BrandKnew November 2019

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

Published by

11.19#85

brandknew.groupisd.com brandknewmag.com

10

Dear Friends: We are hurtling rapidly towards the end of what has been a fascinating year for brands and marketers.

And the coming times augur promise even better. We have tried our utmost to do justice to the action that is happening all around us. We take a look at the Best Global Brands as of 2019. After all who doesn’t need a benchmark to get inspired? We also engage in a talk about Personal Branding Trends that should be in your radar in the coming year 2020. The feature on Authentic Marketing will make very interesting reading. We also evaluate if your brand is intrusive or engaging. PR and Marketing: The Twain has to meet. We express that in this issue. Consistency has been a sore point in branding for a while. In this edition, we bring that to the fore. In a highly distracted eco sphere, we talk about the vitality of brand experience and the new rules of customer engagement. Yes, data driven marketing builds trust and you will understand more about it in this issue. The article on why Digital Advertising must find a cookie substitute will be an eye opener. The advent of 5G and how that will impact marketing and content creators is insightful material. There is ample more actionable intelligence for brand owners, guardians and marketers- so go ahead and make it a November to remember. Till the next…

Best

12 14 16 20 24 28 30 32 34

Suresh Dinakaran @ISDGlobalDubai

@Brandknewmag

linkd.in/1dsjYaW

isdbranding

bit.ly/1h95tgO

isdglobaldubai

suresh@groupisd.com

Brand Knew is published by

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

www.brandknew.groupisd.com www.groupisd.com Download Mobile App from

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

36 38 42 44 48 52 56 60 62

CONTENTS

Personal Branding Trends That Should Be on Your Radar in 2020 How To Tackle The Era Of Authentic Marketing The new rules of engagement in brand experience A peek into the Best Global Brands Tech Marketing Is Losing Its Cool Go to Market Strategy – The Cost of B2B Direct Selling How To Get Pr And Marketing On The Same Page Shifting Influence: Micro-Influencers Prove That Influencer Marketing Is Far From Dead How Data-Driven Marketing Builds Trust Why digital advertising must find a cookie substitute Is Your Brand Engaging or Intrusive?

Fashion Fail: Where Did Forever 21 Go Wrong? {grow}: What 5G Means For Content Consumption and Creators Brands, agencies seek ad efficiencies by going direct Finding Your Voice: Why Confidence Is Key to Persuasion What’s the 2020 Color of the Year? There are three so far Not A Toy Story: How Brian Goldner Is Transforming Hasbro The Power of Consistency in Branding Book, Line & Sinker

Personal Branding Trends That Should Be on Your Radar in 2020 EVERY ENTREPRENEUR KNOWS THAT PERSONAL BRANDING IS A NECESSITY, BUT MANY FAIL TO DO IT RIGHT.

By John Hall

Many startups today are founded by a technologist or an engineer. Every idea that sparks a new company seems to come from deep knowledge of how to create a new product or process -- or improve upon something already in existence.

While these types of founders build good products and solve real customer problems, they often discount the importance of brand.

The founders of the future are going to be that much more prepared. Right now, they might be learning a skill to get a job -- but soon, some will be using that skill to create a company. And branding is important for both startups and founders.

Personal branding is now your résumé. It’s how you define yourself if you’re looking to build a reputation as an expert, get a side gig or even find a new job. It’s what you leverage if you’re looking to start something on your own, whether it’s a social media following or a career as a speaker.

In a sea of competition, a strong brand helps a startup get noticed. Most sales decisions are made prior to ever talking with a salesperson. What your website says and how it looks, the compelling points of view you’re sharing in your thought leadership, your engagement with your audience via social channels, your reputation with your customer base -- these are all brand elements that make the difference between success and failure.

Recently, there’s been talk about how “showing your work” has become an expert’s calling card. For example, a lot of colleges and universities now use Instructure’s tool Portfolium to help students track their accomplishments and create a real-time digital portfolio of their best work and core skills.

This is built into Canvas, a learning management platform that many schools use as their online learning system.

That’s absolutely a form of personal branding. For most of us, it hasn’t been that organized. It’s great to see, and it will put Gen Z in the best possible position to succeed. And the fact that educators now see that as vital means we entrepreneurs should as well.

Branding for a Startup

Startups have a lot of audiences: customers, investors, competitors, influencers. A well-built brand speaks to all of them and gathers momentum. In the early phase, being seen as weak by any of those audiences can impact your future growth trajectory.

For a lot of startups, technology is table stakes. Other digital interactions have led customers to expect their experiences to be outstanding. It’s the brand side of the house that ends up determining why one startup is chosen over another.

brandknewmag.com

11

“One mistake I often hear from technical founders is that brand is all fluff. Brand is your point of view within your industry. Brand is how you engage with your audience, both online and off,” said Kyle York, CEO and managing partner of York IE. “Brand is not fluff. Your brand is your fingerprint.

You leave it behind on everything you touch, and you don’t exist without it.”

York helped build a successful company, Dyn, which was acquired by Oracle for $600 million. After three years at Oracle, he and other Dyn alums decided to go back to using their go-to-market experience to help the entrepreneurs and startups they invest in build stronger brands. They were recently featured in TechCrunch discussing a new model for how early-stage companies get funded -- and branding is a key component of that strategy. The stronger the brand, the more options a startup creates for itself.

Branding for a Founder A founder is three things: 1. The first salesperson: Having a strong brand makes it easier to get meetings with prospects.

2. The head recruiter: If you have a strong brand and reputation, the best people will want to work with you.

Hiring the best will help your company scale.

3. The fundraiser: So much of funding is based on your network. How can you tap into a network if you don’t have one?

If you try to build your personal brand the day you launch your startup, it’s too late. You need to invest in building your brand for years before you ever get the entrepreneurial itch.

It’s a conscious decision in preparation, just as much as R&D or market research might be. And even if you decide not to start a business, a strong personal brand will still help you in your current career. Consider Elon Musk, who’s well known for his innovative mind beyond Tesla and SpaceX -- his brand outpaces that of even his companies.

“One of my core values is playing the long game. Think of

every tweet, blog or LinkedIn profile update as an investment in your future,” said York. “You won’t have a blue checkmark tomorrow, if ever. But you will be projecting how much you care and the type of person and worker you are. That reputation is priceless, and it transcends whatever current role you’re in.”

Think about what you want to be known as the go-to person for -- that’s likely where your expertise lies and where you’re most likely to want to build something later. Build your social media around your thoughts in that area (and your philosophy of business in general). Launch a blog to share your insights. Write a guest column here and there. Speak to groups, whether it’s on a local or national stage. Investing in yourself will pay dividends.

Make an Effort to Share Knowledge Sharing knowledge can be a great way to slowly gain a reputation for being the best. I recently appeared on The Business Method and had several people reach out to say the information I shared helped them with a current problem.

This is just one of the many podcasts or platforms you can utilize to share your expertise and build trust with the people you help (or hope to).

Some people worry that sharing their knowledge is equivalent to giving away the “secret sauce” or rendering themselves obsolete. But knowledge hoarding doesn’t boost your profile -- it reinforces the idea that you’re only willing to share your expertise if it benefits you. That’s a quick way to ensure nobody invests in you the way you’ve invested in yourself.

Being able to give and also promote expertise is a great way to continuously elevate your brand. We gravitate toward what we believe based on our perceptions. Take a look at how the world sees you, and consider how you can make the world see more.

John Hall is the co-founder and president of Calendar, a leading calendar app that’s designed to change how we manage and invest our time. He’s also the co-founder and adviser of Influence & Co., a content marketing agency that helps brands and individuals leverage their expertise to create, publish, and distribute engaging content.

How To Tackle The Era Of Authentic Marketing

By Guy Avigdor

An integral aspect of a successful marketing plan is strong brand messaging. This is the language that conveys your underlying value proposition in order to persuade buyers. Take, for example, Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan or Subway’s “Eat Fresh.”

Brand messaging resonates on a personal level and can help justify a purchase. But nowadays, that doesn’t seem to be enough. We’ve entered the era of The Conscious Consumer. These are people who want to understand the values of the brand they are buying from and what impact their purchase has. This attitude has had both positive and negative impacts on brands; take, for example, Uber’s scandal with its former CEO, Travis Kalanick, and previously reported poor company culture, which led to the #dropuber movement.

As consumers become increasingly aware of the brands they are buying into, brand values have become a core component of brand messaging.

Brand Authenticity

potential buyer’s mindset. And a bigname celebrity on a billboard isn’t always the best way for a brand to prove their “wokeness.” This is where influencers might come in. Not only can influencers be a great channel for promoting brand authenticity and accountability, but they can also establish personal connections over shared ethos.

For brands deciding to go this route, connect with an influencer who is already a credible thought leader or promoter of certain values. Identifying your own brand’s values is a great place to start. What do you stand for? What feelings do you want to resonate with potential customers?

I’ve spoken with many marketers who want to emphasize inclusivity in their campaigns -- that their brand is for everyone. Partnering with a diverse range of influencers is a positive way to indirectly promote such values and make customers feel included.

Value Marketing Vs. Product Marketing

Conscious consumers tend to focus on things like corporate culture, environmental effects, labor laws and ethical sourcing. Their focus is less on what they are buying and more on what the brand they are buying into stands for. It is almost to a point where brands are not selling products, but their products are selling their values.

For example, Aerie, the loungewear line by American Eagle, made a commitment to stop Photoshopping its advertisements and promote body positivity. This commitment was supported by the #AerieReal hashtag and has been a brand ethos for five years.

As influencer marketing becomes a strategic channel for brands, more and more, values are front and center of campaigns rather than products.

In fact, some of the most inspiring influencer campaigns lately have used the product to highlight brand values:

But the truth is, traditional marketing channels can be a hard platform for promoting values when done by the brand itself, especially when authenticity is front and center of a

The Startup

The Enterprise Diet Coke’s latest #unlabeled campaign has the company removing labels from its infamous soda cans to ignite a conversation about judgments.

The campaign includes 16 unique influencers that aim to shed stigmas from a variety of issues from gender, mental health, disability and religion.

Lyft is a company with a strong corporate ethos. It has always been at the forefront of important social issues

such as LGBTQ+ and gender equality.

The brand’s recent campaign highlights Lyft drivers who are immigrants to the U.S., amplifying a discussion about current immigration policies.

The New Kid Klean Kanteen is an environmentally conscious brand offering non-toxic, BPA-Free, reusable water bottles.

It partners with many agri-travel influencers to spread its mission of sustainability. The brand ran a campaign for Plastic Free July, and through a “zero waste advocate” influencer, gave away reusable water bottles to three followers in order to promote the stop of single-use plastic.

Diet Coke, Lyft and Klean Kanteen are brands existing in different spaces, with different parameters and budgets impacting their marketing efforts. Yet, each brand has strategically used its product to advocate a greater message and to promote clear brand value.

Just Another Marketing Scheme?

Some have argued that this new era of socially conscious marketing is just another marketing scheme. This may be so. But is that a bad thing?

Sometimes it is evident that brands are promoting a cause because it’s trendy, but corporate social responsibility (CSR) has led to more brands talking the talk and walking the walk. Sure, advocating a value is a great way to engage with potential consumers, but authenticity in supporting a cause is what will keep customers around.

Brands always have an agenda, and that typically means playing into the interests of consumers. But, if the interests now are most socially aware and humanitarian, why should we question that? Demand drives supply, and if consumers are demanding ethical brands, this will only be good for all of us.

The new rules of engagement in brand experience

By Dom Boyd

Just as digital has transformed markets, it is now transforming how brand value is built, by shifting the centre of gravity from mass storytelling towards personal connected experiences.

Dom Boyd, founder of DADA consultancy, introduces the latest issue of Admap which shines a light on what it takes to win in this new era.

These are extraordinary times. We’re at the foothills of a new era, the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

An era that Professor Klaus Schwab characterises as being differentiated by the speed of technological breakthroughs, the scope and impact of new systems and disruptive technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI), which are now starting to fundamentally change the way we live and work.

An era where our mobile phones are embedded in our lives as defacto work and entertainment operating systems, where we willingly provide our data in exchange for content and expect immediate access to information about anything, from anywhere, 24/7.

This has upended our relationship with each other, with our employers, and with brands. No more can brands hide behind a carefully crafted wall of words & storytelling. We now judge them through their actions & behaviours, from the personal experiences they provide. And we expect immediate gratification – from its social feed, from its SEO links, its website experience, it’s content relevance, it’s e-commerce delivery fulfilment options and from its customer service channel.

No wonder then that organisations and brands are seeking a new roadmap for how to operate to successfully drive growth. The winning rules of engagement have changed and will continue to evolve as new technologies bring with them new possibilities & customer expectations.

This issue of Admap aims to provide exactly that, through 12 articles from thought-leaders that tackle questions including: • how do brand experiences create commercial value?

• what are the secrets to creating the most powerful brand experiences?

brandknewmag.com

15

• how can you avoid potential pitfalls for creating suboptimal experiences?

• how do you recover from #experiencefails and setbacks?

• what is the most effective way to create an experience-led brands in organisations?

• what can non-digital brands learn from new-generation DTC brands?

• how do you effectively measure success?

Our leader article ‘Finding power, potential and innovation through brand experience’, Laurence Parkes, CEO, Rufus Leonard discusses some of the secrets to designing and creating uniquely powerful brand experiences including identifying ‘hero, near-o and zero moments’ in a customer journey. He also discusses their Brand Experience Index which ranks brands across 5 senses to identify relative competitive opportunities.

