rely on a high volume of small donors also benefit from being able to target their appeals to the people most likely to respond. They could have a harder time campaigning in a post-microtargeting world. On the other hand, by far the biggest spenders on digital political ads this year are a trio of billionaires—Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, and Donald Trump—the first two of whom probably would never have even made it to a televised debate if not for their war chests. Which illustrates a fundamental truth: Digital platforms, like most technological advances in history, often end up delivering the biggest benefits to the already rich and powerful.

ONE AFTERNOON IN January, I sent a Twitter DM to an Irishman named Johnny Ryan. All I knew about him was that he worked on policy issues for Brave, a privacy-focused browser; another source had suggested I reach out. Ten minutes later, we were on a video call. Ryan, an academic turned tech-worker turned privacy crusader, talked me through the inner workings of the online ad industry from his home office in Ireland, and I came to realize why his perspective is so important. In the U.S., a handful of folks are suggesting that the behavioral advertising business model should be illegal. In Europe, a coalition of activists including Ryan are saying that it already is In a series of legal complaints filed around the continent, Ryan and his colleagues argue that most digital advertising brazenly violates Europe’s new privacy law. It all comes down to the “real-time bidding” system that connects advertisers with users. Usually, when there’s an opportunity to show you an ad, tens or hundreds or thousands of companies compete in an instantaneous and automated auction for your eyeballs. The idea is to connect you with the one who puts the highest value on someone with your precise characteristics. In the course of this auction, all these companies (plus perhaps a dozen intermediaries) gain at least transient access to your personal data.

But the GDPR generally forbids companies from processing user data without consent. It’s simply impossible, the activists argue, for users to consent to real-time bidding when there’s no way to know which companies are involved in the auction.

Ryan calls it “the largest data breach ever recorded.”

The law does offer a potential loophole: Companies can process user data if it’s necessary for their “legitimate interests . . . except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject.” The fate of the legal assault on real-time bidding may hinge on how European courts interpret that vague clause.

“If we are successful in our complaint, this indiscriminate sharing of data will have to end,” said Finn Myrstad, director of digital policy at the Norwegian Consumer Council, one of the other groups involved in the effort. “And if it ends in Europe, we’re also hoping that it will end around the world.

Because you will create other business models that are more privacy-friendly.”

The U.S. doesn’t yet have a national privacy law, let alone a

substantive debate over whether we should ban all behavioral advertising. But that could change faster than you might think. Just a few years ago, for instance, hardly anyone was talking about enforcing antitrust laws against the tech giants; now that idea motivates multiple investigations at the state and federal levels.

Perhaps the Overton window on behavioral ads will see a similar shift. Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout helped put anti-monopoly issues on the map in her upstart 2014 primary challenge to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Now she is part of the pushback against microtargeting. In early February, she co-authored a paper arguing that the dominant internet platforms should be treated as public utilities and prohibited from using behavioral ads. If telephone utilities aren’t allowed to eavesdrop on our conversations and sell the details to marketers, then Amazon or YouTube shouldn’t be able to do the same with our browsing history.

And while there’s no GDPR-style legislation in the works here, some proposals would move us in that direction. In California, an initiative on this year’s ballot would expand the state’s new privacy law to give users broader rights to opt out of both the sale and sharing of their data. That’s not the same as a prohibition, of course; but it does suggest that the era of behavioral advertising as a fact of life may be coming to an end. So does the fact that internet browsers have been moving to block third-party cookies. Members of Congress may now take it as a given that your tee-shirt shopping habits should be tracked and traded. Will they feel the same in 2022, or 2024?

Even the staunchest critics of the present system recognize that killing microtargeting wouldn’t be a panacea. The internet’s worst pathologies—its effects on discourse, media, privacy, and so on—defy any single remedy. Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, cautions that the practice of mining and monetizing user data has migrated to sectors like insurance, finance, and even automobiles— not to mention law enforcement, as the revelations about the facial recognition company Clearview AI remind us. And Roger McNamee, a former Zuckerberg confidant who is now a zealous bigtech antagonist, argues that microtargeting is only half the problem. Even a subscription-based social network would want to engage its users, he said, and what engages users is sensationalism and filter bubbles. “I do not think it is enough to address the damage of microtargeting if you don’t also deal with algorithmic amplification,” McNamee told me.

Even if a ban on microtargeting were merely a cure-some, rather than a cure-all, it could still be quite powerful. Instead of negotiating baroque regulatory regimes and opt-outs, just alter the incentives. Of course, there would be some victims of this change, some businesses that would struggle to adapt.

But Google could still make a fortune selling ads based on people’s search terms (currently around 60 percent of its revenue) and the content of YouTube videos. Facebook would still have its massive user base.

“Could all these [businesses] still exist? I think yes,” said Tim Libert, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon and a harsh critic of the surveillance economy. “The thing that won’t exist is this weird anomaly where some advertising companies—which is what they are—are the biggest, most powerful companies on the planet.”

Marketing Meets Mission

by Myriam Sidibe

A beer brand might seem an unlikely ally in the campaign to end violence against women. But the clear connection between alcohol and abusive behavior made Carling Black Label, the largest beer brand in South Africa, realize it had to take up the challenge.

The brand has long targeted men, and its messaging has been all about defining masculinity. In the 1980s its television ads featured cowboys who deserved a cold Carling Black Label as a reward for a long day’s work. In the 1990s, when South Africa abolished apartheid, Carling’s ads depicted a nation of builders: Ordinary men were now the heroes—strong, honest, and hardworking. In the 2000s the brand connected the beer with entrepreneurs and the rising generation of “self-made” men, the new role models.

That’s where things stood when AB InBev bought Carling’s owner, SABMiller, in 2016. Andrea Quaye, then AB InBev’s new vice president of marketing for Africa, understood how valuable the brand was, but she also knew it couldn’t continue with business as usual. As the acquisition was going through, local researchers were raising alarms about the country’s drinking problem. South Africans are among the heaviest drinkers on the continent, and men are by far the major consumers. This excess has many consequences, but among the most troubling are rates of murder and violence

targeting women that far exceed the global average.

Rather than trying to distance itself from the problem, Carling decided to confront it and use its clout to drive social change.

That required taking some responsibility—and risk. It wanted to keep South African women safe and maintain the brand’s leadership position, but at the same time, it had to stay true to its heritage as an emblem of masculinity.

The question was: How to do it?

Pursuing Purpose How do you get people to thoroughly wash their hands? Or to stay six feet away from others as part of a precautionary “social distancing” protocol? Or to refrain from visiting loved ones in nursing homes? These questions have taken on a life-or-death relevance during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

But long before they were in the headlines, I’d spent my career studying and trying to solve challenges like this. I’m convinced that brands can and must play a critical role in tackling global health issues, from violence to infectious disease to poor fitness and diet. Most of these problems can be prevented—often through the adoption of new behaviors and positive norms.

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Brands and companies with a social purpose energize employees.

Some of my interest in how businesses in general—and marketers in particular—can address public health problems comes from the years I spent living in regions where they’re acute. As the daughter of a United Nations economist and health official, I grew up in Mali and more than 20 other countries. As a professional adult I worked in dozens more, mostly emerging nations.

While earning a doctorate in public health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, I began to examine the ways that businesses could help improve global health.

One is through marketing, which, when infused with the right mission, can have a powerful impact. After all, influencing behavior is what marketers do best.

I officially joined Unilever in 2006 and soon became the company’s first social mission manager. I stayed there for more than a dozen years, and in that role I worked to embed public health goals into the business model of the company’s 125-year-old Lifebuoy soap brand. I engaged partners— including NGOs, UN organizations, and even competitors Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive—to help us launch

a vast initiative to promote handwashing throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where it could prevent disease and save hundreds of thousands of lives. In 2019 the brand hit its goal of reaching one billion people with handwashing messages, which have had a clear effect on behavior and health.

It’s hard to measure the impact of these messages precisely, in part because our effort is one of many public health initiatives that governments and others have set up. But a randomized, controlled trial involving 2,000 families in India showed that handwashing with Lifebuoy soap led to a 25% reduction in diarrhea, a 15% reduction in acute respiratory infections, and a 46% reduction in eye infections. Since the launch of the Lifebuoy programs we have also seen a sizable drop in child mortality due to diarrhea and pneumonia in countries where we established them. At the same time, Lifebuoy has become one of Unilever’s fastest-growing brands and is now the world’s best-selling antibacterial soap. In fact, at Unilever, brands with a social mission, including Lifebuoy, grew 46% faster than the rest of the business and delivered 70% of revenues from 2017 to 2018.

The handwashing program and others like it build on the concept of shared value, the idea—advanced by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer of Harvard Business School—that

companies should generate economic value in ways that promote social good. As they wrote nearly a decade ago, “Shared value is not social responsibility, philanthropy, or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve economic success.”

But while they described the social benefits that companies could provide through their products and value chains and through economic development, I’m focusing on those produced by brand activities and purpose-led marketing, such as communications and educational programs that promote more-healthful habits and positive norms.

A Framework for Brands That a soap brand would promote handwashing makes perfect sense. But, as AB InBev’s Quaye understood, the connection between a brand and its public health goals needn’t be obvious at first, though it does need to be rational.

In selling social programs to stakeholders, from management to partners to customers, a brand must make a solid case that it can positively affect behavior and that it has some license to try.

In my book Brands on a Mission I describe how a toothpaste brand helped address school absenteeism (oral health issues are a major cause); a building materials and equipment company improved poor sanitation in India, Bangladesh, and Tanzania; and, yes, a beer brand is tackling domestic violence. The connections between those brands and their health goals are legitimate if indirect. More often, brands leverage more-overt expertise and connections, as Lifebuoy did. However, even when the rationale is clear, it doesn’t mean that buy-in from stakeholders will be easy to get or that executing such initiatives will be straightforward.

In my work leading Unilever’s social mission programs and my research during my current sabbatical at Harvard, I developed a framework that can help any brand connect a purpose to its business and enhance its social impact. I describe it as a purpose tree, in which civic initiatives are simultaneously sustained by five deep roots: behavioral change, internal support, measurement, partnerships, and systemic change.

and on how simple and delicious it could be to add greens to stews. The campaign included celebrity testimonials and a school program featuring the Nigerian pop singer Yemi Alade, whose catchy “Toss, Stir, Crumble” song and dance moves helped drive home the point.

Once people started trying greens in stews, they became more likely to try greens in other dishes. A controlled study comparing leafy green and bouillon use in two towns—one exposed to the messaging and one not—showed that the program was decisively changing behavior. In the first town the number of people who added greens to stews increased 41% and people who added bouillon to soups rose 28%, while in the second those numbers rose only marginally.

In addition, the program helped position the brand as a champion of African mothers and daughters, driving its growth.

Since then the program has expanded into Kenya, where it focuses on adding spinach and sister-brand Royco cubes to the national dish sukuma wiki, and has been replicated in Myanmar and the Philippines. Knorr now promotes nutritiouscooking initiatives around the globe in collaboration with retailers and other partners, emphasizing 50 healthful ingredients (the Future 50) and encouraging consumers to use less salt and oil.

Basic marketing principles apply in any brand program, but there are some special considerations for marketers of brands with public health aspirations. Among the questions they should ask are these: • What behavioral changes can we promote that will most effectively support both the brand and its social goals, and will we be able to measure them?

• What is the best way for the brand to encourage these behaviors?

• Are we confident this effort will enhance existing public sector programs (in other words, are our efforts in this arena needed)?

1. Inspiring Behavioral Change

• Do we have the social license to mount an effective initiative (that is, will consumers and potential partners trust and embrace the brand in its purpose-based role)?

Typically the tools of marketers—market research, product innovation, communications, incentive schemes, and more— are used to increase profits, but they can just as readily be employed to change habits and social norms for the public good.

• Do we have the leadership support, resources, and expertise needed to pilot a successful initiative and scale it up?

Consider Knorr, a €3 billion Unilever brand that includes bouillon cubes, a century-old product line with a large global market. As part of a broad push to address malnutrition, Knorr identified iron-deficiency anemia as a serious health threat in developing countries, particularly for young women.

Focusing first on Nigeria, where nearly half of reproductiveage women suffer from anemia, Knorr developed a new iron-fortified bouillon product and launched a campaign encouraging women and teenage girls to add it and ironrich leafy green vegetables to stews.

Public health organizations had long been urging Nigerians to include leafy greens in their recipes but had been stymied by a belief that adding the greens would ruin foods’ flavor. So, rather than leading with the health benefits of iron, Knorr’s ads focused on mother-daughter bonding around cooking

2. Winning Internal Support No matter how dedicated its leaders are, a social initiative will struggle if it doesn’t have support throughout the organization, from the CEO to the front lines. At Unilever, I spent a lot of time gaining and maintaining internal backing.

It helped, of course, that our CEO at the time, Paul Polman, was visionary and threw his full support behind our social initiatives (a legacy embraced and extended by our current CEO, Alan Jope). But there certainly were individuals and functions that had to be brought along.

