Moving marketing upstream in response to business complexity

BY KIRSTIN HAMMERBERG

As business complexity continues to increase, so too does the opportunity for marketing. In particular, the foundations of marketing – rooted in a blend of creativity and strategy – is needed now more than ever to build connections between business and people.

Through our work we see greater alliances forming between marketing functions and business operators as marketers are welcomed back upstream to help set and enable the strategy and operations of an organization. The catch is that marketers must show up ready to connect cultural insight, analytics and market sentiment with business imperatives – expertly advising on strategic priorities that build organizational reputation, mobilize change management or restore the eroding relationship between organizations and their people.

Marketers will also have to spearhead perspectives on how to accurately communicate and engage in topics that are often lacking business maturity (i.e. ESG and DEI) as the backstory of products and services continues to play a role in how people build brand preference and make purchase decisions.

The simple answer around the future of marketing is undoubtedly caught up in the accelerated pace of evolving tech and its application – the importance of voice, AI, virtual worlds, social listening, first-party data and privacy. But as we look to the future, we encourage all marketers to not only revisit their toolkit, but to remember that where and how the tools of marketing are deployed can in and of itself generate meaningful progress and integrity for the industry.

fail: the mass rejection of tracking when Apple initiated their App Tracking Transparency protocols. If Meta does indeed lose $10B in revenue as a result… well, that should be a good clue to everyone else that the advertising stalking and creeping racket is over. People might want personalized experience but not at the expense of feeling creeped,” says Quao.

In a recent op-ed in The Drum, Google’s ads privacy lead Claire Norburn claimed that, despite its efforts to move away from cookies, Google does not believe contextual ads will be enough to “pay for the web that everyone wants.” Without personalized advertising, it’s been estimated that between $32 billion and $39 billion in revenues would be lost to advertisers, publishers and platforms.

For his fintech, Quao has taken a different approach by addressing connected groups of people rather than individuals. Says Quao, “What’s a connected group? That could be anything from the members of an extended family, to readers of a particular page of content on site. The small groups have some affinity or experience in common and that becomes the start of a semi-personalized engagement between us and an audience.”

AI expert Shane Saunderson’s view of the future of personalization echoes Quao’s, but looks at it through a different lens. “Harvard business professor Shoshana Zuboff, who coined the term ‘surveillance capitalism,’ describes it as this massive prediction and modification engine. But does it really work as such? It’s a good tool for granular segmentation, but most people don’t fall for this stuff. So it’s not like we’ve created this perfect system that can convince anyone to do or buy anything.” have to scale your efforts to manage that. If you have a problem that necessitates understanding 100 markets, then you have to do the work (and spend the time) to study them all. This will take a very long time, but that’s what’s necessary. You can’t take short cuts and only study the world you want to study.”

But how to accomplish that at scale? And should we even try?

PERSONALIZATION OR SURVEILLANCE?

“I’m operating under the assumption that consumers will reject hyper-personalization,” says Sabaa Quao, chief creative officer of Cossette and co-founder at Wealthie Works Daily. “I can’t think of anyone who now doesn’t find it stalker-ish. How many of us have uttered words to the effect of ‘I swear my mobile phone is listening to me and then sending me ads?’

“Here’s the big example that hyper-personalization is about to

He goes on to say that the most effective thing that Big Tech has done with surveillance capitalism is boost its sales to marketers by making the behavioural data quantifiable. Big Tech has created an effective tool for something but, ironically, it hasn’t really created an effective tool for advertising: “If you blast 10 million people with a Dior ad, sure you’ll get a thousand of them that want to buy it. But it’s still very much a brute force technology that is layering the world with online advertisements we don’t even notice half the time. So the irony is, now you’re probably spending 99% of your budget ineffectively.”

“Even digital advertising is predicated on an historical ad model that always felt a bit sneaky and subversive... like people had to be subconsciously tricked into buying things,” he says. “What would happen if we flipped the model a bit and were transparent with people? What would an ad look like that, instead of forcing me to watch a random or ‘machine-learning predicted’ 15-second video, let me choose from a list of five things that I might be interested in. Or, better yet, gave me the option to complete a marketing survey in exchange for an ad-free digital experience for a day or a week?

“I think there is so much more that could be done with marketing and advertising if we stopped treating people like manipulable idiots and started respecting them by being transparent about what is going on and giving them agency.” little like stunts now, the space is evolving quickly, with brands like Nike (bottom) using it to feed product lines in the real world. is that they will be encountered only by specific people at specific times. Which means that, while there may be other people sharing the same virtual or augmented space, they won’t see the same narrowly targeted content; they will see content customized to their personal profiles.

Dr. Rosenberg defines a VPP as a simulated product or experience that appears to the user as an integrated element of the ambient environment. He points out that, in unscrupulous hands, advertising in the metaverse “could become predatory, deceiving users into believing that specific products and services are popular in their community (virtual or augmented) when in fact they are observing a promotionally altered representation of their surroundings.”

Given the fact that the metaverse still feels very much like a gaming app, it’s no surprise that teens are a key target of advertising at this point. The problem here is, what constitutes “reality” if a teen spends eight hours in front of a screen every day? What is more authentic, the metaverse or their real, physical and psychological lives?

It was British social critic and art historian John Berger who said that our achievement of the future promised by marketing and advertising is endlessly deferred. This is because its truthfulness is “judged not by the real fulfillment of its promises, but by the relevance of its fantasies to those of the consumer.”

In the good old days of mass marketing, that fantasy took the form of a print ad or a 30-second spot. Ads flooded our minds with images of the ideal home, the ideal car, the ideal nuclear family. Those spots were prescriptive; we were passive recipients being shown how to live. But none of these old school forms could promise a world as immersive as the metaverse.

In the metaverse, we are not passive observers, but active participants, co-creating the fantasies in which we choose to engage with brands. Advertising in the metaverse is more than just a replication of what happens in the “real” world. It’s not just about placing media in a virtual reality. That’s been going on in the gaming space since the 1970s.

According to an article by Dr. Louis Rosenberg for the Future of Marketing Institute, “The metaverse transforms the role of the user from an outsider to a co-located participant who engages in natural, personal and intuitive experiences.” He defines it as a large-scale societal shift from flat to immersive media, one so profound it will fundamentally transform the world of marketing, altering the core tactics used by the industry while also introducing new risks to consumers.

He suggests that, due to the natural, personal and intuitive nature of the medium, the two primary forms of advertising in virtual and augmented worlds will likely be “virtual product placements” (VPPs) and “virtual spokespeople” (VSPs). Nothing new about product placements or spokespersons, but the difference here

In a recent AdNews article, James Sawyer, ANZ managing director of kids-first digital engagement platform TotallyAwesome, shares the stats: the world’s big three gaming platforms, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft have quadrupled in size since 2017. In Australia, 71% of teens are gaming and the sector was the fastest growing with teens in the 12 months prior to September 2021.

And brands are cashing in. Nike, Wendy’s, Samsung, Hyundai, Coca Cola, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Burberry, Ferrari, to name a few, are all building their own metaverse experiences and environments aimed at kids and teens in hopes that they will buy the brand in the real world, when they have real money.

So, what makes for meaningful, responsible engagement when it comes to brands in the metaverse? We’ll look at that next...