In ‘Experience Works, and here’s how’ Mike McCann & Neil Dawson from PublicisSapient share powerful new evidence outlining a new model of measuring the commercial return on brand experience investment, based on Experience Stock, Reputation Stock and Net user Growth. Using this model they show how digital experiences are now the primary source of revenue and growth. They also highlight the importance of developing a long and short-term framework for effectively measuring commercial impact.

In ‘Brand experience should not distract marketers from fundamental brand truths’, Paul Feldwick exposes the fallacy of thinking experiences are in themselves something new. Instead, he argues that they build brands through the same fundamental truths based on the way brands create meaningful patterns of emotionally-driven associations which drive our perceptions & our behaviours.

TSB Bank’s CMO Pete Markey shares his professional reflections on how to rebuild trust and brand equity following a crisis which hugely impacted brand experience and NPS scores. ‘Managing experience in a crisis: Five lessons from TSB’, highlights the critical importance of having a strong brand purpose to rally behind, and the power of using human empathy when getting the brand back on track.

Lorna Sommerville, CMO Function of Beauty and Nazia Du Bois, Founder of Ricebowl Strategy give us a ‘Behind the scenes refreshingly candid look at the inner working of DTC brands’. They discuss the differences between DTC and non-DTC brands, in particular the relative importance of digital data in driving insight-led growth and the challenges surrounding balancing short and longer-term KPIs and the importance of creating attribution models.

In ‘All Experiences are not equal: how to build positive experiences for brand growth’, Fiona Blades, President and CEO, MESH Experience argues that share of experience is now more powerful than share of voice at driving commercial growth, and shows evidence highlighting both how building positive brand experiences are the key to driving growth metrics, and – critically - how a neutral experience is negative.

In ‘Islands and connections – creating organisations everyone

loves’, Jonathan Lovatt-Young, Founder and principal experience strategist, Love Experience reveals learnings from the frontline in creating digital transformation programmes that work. In particular, how people always trump process.

From this insight he also shares a new model for developing brand experience programmes by starting with aligning & connecting people inside an organisation behind experience goals.

Ramzi Yakob, Head of strategy and experience for the Digital Factory, Aviva shares a powerful and provocative new model of how unconscious bias in brand organisations and teams unwittingly builds poor customer experiences by focusing on the functional over the pleasurable aspects of experience.

In ‘Experience debt: Eroding brands through customer experience’, he provides tips on how to avoid this negative experience trap.

In ‘Demystifying the brand experience building process’, Darren Coleman, Founder and Managing Consultant of Wavelength Marketing shares a three-stage tool for building brand experiences called The Brand Experience Blueprint.

This is based on the brand experience Environment, Essentials and Enablers. He outlines a detailed toolkit of components behind each of these elements and how they fit together to define a brand’s experience.

In ‘The house that strategy built’, Jon Wilkins & Lisa Debonis, Accenture Interactive argue that the role of strategy in the experience age must be to use empathy to spot warning signs in the brand experience and to then align customer experience with organizational P&L’s the lens of clear brand fundamentals. They note nothing works well in the connected world if there’s an Experience Gap: no amount of advertising will save you if your brand’s credo isn’t fulfilled through its experience – so the role of agencies is to invent ideas which bridge the experience gap.

In ‘Oculus is not the answer’, Sanjay Nazerali, Global chief strategy and development officer, dentsu X shares his perspective that the data revolution has reduced human beings to behaviours. In doing this, we are in danger of forgetting that our behaviour is driven by motivations.

Finally, in ‘Immersive etiquette: Five marketing rules for virtual worlds’, Rory Byrne, Business Director, Imagination argues that in an increasingly immersive world, it is imperative to experiment with new technology and multi-sensory digitisation that brings sensory elements to the physical environment including audio, visual, sensory replication, and haptics. He outlines fives rules for brands to succeed in this new 4D immersive world.

Together, this collection of articles provides evidence-born stimulus that can help your brand thrive in the new Experience era through asking better questions and identifying better potential solutions.

Enjoy.

Dom Boyd is ex CSO of Publicis Poke, APG Chair and founder of DADA, a digital strategy & brand experience consultancy.

A peek into the Best Global Brands AMAZON SURGES AND FACEBOOK FALLS AGAIN IN REPORT ON BRAND VALUE

By Nat Ives

Facebook Inc. slid again in a new report on the world’s most valuable brands, while the famous names of Amazon.com Inc. and Walt Disney Co. gained.

INTERBRAND’S BEST GLOBAL BRANDS

Facebook fell out of the top 10 in Interbrand’s annual Best Global Brands report, dropping to 14th place from ninth as the estimated value of its brand declined 12% to $39.9 billion.

• No. 1 Apple, $234.2 billion (+9% in value)

Interbrand, part of Omnicom Group Inc., says its report synthesizes elements including the financial performance of branded products or services, the role that brands play in purchasing decisions and brands’ ability to create loyalty.

By Interbrand’s estimation, the Facebook name grew steadily in value each year until 2017, when it earned eighth place.

But Facebook has now endured an onslaught of bad publicity, including the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed that users’ data had flowed beyond Facebook more freely than many people expected.

TOP 10

• No. 2 Google, $167.7 billion (+8%) • No. 3 Amazon, $125.3 billion (+24%) • No. 4 Microsoft, $108.8 billion (+17%) • No. 5 Coca-Cola, $63.4 billion (-4%) • No. 6 Samsung, $61.1 billion (+2%) • No. 7 Toyota, $56.2 billion (+5%) • No. 8 Mercedes-Benz, $50.8 billion (+5%)

• No. 9 McDonald’s, $45.4 billion (+4%) • No. 10 Disney, $44.4 billion (+11%) Today the company and other tech giants are subjects of antitrust investigations and calls by prominent presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) to break them up.

“The lack of trust in a brand, if it goes to the heart of its business model, is really going to affect a brand,” said Charles Trevail, global chief executive at Interbrand.

Facebook declined to comment.

Declining relevance and rising competition also hurt, which is partly how Interbrand explains Gillette’s 18% brand-value drop this year, sinking to 37th place from 28th.

Gillette, a Procter & Gamble Co. brand that peaked at 13 on Interbrand’s list in 2009 and 2010, tried to improve its appeal to young people this year with moves like an ad campaign taking on “toxic masculinity” and a new heated razor under the name GilletteLabs.

billion to remain at No. 4. “And then complementing our own proprietary research and insights we do—It’s often nice to have a separate methodology and data points to complement our own insights.”

“The exact valuation they come up with is not something I really focus on,” Mr. Hansen said. “I do think how much are we increasing or decreasing in a given year against many others is interesting.”

Amazon remained in third place on Interbrand’s rankings, behind No. 1 Apple Inc. and No. 2 Google. But Amazon’s brand value rose more quickly, by 24% to $125.3 billion.

Disney moved to No. 10 from No. 14 with an 11% increase in brand value to $44.4 billion.

“The companies that are doing well are the ones that are making big bets,” Mr. Trevail said, citing Disney’s streamingvideo service arriving next month as an example.

The Department of Justice is investigating the U.S.’s largest tech firms for allegedly monopolistic behavior. Roughly 20 years ago, a similar case threatened to destabilize Microsoft.

WSJ explains.

P&G said it focuses on sales growth and the number of people using its brands. The company’s grooming business expanded organic sales in the year through June 30 and

Luxury and retail brands made up the fastest-rising sector for the second year in a row, Interbrand said.

gained 15 million new users globally, a P&G spokeswoman said, adding that Gillette has the top market share in the U.S. and holds a more than 65% share of the male blades and razors market world-wide.

Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communications officer at Mastercard Inc., said reports like this help marketers evaluate their brands in a wider context than usual. Interbrand said Mastercard’s brand value rose 25% to $9.4 billion.

Marketers don’t treat outside rankings like Interbrand’s as solid financial data, but do keep an eye on the results.

“It is an outside-in view of how this community, this portion of the marketplace is looking at us,” said Jeff Hansen, general manager of brand strategy at Microsoft Corp., which Interbrand said boosted its brand value 17% to $108.8

“Most studies you do about your brand are in the context of who you think are your competing brands and how you are doing,” Mr. Rajamannar said. “Everyone collectively is fighting for consumers’ hearts and minds, not just in your categories.” He added: “So these kinds of external studies cutting across categories are also helpful for us.”

Tech Marketing Is Losing Its Cool WHEN THE CRACKS IN THE FACADE BEGIN TO SHOW, JUST KEEP CALM AND CONSIDER SUPPLY AND DEMAND.

By Virginia Heffernan

groupisd.com

21

The year 2015 was a heady time to do marketing for tech startups. The venture baronry that controlled the fates of founders had decided that markets, rather than engineering or personnel, made or broke new companies. If you were a strategist or a creative, swagger came with the job, along with corporate Uber and free lunches of glistening sushi. You’d enter a pitch meeting in your sharp blowout and bravura nail art—every time; it was all about the rose gold accent nail that year—extremely confident that a solid creed preceded you.

The only thing startups need is markets.

Marketing was on fleek, just as “on fleek” was on fleek.

Those were the days. I was the editorial director of a tech marketing shop based in San Francisco, and—having come up as a blowout-deprived journalist—I felt almost high on the luxe marketing-chick lifestyle. Not only did the job often seem like one long perk, but it was important. I knew, almost by heart, “The Only Thing That Matters,” the 2007 essay by Marc Andreessen, in which the oracle of Menlo Park argued that markets are, indeed, “the most important factor in a startup’s success or failure.”

But didn’t the product matter? The team? Not really.

Andreessen was blunt: With a great market, a company can handle a staff of half-wits or jerks because “the team is remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly.” What’s more, he wrote, “the product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work.”

VCs had also soundly discredited pricing as the key to success. (When a sector is indifferent to the laws of supply and demand, that is some serious irrational exuberance.)

“Innovation,” too, was yesterday’s news. Disappointingly, for those of us who cottoned to the folktale of a new economy driven by brilliant little Edisons and Teslas in Everlane, technological breakthroughs were, by 2015, believed to be too easily copied. Instead, success lay in branding flourishes— Snapchat ghosts, Instagram influencers, the massive glass lantern that is Istanbul’s Apple store.

We in marketing also held tight to Rachleff’s Law of Startup Success, named for Andy Rachleff, another VC god who cofounded the firm Benchmark that made a mint betting on eBay, OpenTable, Snapchat, Twitter, and Uber. Rachleff’s Law: The number one company killer is lack of market.

I liked to associate things like payment software and organicsnack subscription boxes with such universally admired ideas as Apple, love, or Banksy.

And so, flush off earlyish rounds of venture capital, startups paid us to identify, reach, and soften up prospective consumers, using an alchemy of surveys, intuition, design, blue-sky ideation, typography, ethnographies, direct email, advertising, events, comms, logos, PR, stunts, and (in theory) art, literature, and film. And of course my specialty: decks.

These are the sententious keynote presentations, used to

dazzle investors or recruit employees, that try to get a startup to seem like a holy mission. In my decks, I liked to associate things like payment software and organic-snack subscription boxes with such universally admired ideas as Apple, love, or Banksy.

We marketing teams came to believe we alone could save startups from untimely deaths by achieving the desideratum to end all desiderata: product/market fit. PMF. Products were seen as placeholders that were to be broken, iterated on, pivoted from. By contrast, a nice loamy market, primed, was a joy forever. The everything. In the right market, anything— vanilla-­honey vape, ancient grains meal-­delivery service— can find purchase. Though not all startups believed marketing was the silver bullet for success, the ones that came to us seemed to think: If you build it, they will come, and if they come, you will find a way—even if far, far down the road—to sell them mugs. Or memberships. Or ads, or some freemium bunk.

The problem was the usual. We were bullish for too long.

As we watched the big agencies, we saw that even the best marketing couldn’t quite compensate for a certain miniature blood test that didn’t work. Nor, at another agency, could Instagram influencers turn disaster-relief tents into a sexy island bacchanal worthy of Kendall Jenner. From our firm’s gleaming digs, we shuddered as we watched the first cracks in the facade of Theranos. Later, other offerings with marvelous marketing—Jawbone, Hampton Creek (Just Mayo), and Airware—burned through millions of dollars trying to get the optics right on products, services, or business models that were, yeah, janky.

Moreover, when it came right down to it, staffing did matter, especially because teams underperformed when mismanaged by bumptious founders like Uber’s Travis Kalanick and WeWork’s Adam Neumann. Teams willing to work with volatile, arrogant management weren’t so “remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly,” as Andreessen had once led investors to believe; word gets around about people like Kalanick and Neumann. And then, after shake-ups like the ones at Uber and WeWork, startups generally seem more shaken than revitalized.

Four years ago, when companies had profound problems with their models, leadership, or products, marketing came to be seen as not just a way to lipstick pigs but as a way to block and tackle regulation, to keep secrets, to shut out anyone who wanted to so much as see the product.

So marketing went from the only solution to the smoke that suggested fire that suggested indictments. To be fair, at the advent of the social networks, VCs could be forgiven for thinking that marketing was the whole game. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Instagram were acquiring users to make a network and attract more users: The market (users) is the product (the network). So by acquiring users with marketing you were simultaneously building your product. VCs used to love the idea of a young big shot who saw a vast market that the old didn’t: the diary writers who would contribute to Tumblr. The lonely hearts that became Facebook. Investors also swooned at the idea of using

relatively cheap marketing magic to get millions of users hooked on something and then cashing in.

The investors cashed in. But social media companies had to turn into galactic data Hoovers to become profitable, and the naive hope that one day startups could trade on the users, accounts, or subscriptions they’d acquired meant that the early years of a company were expected to be devoted to UA. It’s not that that logic didn’t hold up; it’s that users used to come cheap to divey, bare-bones joints like Twitter, and they’d stick by glitches and unpopular updates because they had made them their own and had nowhere else to go. Now users cost much more to court—have you seen the freebies offered at companies like the home-­ products club Grove Collaborative?!—and with too many apps already on their phone, they enter new brand relationships more warily. Then, unless they’re blinded by love, they tend to jump at the first signs of glitchiness.