One of the biggest challenges of the Lifebuoy initiative, for example, was working with corporate communications, a function that is risk-averse in any company. Social-purpose initiatives are risky in a variety of ways, including their potential to damage the company’s reputation if they go sideways. But communications and many other functions,

including legal affairs, finance, and HR, are essential to the success of these programs, so program leaders must get them on board. In part this is a matter of simple evangelism— persistently sharing a program’s goals, expected benefits to the company and society, and actual impact. Recruiting likeminded colleagues from across the organization early on can be invaluable in helping sway people and functions that may be on the fence or may present obstacles.

Because social programs take years to get results and are demanding, they need corporate-level support, too.

Ultimately, most functions will probably play a role in a program. Some companies, including Unilever, even establish separate divisions for sustainable business, global advocacy and partnerships, or shared value, which support brands’ initiatives.

When attracting allies, expertise, and financing, be up-front about the challenges you face. Whether you’re pitching the program to a department, a unit, the CEO, or the board, be clear about the companywide commitment needed and the time and resources it will take to achieve large-scale impact. At the same time, be convincing about the benefits.

Frame the initiative as an investment, not a cost, one that can help the company differentiate itself, attract customers, stake

positions in future markets, gain valuable new capabilities (such as in product innovation and partnerships), and recruit and retain talent—all while demonstrating the company’s best qualities to the world and creating public good.

The impact on talent can’t be overstated: Brands and companies with a social purpose energize employees.

And passionate employees will knock down walls to solve problems and find creative ways to succeed. HR can become a crucial ally here, helping create career paths and incentive systems that reward employee engagement in the social mission and are appealing to potential hires.

3. Measuring Performance Tracking the impact of marketing is difficult, but measuring the effects on public health is particularly hard. The tools are still being developed, and the science is constantly evolving.

One thing I’ve learned at Unilever is not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Consider the challenge we faced with metrics for the Lifebuoy handwashing program. First we thought we’d simply track soap sales. But because people in our target countries regularly used soap for bathing, we weren’t confident that sales volume was a good proxy for handwashing. We thought

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about just asking people about their handwashing, but that would be subject to large reporting biases. We even piloted tracking handwashing by putting smart chips in soap bars, but we found they were prohibitively expensive and raised privacy concerns. Eventually, we decided to distribute diaries in which people could record their handwashing with stickers.

While this approach probably didn’t eliminate reporting bias, after testing it in partnership with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine we concluded that the results were accurate enough, and indeed this approach has now been validated by other organizations.

Despite the obstacles, measurement is essential. By tracking the resources devoted to different projects and the progress toward social goals, brands can identify the most cost-effective strategies. Project teams need to gather performance data on three levels: Brand level.

Are the efforts boosting sales, margins, and market penetration? Are they increasing purchase intent? Are they helping differentiate the brand and building brand equity?

Not only has Lifebuoy become one of Unilever’s fastestgrowing brands, but it had a compound annual growth rate of 9.6% from 2008 to 2018. The brand is now widely associated with handwashing programs in the public mind, and its social programs have helped it expand in African and Asian markets.

Organizational level.

Are the program’s purpose and performance sustaining project teams’ motivation? Are they attracting ongoing organizational support, including funding and other resources? Are they engaging employees and helping recruit and retain talent?

Inspired and supported by the Lifebuoy program, for instance, tens of thousands of Unilever employees have gone on to teach handwashing in their schools and communities, a good indicator of the program’s effect on engagement.

Public level.

Is the brand effort receiving continued support from business and public sector partners? Is it building trust and attracting favorable recognition, such as awards or praise from NGOs and the media? Is it providing access to partners and networks that the brand wouldn’t have otherwise?

For example, because we could show that the Lifebuoy program increased handwashing, health clinics have allowed us to talk to new mothers about hygiene. And as the program demonstrated its value, we were able to add millions of euros from governments, NGOs, and philanthropies to our own resources for piloting new programs and expanding existing ones. In addition, the brand has received hundreds of awards for its social mission work.

Implicit in these questions is the need for any brand claiming a social purpose to be accountable for its performance.

Stakeholders, including nonprofits, governments, investors, and consumers themselves, are reflexively skeptical when commercial brands say they care about social welfare.

Reliable measurements can reassure all parties that the brand’s efforts are actually doing good and aren’t just window dressing.

4. Securing Partnerships Most brands on a social mission aim to drive transformational change at scale. But they can’t do it alone. They need partners to supply complementary skills, expertise, resources, and networks, and must select them carefully to ensure a good fit on goals, process, budgets, and activities.

Partnering with governments and NGOs is mutually beneficial: A company’s resources and capabilities help the public sector achieve its goals, and the company gets legitimacy, support when entering markets and expanding, and fresh perspectives that galvanize innovation and learning.

Social-purpose partnerships among companies, and even competitors, may be less common, but they can deliver some of those same benefits and sometimes help firms get a lock on a desirable space in the market.

Partnerships played a critical role in Lifebuoy’s expansion of its public health mission. One of the most interesting launched in 2014, when Sightsavers, the world’s largest organization fighting preventable blindness, connected with Lifebuoy for help in eliminating trachoma, a leading cause of infectious blindness globally. Simple hand and face washing can reduce children’s risk by 60%.

Working with Sightsavers, Lifebuoy adapted its successful Super School of Five handwashing program, which features colorful superheroes designed by Craig Yoe, the Muppets’ creative director, to teach children good face hygiene and handwashing. The 21-day program includes a pledge, activities, games, songs and dances, competitions, and a certificate of completion and is supported by washing stations installed throughout participating schools. The initiative began in Kenya in 2015 and soon expanded to Ethiopia and Zambia, where hundreds of teachers were trained to deliver it. It has now reached 600,000 children in more than 300 schools. In concert with efforts by governments and other NGOs, the program helped reduce the prevalence of trachoma by 30% in two years.

Following these successes, we secured another partnership, this one with Big Win Philanthropy, to support Ethiopia’s Ministry of Health programs to reduce childhood stunting, which is caused in part by poor hygiene. And a promising partnership with the vaccine alliance Gavi promotes handwashing and immunization together in Uttar Pradesh in India. The program expects to reach 2.5 million people by the end of 2020, and discussions are under way to scale it up beyond India.

Through these and other alliances, Lifebuoy is gaining real-world knowledge about improving public health and expanding the brand in new markets. Most of Lifebuoy’s partnerships have used coinvestment or other models that pool its resources with partners’. Commenting on these arrangements, global partnerships director Anila Gopal says, “What was previously simply a good thing to have, because it helped build some credibility and add rigor to the programs, has now become the only way to do business.”

5. Driving Systemic Change The higher-level goal for social-purpose efforts should be to achieve long-term shifts in social norms and behaviors—by inspiring a groundswell of public support and collaborations that endure far beyond individual campaigns. The engine for

this is something I call “brand advocacy.”

Effective brand advocacy has several key characteristics. It promotes a positive vision for the future; it speaks to people’s sense of justice and shared humanity; it uses symbols, language, and cultural references that resonate; it calls for specific, repeatable actions; it gives people agency, making them actors rather than just beneficiaries; and it brings people and communities together on shared platforms and through organizational partnerships.

Certainly handwashing as a key to better health has taken root in countries and communities where it wasn’t the norm a decade ago. Parents, teachers, and children themselves are now spontaneously spreading the word about it. Unilever played a part in that, but it’s truly the result of extensive collaborations over many years.

Effective brand advocacy speaks to people’s sense of justice and shared humanity.

Let’s look at a new case, this one involving the insurance business—not everyone’s idea of a purpose-driven industry.

Discovery Limited is a diversified financial group. In only a decade it has become South Africa’s leading health insurer, in part by improving customer health through its Vitality program.

Vitality rewards customers with lower premiums if they adopt healthful behaviors, and it screens their progress through a program called Vitality Healthcheck, which tracks body mass index, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels. It also encourages and tracks exercise and good nutrition. From 2015 to 2018 the percentage of program members who regularly exercised increased by 34%, members’ vegetable purchases increased by 29%, and their sugar and salt purchases fell by 33% and 31%, respectively.

Members also can get up to 25% cash back on fresh fruit, vegetables, and 6,000 other selected products. South African retailers have embraced the concept, with some stores devoting an entire section to Vitality-qualified foods. While the program may seem invasive (and indeed it uses tracking devices from Apple, Garmin, and Suunto to gauge activity), customers are flocking to it for the rewards; the number of Vitality Healthchecks performed increased by 55,000 (21%) during that three-year period.

Other leading insurers—AIA, Generali, John Hancock, Manulife, Ping An, and Sumitomo Life—have launched their own Vitality programs, and in 2018 they and Discovery signed a pledge committing to a goal of helping 100 million people become 20% more active by 2025. The pledge aligned the Vitality programs with the World Health Organization’s Global Action Plan on Physical Activity and

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requires competing insurance companies to cooperate in achieving that goal.

What’s the upshot? Customers are clearly becoming healthier, and Discovery is saving a boatload of money. Vitality estimates that its healthier insurance pool saved Discovery the equivalent of $1.2 billion from 2008 to 2018. Vitality is benefiting all involved—the insurers, retailers, technology partners, and consumers. It’s a textbook case of creating shared value.

The Framework in Action Let’s return now to Carling and its efforts to prevent violence against women. I’ve chosen to highlight this initiative because the stakes are so high and the obstacles for the brand so formidable. Unlike a soap brand pursuing hygiene goals, an alcoholic beverage that claims it wants to reduce violence against women must confront the fact that it contributes to the very problem it’s seeking to solve.

As the World Health Organization notes, “The research supporting the relation between all forms of aggression and alcohol use is enormous [and] unequivocal.” This connection is not lost on the public; during radio interviews about Carling’s antiviolence programs, Quaye says, she was “lambasted by listeners” who accused Carling’s initiative of being nothing but a marketing ploy.

Nonetheless, Carling is showing sustained commitment to an issue it surely has an obligation—and the resources—to address. Let’s look at some of its current programs and the considerable work that remains if the brand is to effect broad change and lay a legitimate claim to its purpose.

In 2017, Carling launched a TV and social media campaign against gender-based violence under the hashtag #NoExcuse. It sponsored a men’s march that drew 8,000 people, released five million #NoExcuse cans of beer, and called on South African men to take a pledge to combat violence against women. Building on this, Carling worked with Ogilvy, the global media communications firm, and indaHash, an influencer marketing firm, to take its message to the Soweto Derby, a biannual soccer match that transfixes much of the country.

Just before the March 2018 match began, a group of women formed a circle in the center of the field and launched into “Asambe Nono,” the South African soccer anthem, but with new lyrics. The song now described a man returning home after his team had lost and threatening his partner in frustration, and it repeated the refrain “No excuse for women’s abuse.” The two soccer teams, the Orlando Pirates and the Kaizer Chiefs, joined in as well. The players wore #NoExcuse armbands during the series of games and posed with a banner at the end. Analysts reported that the Soccer Song for Change campaign reached 45 million people.

That year an AB InBev corporate program also launched pilots that sent “smart-drinking squads” into taverns in two poorer communities to work with owners and patrons.

The squads trained men to become models of responsible alcohol consumption. Building on that work, the Carling brand then engaged with a local social entrepreneur, Craig Wilkinson, founder of the not-for-profit Father a Nation,

to take the squad concept to local soccer associations and colleges and to train “champion men”—influencers who could return to their communities to lead workshops on a range of topics related to men’s roles in society, including violence prevention. Wilkinson explains, “We work with local structures in each community. The whole idea is to ignite a fire, to create a movement that doesn’t need a big infrastructure or constant involvement from us.” By the end of the first year, Carling’s training, workshops, and camps had reached 30,000 people.

The brand now intends to engage other companies in a collaboration to reach one million men by 2025, and AB InBev has committed $1 billion to social marketing and related activities aimed at reducing the abuse of alcohol. In addition, the company plans to ensure that no- or low-alcohol beer products represent at least 20% of its global beer volume by the end of 2025, up from 8% in 2019. (To date it has launched no-alcohol beers in key markets and low-alcohol beers in Canada, South Africa, Australia, and Europe.) “#NoExcuse is the practical embodiment of the dream of helping men become the greatest version of themselves and giving them the tools to fundamentally change society,” says Carling’s brand director, Arné Rust. “Change this deep won’t happen quickly, but we are committed to continuing for however long it takes.”

These are good efforts, but are they achieving the brand’s social goals? The answer is yes, and not yet. Certainly awareness of the problem is growing: Surveys of representative samples of South Africans find that 69% of 18-to-24-yearolds believe the campaigns “break through the silence on domestic abuse.” And the proportion of men now taking a public stand against gender-based violence has risen from 30% to 42%.

