AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION
AMA.ORG
FEBRUARY 2019
- How One Couple Redesigned their Life and Brand - Designing for the Customer Experience - Lessons on Marketer-Designer Communication -
FEBRUARY 2019 NO.
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PHOTO: © ALYSSA SCHUKAR
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ANSWERS IN ACTION • Snapshot • Core Concepts • Ethical Marketing
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SCHOLARLY INSIGHTS • Vamsi K. Kanuri, Yixing Chen and Shrihari (Hari) Sridhar
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EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS • Andy Crestodina • Pam Neely
50-53 CAREER ADVANCEMENT
• Martech • Agency to In-House
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#OFFICEGOALS A Life, Redesigned
Amy and Jason Schwartz have a new baby and run their own agency, Bright Bright Great, which they’re rebranding. As life has changed, so has their work.
28 A Map Finds More Treasure Than a Funnel
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Creative teams need to meet customers where they are and stop expecting them to step into the funnel. Data-driven marketer Jessica Best explains how involving more teams in the experience design process can highlight more on-ramps in the customer journey.
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FEBRUARY 2019 | MARKETING NEWS
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FEBRUARY 2019
VOL. 53 | NO. 2 AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION
Bill Cron Chairperson of the AMA Board 2018-2019 Russ Klein, AMA Chief Executive Officer rklein@ama.org EDITORIAL STAFF
Phone (800) AMA-1150 • Fax (312) 542-9001 E-mail editor@ama.org David Klein, Chief Content Officer dklein@ama.org Molly Soat, Editor in Chief msoat@ama.org Sarah Steimer, Managing Editor ssteimer@ama.org Hal Conick, Staff Writer hconick@ama.org Bill Murphy, Lead Designer wmurphy@ama.org ADVERTISING STAFF
Fax (312) 922-3763 • E-mail ads@ama.org Sally Schmitz, Production Manager sschmitz@ama.org (312) 542-9038 Nicola Tate, Associate Director, Media Channels ntate@associationmediagroup.com (804) 469-0324 Joseph Petit, Recruitment Advertising Specialist joseph.petit@communitybrands.com (727) 497-6565 x3706 Marketing News (ISSN 0025-3790) is published monthly except June/July and November/December by the American Marketing Association, 130 E. Randolph St., 22nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60601. Circulation: (800) AMA-1150, (312) 542-9000 Tel: (800) AMA-1150, (312) 542-9000 POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: Marketing News, 130 E. Randolph St., 22nd Floor, Chicago, 60601-6320, USA. Periodical Postage paid at Chicago, Ill., and additional mailing offices.
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Design vs. design
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apital D Design, as described to managing editor Sarah Steimer on page 43, is the kind of design that solves a problem, whereas lowercase d design creates beauty. One could argue that marketing is the apex between those two missions. Effective marketing brings words and images together in a way that both answers questions and adds beauty to the world. As marketers are increasingly focused on adapting to the customer’s personal journey, graphic designers have helped forge their path; design speaks to people in a way they’ll immediately understand and with an aesthetic they can appreciate. Staff writer Hal Conick spent time with a married couple who work on both sides of the creative coin at their design and brand strategy agency. They discuss their creative process, how client needs come first and what happens when life imitates work—or vice versa. Good designers, like good marketers,
begin their creative process by asking “why?” instead of jumping straight to “what?” How does experience design influence your creative process? MOLLY SOAT Editor in Chief @MollySoat
Canada Post Agreement Number 40030960. Opinions expressed are not necessarily endorsed by the AMA, its officers or staff. Marketing News welcomes expressions of all professional viewpoints on marketing and its related areas. These may be as letters to the editor, columns or articles. Letters should be brief and may be condensed by the editors. Please request a copy of the “Writers’ Guidelines” before submitting an article. Upon submission to the AMA, photographs and manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by a self-addressed, adequately stamped envelope.