When Blue Apron ill-advisedly went public in 2017, it had a valuation of nearly $2 billion. With brilliant marketing, it gained a multi-furlong lead among meal kits, including an also-ran I worked on, and it had an unshakable reputation for being the luxe one. At the same time, I remember taking one look at my first, lovely, logo-adorned box and thinking: This can’t last. Sustainable seafood, no GMOs, antibioticfree and five-star, verdant herbs? The margins must be nearly zilch. But to reduce cost would be to reduce quality, and to hold onto a market of pious foodies, Blue Apron couldn’t risk

that. So the company kept spending without hiking prices, while still throwing no end of freebies at customers to gain loyalty. In May, the NYSE warned Blue Apron that it was in danger of being delisted. It’s currently valued at about 94 percent less than it was at its IPO. Maybe attending to supply and demand is not such a quaint superstition after all.

Companies that do manage to blind users by love, like the Calm meditation app, now seem to concentrate on the product, while essentially bootstrapping. Between 2012 and 2016, investors, evidently late to get religion on mindfulness, turned Calm down by the dozens on the grounds that it was “fluffy” and “a load of nonsense.” Founders Michael Acton Smith and Alex Tew decided to do what entrepreneurs did before startups were called startups: work on the product on a Scrooge budget with fewer than 10 employees out of a one-­ bedroom apartment. They gave little away but rain sounds and a short free trial; once you paid, the app provided lovely, sleepy music and stress-­relieving meditations for its users. Of whom there are now 2 million active subscribers. Gaining traction with extensive, elegantly produced content, rather than giveaways and marketing jazz, has allowed them to expand their offerings to meet the desires of subscribers, who pay up to $156 a year for their services. And well after the company turned profitable on its own terms, in 2017, VCs came calling. Now I’m not saying the Calm people are good people and Blue Apron people are not. I’m just saying Calm has been valued at $1 billion. Meditate on that.

Go to Market Strategy – The Cost of B2B Direct Selling

By Peter

The effectiveness of a companies go to market strategy will be directly correlated to a company’s success. Although the sales function is a critical component of the go to market strategy and the lifeblood of any business, most direct sales people spend precious little time actually selling, even though the annual cost of a direct sales representative is very high.

Incremental changes in the amount of time a direct sales rep spends on core selling activities will have a positive impact on the business. One way to increase the direct selling time for sales reps is to first understand the problem and then craft a solution.

Go to Market Strategy – The Math Behind Direct Selling The fully loaded cost of a direct sales rep selling B2B is approximately $380K per year or $1.9K per business day worked.

Granted, the base and bonus will vary by company. However, a typical B2B sales rep with a sound track record is expensive.

Below is a guideline of how to derive a meaningful number for a company’s specific situation:Go-to-Market Strategy The- Cost of A Direct Sales Rep

• Base is assumed to be $125K – $150K annually • Variable compensation at quota is approximately $150K annually • Overhead (benefits, office, taxes, phone, etc.) is estimated at 20% of total on target earnings • Travel and entertainment is estimated at $50K annually Tip, tax and out the door this total approximates $380K annually. In addition, this estimate does not take into account any equity awards, spot bonuses or car allowances.

Go to Market Strategy – Calculating the Cost per Working Day and Working Hour As we all know, there are 365 days in a year. However, any full-time employee does not work that many days. The number of working days in the year is approximately 200 (based upon 20 work days per month * 12 months = 240.

But, the 240 needs to be reduced by: • • • •

15 vacation days 10 national holidays 2 floating days 12 sick days

brandknewmag.com

25

While the above number is also impacted by Club, Sales Kickoff and other non-selling days, a good working number for the actual number of working days per year is 200. A good assumption for the number of hours worked in a day is 10 (this includes lunch as many meals are business-related) and that yields 2,000 workable hours a year.

The fully loaded cost of a direct sales rep ($380K/year) divided by the number of working days (200) yields a cost of $1.9K per business ,day.

Go to Market Strategy – The Cost of a B2B Sale The typical cost of a direct sales rep in a B2B technology sale is in the neighborhood of $380K, with a quota associated with that compensation package at approximately $2M annually.

Based upon an average sales cycle of 6-12 months and an average sales price of $250K, the number of deals required to make quota are eight per year or one every month and a half–there are elephants but when you look at the median for all sales rep it will approximate 8 deals per year. Granted, SaaS models alter the absolute numbers, but from a relative point of view the analysis holds true.

Note that the cost of the direct sales rep above does not include the cost (direct or variable) of a sales consultant, sales management or executive management participation in a deal. Also, there is considerable cost in losing deals as well.

Another good resource to review is ho to Leverage Marketing, Sales Development, Sales Enablement & Executives to Sell.

The amount of effort to bring a deal to closed/won, and many to closed/lost is significant. In the model below, the average sales cycle is assumed to be eight months (from the qualified opportunity state). The average sales price is assumed to be $250K and only the direct sales rep costs are included.

Here’s a summary of the effort that is typically required from a direct sales rep to win a deal:

via a conference call Meetings – to close a $250K deal over eight months, it is conservatively estimated that five meetings will be required, each consuming ½ a day (round-trip travel and the meeting itself) Meeting Preparation – assuming that at a minimum,1/2 day preparation will be required to prepare for each meeting Meeting Follow-up – assuming that at a minimum, 1/2 day preparation will be required to follow-up on each meeting RFP – Three days have been allocated for responding to the RFP Proposal – Three days have been allocated for developing the proposal Contract – Two days have been allocated for managing the contract process Emails – to close a $250K deal over eight months, it is conservatively estimated that ten emails per month will be sent, requiring 30 minutes each to craft Voicemails – it is conservatively estimated that 12 phone calls per month will be made, each requiring 30 minutes of time The net is that pricing out the cost of a direct sales reps’ time approaches $58K for the deal—and hopefully it results in a closed/won status. Again, note that the cost of other resources reqired to close the deal have not been factored into the equation.

Go to Market Strategy – Where Does a B2B Direct Rep Spends Their Time According to many studies, sales reps only spend 20% – 40% of their time selling, and that includes supporting existing customers. So the question is, where does a sales rep spend their time?

Depending upon the study, the classifications and percentages vary. In general, it can be said that based on a 50-hour work week, a direct sales rep spends: Go-to-Market Strategy - How A Direct Sales Rep Spends Their TimeResearching/prospecting, 22% • • • • • •

SaleProspecting – One day of effort is required to find a suspect or prospect and get them to have them raise his or her hand Qualifying – ½ day of effort is required to find a prospect that fits the target account profile and agrees to a meeting

Direct selling, 21% Administration, 18% Account management, 12% Travel, 13% Quotes/Configuration/Order Processing, 9% Planning, 5%

One thing for certain is that the percentages in each category are not 100% accurate and the categories may not match exactly to your particular organization. However, there is a high level of confidence that the estimate for the amount of time a sales rep spends on direct selling is within 10% – 20%.

In other words, a $1.9K a day resource that is built to sell is spending the majority of their time in non-selling activities.

Go to Market Strategy – How to Increase the Amount of B2B Direct Selling Time Every organization should decide on the core selling activities and non-core selling activities. Some sales leaders believe that a sales rep should own everything (prospecting to close) and this model can produce results if all sales reps are hunters, have a laser focus on prospecting and experience incredibly high conversion rates between sales stages. If not, this is a very expensive sales model, and incorporating less expensive resources that have specific skills should be considered in order to decrease costs and increase effectiveness.

On the other hand, there are those sales leaders that believe that core selling activities are the only activities that a sales rep should focus on and the goal is to optimize the amount of time a sales rep spends on core selling. In this scenario, a critical step is to determine the actual core selling activities.

For example, core selling activities may include:

well, an organization will have to invest in demand creation planning and execution. Such a focus will align scarce resources to the right companies, with the right message and the right offers. The result will be qualified leads that fit the target account profile. Next, an organization will need to invest in the demand management function so that qualified leads can then be converted into qualified opportunities in the sales funnel. It is at this point that the leads are passed from marketing to a direct sales person.

In addition to lead generation, marketing can provide the right sales tools, processes, systems and resources to set the sales rep up for success at bat, resulting in advancing the opportunity forward in the sales funnel. Specifically, some organizations have been able to increase direct sales time by reducing the time a direct sales rep spends: • Developing quotation entries • Crafting external emails • Reducing or eliminating post sales support

• Prospecting

• Responding to internal emails

• Account research and planning for meetings

• Searching for content

• Meetings with prospects and customers

• Scheduling executives

• Meeting follow-up

• Visit prep and customer visit set-up

• Responses to proposals

• Preparing customer data updates

• Proof of concept

• Fulfilling ad-hoc requests

• References

• Searching for references

• Orchestration of internal resources

• Sending collateral

• Contracts

• Preparing RFP responses

• Quotes/configuration

• Creating presentations

• Communications with prospects currently in the sales pipeline • Training • Account planning • Account reviews Non-core selling activities might include: • Expense reports • Communications to existing customers • Responding to administrative requests • Set-up and tear down at events • Internal emails • Internal meetings • Post-sales requests • Sending collateral • Searching for content (pricing, collateral, references, research notes, white papers, etc.)

• Building a database of companies and contacts • Scheduling meetings • Scheduling internal executives The tasks underneath each list will change with each organization. The point is that the lists be developed and a line drawn as to the tasks a direct sales rep will focus on and those tasks that should be delegated. To make this model work

Many of the non-selling activities can be delegated to marketing as long as there is a partnership that aligns at revenue and is solidified with terminology, processes, systems, reporting, metrics, communication and bidirectional feedback. If a marketing function is structured so that it has a market development, demand creation and demand management function, it is a good sign that the marketing person “gets it” and the focus is correlating to revenue.

Go to Market Strategy – The Net of B2B Direct Selling If the goal is to optimize the amount of direct selling for a sales team, then one step may be to conduct an assessment to understand the core selling vs non-core selling activities of the sales organization. Once this baseline is established, a desired state can be constructed and an incremental plan can be developed and executed to move the needle.

In the end, it is all about placing the most efficient and effective resources to each task as possible. It is often better to have a person dedicated to a specific task rather than the same task be performed a very small portion of the time by a large group of people at a more expensive pay grade.

Increase capacity by reallocating and rationalizing tasks. The usual options are to eliminate, automate, offload or increase efficiency.

HOW TO GET PR AND MARKETING ON THE SAME PAGE BREAK DOWN THE SILOS, ORGANIZE FOR SUCCESS AND PREPARE TO LOSE CONTROL

By E J SCHULTZ

The concept of integrated marketing communications— advertising and PR working together every step of the way—is not new. But getting communications and creative teams on the same page is more important than ever in an age where one PR misstep can derail even the most carefully crafted ad campaign.

“The difference between marketing and blurring because we live in a very blurry Cabrera, chief communications officer at former senior VP of corporate relations at

comms is rapidly world,” says Jano General Mills and McDonald’s.

Still, silos exist and without a conscious effort at collaboration, things can fall apart quickly. Here are some tips from PR and marketing pros on how to get the two departments running together like a well-oiled machine.

Start early In the traditional model, the marketing team creates the campaign brief and the PR team is brought on later—often after ads are fully cooked—to help spread the word. But Allison Cirullo, a general manager at PR agency Edelman, says comms teams should help marketing craft the brief. “The marketing team comes at things through very strong data

and segmentation for who the target audience is,” she says, while comms teams are well- versed in “the conversation happening in culture.”

Generate talk value If PR is not involved early enough, brands risk creating campaigns that lack talk value. That is not a good place to be in an era where paid ad buys face roadblocks such as declining TV ratings and increasingly ad-avoidant online viewers. If campaigns “don’t tell a story people want to share, no one is ever going to see it,” says Jeremy Mullman, a partner at ICF Next, the PR agency of record for marketers including MillerCoors, Skittles and Oscar Mayer. PR shops, he says, are used to working without paid media budgets. So “bringing that perspective to something that has paid budget behind it leads to a better result,” Mullman adds.

He points to how ICF Next collaborated with DDB on helping Miller Lite break through in the video gaming space by making a gadget called the “Cantroller,” a video game controller that doubles as a full can of Miller Lite. The idea came from DDB, which created a polished video featuring the can. But ICF Next ensured there were simpler visuals available to spread the news, which got picked up by outlets ranging from PC

groupisd.com

29

Magazine to Food & Wine. “From a story perspective, what was really interesting was that it was real, that they actually made it, and it worked,” Mullman says.

Get agencies on the same page Of course, collaboration can prove difficult in an age when PR and creative shops are often battling on each other’s turf.

Coca-Cola has fostered cooperation by forming an “agency council.” The initiative involves briefing all agencies at once, including creative, PR and experiential shops.

department. But now, brand PR is involved in nearly everything the marketing teams do. And it’s paying off: Total impressions across all Hershey brands grew from 9 billion in 2017 to 18 billion last year and this year have already surpassed the 33 billion mark.

Ryan Riess, director of Hershey’s in-house agency—known as “C-Sweet”—and Anna Lingeris, senior manager for earned media, held a town hall with brand marketers to go over the finer points of what makes something newsworthy. “Is it new?

Is it the first? Is it something that is very topical?” says Riess, running down some items on the checklist.