But Carling has yet to show that these campaigns have reduced alcohol abuse or violence against women. To be sure, the programs are still young—the champion men effort launched just a year ago. As I found with Lifebuoy, it can take a decade to have a substantial social impact, and measuring it is exceedingly complicated. Nonetheless, all eyes are now on Carling and AB InBev. To succeed they will need to pursue all the strategies laid out in this article.

CONCLUSION Almost any brand can embrace a social mission that supports the business and makes a real contribution, even a brand whose relationship to that mission is subtle or fraught. But all effective programs will be long-term and challenging and will involve many stakeholders, including governments and NGOs, employees, customers, and communities—and perhaps even competitors.

I’ve focused here on public health goals, but any of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals can serve as a starting point for a brand in search of a mission. They address poverty, hunger, education, climate action, gender equality, economic opportunity, and other global challenges.

The framework described here, which has been tested and refined over more than a decade, can help any business or brand start on a purpose-driven journey or accelerate it, build momentum, and produce real change.

The future is not what it used to be: Thoughts on the shape of the next normal

By Kevin Sneader and Shubham Singhal

Dealing with the coronavirus crisis and its aftermath could be the imperative of our times. Indeed, we have argued that it augurs the “imminent restructuring of the global economic order.” As Ian Davis, one of our previous managing partners, wrote in 2009 in the midst of the global financial crisis: “For some organizations, near-term survival is the only agenda item. Others are peering through the fog of uncertainty, thinking about how to position themselves once the crisis has passed and things return to normal. The question is, ‘What will normal look like?’ While no one can say how long the crisis will last, what we find on the other side will not look like the normal of recent years.”

It is impossible to know what will happen. But it is possible to consider the lessons of the past, both distant and recent, and on that basis, to think constructively about the future.

We believe the following elements will be important in the shaping of the next normal—and that business leaders will need to come to terms with them.

1. Distance is back In the mid-1990s, the idea of the “death of distance” gained currency. The thinking was that new web-based and telecom technologies had made it possible to communicate and work in new ways that dramatically reduced the value of physical

proximity. As the flow of information became cheap and seamless, global supply chains of bewildering complexity were able to deliver just-in-time products as a matter of routine. Cross-border trade reached new peaks. And the world’s burgeoning middle class took to travel and tourism with something like abandon.

Even before COVID-19 hit, there were signs of unease, expressed in calls for protectionism and more restrictive immigration and visa policies. In these ways, people sought, in effect, to create more distance from those unlike themselves.

Such attitudes were far from universal, of course. But to deal with the pandemic, governments around the world have imposed restrictions on people and goods of a severity not seen for decades. According to one study, more than three billion people live in countries whose borders are now totally closed to nonresidents; 93 percent live in countries that have imposed new limits on entry, because of the coronavirus. If a modern-day Hannibal wanted to cross the Alps peacefully, his elephants would be turned away. Eventually, the tourists will come back and the borders will reopen, but it is certainly possible that the previous status quo will not return.

Indeed, for businesses, the prospect of more border restrictions; a greater preference for local over global products and services; the need for resilience across supply

chains driving a move to bring sourcing closer to end markets (see element 2, “Resilience AND efficiency”); and perhaps renewed resistance to globalization, are all possible secondorder consequences of the actions being taken now to cope with the coronavirus. Technology continues to shrink physical distance, but in other ways, it could be set for a return.

2. Resilience AND efficiency Even when lockdown restrictions begin to ease, businesses will need to figure out how to operate in new ways. In short, resiliency—the ability to absorb a shock, and to come out of it better than the competition—will be the key to survival and long-term prosperity.

Again, the past can be a prelude. McKinsey research on the 2008 financial crisis found that a small group of companies in each sector outperformed their peers. They did get hurt, with revenues falling about the industry average, but they recovered much faster. By 2009, the earnings of the resilient companies had risen 10 percent, while that of the nonresilients had gone down almost 15 percent. What characterized the resilient companies was preparation before the crisis—they typically had stronger balance sheets—and effective action during it—specifically, their ability to cut operating costs.

This advice is still sound—but insufficient. COVID-19 could end up dwarfing the financial crisis in economic damage. In

that case, it will not be enough for many companies to tweak their business model; instead, they will need to rethink it.

One implication of this has to do with how supply chains operate; companies are finding themselves vulnerable because they cannot get the parts they need. Supply chains built on just-in-time inventory and distributed component sourcing may well have to be reconsidered, given the way many have been disrupted. Instead, companies will want to build backup and safety plans.

Other key elements of business structure will also be revisited.

For example, the Wall Street Journal observed that the crisis has revealed weaknesses in succession plans as leaders get sick and deputies quickly need to be found across all aspects of operations. Companies are learning the hard way that succession planning has to go much deeper than the C-suite, and much broader, responding to possible shortterm disruptions as well.

Investors are likely to take note, and to devise ways to incorporate resiliency more systematically into their valuations. Indeed, in the wake of recent natural disasters, the impact of climate change was increasingly being recognized by business leaders and investors, with consequent effects on decision making and valuations. This pressure to include environmental, social, and governance factors in valuing a business is likely to expand to incorporate resilience to

outside shocks, such as pandemics. In sum, many companies will rebalance their priorities, so that resiliency—in all its manifestations—becomes just as important to their strategic thinking as cost and efficiency.

trillion—the equivalent of eight Marshall Plans. Most spending is directed to three areas—supporting citizens’ basic needs, preserving jobs, and helping businesses to survive another day.

3. The rise of the contact-free economy

India is making direct cash transfers to needy citizens, and Indonesia is expanding social-welfare benefits to ten million more households. Britain and France are covering wages (up to 80 percent) of workers affected by COVID-19; Italy is suspending loan and mortgage payments; Brazil is easing labor regulations on companies. And central banks from Australia to Europe to South Africa to Canada are cutting rates.

In three areas in particular—digital commerce, telemedicine, and automation—the COVID-19 pandemic could prove to be a decisive turning point.

E-commerce was already meaningfully and visibly eating into the sales of brick-and-mortar stores. What the coronavirus has done is to accelerate a change in shopping habits that was already well established. Early indications from China, for example, are that new customers and markets—specifically individuals aged 36 and over and residents of smaller, less prosperous cities—have begun to shop online in greater numbers. In Europe, 13 percent of consumers said in early April that they were planning to browse online e-tailers for the first time. In Italy alone, e-commerce transactions have risen 81 percent since the end of February.

The figures for telemedicine and virtual health are just as striking. Teladoc Health, the largest US stand-alone telemedicine service, reported a 50 percent increase in service in the week ending March 20, and is adding thousands of doctors to its network. The Federal Communications Commission is spending $200 million to improve connectivity between patients and virtual-healthcare providers, and the US Department of Health and Human Services has increased reimbursements for telemedicine and enabled cross-state provision of virtual care. Sweden’s KRY International, one of Europe’s biggest telehealth providers, reported that registrations were up more than 200 percent. France and Korea have both changed regulations to ease access to telemedicine. With a vaccine or treatment at least months away, patients and healthcare providers both have reason to expand virtual interactions.

Greater automation was already occurring before COVID-19.

In late 2017, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that 60 percent of all jobs could see more than 30 percent of their key tasks automated, affecting 400 million to 800 million jobs around the world by 2030. According to the Brookings Institution, over the three recessions that have occurred over the past 30 years, the pace of automation increased during each.

In effect, it is becoming possible to imagine a world of business—from the factory floor to the individual consumer— in which human contact is minimized. But not eliminated: for many people, getting back to normal will include popping into stores again, and the roadside kiosks typical of much of the developing world are not about to be replaced by cashless hyperstores. Patients with complex needs will still want to see their doctors in person, and many kinds of jobs are not automatable. But the trends are unmistakable—and probably irreversible.

4. More government intervention in the economy During times of great crisis, such as World War II, citizens have proved willing to accept—even embrace—greater government control of the economy. Already, there has been economic intervention on a scale that hasn’t been seen for decades, if at all. As of April 10, governments across the globe had announced stimulus plans amounting to $10.6

As governments step up to serve, or save, the private sector, the means they choose will differ. Some countries will outright nationalize, some will take equity stakes, some will provide loans, and others will choose to regulate. If nonperforming loans require a second bailout, the banking sector could become something like a regulated utility in some markets.

A push to redefine the global public health ecosystem to better navigate possible future pandemics and related threats could provide additional impetus for cross-country publicsector intervention. In the same way that reform of financial institutions gained momentum in 2009, the same could be true for public health in the near future.

As McKinsey colleagues wrote in the context of climate change, “the tremendous costs of being the payor, lender, and insurer of last resort may prompt governments to take a much more active role in ensuring resiliency.” The implications for the role of the state will materially affect the way business is conducted; business leaders in many more sectors will have to adjust to the next normal of greater government intervention.

At some point, governments may decide to get out of the business of business; how they do so will be complicated and differentiated. How much, how fast, and in what ways governments reduce their economic role will be one of the most important questions of the next decade.

5. More scrutiny for business Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception in many countries that during the financial crisis, financial institutions were culpable for the trauma, accepted billions of dollars from taxpayers, and gave little back. Now citizens all over the world could face higher taxes and/or fewer services in order to pay for the $10.6 trillion committed so far. The public will expect— indeed, demand—that their money be used for the benefit of society at large. This raises complicated questions. What does it mean for businesses to do right by their employees and customers? If a financial institution accepts a bailout, how should it think about calling in loans? When, if ever, is it appropriate to resume buybacks and pay higher dividends?

Even before the coronavirus, there was a growing sense that shareholder value should not be the only corporate value. In August 2019, more than 181 US CEOs signed a statement committing themselves to other priorities—investing in employees, supporting communities, and dealing ethically with suppliers—in addition to shareholder value. The idea of the “triple bottom line”—profit, people, and planet—has become mainstream, as have socially responsible investment funds.

With many businesses likely to be operating to some extent with public money, the scrutiny will be intense. There will be real effects on the relations between government and business, and between business and society. That could show itself in the form of more regulation, particularly in regard to domestic sourcing and workforce safety. And as the coronavirus reveals or heightens awareness of social fractures, business will be expected to be part of finding long-term solutions.

together in order to address the current crisis.

The coronavirus could be the biggest global challenge since World War II. In the wake of that conflict came the question: “What did you do during the war?” That question will be asked, forcefully, of both government and business, once the COVID-19 battle has been won. Business leaders need to ask it of themselves now.

One has to do with the human imperative to communicate.

In this sense, the death of distance continues to be very real, and very positive. Individuals, communities, businesses, and governments alike are all learning new ways to connect: almost everyone knows a story of the grandparent who finally learned to Zoom, Skype, or FaceTime.

6. Changing industry structures, consumer behavior, market positions, and sector attractiveness One of the key questions facing business leaders is whether their industry will rebound from the economic shock posed by the virus, or sustain lasting damage. The answer to this question likely lies in an assessment of the degree to which industries find themselves susceptible to the elements highlighted in this article. For example, those that have shown themselves to be less resilient may find it difficult to regain their pre-COVID-19 standing. In the auto sector, for example, companies have relied on global just-in-timebased supply chains; they will be under pressure to change so that continuity of supply is just as valued as cost and speed to market.

In addition, there could be lasting changes to consumer attitudes toward physical distance, health, and privacy. For example, increased health awareness and a corresponding desire to live more healthily could bring lasting change to where, how, and what people eat. Some consumers and governments—but by no means all—may change their attitudes toward the sharing and use of personal data if it can be demonstrated that the use of such data during the crisis helped safeguard lives.

For millennials and members of Generation Z—those born between 1980 and 2012—this crisis represents the biggest disruption they have faced. Their attitudes may be changed profoundly and in ways that are hard to predict. The tourism, travel, and hospitality sectors may see their businesses subject to long-term changes in business and individual travel preferences. Concern over the possibility of other “black swan” events could change how consumers approach financial security—saving more and spending less. The list of questions about how consumers will behave after COVID-19 is long, and uncertainty is high. As a result, this is the subject of much research by McKinsey and others.

Given the intensity of these pressures, it is reasonable to question whether existing market positions will be retained without significant effort to reposition and respond to changes confronting industries and sectors as a whole. To this can be added the economic impact of stretched balance sheets and valuations leading to changes in business ownership.

In this context, it is possible that institutions may find new and enduring ways to collaborate, prompted by the regulatory and other changes that have enabled corporations to work

7. Finding the silver linings If necessity is the mother of invention—and it often is—there could be some positive outcomes of the coronavirus crisis.

These are unlikely to come anywhere near to compensating for the human and economic toll it is wreaking. However, given the general shortage of optimism at the moment, it may be heartening to consider a few encouraging possibilities.

For businesses, the consequences have been profound. Many have learned how to operate remotely—at a high level and at far greater speed. These practices could well stick, making for better management and more flexible workforces. Flexible work is often critical to support employees at different life stages such as parents with young kids, women during parts of their career, or affinity groups such as the disabled.