CONTRIBUTORS
Annual subscription rates: Marketing News is a benefit of membership for professional members of the American Marketing Association. Annual professional membership dues in the AMA are $220. Annual subscription rates: $35 members, $145 nonmembers and $190 libraries, corporations and institutions. International rates vary by country. Nonmembers: Order online at amaorders.com, call 1-800-633-4931 or e-mail amasubs@ ebsco.com. Single copies $10 individual, $10 institutions; foreign add $5 per copy for air, printed matter. Payment must be in U.S. funds or the equivalent. Canadian residents add 13% GST (GST Registration #127478527). Advertisers and advertising agencies assume liability for all content (including text, representations and illustrations) of advertisements published, and also assume responsibility for any claims arising therefrom made against the publisher. The right is reserved to reject any advertisement. Copyright © 2019 by the American Marketing Association. All rights reserved. Without written permission from the AMA, any copying or reprinting (except by authors reprinting their own works) is prohibited. Requests for permission to reprint—such as copying for general distribution, advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works or resale—should be submitted in writing by mail or sent via e-mail to permissions@ama.org. Printed in the U.S.A.
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JESSEE FISH
ALYSSA SCHUKAR
Jessee Fish is a Chilean artist and designer with years of experience at both startups and international ad agencies. She’s currently an art director at Winc in Los Angeles. She feels strongly about white space, 1980s synthpop and the plight of the bees. Follow her on Instagram @jesseefish.
Alyssa Schukar is a Chicago-based photographer, writer and teacher as well as a frequent contributor to The New York Times. In her personal work, she focuses on how public policies—especially those related to the environment—affect communities.
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What Every Marketer Needs to Know About Influencer Marketing and Buying Followers
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nline influencers are an increasingly popular marketing tactic. Everyday opinion leaders are the driving force behind this trend. Brands increasingly seek out these voices to create content and build awareness about their products and services. Paid influencer marketing, commonly identified by disclosures or hashtags such as #ad or #sponsored, grew by almost 200% in 2017, composing more than 1.5 million Instagram posts. In response to this opportunity, some influencers are buying followers to boost their perceived reach and improve their opportunities for working with paying brands. This practice has drawn criticism about a lack of transparency that can deceive consumers. Brands are now boycotting influencers who purchase followers. For example, Unilever recently called on marketers to stop working with influencers who buy followers and it laid out steps to distance itself and its brands from such accounts. Working with trusted partners is key to engaging influencers who have trusted followings and can successfully promote a brand or campaign. Understanding this trend is key to helping marketers and communicators make informed decisions about which influencers are the best fit for a brand or campaign. Influencer marketing agency The Motherhood and research corporation Westat fielded two surveys in August 2018, one to influencers and one to marketing professionals. More than 400 influencers responded to the survey, with 90% reporting that they have never
purchased followers. However, 18% said they have considered doing so for two main reasons: 1. Brands told them they needed greater reach before they would be eligible for partnership. 2. They knew other influencers were purchasing followers and felt that was the only way to compete effectively for opportunities. One influencer said, “An influencer company and PR company that I worked with on a regular basis suggested [that I purchase followers]. Their words were, ‘It’s not a big deal, brands don’t care, they just want numbers. They no longer focus on the content, which is what matters. We suggest this to everyone with excellent content but a small following.’” Every surveyed marketer agreed that they would pay influencers more if they had a higher level of reach or engagement, further incentivizing influencers to purchase followers. These findings demonstrate the anxiety that influencers, their agencies and their representatives feel in meeting brands’ rising expectations in influencer marketing. For marketers without a reputable agency partner, Google can help identify whether an influencer’s following is organic or purchased. However, making that determination can be a time-consuming process. Agencies use a multistep eligibility review, which includes an analysis of engagement rates to ensure a level of interaction that’s appropriate for the number of followers an influencer has. To be eligible for campaigns with a network like The Motherhood, influencers enter a contractual relationship with the agency. The agreement includes integrity clauses.