“It brings everyone in at the same time, instead of having a PR or experiential or digital [agency] being the last one brought in [to] amplify the creative—because that is not how it works anymore,” says Kate Hartman, Coca-Cola group director for brand and business communications. A creative shop, such as Anomaly, might come up with a good PR idea that Coke hands off to one of its PR shops, like Weber Shandwick, to execute, or vice versa. “It’s definitely a different way for us to think culturally, but it’s helped break down the silos,” Hartman says.

The mind shift has led to efforts like the “Candy Converter,” a machine placed near Washington Square Park in New York City last Halloween that let people deposit candy they hate in exchange for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. The idea came from Anomaly, but PR intervened so it was launched at the perfect time: three days before Halloween, not on the day itself, “so all the press leading up to Halloween was about his crazy contraption,” Lingeris says.

Organize for success

If you want to get your brand in the news, you can’t expect to control the message like a paid campaign. The story you tell will run through a filter, be it a journalist or an influencer, who will put their own spin on it. It’s a lesson that PR pros know all too well that CMOs must also embrace. To get buzz, especially online, brands must ”understand that you have to give up a little bit of control,” Cabrera says.

Hershey Co. has also made structural changes to better coordinate creative and communications. The candy giant last year put brand PR within its marketing department, reporting to Jill Baskin, chief marketing officer. The group had previously sat inside the corporate communications

Lose control

Shifting Influence: Influence: Micro-Influencers Prove That Influencer Marketing Is Far From Dead

By Maria Barea

Chief Marketing Officers and their teams are faced with an everevolving selection of marketing strategies and approaches that makes their job tough to do well. Navigating the complex web of martech, adtech, data platforms, personas and more, all to find the right way to reach and engage with key audiences has never been more difficult, complex or risky.

Finding the right approach can be like playing the lottery, while going down the wrong path can cause brands to lose credibility with their customers. One option that has been talked about at length, and is equal parts controversial and promising, is influencer marketing.

Influencers have taken a lot of flak recently, and some of that is warranted. Virtually every week, you’ll read news stories covering paid-for followers or bots. Large-scale scandals, like the Fyre Festival, and the push from influencers to support it call the entire practice into question, leading many to wonder if in fact, influencer marketing is dead? My take is that the effectiveness of influencers continues to evolve, but it is adding value to today’s marketing mix and will continue to do so in the future. There are a number of reasons why influencer marketing isn’t dead. The first is the impact that influencers have on brands. People generally trust the recommendations of their friends and peers, but it’s difficult for brands to tap into that at scale.

Influencer marketing allows brands to “designate” a peer that can be trusted by the community with which they identify — and the results of this approach speak for themselves. Our own research into why consumers follow and trust influencers has found that nearly half of survey respondents have considered making a purchase after seeing an endorsement by an influencer, and nearly one-third said that they have bought a product based on an influencer’s post. That’s a measurable and significant impact! Are Micro-Influencers the Holy Grail? While the research is very positive, it’s only a snapshot and doesn’t help define what we think will happen with influencers in the future. And for that, I think the best indicator is the rising number of microinfluencers that are emerging. We define micro-influencers generally as those with up to 100,000 followers. Since microinfluencers have smaller audiences, they are better able to tailor their messages and truly connect with their followers.

Mega-influencers, on the other hand, are often celebrities and even when they are not, the sheer size of their audiences make it difficult to really connect or identify with their followers. While their influencer marketing posts may reach

an enormous number of people, they may only apply to a miniscule part of that audience and be lost in the churning sea of posts they publish for other brands. In fact, a study by influencer marketing company Markerly found that as an influencer’s follower total rises, the rate of follower engagement (likes and comments) decreases. It also found that influencers with fewer than 1,000 followers generally received likes on their posts 8 percent of the time. Influencers with more than 10 million followers received likes only 1.6 percent of the time, indicating an inverse relationship between the scale of the influencer’s reach and his/her levels of engagement. In addition to more effectively connecting with their audiences, micro-influencers are also the ones that are innovating.

The most popular social media platforms allow microinfluencers to cater to niche communities. If a brand wants to find an influencer that speaks to the most passionate fans of a popular video gamer, one that specializes in a specific coding language, or one that sides with the villains in Game of Thrones, it can do so. If a brand wants to do a unique activation or longer-term effort, micro-influencers are more likely to be receptive to those initiatives, and may even be willing to invest more time and energy into making it a success. The most successful brands are the ones that involve their customer communities in their branding efforts, and allow them to participate in the development and evolution of their identities leveraging their ability to create authentic content. Leveraging micro-influencers makes them active participants in engaging customers in a real, authentic way, with messages that are aligned with target customers’ values. Vertical industries, such as fashion, travel and beauty, appear to be leveraging micro-influencers most effectively. They also deliver significantly more engagement on Instagram than other influencer subgroups. Finally, the investment in influencer marketing has continued to grow as an industry over the last few years, according to Influencer Marketing Hub’s recent report. It was a $1.7 billion industry in 2016, increasing to $3 billion in 2017. Growth continued to $4.6 billion in 2018 and is expected to continue its upward trajectory this year to potentially become a $6.5 billion industry. There’s no doubt that there are some bad apples out in the influencer world, but they shouldn’t spoil the whole bunch. The right influencers, specifically those with small and engaged audiences, will positively impact branding efforts, and the rising tide of micro-influencers are why I believe that the influencer wave has not crested, and is in fact just picking up momentum.

How Data-Driven Marketing Builds Trust

By Consumer Technology Association

Data collection is core to marketing strategy, now more so than ever, allowing marketers to understand their consumers and improve customers’ experience. With increased data usage, marketers are faced with the challenge of creating a transparent, trusting relationship with their consumers.

“Reap the benefits of data-driven marketing, but also put the same energy in making sure that there’s accountability in place,” said Keith Weed, CMO of Unilever. “A brand without trust is just a product. Advertising without trust is just noise.”

A brand without trust is just a product. Advertising without trust is just noise.

KEITH WEED,CMO, UNILEVER

“With Great Data Comes Great Responsibility Michelle Peluso, SVP and CMO of IBM, outlined three key principles for marketers working with data: • Believe data is being used to make the product service offering better for the customer.

• Provide transparency about what data is being captured and used.

• Provide easy ways for consumers to opt in and opt out of sharing their data.

“Generally, people are always willing to make the trade: information for better experiences,” she said. “But we have to make sure that is straightforward and transparent and easy for consumers.”

On the CES 2019 stage, Peluso and Weed agreed that proving accountability with data ownership drives businesses forward, creating a customer-centric business model that better serves people.

Advertisement with Representation In building trust, marketers should also provide opportunities

for consumers to feel represented with the company. In 2016, Unilever conducted a survey that found that 40 percent of the time, women said they did not identify with ads.

“That doesn’t reflect the women I know. You can make better advertising if you un-stereotype,” Weed said.

They also found that in Unilever ads, progressive ads performed 23 percent better. Using this data, Unilever and the United Nations Women formed the Unstereotype Alliance, an initiative that seeks to eradicate harmful gender- based stereotypes in media and advertising.

“There has never been a better time to make progress,” said Peluso, who spoke of IBM’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. “There is more pipeline than ever before. There are more models for how to recruit and retain great people of color, gender diversity, etc.”

Tech Advances Versus Trust Advances in technology, such as artificial intelligence and blockchain, have opened up avenues for data-driven marketing, but with the exponentially increasing pool of information comes new concerns about data responsibility, and how marketers are treading the line between effective advertisement and “creepiness.”

Reflecting on the history of other technological advances, Weed said, “We are going to get to that stage where artificial intelligence has that same all-powerful approach, if it’s handled responsibly.”

For him, it’s a simple matter of companies using common sense.

Speaking about blockchain, Peluso highlighted how the technology is bringing transparency to transactions, seen particularly in the food tech industry.

The increasing focus on transparency and trust and a growth in understanding data ownership will help modern marketers form new bonds between their companies and their customers.

Why digital advertising must find a cookie substitute FIREFOX NUDGES ADVERTISERS TOWARD COOKIE ALTERNATIVE

By Ambreen Ali

If the news last month that third-party trackers would now be blocked by default in Firefox browsers hardly made a splash, it’s because the nail on the proverbial coffin of HTTP cookies has just been hammered in really, really slowly.

trackers. In fact, the Interactive Advertising Bureau released a report in 2014 called “Privacy and Tracking in a Post-Cookie World.” At the time, the group was concerned about “do not track” settings in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.

The move still marks an important moment in digital advertising, one that could usher in a more improved and streamlined identifier that eliminates many of the problems with cookies for users and ad companies alike. Cookies were invented in 1994 – long before the introduction of Facebook, Instagram, Gmail and many of the other everyday tools internet users rely on today – as a simple data file that websites could save on a user’s hard drive to remember details, such as logins and browser history, the next time they visited a site.

The problem with cookies goes way beyond browser restrictions, and they are an imperfect tool for digital advertisers in today’s marketplace. They are tied to a device, not a user, making it difficult for marketers to understand a consumer across platforms. And because cookies can only be read by the company that sets them, there is a lot of duplicative effort.

Since then, cookies have evolved alongside the internet in a complex ecosystem of hundreds of ad-tech companies that engage in data buying and selling, automated and targeted advertising, and omnichannel and multi-device user experiences. Cookies are not only too basic to address the needs of today’s marketers and users – who expect a unified, streamlined experience no matter how they access the internet – but they are also now often blocked.

Mozilla’s release of Firefox 69 in September came with Enhanced Tracking Protection, first introduced as an opt-in feature in October 2018, but now activated by default. It blocks third-party cookies from more than 2,500 domains, and allows users to make exceptions when, for example, a site does not function properly without enabling tracking.

It’s the latest in a series of iterative steps by the company, which is locked in competition with the more popular Safari and Chrome browsers to be the trusted way to browse the web. What began as the ability to block trackers in “private browsing” mode in Firefox in 2015 has slowly expanded to where we are today.

Mozilla’s focus on third-party cookies has had a ripple effect beyond its immediate base of more than 255 million monthly active users. Apple stirred up the ad industry by announcing it would block cookies on Safari browsers two years ago, and the latest version of Chrome Canary by Google also offers a way to block third-party cookies.

Advertisers have had years to adjust to the restrictions on

“Make no mistake: The cookie was a boon to the internet. It enabled sites to commercialize their offerings by personalizing ads and content according to user interests, undergirded the entirety of e-commerce, and enabled the analytics that have turned individuals into influencers and even media moguls,” Jordan Mitchell, senior vice president of membership and operations at IAB Tech Lab, recently wrote. “But the cookie also broadly fragmented and privatized privacy, while necessitating excessive, redundant HTTP requests from every consumer page view … commencing the data and privacy crises that we see today.”

Digital advertisers have an opportunity today to establish a neutral, standardized identifier that could make privacy and consumer controls more streamlined and uniform, while also offering digital advertisers a better way to recognize audiences and tailor experiences to them, Mitchell suggested. Such a system must comply with privacy preferences, be accountable to standardized protocols and operate as a shared utility, he added.

Thanks to Mozilla, the moment is ripe for such a standard to be embraced.

“For years now, hardly a month goes by that we don’t hear negative sentiment regarding HTTP cookies, though they remain the only technical mechanism available within standard internet protocols to support the personalized web experience we expect as consumers, including our privacy preferences,” Mitchell noted. “However, if we eliminate the cookie without a suitable replacement, we constrain the open innovation, competition, access and choice that are indeed the hallmarks of the internet.”

Is Your Brand Engaging or Intrusive?

A BRIEF GUIDE TO DEVELOPING CONSTRUCTIVE CONSUMER RELATIONSHIPS.

By Bob Priest-Heck

Managing a brand is a little like that relationship you have with your old roommate. You wistfully remember your good old days and the fun, crazy and life-changing experiences you shared, and you’re fiercely loyal to them and those memories. Then, 10 or 20 years later, maybe that relationship feels a little intrusive. Sure, you’re always happy to lend a compassionate ear when things are tough. Yet those now alltoo-frequent calls to rehash the same old bag-of-woes can get a bit weary. Eventually, you wince when the, “Hey, can I ask a favor?” text message flashes across your phone -again.

Branding and advertising can feel that way too. You respond to a friend’s social-network plea to support their charity, only to endure a year of unrelenting online-fundraising solicitations. You click on “Hotels in Nashville” and get weeks of Facebook ads, promotional emails and intrusive, “You’ve won a free vacation” phone calls.

As marketers, we spend big bucks on big data to understand customers’s individual needs. Yet we often squander that insight and the opportunity to create meaningful one-onone relationships with excessive, pervasive and ultimately intrusive pitches. In short, we know more about our customers as prospects, but seem to care less about them as people. But there are ways to remedy this.

Knowing “You” Versus Knowing “About You” Today, harnessing big data is a $116 billion industry.

Marketers know what we watch, the tweets we post and which Facebook friends, groups or companies we “like.” Mobilepurchasing platforms know where we are, what fast food we order and when real-time digital coupons drive our mobile or in-store purchases. Our own company has invested in data technology and analytics that help our customers understand the impact of interactions with people attending their programs and events. Used well -- and with customer value in mind -- these tools can build meaingful relationships.

While macro data feeds marketing-campaign algorithms, personal one-to-one engagements give us insight and empathy you just can’t get from clicks and likes. While it’s easy to think it’s the marketing department’s job to generate leads, building meaningful relationships really needs to be baked in at every level of a company. That’s why good marketing includes working with every member of your customer-facing team and training them to listen, learn and engage.

Sure, as a marketer, I want to track trends and identify issues from online insights or call-center inquiries, but real customer loyalty starts with that well-trained customer support person who patiently spends an hour on the phone to solve your computer glitch. Yet, think about that national restaurant chain opening a new venue in your neighborhood. They already know your dining-out habits, track when you’ve scanned their online menu or downloaded a coupon and see your reservation on OpenTable. However, when you arrive, the hostess barely says hello before shuffling you off to a table where an overworked, harried server ignores you while

brandknewmag.com

37

ping-ponging between tables. #EpicFail.