Business leaders now have a better sense of what can, and cannot, be done outside their companies’ traditional processes. Many are beginning to appreciate the speed with which their organizations can move once they change how they do things. In short, the coronavirus is forcing both the pace and scale of workplace innovation. Indeed, as businesses are forced to do more with less, many are finding better, simpler, less expensive, and faster ways to operate.

The urgency of addressing COVID-19 has also led to innovations in biotech, vaccine development, and the regulatory regimes that govern drug development, so that treatments can be approved and tried faster. In many countries, health systems have been hard to reform; this crisis has made the difficult much easier to achieve. The result should be more resilient, responsive, and effective health systems.

These silver linings are thin compared with the scale of the coronavirus catastrophe. Nurturing a next normal that will be better than what it replaced will be a long-term test of all our institutions, global and local, public and private. It will be critical to reconstruct for the future and not solve for the problems of the past.

One possible next normal is that decisions made during and after the crisis lead to less prosperity, slower growth, widening inequality, bloated government bureaucracies, and rigid borders. Or it could be that the decisions made during this crisis lead to a burst of innovation and productivity, more resilient industries, smarter government at all levels, and the emergence of a reconnected world. Neither is inevitable; indeed, the outcome is probably more likely to be a mix. The point is that where the world lands is a matter of choice—of countless decisions to be made by individuals, companies, governments, and institutions.

The early 20th-century British explorer Ernest Shackleton once noted, “Optimism is true moral courage.” Optimism and courage: these qualities are needed more than ever as leaders make the decisions that will shape the next normal.

Who is tomorrow’s marketer?

BY WARC STAFF

The marketing skillset is changing rapidly; by prioritising upskilling, soft skills and implementing continuous learning, brands can develop more effective marketing teams, says a leading specialist in media executive search.

This month, The WARC Guide looks at important structural considerations for brand marketers looking to drive more effective marketing – including the need for marketing departments to remain responsive and agile in a constantly changing digitally-powered world.

In Skillsets of the modern marketer: How to create a balanced, effective team, Joanna Reesby, partner and founder of media executive search firm Mission Bay, notes that while the core challenge faced by marketers remains much the same as it ever was – identifying the consumer, reaching them and motivating them to buy – the tools required to manage that have multiplied hugely, thanks to the volume of data now being captured.

“From data mining and analytics to category stratification and segmentation and from touchpoint planning to programmatic, measurement and real-time campaign optimisation, the marketing capabilities required can seem overwhelming.”

It’s also the case that many organisations face “an intergenerational skills imbalance” where younger, digital native employees can be strong on digital skills but light on strategy,

while the reverse is true for more experienced employees.

Achieving the right mix of skills in order to be effective, not just today but in the future, is a major issue.

Brand owners need an approach that is forward-looking, flexible and agile, says Reesby. “On top of this, they must think laterally and seek inspirational externally as well as internally.

“Effectively future-proofing the marketing team isn’t about bringing in new team members from other companies or upskilling existing talent, it’s about both.”

She highlights three things done by companies that build great marketing teams: • They look to recruit from beyond their immediate category.

• They implement continuous learning rather than relying on occasional workshops.

• They build a flexible internal culture that relies on networks rather than hierarchies.

The WARC Guide is a compilation of fresh new research and expert guidance with WARC’s editorial teams in New York, London, Singapore and Shanghai pulling in the best new thinking globally. It also showcases the best on WARC – case studies, best practice and data sourced from across the platform.

Half of online adspend never reaches publishers, new study finds

By ISBA, Financial Times

A major study has revealed the alarming extent of the labyrinth-like supply chain involved in online advertising, and reveals that around 50% of the money spent by advertisers is gobbled up by middlemen.

The two-year study, published by the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) and carried out by PwC, is the first to look in detail at the supply chain of online advertising, a market worth around £2 billion in the UK, and some £100 billion worldwide.

In addition to discovering that half a brand’s adspend never reaches the publisher, researchers also found they were completely unable to trace 15% of the money spent by advertisers.

“It’s important to realise that this study represents the most premium parts . . . the highest profile advertisers, publishers, agencies and adtech,” Sam Tomlinson, the PwC partner who led the study told FT.com.

“If examined, the ‘long tail’ would presumably further reinforce these findings,” he added.

Many publishers and advertisers will be unsurprised by the findings as they have long complained of poor value for money from the many levels of cost involved in programmatic advertising.

“The market is damn near impenetrable,” Phil Smith, ISBA director-general said. “As you start to break down the value chain for the impressions we have matched, the erosion of value is really significant.” He said the 15% of spending that was untraceable “was really shocking” and it was evidence of the need for shared standards and more transparency.

Fifteen advertisers took part in the study, including Disney, HSBC, Unilever and Nestlé. And data was collected from eight agencies, five Demand Side Platforms (DSPs), six Supply Side Platforms (SSPs) and 12 publishers, representing approximately £100 million of UK programmatic media spend.

The study lays bare the depth of the supply chain’s lack of organisation and complexity, the ISBA says. “A total of over a thousand distinct supply chains were found; across the 15 advertisers. Researchers were able to end-to-end match 290 chains (31 million impressions) all the way to the 12 publishers.”

Nigel Gwilliam, Director of Media Affairs at the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, said: “This report highlights the complexity of the programmatic supply chain and exposes the vital need and action points required for greater data standardisation and transparency across the adtech ecosystem.”

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Three lessons from the most effective campaigns

By WARC Team

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen brands attempt to shift emphasis from simply selling a product or service to effecting real-world change, but that’s what many of the most effective campaigns were already doing, according to a new WARC report.

Lessons from the Effective 100 is based on an analysis of the WARC Effective 100, a ranking of the world’s most awarded campaigns and companies for effectiveness. It identifies three themes.

Acts, not ads This new report says that ‘acts, not ads’ is a theme of effective campaigns that predates the current situation; “we’re here for you” emails won’t cut it.

The report notes that, in order to rise above the daily blur of messaging, brands are commonly aligning themselves to a ‘greater cause’, basing their principles on the acts they do and the experiences they create for their customers.

This was especially true of French supermarket Carrefour which stocked and sold produce grown from illegal seeds to demonstrate its commitment to biodiversity, to show support for small farmers and to drive legislation change.

engagement and positive sentiment, but also faster growth and higher share prices.

Multiple approaches to driving fame Ads don’t need to be traditional to be effective. The campaigns in this year’s Effective 100 stand out in the diversity of their approach to creative effectiveness, and the absence of a ‘traditional ad’ at the top of the table is notable.

The top campaigns frequently used fame-building tactics, often built on a highly PR-able idea with media in support; sociability, spin, salience and spectacle were all in evidence.

As Will Humphrey, Strategy Director at Wunderman Thompson, London, notes in the report: “It used to be that effective communications PR’ed the advertising. Now, increasingly, effective communications advertises the PR.” Asian innovation Six of the top ten campaigns, and 25% of the top 100, came from Asian countries. The combination of new tech adoption and fast-changing cultures and economies means that there is significant scope in Asia for innovation and marketingdriven growth.

“Invest in the actions behind the causes your brand is aligned to, building platforms for consumers to participate in and change their world,” the report advises.

The high mobile penetration in APAC, and relative proportion of mobile-only internet use in Asia is driving the use of mobile and apps as lead channel in four times the number of campaigns as elsewhere.

Doing so successfully requires integrity: closing gaps between purpose and actions is important to drive not just

At the same time, Asian campaigns are also more likely to use online video, while being less likely to lead with television.

5 REASONS WHY ADVERTISING IS CRAPPY

By Bob Hoffman, Ad Contrarian

There’s not much happening in adland these days other than massive layoffs and CEO’s giving earnings warnings. Who the hell wants to read about that? So today let’s ignore the unpleasant news and answer a question I get asked at least 5 times a week: Why is advertising so crappy?

Here are 5 reasons...

THE FIRST and perhaps most material reason advertising is crappy is that good advertising is very hard to create. Much harder than you think. There are very few people who can make excellent advertising on a consistent basis. I spent 40 years in the ad business and I created maybe 10 or 12 ads I think are really good. The rest were somewhere between okay and awful.

If you’re stuck at home in lockdown like I am, you’ve probably come to realize how many shitty TV shows, shitty movies, and shitty songs there are in the world. It’s not that people set out to create shitty things, they just turn out that way. Creating something excellent is amazingly hard.

The same is true of advertising. Nobody sets out to write bad ads, they just usually turn out that way. Talent is a rare and precious thing and contrary to pop-psych bullshit we are not all creative. In fact, hardly any of us are.

NEXT reason for ad crappiness is that ad agencies have lost confidence in the power of creativity. The advertising industry has devalued creativity in favor of technology, data, and other manifestations of business math. Sure, they still give lip service to creativity, but follow the money. For the past ten years agencies have been throwing lots of money at technology and data, but not at creative talent.

Publicis is a great example. They put tens of millions into a dumbass internal AI initiative called Marcel that looks to all the world like just another closed-loop social media whackoff. Imagine what they could have done for their business if they had taken the $20 million and hired an army of outstanding creative people instead?

that we associate with what we used to call junk mail -- ads with coupons, 800 numbers, and now “click here” buttons.

The brand building lineage usually produces a higher level of advertising.

I think we expected online advertising to be part of the Madison Avenue/brand building lineage. It has not been. It has been a super-charged direct response factory -- electronic junk mail. Sadly, the people trained in “clickonomics” are now running creative departments and have taken the online aesthetic to other forms of advertising.

FOURTH is the drift of talent away from ad agencies. Agency holding companies have become very large corporate entities with layers of obstacles between a good idea and the light of day.

Talented creative people have too many options these days to bother with the silliness of trying to convince corporate flat tires to understand what they’re trying to do. Consequently advertising has, in too many cases, become a last resort option for talented people. Furthermore, the ad industry’s unsavory complicity in the dangerous business of fraud and privacy abuse has turned off a lot of idealistic-minded young people.

It’s a double whammy. While young, talented creative people are less enthusiastic about entering advertising, experienced, proven creative people are being dumped by the busload.

For more about this, read Prisoners Of Pop Culture here.

FIFTH reason is that the wrong people are making ad decisions. MBAs are taught to think logically. They are taught the logic of cause and effect. If I do A then B will happen.

For most business activities cause and effect is the right way to think. Not advertising. Advertising doesn’t work in strictly logical ways.

THE THIRD crap enabler is the web. Let me explain.

It is the rare CMO, brand manager, or account manager who can understand and accept the baffling nature of ad effectiveness. Most are only comfortable with logical explanations. When the wrong people are making advertising decisions, the wrong advertising gets made.

In advertising, the tactical always drives out the strategic. The tactical, short-term nature of online advertising has taken precedence over the long-term, strategic belief in brandbuilding advertising.

All this is not to say that there aren’t brilliantly talented people in advertising or that wonderful advertising isn’t being made. There are and there is. But the ratio of good to crap is diminishing and it is a serious and deeply concerning issue.

The great Doc Searls says that advertising has two major lineages. The first lineage is the Madison Avenue style brandbuilding lineage that we associate with major brands like Coke and Nike. The second is the direct response lineage

Sadly, advertising has always been mostly an annoyance, but never so much as now. The amount of advertising we are subjected to is growing at an alarming rate and the quality of that advertising is steadily eroding. This is not a good thing.

OUR INVINCIBLE IGNORANCE

By Bob Hoffman

The disgrace of online advertising reached some kind of wretched crescendo this week as a report emerged detailing how advertisers are being fucked blind by the adtech industry.

The ISBA (the UK equivalent of the ANA in the US) released a report on a study conducted over a two year period by PwC that unambiguously laid out the absurd wastefulness of the hideous adtech “ecosystem.”

The study was conducted to establish what component of an ad budget invested in programmatic online advertising

actually pays for advertising.

Fifteen major advertisers, including Disney, Unilever and Nestlé participated in the study as well as 8 agencies, 5 DSPs, 6 SSPs, and 12 publishers. Also participating in the project were Google’s dv360 and Ad Manager, Amazon Advertising, and the Rubicon Project.

“It’s important to realise that this study represents the most premium parts . . . the highest profile advertisers, publishers, agencies and adtech,” said the leader of the study from PwC.

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41 Here are some highlights from the report: - Half of online ad money is being siphoned off by the adtech “ecosystem” before it reaches publishers.

- According to the Financial Times, of the 50% of the budget that was siphoned off, about 1/3 of the dollars “were completely untraceable.” In some cases the untraceable costs were as high as 83%. This means the money just evaporated into the adtech black box without a trace.

lead by duplicitous “leaders,” have displayed astounding incompetence by not cleaning up a trash heap that has been stinking up the environment for years.

Adding Value The adtech industry, and its worshippers in the agency business, will claim that adtech earns its money by “adding value” -- by helping you find the most effective plan for investing your advertising dollars.

- Only 12% of the ad dollars were completely transparent and traceable. An astounding 88% of dollars could not be traced from end to end.

Really? Do you pay your stock broker a 50% commission for similar services? Even a “digital strategist” wouldn’t be that fucking stupid.