While reach can be a contributing factor to campaign success, vetting should also consider other factors. To showcase how the quality of an influencer can be more powerful than their reach, consider the following case study: In partnership with an at-home fertility aid brand, one blogger, who had the lowest reach of all participating campaign influencers (fewer than 5,000 unique monthly visitors), generated more than 5,000 unique website visits in the final month of the campaign. More than 16% of those visitors caused online retailers to sell out of the fertility aid devices within 24 hours. In contrast, a team of nine elite-level influencers with a total blog and social media reach of more than 100,000 unique visitors each generated total impressions, earned media value and ROI significantly below the average performance of mid-tier influencers when partnering with a consumer packaged goods brand. Influence can be effective at any level, whether an individual has 100 followers or 1 million. However, as brands have recognized that they can tap into that influence to educate, build awareness and encourage sales among their target audiences, the emphasis on reach above all other considerations has grown. This near-exclusive focus on reach as a partnership criterion and success metric has incentivized influencers to purchase followers and is proving problematic for brands in the long run. Unilever’s announcement about avoiding partnerships with influencers who purchase followers was a step in the right direction. All brands should take the additional, necessary step of looking at influencers from a well-rounded perspective when considering a partnership, rather than zeroing in on reach alone. —ERIN OLSON, COOPER MUNROE AND AMELIA BURKE-GARCIA
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The State of the NFL and the Super Bowl
T
$ 534
he 2017 NFL season was plagued by reports of falling viewership, but viewership increased a reported 5% to 15.8 million TV viewers per game during during the 2018 season. Whether this increase is the start of a new upward trend or just a flash in the pan remains to be seen. The latest statistics show a drop in Super Bowl viewership, an increase in the cost per game ticket and drops in average per game attendance—yet NFL games remain popular with sponsors and advertisers. A 30-second Super Bowl LIII ad costs at least $5 million, about the same as 2018. Some newer brands will be making their first appearance at the big game, including dating app Bumble and expense management company Expensify. Planters is returning for its first Super Bowl commercial since 2008. Anheuser-Busch, a veteran advertiser of the championship game, is buying 5 1/2 minutes of airtime, its largest-ever media spend for the game.
MILLION
2 0 1 7
$ 482 MILLION
2 0 1 8
For the 2018 Super Bowl, marketers spent $482 million on ads before, during and after the game, compared to $534 million in 2017
TV Viewership of the Super Bowl in the United States from 2002 to 2018 (in millions)
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86.8
88.64
89.79
86.07
90.75
93.18
97.45
98.73 106.48
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
111
111.3
108.4
111.5
114.4
111.9
111.3
103.4
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
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Average Cost of a 30-second Super Bowl TV Advertisement from 2002-2018 (in millions, U.S. dollars)* SUPER BOWL XXXVI (2002)
2.3
SUPER BOWL XXXVIII (2004)
2.6
SUPER BOWL XXXIX (2005)
2.7
SUPER BOWL XL (2006)
2.7
SUPER BOWL XLI (2007)
2.7
SUPER BOWL XLII (2008)
2.7
SUPER BOWL XLIII (2009)
3.1
SUPER BOWL XLIV (2010)
2.7
SUPER BOWL XLV (2011)
3
SUPER BOWL XLVI (2012)
3.5
SUPER BOWL XLVII (2013)
4
SUPER BOWL XLVIII (2014)
4
SUPER BOWL XLIX (2015)
4.5
SUPER BOWL 50 (2016)
5
SUPER BOWL LI (2017)**
5
SUPER BOWL LII (2018)***
5 0
1
2
3
4
5
* INFLATION-ADJUSTED AVERAGE COST OF A 30-SECOND AD SPOT. ** ESTIMATE OF $5 TO $5.5 MILLION *** SOURCE STATES THAT THE NETWORK WILL AVERAGE MORE THAN $5 MILLION FOR A 30-SECOND SPOT
51:20
The 2018 game contained 51 minutes and 20 seconds of ad messages between the opening kickoff and final whistle, totaling 86 ads.
Length of 2018 Super Bowl Ads OTHER 15 SECONDS OR LESS
30 SECONDS
7% 11% 51% 31%
60 SECONDS OR MORE 86 TV AD SPOTS
**ALL STATS FROM KANTAR MEDIA AND STATISTA
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Two Truths and a Lie How to use organization truths and customer truths to evaluate your agency’s ideas
S
eth Godin famously published a book called All Marketers are Liars. In it, he describes the way successful marketers invent stories (i.e., tell lies) to sell products and services. There’s power in that idea, but it’s nothing new. If you’ve progressed to a marketing leadership role, you intuitively know the power of stories. What you might not know is that
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effective storytelling requires two specific kinds of support to ensure that it builds brand rather than devaluing it. These supports are two different flavors of objective truth, each serving as a pillar that a good brand story bridges. I call this the two truths and a lie framework. As a marketing leader, you can use this framework to evaluate whether the ideas that your agency is presenting
are likely to go the distance or fall flat.