As marketers, we frequently take digital shortcuts to connect with prospects, but fail to deliver on our brand promise by forgetting how to engage and interact with customers.

Speed, Frequency and Per-Click ROI Don’t Build Relationships Data and social media-driven marketing is great at reading a potential customer and responding with offers and ads three seconds after you type a search inquiry. But do digital marketers really think, to my earlier example, that when I type “Nashville Hotels,” I want, or need, 30 promotional offers in three minutes? Instead, try connecting later that day with information I might find helpful. Maybe I’m thinking about visiting my aunt next spring, planning a driving tour to look at colleges or just looking for a great restaurant. Tell me what AAA says about best hotels, great hiking trails at a local state park or, if you really want to harness big data, how to connect my interest in country music with the best honkytonks in the area.

Stop Shouting and Start Listening I appreciate that big data helps me spot trends, directs me to new audiences and fuels digital tools that help me connect quickly and, as a marketer watching a budget, efficiently.

Much like that adage about direct response, today’s digital marketing lets people raise their hands. The question is, once I’ve identified someone as a prospect, do I shout or do I listen? Meaningful engagements -- the ones that build and

sustain brand loyalty -- start with listening. Whether face-toface, digital or virtual, it’s still a person-to-person exchange.

Let’s go back to that former roommate. There was a time when, if you had a problem, the two of you might share a beer while your friend sat patiently and listened empathetically to your concerns. But today, maybe he’s too busy or impatiently interrupts with a, “Yeah. OK. So, what you need to do is….” quick solution. That old friend now isn’t ready to listen and, as marketers, we’re sometimes not ready either. Although we’re armed with massive data, algorithm-driven marketing models and real-time, virtual response tools, do we miss the opportunity to listen before we respond?

As marketers, let’s stop measuring ROI by how fast our service members churn through customer calls, and instead reward our folks who spend time listening to our customers. Let’s train our sales teams at conferences and other live events to listen, engage and then maybe respond days later with meaningful information and ideas. Host more roundtables and webinars that seek input, share ideas and offer resources instead of just dishing out thinly disguised sales pitches.

Engagement-based marketing opens channels to speak, interact and share information and ideas that create and build relationships. As an industry, if our brand-marketing is centered on engaging with our customers by listening and providing value -- rather than pushing out quick-hit responses measured in click-throughs -- our prospects and customers will reward us with their trust and loyalty.

Love to chat more about this, but my roommate just called … and I need to listen.

Fashion Fail: Where Did Forever 21 Go Wrong?

By Knowledge@Wharton

From its reign as king of the mall just a few years ago to its tumble into bankruptcy court last month, Forever 21 is a spectacular success story that seems destined for an unhappy ending.

South Korean immigrants Jin Sook and Do Wan Chang started the chain in 1984 with $11,000 that they saved from working in low-paying service jobs. Their first store was a 900-square-foot space in Northeast Los Angeles that offered cheap and trendy clothing to a young, mostly KoreanAmerican clientele.

But the couple had a plan. Their fast-fashion business model, which was based on quick-turnaround designs that could be inexpensively mass produced, proved wildly popular with young customers who didn’t have much money to spend but wanted the latest looks. By 2015, global sales peaked at $4.4 billion, with 480 stores occupying enormous spaces in malls across America, according to Business Insider. Sook and Chang became wealthy, with a combined estimated net worth of nearly $6 billion.

However, the couple didn’t anticipate the so-called retail apocalypse, which began in 2017 and continues to threaten virtually every retail chain. More than 8,200 stores in the U.S. have closed this year, according to Coresight Research. The firm anticipates 12,000 closures by year’s end, eclipsing the 5,844 closures in 2018.

The rapidly changing retail sector put too much pressure on Forever 21, and the privately held company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late September. It announced that it will cease operations in 40 countries, including Canada and Japan, and close 350 of its 800 stores, including 178 in the U.S. The dramatic rise and fall of Forever 21 is a story that repeats in similar fashion across the retail landscape, but there are some factors specific to the chain’s troubles. Wharton marketing professor Barbara Kahn and Ludovica Cesareo, marketing professor at Lehigh University, analyzed the case on the Knowledge@Wharton radio show and outlined three distinct reasons why Forever 21 failed to stay on top. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)

groupisd.com

39

“Instead of slowing down on physical space, they were building up physical space. That was a tactical mistake.”

– Barbara Kahn

Too Many Stores, Too Much Space Forever 21 expanded rapidly in a short period of time, going from outlets in seven countries to 47 in just six years. Even as other chains were downsizing amid the retail apocalypse, Forever 21 was opening new stores as late as 2016.

“It’s kind of like The Gap, where they overbuilt the stores, too,” said Kahn, who also hosts “Marketing Matters” on Sirius XM. “They weren’t seeing the trends, and instead of slowing down on physical space, they were building up physical space. That was a tactical mistake.”

It isn’t just the number of stores that is problematic, it’s also their size. Forever 21 stores are huge, with the average size at 38,000 square feet, according to the company’s website.

The largest store is multiple stories and takes up 162,000 square feet. The Times Square store in New York City is 91,000 square feet, and a mall store in Las Vegas spans 127,000 square feet.

All that space is expensive, the experts said. Sales reportedly dropped by 20% to 25% last year, which means the company likely struggled to pay the high rents demanded by premier spots while facing increased competition from Zara and H&M, the other big players in the fast-fashion segment.

“A lot of [Forever 21] stores were big footprints – almost as big as department stores in some of the malls,” Kahn said.

“When they close down, it’s kind of like an anchor closing down. It doesn’t bode well for those malls, either.”

The company’s rapid expansion in recent years is opposite to the business strategy currently being deployed by retailers trying to save themselves from extinction. Many chains are closing their big stores and moving to smaller footprints and mini-shops as a way to shrink costs while maintaining consumer access to their brands. Even big box retailers like Target are opening smaller stores in metropolitan areas, where big retail space is hard to find.

Meanwhile, “digital native brands — think of the Warby Parkers or the Caspers of the world – they’re opening stores,” said Cesareo, whose research specialty includes consumer behavior. “You would say it almost wouldn’t make sense, but they are opening these small pop-up shops and flagship stores where consumers can actually experience the brands firsthand. There’s more of a shakeout in retail than a full apocalypse right now. Retail is just repositioning itself.”

A Weak Focus on e-Commerce Another big failure for Forever 21 is particularly baffling to Cesareo. She said the company didn’t bolster its e-commerce platform, even though its core customers are young people who prefer to shop online.

“It’s fascinating that they couldn’t predict that shift, so now they’re forced to restructure their entire company and really put pressure on their online commerce platform to try to make up for the lost sales,” she said.

“There’s more of a shakeout in retail than a full apocalypse right now. Retail is just repositioning itself.”

– Ludovica Cesareo

Digital has become such an important component to retail that most stores cannot survive without it. For brands that target younger consumers, digital drives their business. Forever 21 has stated that 16% of sales come from online, and Cesareo praised the site for being user-friendly. In fact, she said, it’s highly rated in surveys by Generation Z shoppers – defined as those born after 2000. The company also has good customer interaction, reposting a lot of social media content from their customers that showcases the store’s products.

“So they’re good at doing it, except they didn’t realize that’s where consumers wanted to buy most of their clothing, and they also didn’t realize the amount of competition coming from other online retailers was skyrocketing,” she said. “Think of brands like ASOS or Fashion Nova, whose entire business model is online. They have understood that the customer of the future is a digital-savvy one who wants to buy online, who prefers to buy something online and return if they don’t like it or don’t have a need for it, rather than going into the store to try it on.”

Kahn argued that customers still like the experience of shopping in physical stores, and she and Cesareo agreed that stores have to reinvent themselves.

“Bad, out-of-date retail that’s not paying attention to the trends, those are the ones that are closing. But to say physical stores don’t have a purpose, I just don’t think that’s right,” Kahn said. “I think you just have to pay attention to what’s going on and what people want.”

The Move Toward Sustainability Perhaps the biggest mistake made by Forever 21 was its leadership’s inability to read the tea leaves and see a significant shift in consumer attitudes about fast fashion. That business model worked well, until the world woke up to the pressing problems of climate change.

According to the United Nations, the fashion industry produces 20% of the world’s wastewater and 10% of global carbon emissions – more than all international flights and maritime shipping. With its focus on synthetic fabrics and quick manufacturing time, fast fashion has been shouldering much of the blame for those statistics because it produces tremendous waste.

Young people are leading the charge for sustainability, demanding that businesses reduce their devastating impact on the environment. Customers that once flocked to fast-

fashion stores like Forever 21 are abandoning them in favor of clothing that isn’t disposable.

“I think fast fashion as we know it is not going to exist for much longer, meaning they’re going to have to completely rethink their business model because the younger consumer is so attentive to sustainability issues,” Cesareo said. “The younger consumer wants to spend more money on higher quality clothes, so they’re less likely to go to Zara 17 times a year as they did in the past because they just care more about the environment, and they know that these companies don’t really have sustainability at the heart of what they do.”

Gen Zers are demanding change and want to see their values reflected in their favorite brands. Companies including Forever 21 must show their sustainability efforts not just through their products but also in their marketing, messaging and online engagement with customers, Cesareo said.

She and Kahn credited Zara and H&M for rolling out sustainable collections this fall, and they highlighted the growing trend toward upcycling, recycling and renting clothes.

“We see a lot of these brands that come back and they just don’t seem to get it.”

– Barbara Kahn

Forever 21 built its model on “trying to have this fashion come in, and in style, very, very quickly. The clothes aren’t necessarily supposed to hold up for a while. They’re only a

couple of wears because they’re so trendy,” Kahn said. “At the same time they’re doing that, there’s a lot of headwind for sustainability efforts and renting and sharing and not making clothes that get thrown away.”

Kahn does cut the company some slack. After all, she said, predicting what young consumers want is difficult because they change their minds so quickly that it’s hard to keep up.

“They’re fickle. That’s the point,” she said. “They’re revolting about what’s there, they want to do something new, and it’s kind of hard to figure out what their trends will be.”

Still, the professors believe the sustainability movement is here to stay. The company will have to get onboard as part of its survival — if it can survive.

In a letter posted to customers on its site, Forever 21 emphasized that it is not shutting down. “We are confident this is the right path for the long-term health of our business.

Once we complete a reorganization, Forever 21 will be a stronger, more viable company that is better positioned to prosper for years to come,” the letter states.

The professors remain skeptical.

Cesareo said she’s waiting to see whether Forever 21 takes on some of the strategies that are helping other retailers succeed, including smaller stores, ship-to-store options and sustainable products. Kahn said it’s imperative that they restructure properly.

“One can only hope,” she said. “We see a lot of these brands that come back and they just don’t seem to get it, so I hope they do.”

{grow}: What 5G Means For Content Consumption and Creators

By Brooke B. Sellas

Emerging 5G services will not only make our devices go faster, but it will also better interconnect society.

Efficiencies and experiences will improve. Including user experiences. But a unique product of 5G services will be the ability to consume even more content.

Yes. You read that right. 5G will enable the freeing up of our time, which in turn will allow us to consume more content.

Content Consumption (& SHOCK)

“This upward trend of content consumption is not sustainable because every human has a physiological, inviolable limit to the amount of content they can consume.”

And in 2014, Neilson backed this up with research showing consumers consumed about 11 hours of content a day. Today, those numbers remain largely the same.

According to a recent article by Adobe “Older” consumers spend 8.8 hours a day, on average, engaging with digital content

Back in 2014, Mark Schaefer wrote a post that went bananas (“Brooke speak” for viral). His post on Content Shock was an Internet and worldwide sensation.

It jumps to 10.9 hours for Millennials, on average

Content-Shock-definition

That’s nearly half the day consuming content, which is mindblowing! How people find time to do that, work, eat, sleep, and be basic humans is beyond me.

Mark’s point was this …

Gen Z spends 11.4 hours consuming content

brandknewmag.com

43

But here we are.

will induce greater consumption of content.

Our 5G Future

Does that mean you need to create more content? Not necessarily. But if you haven’t yet honed in on the type of content that works best for your audience(s), you need to get there. And fast.

Imagine boarding a plane where there’s no in-flight entertainment. You grab your phone and download a couple of movies on Netflix — all before the cabin doors are closed.

That’s what 5G will offer.

To break it down, the G in 5G means it’s a generation of

Voice search and marketing is another place that will be majorly impacted. 5G will bring smart speakers to a whole other level; the combination of cloud-based AI and 5G will

wireless technology. Wireless technology means we will stop having to think about signal or connection — it will just be.

likely improve conversations between machines and humans.

According to Gizmodo, 5G networks will have the capacity for transfer speeds 10 times those of 4G networks.

And for advertisers … if 5G moves smart speakers to become more like buying and scheduling assistants, how will advertising play a role?

This not only implies a faster service but also means devices will more easily talk to one another. Your bots or AI will be talking to the bots and AI of the brands you buy from. You will use your device to automate all kinds of tasks.

5G will be a huge breakthrough for self-driving cars.

And what will we do if we no longer have to be at the helm of our long commutes? Turn to our devices.

5G Means Content Marketers Better Start Strategizing NOW All the marketers reading this probably skipped ahead to this part. I feel ya! As a marketer, you’re wondering what the future of 5G technology means for you.

As streaming becomes seamless and content downloading happens in seconds, the assumption is that increased speed

Example: “Alexa, buy me some butter.” (will the smart speaker be smart enough to buy what you prefer?)