- From the director-general of the ISBA, “The market is damn near impenetrable”

Invincible Ignorance, Part 2

A few comments: - Remember, this study only reported on the highest quality tip of the iceberg -- the most premium end of the programmatic marketplace. Imagine what the numbers must be like in the rest of the adtech cesspool where most advertisers swim their laps.

- With the release of this study, all the usual clowns and apologists for the online ad industry seem to have suddenly disappeared. I haven’t heard anything from the arrogant pricks who usually hurl abuse at those of us trying to shine a light on the scourge of adtech. I’m sure they’re down in their basements busy working on their logic-torturing exercises.

What effect will the ISBA report have on the ad industry?

Zero.

Just like with ad fraud and privacy abuse, the ad industry is far too invested in the status quo to do anything about the black hole of adtech.

Agencies, who are supposed to be experts who protect advertisers from wasting ad dollars, universally utilize and often promote the adtech black box and frequently have a financial interest in it. By next month this whole thing will be buried and forgotten. We might get a PR release or two. Here in the states the Gang of Three -- the ANA, the 4As, and the IAB -- might round up the usual suspects and appoint a bullshit committee. Other than that, nada.

- One exception is the always reliable IAB. Listen to this from an IAB spokesweasel “...it is not a dark art and we shouldn’t lose sight of the crucial role programmatic plays in supporting our ad-funded, open web.” Bullshit. Bullshit.

Bullshit. As usual from these creeps, this is utter nonsense.

The good things we get from the web are supported by advertising -- not adtech, not programmatic horseshit, not dodgy middlemen. More about this in The Good In Online Advertising (and, ahem, my books, Advertising For Skeptics and BadMen.)

Invincible Ignorance, Part 3

- Just because 50% of your ad budget is reaching publishers doesn’t mean you’re getting 50% of value from your ad investment. Let’s not forget the enormous amount of fraud in the programmatic ecosystem, which this report doesn’t address. Once half your money escapes from the adtech jungle and gets to a publisher, it is still exposed to creepy “publishers” who hang around the programmatic playground. As fraud expert Dr. Augustine Fou says, “... the 50% that makes it through to publishers could still be subject to fraud if that publisher is buying traffic and doing other shitty things like refreshing the page every 10 seconds, refreshing the ad slot every 2 seconds, stacking 10 ads on top of each other, loading 1,000 hidden ads in the background.

The advertiser is still exposed to the potential of 100% fraud if that publisher is a fake site using fake traffic, and selling their inventory through the adtech plumbing.”

Since then, the Media Rating Council (MRC), media watchdog for the ad industry, has been trying unsuccessfully to get Facebook to comply with its standards. This week, the Journal reported that the MRC has had enough of FB and is ready to pull their ticket as an accredited media supplier. The article, entitled “Facebook Warned That It May Lose a Key Seal of Approval for Ad Measurement” says, “Facebook Inc. is at risk of losing a key seal of approval that gives companies confidence they are getting what they pay for...”

The real blame in all this goes to the advertising and marketing industry. Us. No one who doesn’t have his head up his ass should be surprised by anything in this report.

Dumbass bloggers and many others have been reporting on this forever. The advertising and marketing industries,

For years Facebook has refused to abide by the rules of transparency practiced by the rest of the ad industry. They have not allowed impartial third parties to monitor their audience “metrics.” In fact, they have become famous for the utter nonsense they release as audience measurement. In 2016, “Facebook acknowledged (they) had inflated reported (video) viewing times by as much as 80%,” says The Wall Street Journal.

Getting what they pay for? From Facebook? Is this some kind of joke?

Will this disturb the invincible ignorance of the ad industry?

Not a bit. While virtually all other media suppliers are required to provide third-party verification for their audience claims, Facebook Zucker-punches an entire industry. We stand by like the feckless weaklings we are and allow an arrogant prick to walk all over us.

Facebook will never allow full transparency of its metrics because I believe it is a company built on an edifice of lies and deception. If not, why hide the numbers?

Discovery Driven Digital Transformation

By Rita Gunther McGrath and Ryan McManus

What’s your digital strategy? That simple question often throws the CEOs of traditional companies into a panic. They believe that digital technologies and business models pose an existential threat to their way of doing business—and of course they’re right. But the pressure they feel often leads them to make big bet-the-farm moves—and that’s usually wrong.

Veon, a large multinational provider of telecommunications services, is a case in point. Its new digital platform, introduced in 2017, was a huge project, involving 100 staff members in Amsterdam and another hundred or so in its London office. The idea was to create a mobile app that would offer users rich localized experiences and serve as a sales channel for Veon’s commercial partners (such as Mastercard). Management considered the project its top priority. But after being launched with much fanfare, the app got a lukewarm response from customers, and the effort to build a new ecosystem around it was scrapped. The failure led to a management exodus, layoffs, and a back-to-basics strategy with digital efforts sidelined to pilot-project stage.

Veon still needs a new business model, though, and clearly can’t afford to make many more large investments in searching for one.

It doesn’t have to. Just because a threat is huge doesn’t mean that a response has to be. To the contrary, companies like Veon would actually be much better off taking a more incremental approach to transformation over time. While they should always have a vision of where they want to go, they should work their way toward it by continually finding opportunities to digitize problematic processes in their core operations. When they tackle those projects, they’ll learn what metrics to use, which assumptions to revise, where they can introduce new business models, and who their new competitors might be. And as they absorb those lessons, their

understanding of their competitive landscape—and the longterm goals they set for themselves—will inevitably change.

There’s already a process for this kind of ongoing learning approach to strategy: discovery-driven planning (DDP). One of us, Rita, and Ian MacMillan developed it in the 1990s as a product innovation methodology, and it was later incorporated into the popular “lean start-up” tool kit for launching businesses in an environment of high uncertainty.

At its center is a low-cost process for quickly testing assumptions about what works, obtaining new information, and minimizing risks.

In the following pages we’ll describe how an adapted form of DDP can help incumbent firms confront digital challenges and learn their way toward a new business model. Let’s begin by looking in more detail at why a step-by-step transformation works better for traditional firms than the all-or-nothing approach that characterizes a start-up’s pivot.

The Incremental Advantage of Incumbent Firms Economists have long puzzled over why firms exist at all and, at a more granular level, which tasks belong within the boundaries of a given firm. One line of thought, begun

by Ronald Coase in the 1930s, suggests that under certain conditions, market transactions often are not satisfactory for individuals: when it is difficult or expensive to get information about what you want to buy, when bargains are hard to strike because information is asymmetrical, and when it’s costly or challenging to enforce agreements. If any of those conditions apply, it makes sense to keep the activities involved within a firm.

Until fairly recently, the boundaries between firms and markets were well understood and relatively fixed. But digital technologies have changed all that by making it possible to use markets for a lot of work that once was done more efficiently

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within firms. Platforms such as Alibaba and Amazon have made it easy to outsource functions like selecting suppliers, negotiating prices, enforcing contracts, managing payments, and more.

As a result, executives in companies that were born digital have assumptions about how transactions should be structured that are completely different from those of executives in legacy companies. What’s more, because digital firms’ structures are evolving all the time, their managers revisit those assumptions frequently. Direct-to-consumer businesses (think Casper in mattresses, Harry’s in shaving, and Warby Parker in eyeglasses) are constantly experimenting with and adjusting features like free shipping, product bundles, bonuses for adding items, and so on. Those tactics simply aren’t available to an incumbent selling through distributors.

And because the digital businesses cut out intermediaries, they can be profitable at a much lower scale.

A key consequence of all this is that digital start-ups can change direction, or pivot, without destroying much value.

They usually aren’t that capital-intensive and don’t have big payrolls. The founders of Rooted, for instance, initially sold plants out of their apartment directly to consumers, only later moving to a separate space and hiring employees. For such companies, failure is relatively cheap—unless it happens late in the day (or investors succumb to the growth-at-all-costs mantra that is unraveling the fortunes of many so-called unicorns).

The employees, managers, and shareholders of traditional companies, however, cannot pivot without destroying value.

If their digital gambles fail, workers lose their jobs, and physical assets have to be unloaded at fire-sale prices. And unlike the venture capitalists who back start-ups, the investors in what was once a safe company may not have the buffer of high-return investments to offset their losses.

But although incumbent firms can’t pivot easily, the good news is that they don’t need to. Think about what big companies can do that start-ups can’t. Entrepreneurial ventures nearly always exploit a single idea. They usually can’t try out multiple versions of the same idea at the same time, let alone multiple ideas. A big firm, in contrast, has the resources to explore a variety of ideas and can more easily experiment with different processes and operations, which makes it more likely to discover a dominant model than a start-up is. This also gives a large firm a better chance of responding effectively to a digital challenge.

Goals should frame the technology as an opportunity for the business.

Take the case of the German metals distributor Klöckner. Its CEO, Gisbert Rühl, wanted to build a digital platform for the entire industry—but he didn’t sponsor a big-bang effort to create one. Instead, his goal was to build digital competencies gradually, while benefiting from the knowledge and insight of people working in the firm’s core steel business. For the first two years Rühl focused on digitizing inefficient manual processes; the firm created an online shop, a contract portal, order transparency tools, and a parts-manager app. Through these efforts it learned enough to create a platform on which the company and customers could seamlessly interact.

Klöckner’s story reveals another advantage that incumbent firms have, at least in the early stages of an industry’s adoption of digital models. They’re led by people who already know their customers and can mine rich databases of prior transactions for insights. Start-ups are often led by technical experts and tend to be driven by new technical functionality rather than by the full portfolio of what customers are looking for. If you put a team of people who know the customers on the job, you’ll stand a better chance of making your digital investment pay off. That’s why Klöckner insisted that every

project focus on how to help customers communicate more easily and efficiently with the company. That isn’t the only goal to set, of course. Another company might start with a priority on shortening the time it takes to respond to a customer request. But whatever the goal is, it should frame the technology as an opportunity for the business rather than frame the business as an opportunity for the technology.

Once you accept the idea that firms should aim to disrupt in a nondisruptive manner, the challenge is subtly transformed from “What new business model should we back?” to the more nuanced question, “How can we learn our way toward a model that’s right for our business?” That is where DDP comes in.

The Digital Context DDP is somewhat like reverse engineering. When you use it in product development, you begin by imagining the offering you want to create and then figure out what you would need to change in order to get there. When you apply it to digital transformations, however, the focus is on reinventing the way you sell and deliver the products you already make as well as on identifying how to create and deliver new value through new digital capabilities.

Take power generation. Digital technologies are disrupting this once-stable industry, just as they are many other industries. Traditionally, power was generated from a central source and sent to its destination over a centrally managed grid. But new advances have made it possible to dynamically distribute power generated from dispersed small-scale producers tapping multiple energy sources. People with solar panels on their roofs or windmills in their gardens can sell surplus energy back to the grid, making households’ cost of investing in power generation hardware more affordable and reducing the public’s reliance on huge fossil-fuel power plants. If incumbents assume that the old business model will predict future success, they’re likely to make big mistakes.

General Electric’s failed bet on the continued dominance of fossil-fuel-based electric plants provides a dramatic example.

Let’s explore what’s involved in applying a DDP approach to digital transformations. There are five key steps: 1. Define the Operating Experience: It’s Not Just About Digital Before investing in a line of code, look for what isn’t quite working in your operation. Where do you regularly need workarounds or have to stop a process unexpectedly to fetch more information or involve another person? These are likely to be areas that digitization can improve. Then think about how to redesign your operations there so that technology adds value, by making offerings and processes better, faster, cheaper, or more convenient.

The retailer Best Buy is one incumbent that was able to reconfigure its business operation in a way that created competitive advantages the digital-only players couldn’t replicate. Back in 2010, Amazon released its pricecomparison app, one of many tools that allowed shoppers to check out products in a physical store but order the same

items at a discount online. Called “showrooming,” the practice threatened to squeeze the lifeblood out of retail chains, which struggled to offer competitive prices while paying for real estate, staff, and inventory. It was one of the reasons Best Buy lost $1.7 billion in a single quarter in 2012.

Hubert Joly, the CEO hired to turn the company around, centered his strategy (and his business model) on solving two problems: negative comparable sales and declining operating margins. To do this, he envisioned a company that blended the human, the physical, and the digital in ways that an online-only player would find hard to match. He began by imagining what kind of customer experience Best Buy could deliver and, more important, identifying where it hadn’t leveraged digital technologies to create that experience.

From this was born Best Buy’s Renew Blue project, which had five components: a reinvigorated customer experience; a change in vendor partnerships; investments in ecological and social initiatives; the employee experience; and a return for investors. Financial targets and experiments were set up for each component.