Better. Faster. Stronger.

Supporters of 5G are quick to sell how the technology will allow more data to be captured around consumers (particularly their location). This great news for targeting!

And marketers! So YAY! But, before we get “there” with 5G, we all have to remember that feelings around privacy are increasingly more negative.

If people feel marketers are spying on them, 5G won’t be enough to save us.

In any case, I do think 5G will improve the way we operate in our daily lives, and therefore free up more time for content consumption.

Brands, agencies seek ad efficiencies by going direct MARKETERS ARE GOING STRAIGHT TO EXCHANGES FOR ULTIMATE DATA TRANSPARENCY

By Sarah Sluis

As marketers seek more transparency into their programmatic buys, they’re bypassing their demand-side platforms and going straight to exchanges and publishers to ask for loglevel data about the bids they’ve won and lost.

More than a dozen of the most hands-on, sophisticated marketers – including P&G, L’Oréal, T-Mobile and Bayer – are leading the charge. Select agencies, including Havas and IPG’s Magna Global, have also requested log-level data from exchanges.

Initially, buyers wanted to audit the buying path to ensure exchanges weren’t doing anything untoward. But now, buyers can use this data to prune how they access digital inventory.

Log-level information helps them do supply-path optimization and whittle down who they work with based on performance and fees.

Advertisers are planning to use this data to power their buying strategies. Buyers could find pockets of undervalued inventory though log-level analysis and make more intelligent decisions than competitors who don’t have access to this data. Granular pricing information could inform negotiations in direct deals with publishers.

Agencies could create planning and forecasting tools around programmatic inventory with better visibility into the supply side.

But these potential applications are still nascent, according to more than a dozen sources AdExchanger spoke to for this story. Gaining access to this data and analyzing it is a longterm, expensive, multi-year project.

And it’s a project that’s ruffled feathers even as it lays the groundwork for a more mature phase of programmatic.

groupisd.com

45

Why is log-level data so important?

The first marketers embarking on this project started making formal requests for information (RFI) last year to exchanges like Index Exchange, OpenX, PubMatic, Rubicon Project, Sovrn, Telaria and Xandr. These exchanges started sending regular data feeds over to buyers to audit and analyze this year.

Google’s exchange is the only exception, refusing to send over log-level data to buyers in favor of aggregated information.

with each other. Some buyers have been told that they don’t have the right to access any of this data because there’s no direct contract between the brand and the exchange.

“There has been some pushback from SSPs about using publisher contracts and relationships in order to obfuscate what the publisher fees are, which in today’s market I find unacceptable,” said Havas EVP and head of programmatic Andrew Goode.

The log-level data shared by these exchanges includes impression-level details like ad size, geo, session depth, URL, placement, browser, and the “bid landscape,” which describes the number of auction participants and the price they bid. Exchanges have also been willing to share this level of detail for impressions that buyers lost, a previously inaccessible data point.

But identifiers are not included. Every exchange and publisher who sends this data to buyers attested that they stripped out uniquely identifiable information from the log files, citing privacy concerns.

Buyers also want impression-by-impression fee information.

Fees can differ from one impression to the next, even on the same publisher, because of different contracts and costs associated with different programmatic deal types.

Some of this log-level data is available through the DSP – but not all of it. DSPs often don’t ingest every field the exchange fills out. And they usually don’t know why a buyer lost a bid or what fees are taken out.

So getting data directly from an exchange, which sees more than a DSP, gives marketers a glimpse at the bigger picture. They can audit the supply chain by monitoring any discrepancies. And they might understand an exchange’s access to publisher inventory better than if they purely looked at the exchange through the lens of their DSP.

How advertisers obtain log-level data Analyzing log-level bid requests requires setting up data feeds between an exchange and marketer, two groups that until recently rarely worked directly with each other.

Establishing a business relationship poses both legal and technical challenges.

From a technical standpoint, an exchange’s log-level data far exceeds what can fit in an Excel spreadsheet.

To transport such large amounts of data, exchanges often set up cloud-to-cloud connections.

Two exchanges productized these connections. Early this year, Rubicon Project rolled out a product to share feeds of loglevel data with buyers, said Adam Soroca, Rubicon Project’s head of buyer team. Index Exchange publicized its log-level data sharing tool in September.

Once they have the data, buyers pay to store this data, and find analysts to process it.

Accessing log-level data also requires legal work to set up.

Brands and exchanges hold contracts with their DSPs, not

To establish a relationship, marketers typically sign an NDA with the exchange and set up terms for data sharing. Buyers need to make sure they aren’t violating their DSP agreement by getting data from the exchange. And exchanges need to make sure they’re not violating contracts with their publishers, which often mandate the exchanges keep fee data private.

Exchanges are often eager to share data. AppNexus for example could share fee data with buyers.

Exchanges who receive these RFIs see an opportunity to cozy up to brands that are making decisions about what exchanges to work with – and which ones to cut.

But with that carrot comes a stick: Exchanges that don’t share data fear they’ll end up on the chopping block as buyers winnow down who they work with to include only transparent exchanges. The largest exchange of them all, operated by Google, likely doesn’t feel the threat of being sidelined.

Marketers and agencies that have asked Google for log-level data have been told that since they don’t hold a contract with Google’s exchange, they can’t access the data. On occasion, Google has shared aggregated fee information.

Though Google’s decision is hardly a surprise given its tough stance on data sharing, it nevertheless has exasperated some buyers.

The pickle for publishers Publishers are also fielding RFIs from brands who want access to log-level data, and hearing from buyers that are processing exchange data. They see this trend as either a threat or an opportunity.

Some publishers want buyers to understand the path to their inventory better and believe both sides will benefit from greater transparency.

Plus, when buyers request log-level data specifically from publishers, they can tie access to media commitments.

Because of the complexity of data sharing, publishers won’t provide log-level information to anyone but their top spenders.

don’t have the resources to do this type of analysis themselves.

The big downside to processing log-level data is the cost and resources involved, which put it out of reach to all but the most sophisticated buyers. Fortunately, working with this data does not necessarily need to be an ongoing project.

But even those publishers have limits to what they’ll share.

One brand asked a publisher to share the direct-sold CPM price for individual impressions. But the publisher refused to share that proprietary pricing data.

Other publishers fear data sharing could put them at a disadvantage. If buyers see impressions clearing at lower prices than what they’ve been paying, they can use that leverage to negotiate lower prices for private marketplaces or direct deals.

Yet, some buyers do this already, using DSP data to compare bids on the open marketplace to direct deals.

The difference is that exchanges share data about auctions a marketer lost, not just ones they won, which could enable brands to do pricing analysis on a much larger scale and with greater precision.

But as much information as exchanges have about pricing, there are certain details that buyers won’t see in the logs.

For instance, publisher inventory in logs might show two seemingly identical 300x250s placements. But one might be historically a much better place for an advertiser to buy – and only accessible via a higher price in a separate marketplace.

These nuances in inventory differences require working directly with a publisher, not just directly with an exchange.

Havas, for example, pared down the exchanges it worked with this year and is now establishing a legal code of conduct it wants all of its partners to sign – all big transparency projects aided with the transparency it received from log-level data.

But now that it’s processed log-level data enough to gain confidence in how auctions work, it’s asking exchanges for more aggregated information that it can internally process more quickly.

What buyers will do next

“Log-level data has been held up as the panacea, the gold standard. That might be a false economy,” Goode said.

Brands undertaking the large task of analyzing log-level data shows that programmatic is entering a new era of maturity.

Marketers don’t want to just use RTB, they want to know what’s inside an RTB bid request.

Marketers with in-house programmatic teams are propelling this trend because they have more budget flexibility to hire data analysts or pay to store data. Many also see the strategic importance of auditing their supply chain. These projects could create a competitive edge for marketers who use this data.

Agencies see log-level data access as a way to deliver value to their clients. They can increase their negotiation clout and ensure transparency for clients, especially for buyers that

As buyers continue to request data from exchanges, the process may become even more turnkey than standardized data sharing and legal agreements. Another option is for DSPs to ingest more information from exchanges in the future, making it more accessible to anyone using a buying platform.

But first, marketers must establish trust directly with exchanges, and getting log-level data is the most bulletproof way to do it.

Sarah is a senior editor for AdExchanger.com, covering the publisher side of digital advertising, including publisher platforms. She has held editorial positions at Film Journal International and most recently CRM Magazine, where she focused on enterprise applications and strategy.

Finding Your Voice: Why Confidence Is Key to Persuasion

By Knowledge@Wharton

Pulitzer-prize winning poet William Carlos Williams wrote, “It’s not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.” According to new research from Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger, he was right. Berger and Alex Van Zant, management professor at Rutgers Business School, conducted four experiments on use of nonverbal communication in persuasion, finding that speakers who modulate their voices appear more confident, which makes them more likely to succeed in convincing their listeners to take action. Berger recently spoke with Knowledge@Wharton about their paper, “How the Voice Persuades,” which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: What was the inspiration for this research?

Jonah Berger: Almost everyone has someone they want to persuade. Salespeople want to persuade the customer or the client. Marketers want to persuade the consumer. Leaders want to persuade employees. Managers want to persuade their boss. From politicians to folks in business, lots of people want to persuade others. But persuasion is often quite difficult. Often, when we try to persuade others, they’re less likely to do what we suggest. We wondered how might the voice that someone uses — the way they talk, in addition to

the words they use — affects what other people do, affects whether other people listen?

Recently, I’ve been fortunate to do a lot of work on text analysis, which is processing textual data to understand how it impacts behavior — things like looking at the words used in customer service calls and how they impact satisfaction, or predicting the success of songs or movies based on their lyrics or their scripts. But while we looked at the language itself, the words themselves, we paid less attention to how those words were used. In this project, we wanted to begin to ask, “What about paralanguage? What about vocal features, and how might those aspects impact persuasion?”

Knowledge@Wharton: As you noted, sometimes the more you try to persuade someone, the less effective it is. What has past research said about why these attempts to persuade sometimes backfire?

Berger: There’s a concept in behavioral science called reactance, and I think this is something many of us are at least a little bit familiar with. When we try to push someone to do something, ask them to do something, persuade them to do something, they often don’t do what we want. They often do the opposite. They often push back. A good way to think about it is almost an anti-persuasion radar. It detects incoming projectiles and shoots up things to knock them down.

brandknewmag.com

49

“When people hear someone trying to persuade them, they push back. They react against the message.”

When people hear someone trying to persuade them, they push back. They react against the message. In some cases, we delete an incoming email if we know it’s trying to persuade us. We see an ad, we walk out of the room. But it’s not only that. We also counter-argue against those messages. If we watch an ad or listen to someone trying to persuade us, we’re often not just listening to them, we’re thinking about all the reasons that they’re wrong, why what they’re saying isn’t exactly true, how it could be different, why we shouldn’t listen to what they’re saying. For all those reasons, it’s really hard to persuade someone to do something. When they know we’re trying to persuade them, they’re actually less likely to listen to what we might want to say.

Knowledge@Wharton: Your research focuses on paralinguistic cues or how we say things, as opposed to the words that we’re speaking. What are some ways people use nonverbal communication in persuasion?

Berger: First, I think it’s important to talk about what we mean by paralinguistic cues, and that is all the vocal features from a conversation, from what someone might say to one another. How high-pitched or low-pitched someone is talking. I can talk at a very high pitch, and I can talk at a very low pitch. I can talk at a faster rate. I can speak very quickly, or I can speak more slowly. I can talk at a high volume, or I can talk at a lower volume. When you ask me a question, I can take a long time to respond, waiting for a couple of seconds to respond, or I can respond very quickly. All of those are examples of paralinguistic features, examples of ways that people might modulate their voice when talking to one another.

In this case, we found that when people are trying to persuade, they tend to use a number of different features. They increase their pitch. They vary that pitch more. They speak faster, in addition to raising their volume and varying their volume.

They try a number of things when they try to persuade. Not all of them are effective, but when we’re trying to persuade, we tend to do a lot of things even without realizing that might shift the way our voice sounds.

Knowledge@Wharton: You studied this over the course of four experiments. What vocal cues did you find were the most effective?

Berger: We found a couple of things. First, we did a variety of experiments in different contexts. We asked people to try to persuade someone else to buy a television, for example, like they might in an online review. We asked people to dissuade others to do a task that we had asked them to do — to persuade them to do one task rather than another. In addition to changing what they might say, some participants also changed the way that they said it. Some participants tried really hard to persuade others, not through the exact words, but through what they said and how they said it.

Others didn’t try so hard to persuade. They just used their

regular voice.

What we found is that increasing and varying volumes — talking more loudly but also varying that volume during these attempts — had an effect. But what was interesting is it wasn’t necessarily for the reason one might think. One reason that changing your voice might have an effect is people don’t realize the voice impacts behavior…. Someone says, “You should buy this TV. It’s really great!” I go, “Oh, why are they saying that? They’re trying to persuade me.” But their vocal features are harder for me to detect.

People detected that someone else was trying to persuade them. [But] when we persuade through our voice, not just through what we say, using vocal features, someone can’t tell that we’re trying to do it. So, it wasn’t just that it went undetected, but what happened is it made the communicator seem more confident.

When people were trying to persuade others, they modulated their voice by changing the volume and changing the variation in their volume in a way that made them sound more confident. And because they seemed more confident in what they were saying, that confidence led to greater persuasion.

It’s not so much that people don’t realize that we’re trying to persuade them. They might realize it, but we sound more confident in some cases when we use the right vocal features.

And because we sound more confident, we’re more impactful.

“There’s really a power of voice that we often don’t think very much about.”

Knowledge@Wharton: You noted that this research applies in many arenas. I imagine politics would be one. What are the key takeaways for those who are interested in your research?

Berger: I think the first thing to think about is that we often think about what we say, but we pay a lot less attention to how we say it, whether we’re a politician trying to convince a large audience, whether we’re a leader trying to convince an organization, or a doctor trying to convince a patient, or whether we’re a marketer or a salesperson trying to convince a customer or client. We spend a lot of time on the words we’re saying, and even sometimes think about speaking slowly and standing up straight. We think a lot less about the vocal features. It’s often an unconscious thing that we engage in, and it’s an important area to consider.

There’s a lot of research showing the power of voice just in general. I think in today’s day and age, we’re so used to shooting off an email or texting someone or doing something else because it’s easier. We don’t want to take the time and set up a phone call. We worry about, “Oh, what are they going to say, and how are we going to react?” In this more asynchronous method, written communication, we have more time to construct and refine what to say, so we think we can pitch things better that way.

But, first of all, it’s easier to ignore those pitches. Second of all, some other research shows that the voice is really

humanizing. It really brings out the people behind what is being said, and in a wide variety of domains can have a bigger impact. There’s really a power of voice that we often don’t think very much about. While in some cases it’s more effortful to call someone or get together in person, to actually use our voice beyond just the words we say, we should think more about communication modalities and think about which ones are going to be most effective for the impact that we’re trying to have.

Knowledge@Wharton: In a working environment, should this persuade us to walk down the hall and talk to someone, as opposed to sending an email?

Berger: Certainly. There’s a lot of research that came out when email began, showing that emails are easily misinterpreted.

We think we’re being very clear, and someone on the other end thinks we’re screaming at them, for example. It’s easy to misinterpret words without some of the vocal cues that come along with them. But in addition to the misinterpretation, I think the voice just has a powerful humanizing effect. It’s much easier to see people as not real people when they’re just words in front of us. Whereas when we hear their voice, we really get that richness, that sense of who they are as an individual. They have a sense of mind. We may treat them more fairly, and we may react better to them because we hear that voice.

Not only should we walk down the hall to talk to a colleague, but maybe we want to do that pitch in person or over the phone, rather than just over email. We should think about situations where that humanizing power of voice is useful, where the persuading power of voice is useful, and make sure to use those features of our voice that can help us.

“Not only should we walk down the hall to talk to a colleague, but maybe we want to do that pitch in person or over the phone, rather than just over email.”

Knowledge@Wharton: Where do you think this research will take you next?

Berger: This is my first foray into this space. My colleague, Alex Van Zant, who is the first author on this paper, knows a lot about voice, but we’re doing a bunch of work on analyzing text and on analyzing paralinguistic cues or vocal features.

Another project we’re doing, for example, is looking at customer service calls. [We’re looking at how] the words agents use might make customers more satisfied, but also how they say those words. Think about pauses. We’re having a conversation. Should I pause more or less? Maybe pausing as a customer service agent gives time for the customer to respond. “Yes, yes, oh yes — I agree with what you’re saying.” And that agreement helps facilitate that interaction.

What I find particularly interesting about this area as a scientist, but also as someone who teaches in a business school, is that we often don’t think about the words that we put out there in the world. But words are really powerful. We tell our kids there are certain magic words that have more impact than others. Words do a couple of things. One, they reflect something about the people who create them, so you can learn a lot about a person from the words they use. In an employee context, for example, you can tell whether someone is going to stick around at a company, get fired or leave

based on the words they use in their email. Whether those words are more similar to or different from the language that the company tends to use can give a signal of whether they’re likely to stick around.

But words not only reflect things about the people who create them, they also impact the people who consume them, whether they’re individuals or the culture more broadly. In the case of persuasion, we have an audience that we’re trying to persuade. But more generally, whether we’re writing a song, creating a movie or doing anything that involves language, thinking about how those words impact that audience is a really powerful opportunity. We’re both studying the words themselves, as well as how those words are used for insight into human behavior.

What’s the 2020 Color of the Year? There are three so far MORE AND MORE COMPANIES ARE COMPETING TO CLAIM ATTENTION AND INFLUENCE BY ANNOUNCING THEIR OWN OFFICIAL COLOR OF THE YEAR.

By Evan Nicole Brown

Twenty years ago, the Pantone Color Institute began a tradition that’s become ubiquitous across the paint industry: The Color of the Year. Equal parts trend forecasting and marketing craze, the Color of the Year program elevates a single color to demigod status. The company’s first selection, in 1999, was Cerulean. “Lifestyle movements suggest that consumers will be seeking inner peace and spiritual fulfillment in the new millennium,” the company announced.

Bruce Falconer offers a glimpse at the influence of Pantone’s research. “Color forecasters like Shah and his team at Pantone have tremendous influence over the visible elements of the global economy—the parts of it that are designed, manufactured, and purchased—though their profession itself is all but invisible,” he writes.

Over the past two decades, many other color and paint companies have followed Pantone’s lead, naming a Color of the Year they feel encapsulates not only where the world is, but where it’s going. “We view the Pantone Color of the Year as an educational program that is intended to highlight the relationship between what is taking place in our global culture and how it manifests itself in color,” says Laurie Pressman, VP of the Pantone Color Institute.”With color and context so intertwined, there really are reasons why a color family or individual color comes into prominence when it does, and for the most part the popularity of a color is symbolic of the age we are living in.”

Announcing a color of the year also helps these brands speak directly to consumers, whether they’re people buying paint at Home Depot or designers looking for trend forecasting as they develop new products. The latter is more important than you might imagine, in the $24 billion paint market. In a New York Times piece on color’s significance in culture,

[Photo: Behr]

groupisd.com

53

Most companies begin researching a couple years in advance, visiting trade shows to see what’s happening in retail and following the lifestyle trends of trusted influencers on social media. But they also depend on intuition and experience to make their forecasts. Pressman says the Pantone team stays “on the lookout for the color we see as ascending, and seems to be building in importance across all areas of design— the one color that is really pushing through, and the single shade we think can communicate the color message that best reflects what is taking place in our culture at this moment in time.” Ideas can emerge from expected places, like fashion and design, but also sources more far afield. “Areas we look to can include the entertainment industry and films in production, traveling art collections and new artists, fashion, all areas of design, popular travel destinations, as well as new lifestyles, play styles, and socio-economic conditions.

Influences may also stem from new technologies, materials, textures, and effects that impact color, relevant social media platforms and even upcoming sporting events that capture worldwide attention.”

While Pantone won’t announce its hotly anticipated hue until later this year, paint companies like Behr, Benjamin Moore, and Sherwin Williams have already released their picks for the new decade, along with what they believe those colors reflect about the year ahead. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, they’re all different.

indoor, outdoor appeal.”

[Photo: Benjamin Moore]

Benjamin Moore’s 2020 selection, a soft, rosy pink called “First Light,” was selected, in part, because the company’s forecasters kept seeing it pop up in their travels.

“One of our team members saw it during Dutch Design Week,” says Andrea Magno, Benjamin Moore’s director of Color Marketing & Development. “There was a sophistication, it wasn’t overly sweet but the soft, blush color has been around for a number of years and we’ve been tracking it.”

In this sense, paint companies become curators; they seek out popular design aesthetics and distill them for consumers.

Annual colors of the year not only provide inspiration for interiors, but also help guide homeowners toward living amongst a fresh palette of colors that may not be in their immediate field of view.

[Photo: Behr]

Behr’s selection, a soft and grassy shade of green called “Back to Nature,” is the company’s third official color of the year and was chosen for its association with the great outdoors.

Emphasizing the preciousness—and precariousness—of the natural world, it taps into growing concerns about plastic and other sustainability issues, the rise of biophilic design, and the booming indoor plant industry. “It goes back to lifestyle and how we’re living, there’s kind of a social movement to get out there and engage with nature,” Erika Woelfel, Behr VP of Color and Creative Services, says. “We know that people are very aware that getting outside is really important.”

All kinds of green are trending at the moment, especially in the world of home decor. “There’s a huge trend of people bringing plants into their home, which cleans the air and has all these health benefits; that’s why we’re seeing jungle greens and desert greens,” Woelfel explains. ” ‘Back to Nature’ is a sweet spot: it’s not too dark and not too light, it’s fashion-forward in these sense that it’s not too dated, [and it can] create a sanctuary in your home. It really has that

[Photo: Benjamin Moore]

“[First Light] is one of those colors that can live in a lot of different rooms, you can see how it becomes this really beautiful backdrop. It can almost serve as a neutral and give a warm glow to the room,” Magno says. “We thought it was really indicative of fresh thinking. We’re on the dawn of a new decade and we thought: ‘How do we want to embody that?’” While this rosy shade is certainly fresh, it’s not so dissimilar from the ubiquitous whisper of Millennial Pink, a color that has been exhausted to the point of polite mockery.

Perhaps First Light’s slightly softer tone will situate it more as a delicate accent color, rather than its dominant and highly branded millennial cousin.

Meanwhile, Sherwin Williams’s 2020 Color of the Year conjures no feelings of a verdant meadow or a fresh morning.

The company’s pick, “Naval,” is a rich and brooding navy shade—and is a refreshing departure from the more cheery colors that have dominated the past couple years.

While companies are concerned with being on trend, they also

[Photo: Sherwin-Williams]

creators. In the case of Wadden and her team at Sherwin-

need to make selections that are distinct from the colors they celebrated the year prior, which may help explain why these companies don’t often land on similar colors. Ultimately, it comes down to the instincts of each particular team of palette Williams, a deep, bold hue felt right.

[Photo: Sherwin-Williams]

“We knew navy was going to be a big color, [because] we could see black and white and monochromatic was a big trend,” says Sue Wadden, director of color marketing at Sherwin-Williams. “Our 2020 forecast is about taking wellness into the next decade, and [navy] was a great design trend. A really calming, timeless hue that’s always going to look good.”

These teams of designers and marketers are tasked not only

[Photo: Sherwin-Williams]

vibrant yet mellow Living Coral embraces us with warmth

with responding to culture, but attempting to participate in it, too.

Take “Living Coral,” Pantone’s 2019 pick. The company wanted to select a color reflecting critical global trends, and chose a hue that was meant to carry symbolic meaning. “Just as coral reefs provide sustenance and shelter to sea life, and nourishment to provide comfort and buoyancy in our continually shifting environment,” Pressman says. Some felt the color didn’t place enough emphasis on the environmental issue of coral bleaching, even offering alternatives like a grey “Dead Coral” or all-white “Bleached Coral.”

Color touches nearly every object and industry; far from superficial, it plays an essential role in shaping the world and how we see it. But the public’s interest in color forecasting may also reflect confusion about an ambiguous future, whether in terms of climate change or polarizing politics. A single color that serves to explain the coming year seems like a balm for the confusion.

Naval is Sherwin Williams’s tenth color of the year, and was selected in February during the company’s annual forecast meeting. “We have 12 team members and we all get together and hash this out,” Wadden says. “It’s like a threeday process, and by the end of it one color usually rises to the top.”

“There’s been this neutral mania, so it’s exciting to see things ripening . . . I think people are excited to bring color back [into the home], I like the arc we’re on,” Wadden says. “We’re here to inspire, we know what color can do and how it affects mood . . . that’s my goal moving into 2020, is to get people excited about color.”

Not A Toy Story: How Brian Goldner Is Transforming Hasbro

By Matt Perez

brandknewmag.com

57

It’s Friday night and The Uncommons in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village is running at full tilt. A few dozen people— kids, college students, adults—fill every corner of the meandering space that’s part café, part game shop. Seated shoulder to shoulder, they fill the room with the sounds of Magic: The Gathering, the 26-year-old collectible card game owned by Hasbro, the world’s most valuable toy company.

In an age of Fortnite, League of Legends and stadium-filling esports tournaments, the chatter seems to come from another time. Players arm themselves with decks of 60 cards, each one featuring a deadly fantasy creature or a fiendish spell, with 20,000 unique cards up for grabs. It’s easy to learn but infinitely deep. More importantly for Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner, it has a rabid, and profitable, following. In total, some 38 million people have played Magic since its release in 1993, and in 2017, the game accounted for an estimated $500 million in sales, according to KeyBanc Capital Markets.

“We’ve always been a management team that’s taken the longer view,” says the 56-year-old Goldner, who joined the Pawtucket, Rhode Island-based company in 2000 as the head of toys and games, and took over as CEO in 2008.

“Any moves we make in the future, it’s with an eye to where the consumer and audience is going to be in three to five years, not three to five weeks.”

Brian Goldner’s Hasbro now manufactures stories, not just Monopoly boards and G.I. Joes. That’s why it’s trouncing the competition—and just spent $4 billion on a pig named Peppa.

Goldner has built his career both by carefully stewarding old franchises like Magic and Dungeons & Dragons and by turning toys like My Little Pony and Transformers into television and movie stars. Goldner calls it the “brand blueprint” strategy: Nurture your own brands, build audiences around them and push them onto riskier, but more lucrative, platforms.

He sold off Hasbro’s factories, pushing all of that messy, low-margin manufacturing work onto third parties. Revenue hit a record $5.2 billion in 2017, the year before Toys “R” Us died and Hasbro saw a 12% drop in revenue. Even in that annus horribilis Hasbro managed to eke out a profit of $220 million on revenue of $4.6 billion. That same year, its archrival Mattel lost $531 million on revenue of $4.5 billion.

Under his leadership, Hasbro shares have returned twice that of the S&P 500, hitting a record high in July. In all, Goldner’s performance has been good enough to earn him the 96th spot in our first ever ranking of America’s most innovative corporate leaders.