To improve the employee experience, Best Buy launched initiatives focused on workforce morale, such as bringing back a popular employee discount that had been discontinued and investing in more-intensive training. To appeal to customers, the company began to match the prices of Amazon and other e-commerce players, which required a massive effort to overhaul Best Buy’s warehousing, software, and supply chain activities. But because customers could walk out of the stores with the products, they could avoid the wait and the hassles (such as porch piracy) of having expensive products delivered, and that gave Best Buy an important edge. The company also created a system through which customers could order goods online for delivery or for pickup at the store. With 70% of Americans living within 15 miles of a Best Buy outlet, that approach proved to be extremely cost-effective.

Best Buy’s new model turned the disadvantage of costly real estate into an advantage. At its more than 1,000 big-box locations, brands such as Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft created stores-within-stores, essentially paying rent to feature their offerings where real live shoppers could discover them in person. Best Buy is a neutral party to warring tech giants; archrivals Amazon and Google both sell their goods there.

Finally, Best Buy invested in an in-home adviser capability, in which salaried, highly trained consultants go to customers’ homes and provide tech help without selling anything. The goal is just to build stronger relationships with consumers.

Throughout it all, Best Buy steadily transformed its digital footprint to support the strategy.

The Best Buy story illustrates the importance of being willing to rethink assumptions about how to use assets and engage with partners. Previous leaders in the firm had failed to see any way that it could price-match online retailers. But because Joly challenged traditional thinking, he spurred the company to reimagine relationships with vendors (which now pay to be in Best Buy stores) and redesign its supply chain so that the company’s physical assets could support a new business model for competing with e-commerce giants.

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45 2. Focus on Specific Problems: Identify Outcomes and Progress Metrics The key question in any digital-transformation strategy is, How can we use data and digital capabilities to create new value for our customers? The DDP process translates that challenge into clear project goals.

A traditional success metric for new projects, even today, is return on investment. But ROI doesn’t help you understand what value a project adds for customers, at least not directly.

Further, to calculate it you need to estimate both investments and returns, which is precisely what you haven’t figured out yet. What you need to do instead is identify metrics that are more closely linked to the specific improvements you hope digital initiatives will bring about.

We typically collect all this information in a “from-to” table, which identifies a problem, describes what a solution would achieve, and proposes a way to measure progress on that solution. As you work through solving these problems, you’ll test and refine your assumptions—a key DDP discipline. You can also capture what you’ve spent to gain new insights and what they’ve saved you. Eventually, you can back into something similar to an ROI calculation.

At Klöckner, the ultimate goal was to change the business model in steel from marking up inventory to a services revenue model. At first, the digital initiatives were simple and were focused on improving the order process—by, for instance, replacing the faxing of orders with an online portal for ordering. With each one, performance on metrics such as turnaround time and the number of steps required to complete an order improved. As the company gained more knowledge and capabilities, its projects became more ambitious.

Of course, you still need a way to measure progress on digital transformation overall, and to do that we suggest a metric we call return on time invested (ROTI). To calculate it, you simply divide your total revenue by the number of employees.

The idea is that successful technology investments should let you accomplish more with fewer people. For example, we used annual report data from 2018 to compare Amazon (a digital-first company) with Walmart (a more-traditional legacy business). We found that Amazon had $232.9 billion in net sales and 647,500 full- and part-time workers. Its sales per employee were $359,671. In contrast, Walmart had $495.8 billion in net sales and 2.3 million associates. Its sales per employee were $215,548. Amazon enjoyed 67% higher performance per employee.

3. Identify Your Competition: Cast a Wide Net Industry boundaries have blurred so much that standard industrial classification (SIC) codes are more or less useless.

This by itself is one reason why conventional strategy-making approaches predicated on boundary assumptions are failing incumbents.

We suggest that leaders instead think about the field of competition not as a marketplace where similar players

offer rival products and services but as what strategists call an arena. An arena is defined by a customer need—what Clay Christensen dubbed the “job to be done.” It’s a notion that goes back to Ted Levitt, who recommended that railway companies see themselves as competing in the transportation business against airlines, buses, trucking, and even cars.

If railway passengers are a market, transportation users constitute an arena.

Smart born-digital firms already think this way. For example, Netflix has been very clear that it doesn’t intend to compete just against television or the movies for viewers’ time. It intends to compete against every possible leisure activity that a person might do instead of watching streaming content.

The company sees traditional media companies as its rivals, of course, but its leadership looks at magazines, books, podcasts, and sporting events as competition as well.

At this point in the process, you should go back and determine whether the outcomes and metrics of success you spelled out in steps one and two are reasonable, given the arena you’re competing in. Is your category losing share of wallet to others in the arena, for instance, or holding its own? Netflix has plenty of room to meet its growth goals, because total hours of video viewing are increasing and a lot of that growth is from streaming video.

4. Look for Platforms: Don’t Forget the Ecosystem Implications In the digital economy, striving to become an intermediary through which others buy and sell goods is an extremely popular strategy. It’s a tempting business model, because once the two sides of a market have joined a platform they have little incentive to jump to another. This is partly due to network effects, whereby a platform’s value to any user increases as the number of other users on that platform rises.

Airbnb, for instance, benefits when more hosts and more guests use it and has historically gone to great lengths to ensure the loyalty of both.

ROI doesn’t help you understand what value a project adds for customers.

A platform is also attractive because it needs less capital.

To run a conventional hotel, you have to have real estate, rooms that need to be looked after, reservation systems, staff, and so on. Airbnb, in contrast, taps an ecosystem of hosts to provide all those things, and its directly controlled activities are simply to match hosts and guests and guarantee transactions, both of which occur entirely in the cloud and thus are infinitely scalable.

To understand whether a platform opportunity exists, we use a tool we call a customer consumption chain (introduced in HBR in 1997). The idea is simple: that as customers try to get jobs done in their lives, they go through a series of experiences, beginning with awareness of a need, then working through how to get that need met, and going all the way to the conclusion of a service or the end of a product’s

life. Digital technologies make open-market transactions for many links in that chain possible, allowing firms to build platforms.

That sounds like bad news for established organizations.

But they have an ace in the hole: They employ many people who have deep technical expertise or understand customer problems. Those capabilities can give them an edge in identifying platformlike opportunities and building ecosystems. At Klöckner, Rühl realized that once there was price transparency—and far less friction—in the trading of basic metal commodities, competitive advantage would shift to suppliers that could offer superior solutions and service. The company blended the new ways of operating on platforms (co-creating designs with customers, for instance) of its digital arm with its workforce’s deep expertise (in, say, manufacturing with 3-D lasers) to develop customized, higher-value offerings.

About the art: In his series “Cartographic Colour,” photographer Giles Revell abstracts the forms of flowers, combining science, graphics, and photography to investigate the role that color plays in our perception of the world.

Becoming a popular platform isn’t easy for corporations.

The business landscape is littered with would-be platforms that failed even though they seemed to have all the right components. General Electric’s Predix initiative, which was intended to be the platform for the industrial internet of things, is an example. Rather than driving the digitization of services that customers would value, Predix was sucked into serving primarily internal GE units—and a lot of them.

Further, as part of GE Digital, the initiative was given P&L responsibility, which oriented it toward short-term contracts with customers that could pay some bills in the interim. It also took on way too much too soon, rather than proceeding by finding a good fit for its capabilities and building from there.

5. Test Your Assumptions: Failures Are Lessons Too One of the more popular tools to come out of DDP is the assumption checkpoint table. To create one, just write down the next few milestones that your digital project will go through, which assumptions need to be tested at each, and if possible, how much that test will cost. The beauty of this approach is that it moves the conversation from “Oh, you were wrong, that was a failure” to “Was it worth that price to learn what we needed to learn?”

Consider how Buffer, a service that allows people to space out social media promotions without having to predetermine the timing, tested assumptions in its launch phase. Joel Gascoigne, Buffer’s cofounder, got the idea for the business from his own frustration with how clunky it was to try to tweet more consistently.

The first assumption he wanted to test was whether anybody else perceived this to be a problem. So he built a very simple two-page website. The first page’s pitch was “Tweet More Consistently with Buffer.” If users clicked on it, they were taken to a second page, with the heading “Hello, You Caught Us Before We’re Ready,” which had a place for people to enter their email addresses if they were interested in Buffer’s

solution. Most people weren’t, but some were. So Gascoigne added a third page between the other two to test pricing hypotheses. And again, most people weren’t interested in paying, but enough were to persuade Gascoigne to build the product.

Next he had to decide how complex to make it and how many social platforms to apply it to. He ended up keeping it very simple and supporting only Twitter at first. As of 2018, Buffer had more than 1.4 million social accounts connected to its apps.

Many large corporations have adopted a similar test-andlearn mindset. Several new services make experimentation easier—for example, Alpha, whose subscribers use it to obtain fast feedback about products from potential customers before making expensive or irreversible decisions. At WellMatch, an Aetna business unit, experimentation helped resolve disagreements about design decisions. According to Etugo Nwokah, the former chief product officer, one area of disagreement involved its website: Every group in the unit wanted to have its content appear on the landing page. The trial entry page ended up being so busy that it confused consumers. The company had to go back to the drawing board and do a redesign—but was able to do so at a much lower cost and risk than if the webpage had been launched for real.

The Payoff Digital transformation is complex and requires new ways of approaching strategy. Starting big, spending a lot, and assuming you have all the information is likely to produce a full-on attack from corporate antibodies—everything from risk aversion and resentment of your project to simple resistance to change.

A discovery-driven approach gets leaders past the common barriers to digital transformation. By starting small, spending a little on an ongoing portfolio of experiments, and learning a lot, you can win early supporters and early adopters. By then moving quickly and demonstrating clear impact on financial performance indicators, you can build a case for and learn your way into a digital strategy. You can also use your digitization projects to begin an organizational transformation. As people become more comfortable with the horizontal communications and activities that digital technologies enable, they will also embrace new ways of working.

Incumbent companies have some great advantages over new competitors: paying customers, financial resources, customer and market data, and larger talent pools. But CEOs will have to integrate agility and innovation into their broader organizations and communicate the new ways of digital thinking while minimizing disruption to their existing businesses. A discovery-driven approach provides a way to address those challenges.

Rita Gunther McGrath is a Professor at Columbia Business School and a globally recognized expert on strategy in uncertain and volatile environments. She is the author of The End of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Review Press), and most recently, Seeing Around Corners (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

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Mindful Living for Marketers: MarketingProfs Founder Allen Weiss on Marketing Smarts [Podcast]

By Kerry O’Shea Gorgone

When everything seems uncertain, people get stressed. That’s one thing we all have in common. But there is always one thing you can control: your reaction to the situation.

Mindfulness helps you to develop a healthier relationship with your thoughts and emotions. And scientific research shows that practicing mindfulness builds emotional resilience and enhances your immune system.

the practice of being aware. Just being present for whatever

Luckily, MarketingProfs has an in-house mindfulness expert.

MarketingProfs founder Allen Weiss is also the founding teacher and director of Mindful USC and a senior teacher at Insight LA.org, where he’s taught mindfulness classes for 12 years.

aware of the moment, but it’s actually much more about

I invited Allen 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, Allen and I talk about incorporating the practice of mindfulness into your life, reducing stress, and gaining inner peace (and how all this helps us to be better marketers).

Here are just a few highlights from our conversation.

Practicing mindfulness will help you to successfully navigate stressful situations (02:21) “It’s always been the right time for mindfulness. It really helps people through anxiety and fear. Anxiety and fear is probably the thing that’s going on most in the world right now. And that’s why the free seminar we did [on mindfulness] for MarketingProfs had more than 1,500 people who signed up. It’s all because people are trying to find other ways to deal with all of this stuff. Mindfulness helps resilience, it really helps with clarity.

It helps us deal with all these problems we’re having right now.”

Mindfulness doesn’t just mean being aware of the present moment, it means meeting whatever comes without judgment (03:17) “Mindfulness is really

is arising in your mind, in your emotions, in your body. And doing so without reacting, without judging, with a very relaxed mind. A lot of people think that mindfulness is just being having a relaxed mind without judging. Just being open and receptive to whatever arises. That’s the practice.”

When

you’re

feeling

overwhelmed,

take

10

seconds and just breathe (16:07) “When you get really stressed out and you’re really in the middle of everything... one thing you can do is put your attention on the breath for just 10 seconds. If you feel like you’re getting anxious, just put your attention on the breath for 10 seconds as you breathe in and breathe out. And see if you can just keep with the sense of breathing for 10 seconds. At the end of 10 seconds, what you’ll realize is that the anxiety that you had is not increasing anymore.”

To learn more, check out Allen’s free MarketingProfs webinar on mindfulness, and be sure to sign up to learn about any future mindfulness courses he’s got in the works. You can also follow Allen on Twitter at @allenweiss.

Allen and I talked about much more, including how mindfulness can help you professionally as well as personally, so be sure and listen to the entire show, which you can do above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience.

Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode!

Kerry O’Shea Gorgone is a lawyer, podcaster, speaker, and writer. She co-hosts Punch Out With Katie and Kerry about people’s hobbies, interests, and weird collections!

Kerry also hosts MarketingProfs’ weekly interview show Marketing Smarts.

How Gary Vee, Mark Cuban, and Arianna Huffington Build Their Brand

By Social Marketing Solutions

Many CEOs and entrepreneurs still have their hesitations on whether or not to have a personal account active on social media, even though the year is 2018!

A report from CEO.com showed that a whopping 61% of CEO’s have no presence at all on social media. It’s estimated that of the 39% with a presence on at least one of the major social media networks many of them are rarely active.

They fail to make the connection between their personal brand and their business brand.

The truth is, all business owners should have a presence on social media because that is where consumers are. Being the CEO, founder, or owner of a company doesn’t mean you should hide behind a team of social media marketers.

The world’s top CEOs and entrepreneurs who have a presence on social media bring a personal brand to their company’s image, something that many consumers appreciate.

Arianna Huffington, Twitter Founder of the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington is an excellent example of how CEOs should brand themselves on social media. Her Twitter account profile explains that she is, “mother, sister, flat shoe advocate, sleep evangelist, HuffPost founder, and founder and CEO of Thrive Global.”

In that one sentence, she lays out her priorities in order.

Huffington is an inspiration for women who are looking to dive into the startup world, so it’s no wonder as she has over three million followers to date.

Gary Vaynerchuk, Snapchat Not all CEOs or entrepreneurs can voice their personalities and brand in writing. Video and image messaging apps are there for those who are a bit on the chatty side. One such chatterbox is marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk.

Here’s how some of the world’s top CEOs and entrepreneurs use social media to use their personal brand to help grow their business.

He is very active with his Snapchat account, sharing his tips and tricks as he is on the go. He draws people in with his raw attitude and tell-it-like-it-is mentality that make up his personal brand.

Marc Cuban, Instagram

Marie Forleo, YouTube

As a CEO, you don’t need to always have a serious business face on. Marc Cuban, investor and Shark Tank star, is very active on Instagram. While the public does get to see a lot of Cuban’s personality on the show, his Instagram account gives followers insight into his personal life.

Life coach, motivational speaker, and entrepreneur Marie Forleo’s YouTube channel has over 400,000 subscribers. Her authenticity and sound advice come through as she interviews her guests.

He posts a variety of photos that show his family life, behind the scenes of Shark Tank, as well as his own business ventures.

Cuban’s Instagram account lets his fans connect with him on an emotional level, which is proven to drive brand loyalty.

Bill Gates, LinkedIn If you look up Bill Gates on LinkedIn, it may surprise you that he doesn’t define himself as the co-founder of Microsoft.

Instead, his profile reads, “co-chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.” Listing his philanthropy before Microsoft is humbling. It tells you that he values making the world a better place.

Gates shares articles and posts on LinkedIn at least once a week that reiterate his concern about global health.

Her episodes have content that keeps you engaged until her call to action at the end where she invites you to her website.

This is an example of the ultimate personal and business brand meshed together successfully.

CEOs and entrepreneurs who share their passions, personal causes, and home life are the ones who find the most success on social media. Followers like to see a down-to-earth person who is just as vulnerable as they are.

The thought leadership these CEOs and entrepreneurs show when it comes to the passion they have for their own business on social media makes them the best possible spokesperson for the company.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather work for or buy from a company with a social CEO than a CEO who hides behind the corporate logo.

BOLD OPPORTUNITIES IN A TIME OF CRISIS

By Mia Pinjuh

If there’s a silver lining to being a marketer in a sales-driven organization in the middle of this crisis, it’s this: There are marketing opportunities to build the commercial engine you’ve always dreamed about.

In my marketing career, I’ve heard “no” a lot … especially from sales.

Can marketing target this segment? No. These leads need follow-up, can we build a better process?

No. This would make us more efficient and increase conversion.

Could you collect this data point? Let’s have a meeting … followed by blah, blah, blah, no.

Change takes guts and when you’re dealing with sales in a normal, stable period there’s natural resistance because of how sales is incentivized. For practitioners of marketing strategy, there are few business irritations that rank as high as having to market at a continuous status quo.

In her book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert said if you’re aware of the ideas knocking on your door and, they can turn into something extraordinary. Wait too long and the idea will move to the next person. I think the same thing happens with marketing opportunities.

On the surface, the coronavirus crisis doesn’t feel like an opportunity.

This is a time of disorientation, apprehension, and uncertainty for nearly every business. Shifting our mindset from a place of dread and worry to one of curiosity and intrigue can soothe that fear and accelerate innovation. Here’s what we need to

remember: Cause > Fear When you have a cause or purpose, you’ll naturally move forward because there’s no time to sit and debate fear. At my company, the mission is to connect healthcare providers and communities to transform lives. That’s a big ask. The coronavirus crisis makes it colossal.

Every one of us has a choice – be diminished by fear or absorbed in mission. Whether it’s a company or personal mission, by tackling one new tactic each day, you’ll achieve more than you once believed possible.

Early in the pandemic, a friend with an event company (one of the largest in the nation) pivoted to become a field hospital and testing site company. I placed a few calls, asked for a partnership and they said yes. Turns out this event company was starting a coalition banding 100 event companies to fight the pandemic. By being brave enough to call and ask, we became the first and only staffing company listed as a coalition partner. My focus on mission rather than fear continues to guide me to new opportunities.

Stop asking permission The coronavirus crisis can enable you to dismiss your title and normal swim lane. This is an environment that is allhands-on-deck, jump-in, act … and ask for permission later. As a result, it’s brought greater company awareness to marketing’s capability and earned us more voice at the table.

Case in point — several years ago, my team sought permission to take over more of the email efforts led by sales. We spoke ad nauseum about their unsubscribe rates, lost revenue, lost

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opportunity, and our ability to optimize results if given the chance. They wouldn’t listen to us.

When COVID-19 hit, marketing stopped asking permission and began sending. Our email communication has been far more effective, leading other teams to solicit our help to reach healthcare providers for critical positions.

My job is to find physicians and advanced practitioners who serve critically ill patients (a very difficult assignment right now!).

Despite the hurdles, we generated hundreds of new leads in a matter of 24 hours and earned the trust of healthcare workers who shared contact information they would have typically kept close to the glove.

By moving forward without waiting to be asked or asking to proceed, we had a greater impact on our organization and created marketing opportunities that will transcend the crisis.

Chaos leads to innovation The COVID crisis introduces ambiguity and new constraints, which can feel paralyzing. However, re-framed, it’s a window to incredible creativity. The old rules don’t exist, we don’t know how the market will respond, so build from your gut. If you have a nagging idea, a hunch, something you’ve longed for, give it a try now.

During this period of chaos, we’ve re-imagined our campaign attribution model to better understand our direct relationship to ROI. Until now, our organization has run the last touch attribution model. You never want to overwrite a paid source with email as a source, so it’s been nearly impossible to quantify the financial value of marketing’s campaigns, which hurts optimization efforts.

With marketing’s initiatives taking greater visibility, we started logging every response we received, funneling them into a spreadsheet to track leads surfaced by marketing. Now we know what we can generate through email automation. The figure brings credibility to our efforts and provides a baseline of success to build on.

There’s an innovation you know will elevate your business.

Now’s the time to build a small-scale pilot to prove your concept.

Humanity wins As Mark Schaefer wrote, “The most human company wins.”

Period.

It can feel awkward to sell something in a national crisis.

Instead of feeling invasive or needy, think about how your product or service genuinely helps others. That will reveal bold opportunities that could have lasting consequences.

From sunglasses to shoes, every product can create an emotional lift for the buyer. Nothing is strictly functional. If you sell sunglasses, you could be helping a runner find a pair that doesn’t fall down the bridge of their nose or someone struggling with depression during this time increase sunlight and serotonin.

In this crisis, my team has helped remind providers why they were called to medicine, which can get lost in the documentation and bureaucracy of normal practice.

For our sales teams, we’ve helped create safety by identifying leads when the normal practices failed. And for families across the country, we are doing our part to bring hope so that someday soon we can all walk outside and hug a good friend.

What I learned from working in this crisis isn’t necessarily unique, but I’ve been forced to understand core principals that I took for granted when everything was normal.

If you’re ready to reframe disruption as opportunities, you’ll see a world of possibility.

marketing

Alycia Kaufmann is Division Vice President of Marketing for Jackson & Coker, one of the largest physician and advanced practitioner staffing firms in the nation.

During COVID, she’s picked up indoor tennis and water bottle bowling with her family.

Human connection is key to effectiveness – a neuroscience perspective

By Shazia Ginai

During a time of social distancing, people crave human connection more than ever. Shazia Ginai offers some tips on how to achieve that.

The past year and a half has seen a wave of purpose-led advertising campaigns, and in the current climate the need for more emotion-based ads has ramped up further.

With movements around diversity and inclusion, climate change and mental health, campaigns launched across the vast media landscape have taken a variety of innovative approaches, and more brands have been leaning into experience and interactivity-based communication to truly touch the hearts of consumers. It’s not just about selling, it’s about building trust and empathy.

In this context what has become increasingly important is showcasing human connection and care for what truly matters. In terms of how our brains respond, this is exactly the right move, as has been shown by some great examples within this year’s Effective 100 ranking.

Our brains are not actually that interested in brands. What they care most about is stories – humans make meaning of life and sense of the world around them through stories.

Our brains look for narratives to string together and these narratives encourage our brain to encode information into our long-term memory.

Direct address When measuring long-term memory encoding, at NeuroInsight we measure electrical signals in both the left and right hemispheres. Long-term memory correlates to our future action, decision making and behaviour change, and both the left and right side are crucial to this for brands. The left

side processes detailed information – this includes words and images – and research has shown that our brains have a strong affinity to direct address from characters within the story. The right side is responsible for processing big picture information as well as retrieval of familiar information such as celebrity faces.

In a United Nations ad, The People’s Seat, David Attenborough directly addresses the viewers. This utilises both the narrative lever of direct address mentioned, as well as giving viewers a trusted and familiar source to deliver this information. Which explains why this content is so effective.

As per the basic ingredients of a good story, you could say an effective campaign needs four key elements: a hero, a mentor, a magic object and a treasure. Arguably, the hero may be the ‘brand’, in this case the United Nations, but the crucial mentor used in this case is David Attenborough – a trusted source of information and a face everyone intuitively links to nature and the planet, helping to thread the story together.

One of the key drivers of what our brains choose to put into memory is what we call engagement or personal relevance – at the very pre-frontal part of the brain an area activates when people encounter experiences and things that are of personal relevance to them. Again, this campaign addresses a topic of relevance to all people – our planet. This combination of elements drives true effectiveness.

Intrigue for difficult subject matter

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Many brands have questioned the use of shocking content, and more negative concepts can be seen as tricky to use.

These can result in negative emotional responses at key branding moments if used poorly; if used correctly, however, the brain can go on the appropriate emotional journey, resulting in greater effectiveness. The Project 84 campaign from ITV proved that this can be done effectively. The human brain looks for intrigue in any given story and this campaign certainly gives a hit of intrigue to start. It then goes on to show well-loved and trusted familiar faces, Philip Schofield and Holly Willoughby on This Morning, as well as showing true stories from the general public, driving empathy and creating a narrative that shows the impact of male suicide on people like many of those watching the campaign.

On the flip side of this is the Libresse Vulva ad, which talks about an incredibly personal subject but shows it in a more visually comedic light. Again, the use of intrigue is incredibly effective here, providing a reason for the brain to want to initially engage. There is also a clear narrative thread for the brain to follow, but it manifests itself in various visually engaging forms, helping to give the brain incentive to sustain that interest. The lighter nature of this campaign with a clearly hard-hitting message at its core would likely stimulate emotional centres of the brain and for the target audience is incredibly personally relevant. Consciously many may say its jarring, however the key is sustained engagement.

Personal relevance Research conducted with Twitter looking at how our brains respond to videos on social media showed that the use of characters and interaction (whether that be with multiple people or just direct address to views) resulted in a 133%

increase in emotional response vs. those without human beings. Also, ads with a more topical narrative had a higher likelihood of being viewed as topicality creates an underlying narrative to follow. Aligning to something culturally relevant or time-specific triggers the brain to respond since there is a level of familiarity. All the campaigns mentioned here certainly touch on very current, topical themes which is why they prove to be effective.

All this links back to one of the key themes coming through the Effective 100 campaigns – personal relevance. Particularly as we are moving through a global crisis with the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers are starved of ordinary human connection and are therefore more acutely aware of how important human connection, emotional and values-based messaging is.

Brands need to adapt not only the assets they have but how they bring these to life, steering more towards the use of trusted and personal, faces, places and experiences to enable those key underlying brand themes to be embedded into the memory of their consumers.

This article is taken from the WARC report, Lessons from the Effective 100, an analysis of the world’s top effectiveness campaigns, as ranked by the Effective 100, to uncover shared creative, media and measurement strategies.