He is not resting on his laurels. Goldner made a huge move, spending $4 billion in late August to buy Entertainment One. The Toronto-based film and TV production company is known mostly for owning Peppa Pig and PJ Masks, cartoon favorites of the preschool set. The two properties pull in almost $2.5 billion of retail sales and are a nice addition to Hasbro’s My Little Pony and Play-Doh. Better yet, Peppa Pig and PJ Masks are not only beloved stories, they also represent the potential for future Hasbro toy sales. As Goldner can attest after his flopping with movies based on Battleship and Jem and the Holograms, it’s much easier to start with a great story than with a great toy.

Back when Goldner joined the company, stories weren’t Hasbro’s business. They manufactured toys, and revenue was increasingly reliant on outside ideas, like licensing Pokémon, and tethered to a holiday shopping season that left managers holding their breath until Thanksgiving, when sales began to pick up steam.

The 26-year-old card game Magic: The Gathering had its best year in 2018.COURTESY OF HASBRO

“People were asking, ‘Why is that essential?’ and ‘Does that add more volatility?’ ” Goldner says. “You actually have more volatility when you’re relying on other people to provide you all the entertainment for your portfolio.”

Goldner, after being named COO, tapped Transformers as a place to prove it. The line of miniature cars that can be converted into bipedal robots had been a huge hit with kids since the mid-1980s, thanks in part to a popular television cartoon. Goldner turned his sights to a much bigger screen.

Attach characters like Optimus Prime to a Hollywood blockbuster and things could really soar.

Steven Spielberg got it. A fan of the toys, the billionaire director signed on to produce the movie, and would spend planning meetings carefully positioning the action figures on a table and taking shots with his phone as they talked. The film was directed by Michael Bay and debuted in 2007, with Goldner and Spielberg as executive producers. It did $710 million in global ticket sales and increased Transformers

toy sales by a factor of five. Goldner was named CEO the following year.

The son of an electronic engineer and teacher turned investor, the Long Island native is a boundlessly energetic self-labeled geek who can flip conversations seamlessly between everything from building radios to canoeing. He is no stranger to adversity. Just as things were starting to click at Hasbro, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which he revealed to investors he’d been treated for in 2014. A year later, his adult son died of an opioid overdose.

have almost four million players by year-end, a promising step toward bringing lapsed players back to the game. An animated Netflix spinoff series from Joe and Anthony Russo, the duo behind the Avengers: Endgame, is in the works.

The Transformers films are also thriving, with two sequels pulling in $1 billion each worldwide. A television series, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, became a massive hit among children and, surprisingly, older viewers, known as “bronies.”

By buying Entertainment One, he’s just taken on a hefty new challenge. Hasbro shares plummeted when the deal was announced, some saying he overpaid for two preschool properties and others focused on the risks of owning a media company outright, rather than hiring one to tell your stories. Entertainment One’s content library, worth $2 billion, also comes with adult-skewing properties that don’t lend themselves to selling more toys, such as TV shows Criminal Minds and Sharp Objects.

The rise of social media helped Hasbro turn the game Pie Face, a 1960s throwback, into what market researcher NPD says was Hasbro’s bestselling toy in the U.S. in 2016, due to viral videos, like one of a grandfather and grandson having laughing fits, which drew 205 million views on Facebook.

Late last August, Hasbro spent $4 billion to acquire Entertainment One, known for its popular preschool properties Peppa Pig and PJ Masks.

COURTESY OF HASBRO

There is reason for skepticism. In 2009, Hasbro invested $300 million in Hub, a children’s TV network that was a joint venture with Discovery Communications, and has little to show for it today. A push to make G.I. Joe into a movie star made for decent box-office sales but didn’t move the needle on sales of the action figures. Other films just tanked. And the company has suffered repeated black eyes with efforts to further exploit Monopoly, arguably it’s most iconic property, including a recent attempt to create a socialist-themed version of the canonical board game of capitalism.

But then there’s Magic, which Goldner’s team has rejuvenated in conjunction with Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary based outside of Seattle that also oversees Dungeons & Dragons. The card game had its best year in 2018, fueled by an expansion into digital that began with Magic: The Gathering Arena, a free-to-play video game that some feared would cannibalize the core tabletop product.

So far, those fears have proved unfounded. Still not officially launched and lacking a mobile version, its soft launch has significantly boosted its audience on Amazon’s game streaming platform, Twitch, and viewership is up 120% year over year.

KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Brett Andress estimates Arena pulls in $75 per user. He expects the free version will

These new efforts are funded in part by a 2014 coup that saw Hasbro steal the license to produce Disney Princess toys from Mattel. Euromonitor estimates the rights brought in $441 million for Mattel in 2014. Despite the new emphasis on owning its own intellectual property, Hasbro hasn’t abandoned the licensing game. Third-party partnerships, including Disney’s Marvel and Star Wars franchises, make up 21.5% of Hasbro’s revenue.

And things are far from perfect in the toy industry, which NPD reckons generates $90.4 billion in annual sales. Not only is Toys “R” Us a shell of its former self—the struggling retailer remained an important sales channel even in the era of Amazon—but the threat of Chinese tariffs is making 2020 look uncertain. Hasbro currently outsources about two-thirds of its manufacturing to companies in China.

So the move into media could prove prescient. The streaming wars are picking up and players like Netflix, Hulu and Disney+ are all on the hunt for fresh properties. Goldner says the acquisition will help Hasbro create content out of its smaller properties, while bigger brands will still get the Hollywood touch, including Transformers films, which are produced by Paramount under a five-year deal signed in 2017.

Stephanie Wissink at Jefferies estimates the acquisition could boost Hasbro revenue by more than $1 billion and operating income by more than $200 million.

“People are looking for high quality content that has great story and canon and characters,” Goldner told Forbes the day after it was announced. “We of course have that in spades.”

The Power of Consistency in Branding

By BJ Bueno

Successful Brands Are …

Successful brands are many things.

To appeal to customers, organizations must be credible, with actions that are in alignment with their messaging.

There must be no disconnection between what a brand promises and what it delivers.

A brand must be meaningful, with specific relevance to customers’ lives.

Successful brands are unique, with a distinct identity in the marketplace.

Successful brands are holistic, meeting customers’ needs on multiple levels.

Successful brands are sustainable, engaged in business practices they can maintain over the long term.

All of these criteria are important. But there’s one factor that trumps all of these factors: Consistency. Successful brands add value to the customer experience across all touch points, and are trusted because they consistently deliver on their promises.

Why Is Consistency So Important?

It’s dinner time at your house. You’ve got a big juicy burger. The only thing that’s missing is the ketchup. So you go to the fridge, take out the bottle, and give it a shake. After squeezing a good amount of ketchup onto your burger, you take a big bite.

Something’s wrong. Instead of the intense tomato experience you were expecting, you’ve got a watery, bland mess on top of your burger. That’s no

good, so you toss the ketchup and buy a new bottle. This time, everything’s great.

You use up that bottle of ketchup, and get another bottle from the store. This time, the ketchup’s watery and bland again. It’s time to go back to the store for another bottle.

Are you going to buy the same brand of ketchup again?

Chances are that you won’t. Customers like predictability in their purchases.

They want to know ahead of time what they’re getting for their money. That’s why companies like Heinz take great pains to deliver the same amazing taste of their product consistently—even when they’re filling the small packet at McDonald’s.

Performing Consistency Checks Being consistent in your messaging and product offering is a discipline that requires regular practice on a yearly, quarterly, monthly, and in some cases, weekly basis.

You can start by listing all of your consumer touch points—all of the ways your customers interact with your brand. Here’s a list of common consumer touch points: • Names (product & company) • Advertising (commercials, billboards, etc.)

• Collateral • Direct Mail • Publicity / Public Relations • Customer Relationships • E-mail Communication • Partnerships / Alliances • Recruiting / Training • Sales / Marketing • Customer Service • Culture • Intellectual Capital • Physical Environment • Conferences • Web Sites • Sponsorships • Logos / Design / Colors Assuming you have clarified your brand’s promise (and that’s a whole process in itself), review each touchpoint while asking the question, How well are we communicating and delivering on our brand’s promise?

You can even create a rating scale of 1 to 5 to help you subjectively measure your effectiveness.

Performing these consistency checks often will help ensure that you’re delivering on your promises. This is vital if you aspire to foster authentic brand loyalty with your customers.

Book,

&

Line

Sinker

Subscription Marketing: Strategies for Nurturing Customers in a World of Churn Kindle Edition

My Blogging Secrets: A guide to becoming a pro-blogger Kindle Edition

By Anne Janzer

By Amber McNaught

Subscription Marketing offers creative marketing strategies for sustaining the customer relationships that build long-term success. This book is a practical guide for marketers, start-up executives, customer success management professionals, and executives of establishing businesses adopting or transitioning to a subscription-based model.

Want to make a living simply by writing about your life? Here’s how one woman does it...

On a sunny day in April, journalist-turned-PR Amber McNaught walked out of her well-paid office job, and started a blog.

Beyond Sizzle: The Next Evolution of Branding

By Mona Amodeo

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

Award-winning management strategist Dr. Mona Amodeo brings together the best practices of change management, marketing, and communications to give readers an actionable process for creating brands that matterorganizations that are redefining workplaces, reimagining customer experiences, and creating innovative products and services that are building healthier, more sustainable communities in turn, creating a better world for us all.

By Fabian Geyrhalter, Elaine Pofeldt (Editor)

This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See

By Seth Godin

Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

For the first time, Godin offers the core of his marketing wisdom in one compact, accessible, timeless package. This is Marketing shows you how to do work you’re proud of, whether you’re a tech startup founder, a small business owner, or part of a large corporation. No matter what your product or service, this book will help you reframe how it’s presented to the world, in order to meaningfully connect with people who want it.

By Donald Miller Donald Miller’s StoryBrand process is a proven solution to the struggle business leaders face when talking about their businesses. This revolutionary method for connecting with customers provides readers with the ultimate competitive advantage, revealing the secret for helping their customers understand the compelling benefits of using their products, ideas, or services.

Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld

A New Brand World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the Twenty-First Century

By James B. Twitchell Branded Nation uncovers a society where megachurches resemble shopping malls (and not by accident); where a university lives or dies on the talents of its image makers -- and its ranking in U.S. News & World Report; and where museums have turned to motorcycle exhibits and fashion shows to bolster revenue, even franchising their own institutions into brands.

In “Bigger Than This,” Geyrhalter analyzes brands that are based on commodity products – watches, socks, shoes, fish – yet they quickly turn into beloved brands. He emphasizes the importance of storytelling, encouraging brands to embrace 8 simple traits these brands showcase and offers specific, actionable commandments that any brand can implement – story, belief, cause, heritage, delight, transparency, solidarity and individuality.

By Scott Bedbury, Stephen Fenichell In A New Brand World, Scott Bedbury, who helped make Nike and Starbucks two of the most successful brands of recent years, explains this often mysterious process by setting out the principles that helped these companies become leaders in their respective industries.

groupisd.com

63

The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader: How to Succeed by Building Customer and Company Value Kindle Edition

By Thomas Barta, Patrick Barwise

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company’s Future - and What to Do About It Kindle Edition

The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader, by former McKinsey Partner Thomas Barta and senior London Business School professor Patrick Barwise, is the first research-based leadership book for marketers in the 21st century. Based on the largest ever research study of its kind, with detailed data on over 8,600 leaders in more...

By Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

Top of Mind: Use Content to Unleash Your Influence and Engage Those Who Matter To You

The Story Engine: An entrepreneur’s guide to conte Kindle Edition

By John Hall It’s the winning approach John Hall used to build Influence & Co. into one of “America’s Most Promising Companies,” according to Forbes. In this step-by-step guide, he shows you how to use content to keep your brand front and center in the minds of decision makers who matter.

Brands in Glass Houses: How to Embrace Transparency and Grow Your Business Through Content Marketing

Tzuo shows how to use subscriptions to build lucrative, ongoing one-on-one relationships with your customers. This may require reinventing substantial parts of your company, from your accounting practices to your entire IT architecture, but the payoff can be enormous.

By Kyle Gray, Tom Morkes (Foreword) Every entrepreneur has a story to tell, whether they’re running seven-figure startups or small personal brands. Your story is the most powerful asset you have at your disposal. It can cut through the noise and connect you with your customers.

Content marketing is one of the most affordable and powerful digital marketing tools available to tell your story at scale.

Building Strong Brands Kindle Edition

By David A. Aaker

Brands in Glass Houses shines light on businesses that are revealing themselves authentically, not just as a marketing tactic, but also as a way of doing business. It shows you how to provide interesting content so that customers can connect with your brand on an emotional level...

As industries turn increasingly hostile, it is clear that strong brand-building skills are needed to survive and prosper. In David Aaker’s pathbreaking book, Managing Brand Equity, managers discovered the value of a brand as a strategic asset and a company’s primary source of competitive advantage. Now, in this compelling new work, Aaker uses real brand-building cases from Saturn, General Electric, Kodak, Healthy Choice, McDonald’s...

Overthrow: 10 ways to tell a challenger story Kindle Edition

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

By Mark Holden, Malcolm Devoy, Adam Morgan

By Michael Lewis

By Dechay Watts, Debbie Williams, Said Baaghil (Contributor)

Anyone interested in challengers is interested in compression: how do you make a story utterly compelling in a very short space of time? And one of the reasons that the concept of the ‘challenger brand’ has caught on, you might argue, is that it itself does just that: within just two words you surely have all the ingredients of an engaging story – conflict, a protagonist and an adversary, an anticipation of a future event...

Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original papers that invented the field of behavioral economics. Led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. In The Undoing Project, Lewis shows how their Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.