Shazia Ginai is the CEO of Neuro-Insight in the UK, managing the growth of the business and overseeing projects across a range of media and industries.She has a track record of successfully building and leading insight capability and embedding this into organisations to drive action across multiple markets and functions.

HEAR LEBRON JAMES AND NIKE’S PEP TALK TO MOTIVATE YOU FOR A SPORTS-LIKE COMEBACK

BY JEFF BEER

LeBron James narrates a never-quit script over tough times for himself, Serena Williams, Tiger Woods, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Naomi Osaka.

Despite all his successes, LeBron James has been down before. Back in 2016, the Cleveland Cavaliers were down three games to one to the Golden State Warriors in the bestof-seven NBA Finals. But with a 93-89 win in Oakland, the Cavs not only won the city’s first sports title in 52 years, they also became the first team to ever win it all after being down 3-1 in the Finals.

Now in a new Nike ad, James delivers a pep talk to the world, using that comeback and similar against-all-odds battles of such stars as Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, and the New England Patriots’ 2017 Super Bowl win as an analogy for how the world is dealing with the pandemic. This is a tough time, and it’s very easy to feel beat down.

But while this health emergency is no game, we can use sports as an inspiration to hold our nerve and continue to push through.

In a statement, James said the whole world is fighting for something bigger than a championship right now. “People are struggling and this continues to be an incredibly difficult time,” said James. “For me, thinking forward to a time when we’ll be able to play again, it keeps me going. Even if

basketball looks different for a while, I’m excited about the possibility of getting back in the game because I know how inspiring and powerful sports can be. I think the lessons we learn from sport can inspire us all.”

This isn’t Nike’s first pandemic-related ad. Back in midMarch, as social distancing and stay-at-home orders were first (finally) being enforced, the brand put out a simple tweet that aimed to put individual discipline and action into a global perspective.

Then in April, the brand posted a new ad featuring a laundry list of its sponsored athletes working out at home. That spot complemented moves that the company was making to its own digital products, using its Nike, Running Club, and Nike Training Club apps as well as its social channels and more to serve up tools and motivation to help people stay active, including things like weekly YouTube workouts and making its premium Nike Training Club app content free in the United States.

This month, the brand has reopened almost all of its retail stores in China and South Korea, and it’s begun opening doors across 15 other countries, including the United States.

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CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY IN THE DIGITAL ERA

By Michael Wade

Corporate digital responsibility spans four areas — social, economic, technological, and environmental — that should be merged under one organizational umbrella.

Sustainability and digitization have been two of the most significant global business trends over the past several years.

Sustainability concerns humanity’s relationship with the natural world, while digitization focuses on the virtual world.

Lacking obvious common roots, they have developed more or less independently of each other, but it’s time for these two worlds to merge.

The need for this merger is simple. The risks to humanity of poor or unethical digital practices are increasing rapidly and can no longer be ignored. Imagine the damage that could be caused by a weapon controlled by malevolent AI, the impact of a total loss of personal privacy, or the social and economic costs of unregulated gig-economy jobs with few or no social protections. The potential outcomes of these and other scenarios are starting to be openly discussed within governments and civil society. Now corporate entities need to join the debate.

The corporate world is, in fact, beginning to realize its responsibilities for protecting the planet. Large entities like Unilever have long championed sustainability as a key corporate objective. The 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, chose “how to save the planet” as a guiding theme. Even the cutthroat world of private equity is taking note, as evidenced by BlackRock’s recent announcement that it will prioritize investments in sustainable entities.

These organizations realize that sustainable practices are

not only good for the environment but for business as well.

Unilever’s Sustainable Living Brands have accounted for more than 75% of the company’s recent growth.

Within most companies, however, the digital aspects of sustainability have been spread thinly across various corporate departments, if not entirely overlooked. Bringing these disparate and fragmented elements together under a single umbrella allows them to be addressed in a consistent and complementary manner. This new, consolidated focus is known as corporate digital responsibility. CDR is a subset of corporate social responsibility, an already established entity in many organizations.

I define CDR as a set of practices and behaviors that help an organization use data and digital technologies in a way that is socially, economically, technologically, and environmentally responsible.

The Four Categories of CDR Each of CDR’s four categories contains components that engender significant opportunities to create competitive differentiation. (See “The 4 Categories of Corporate Digital Responsibility.”) They may also become threats if not appropriately addressed.

Social corporate digital responsibility involves an organization’s relationship to people and society. The vital topic of data privacy protection of customers, employees,

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and other stakeholders is included in this area. It also incorporates aspects of digital diversity and inclusion, such as bridging an increasing divide between digital haves and have-nots across geographies, industries, social classes, and age demographics.

Economic corporate digital responsibility concerns responsible management of the economic impacts of digital technologies. Much has been said about the replacement of human jobs by robots and other digital technologies, and this is certainly a relevant part of economic CDR. Economic CDR also relates to the creation of new digital-era jobs that are enriching, purposeful, and interesting. Emerging evidence suggests that jobs created by the so-called gig economy are often uninteresting, repetitive, and low paying. Questions are also arising about how companies share the economic benefits of digitization with society through taxation of digital work, and if and how the original owners of monetized data are fairly compensated.

Technological corporate digital responsibility is linked to the responsible creation of technologies themselves. For example, biased or inaccurate AI decision-making algorithms can lead to unfair or discriminatory practices, as has been noted among many recommendation engines. In 2017, more than 1,000 AI researchers, including luminaries such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, signed an open letter calling for a ban on the weaponization of AI and similar digital technologies. Other technologies, such as so-called deepfake videos in which people are realistically made to appear to be saying or doing things that they did not, can also have harmful effects on society.

Finally, environmental corporate digital responsibility concerns the link between digital technologies and the physical environment, including issues of responsible recycling or the disposal of old computer equipment. Extending obsolescence cycles by one year, for example, could have an enormous positive impact on the environment. Another consideration is limiting power consumption, including reducing the use of electricity to support bitcoin mining.

A Consolidated Approach to Digital Sustainability Many organizational processes, practices, and projects exist to address digital aspects of social, economic, technological, and environmental responsibility, but they’re rarely coordinated or optimized. Cybersecurity, for example, tends to be the responsibility of IT departments, whereas workforce automation may fall under the purview of operations, and yet other elements may sit with HR, legal, engineering, R&D, or particular business lines.

To ensure better mitigation of risks and the capturing of rewards, these disparate areas should be coordinated collectively. The responsibility for this consolidated approach could sit with a CDR office that coordinates and oversees the role of digital technologies to promote ethical and sustainable business practices. This office should consist of a cross-functional team of key decision makers from areas such as IT, legal, supply chain, and administration rather than yet another siloed corporate function.

Organizations need to examine how their digital technologies and practices impact employees, customers, and society at large. Failing to do so may lead to a whole host of problems, such as employee resistance, as we have seen recently at Amazon and in Silicon Valley giants such as Google.

Unexamined or insufficient digital sustainability practices may also lead to falling revenues and profits as civil society demands more-responsible practices, targeting organizations that are seen to fall short. Failure to act could also lead to more stringent regulations, such as the EU’s GDPR legislation, which includes severe penalties for noncompliant behavior or inaction.

As sustainability and digitization trends continue to grow, CDR will become increasingly relevant for organizational performance, both to mitigate risks and to delight increasingly digitally and sustainability-savvy consumers in new ways. Organizations that fail to take a synergistic and coordinated approach to CDR may find themselves in trouble with customers, employees, and regulators.

t c e t o r P o t e r a p e Pr

By Paul Mee and Gokhanedge Ozturk

Digital assistants are always listening, creating a significant security risk as the threat of voice-based cybercrime grows.

The threat of voice-based cybercrime is growing along with the explosion of voice-directed digital assistants, billions of which are already embedded in our mobile phones, computers, cars, and homes. Digital assistants are always listening, creating a significant security risk, especially as millions of people work from home during the pandemic.

It’s estimated that in the next two years, there will be more virtual digital assistants than people in the world. Nearly two-thirds of businesses plan to use voice assistants for their customer interactions, according to a 2018 survey conducted

by Pindrop Security.

Already, the number of cyberattacks on voice-recognition systems is rising as people converse with bots to play music, pay their bills, book reservations at restaurants, and perform other everyday tasks. It now takes less than four seconds of original audio to create a deepfake of someone’s voice. Recently, hackers used machine learning software to impersonate a CEO and order subordinates to wire hundreds of thousands of dollars to a fraudulent account.

Much of today’s voice fraud, known as “vishing,” involves controlling voice assistants by methods such as embedding undetectable audio commands, replaying voice recordings, and modifying fraudsters’ voices to match the pitch of their victims’ voices. As hackers become better at impersonating people, they will be able to apply deepfakes of voices that will be far harder to detect.

The damage could be catastrophic unless companies take appropriate cybersecurity precautions. Financial services companies send millions of customers new credit cards after criminals steal information, but they can’t send them new voices. Unless voice activation is made secure, the rapid growth of machines that recognize voice commands could grind to a halt, damaging customers’ trust in the privacy safeguards of the many companies that use voice systems.

Pindrop’s survey found that 80% of businesses worldwide considered the security of their voice-directed services to be a concern. So how can managers make their customers’ voices safe?

As a first principle, companies should roll out voice-directed services only when they are confident of their ability to mitigate the accompanying cybersecurity risks. For example, at first, financial companies may want to offer customers only the ability to check basic facts by voice — such as account balances and stock quotes — and have them continue to use manual means or biometrics like the person’s face or fingerprint to execute transactions.

As the range of voice-activated services extends and becomes more sophisticated, here are some other measures businesses can take.

Strengthen Customer Authentications Companies should introduce screening protocols for voicecontrolled services that are at least as robust as those used for other digital services. Customers should receive alerts if their orders exceed a certain threshold or appear to deviate from their typical purchasing patterns.

Companies can increase awareness of potential scams by distributing checklists to help customers gauge whether a third party’s approach or a request for information could be fraudulent. For example, a company could advise customers to hang up if a caller doesn’t know their name and relationship to the company, or if the caller’s phone number seems suspicious. Recently, scammers have been tricking people into giving away sensitive information when they use voice searches to find customer service numbers. Customers should also be made aware of the extent to which they are insured against fraud whenever a company launches a new voice-directed service.

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At the same time, voice-directed services should ask for additional forms of authentication. These could consist of biometrics such as a customer’s fingerprint or face. Or they could be qualitative verbal authentications that can’t be found in the public domain — personal preferences, for instance, or the relative a customer visited with most often as a child, or both.

Companies will also have to invest in filtering technologies that detect whether a voice is real or synthesized as they become available. Some companies are already trying out technologies that can detect clues that human hearing normally misses, such as the sound of breathing, which may be present in a genuine voice but absent in a synthesized impersonation. Systems are also being designed to block inaudible commands by identifying and canceling ultrasonic signals, which researchers have found can take control of voice-recognition systems.

Conduct Cyber Exercises Hackers will continue to develop new methods to exploit the weakest links in systems. Companies offering voice-activated services need to test their security constantly, conducting cyber exercises that identify vulnerabilities to determine ways to plug the gaps. They should also prepare responses to deploy in the event of a successful cyberattack.

voices, how should it react? How would it detect an attack in the first place? And what alternatives should be made available in the event of an emergency?

Communicate Across Industry Today, regulations exist for voice-directed services. For example, the California Consumer Privacy Act limits the sale and mining of consumer voice data collected through smart televisions. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation requires companies to report personal data breaches to their relevant local regulatory authority, though it does not currently address voice compromises directly.

Whatever the rules, cybersecurity officers should maintain regular contact with governments and others in their industries in order to stay ahead of regulations and potential new threats. Voice operations — and the convenience and efficiency they bring — will only spread so long as the companies offering them show that they can safeguard customers’ voices.

Companies should establish forums and other methods to share data about voice-assistant breaches so that whole industries can stay ahead of their adversaries. Once voice assistants become a common method for transferring money, new security protocols may also be needed.

As a training exercise, some of a company’s cybersecurity experts could try to exploit a voice assistant’s security gaps while others guard against the attackers. Alternatively, companies could engage ethical hackers to conduct surprise attacks on voice-assistant services — either on their own or in collaboration with other businesses or industries. The defense and payment industries already hold cross-industry cyber war games of this kind.

The Potential of the Conversational Economy

Cybersecurity teams should simultaneously explore alternate ways of operating should a voice-related cyber crisis arise.

Experts should puzzle out in advance how to react to scenarios by considering a series of questions: If withdrawals are suddenly made from a bank using deepfaked customer

But delivering this conversational future will require cybersecurity to stay ahead of hackers’ ability to abuse voice systems. Businesses should prioritize exploring now what it will take to keep their customers’ voices safe — and prepare to continue the battle indefinitely.

If voice-directed services were made secure, they could deliver services that would improve — and possibly transform — consumers’ daily lives. People could tell cars to take them to appointments. They could turn to mobile phones to arrange their vacations. One day, they might even ask virtual assistants for financial advice.

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