Seeking Truths ORGANIZATION TRUTHS
To make a brand story work, there are two kinds of truths you need. The first is an organization truth. This is an objective fact about your organization. For instance, one objective fact about Wendy’s is that their hamburgers are square. That’s not necessarily a benefit to the consumer, who doesn’t care what shape hamburger he eats, but it’s a truth about the Wendy’s product— and one that distinguishes it from other burger joints. Looking at the world of healthcare
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providers, take the example of a health system that is affiliated with an academic institution. There’s no inherent customer benefit to academic affiliation, but the affiliation is a fact. That’s an organization truth and the first support for a brand story. CUSTOMER TRUTHS
The second truth is a customer truth. An organization truth is usually a cold, hard fact, but a good customer truth is fuzzier. It’s less likely to be a demographic fact than it is to be an insight into your customers’ worldview. Rather than, “My customer is between the ages of 45 and 65,” good customer truths sound like, “My customer wants a good deal for his or her money.” In healthcare it may sound something like, “My customer believes she shouldn’t have to
compromise on her healthcare.” Good customer truths need not be logical or rational. It’s much more important that they have emotional resonance. It’s better to connect to something that your customer believes in for irrational reasons than to something your customer can clearly explain. Good customer truths don’t need to be directly tied to your industry. It’s better to find something your customer believes deeply about the world at large than something they believe shallowly about the industry.
Telling Lies With a firm grasp on the twin pillars of customer and organization truths, a good advertiser can write the brand story (i.e., the lie). The brand story builds a bridge between the
two truths. It’s a story your customer wants to believe and it fits with their worldview. It has an important role for your organization truth. You’ve heard thousands of examples of stories like this and it’s likely you don’t remember the organization truth or the particular worldview of yours that the advertiser tapped into. What you remember is the story. For instance, you remember that the answer to the question “Where’s the Beef?” is “at Wendy’s.” You don’t notice how adeptly that commercial tapped into the truth that most customers want a good product for their money. And you might not notice that the organization truth is that Wendy’s hamburgers, by virtue of being square, allow the patty to stick out of the bun so customers can see the quality of the meat.
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For a health system example, the Cleveland Clinic offers second opinions for cardiology patients. But you don’t see the customer truth that powers this message from behind the scenes, that people with serious heart conditions often worry that they might not be getting the right treatment. And it’s likely that you don’t know the organizational truth, which is that Cleveland Clinic’s heart and heart surgery
program has been ranked No. 1 in the nation since 1995.
Gut-Checking your Agency Most marketing agencies, no matter their specialization (or lack thereof) can tell a story. That can make it hard for you, the marketing director, to predict whether a particular campaign is going to help build your brand and reach your goals or leave you and your customers wanting more.
ORGANIZATION TRUTH
Better to find out at the beginning than after you’ve invested the media budget. If you find yourself in a position like this, consider applying the two truths and a lie framework. Ask your agency to share the customer truth and the organization truth they used to build the brand story, and gut-check them against your experience. You just might find better results on the other side. —KATIE SORCE
CUSTOMER TRUTH
BRAND STORY
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PA R T N E R C O N T E N T | P R O V I D E D B Y C O L L E G I S E D U C AT I O N
Is Your Martech Game On Point?
F
BY CHRISTINE BIRKNER
or higher-ed marketers, navigating today’s increasingly complex martech systems can be a huge challenge. From content management systems, to marketing automation, to CRMs and digital analytics, prospective student journeys are enabled by myriad tools that often don’t work together efficiently. To help navigate these systems, Collegis Education and its partners use game board exercises to map out the way these technologies work and create more efficient marketing plans. We caught up with Dan Antonson, senior marketing technology manager at Collegis, to explain this game board strategy and explain how mapping and tracking marketing technologies can help colleges boost enrollment and prepare for future marketing challenges.
Q
Marketing technology in higher education feels harder today than it did before, even though all the tools promise simplicity. What is driving this complexity? What impact does this have on the use of complex martech models in higher ed?
A
Marketing technology is a huge space, and it’s made up of tools that supposedly help make emailing, content management systems, chat widgets, surveys, testing tools and tracking systems easier. There are over 5,000 distinct companies in the space and more doesn’t mean easier.
Each company has multiple products with multiple versions. That space is really a conceptual ecosystem of tools and tactics. It’s never one tool, it’s a series of tools. To understand that ecosystem, we have to create a map of it to understand how those tools link up and how the tactics support— or don’t support—the ecosystem itself. Interestingly, there is a growing body of research that has shown that GPS devices are making it harder for our brains to understand maps. And that’s why we need martech maps. In order to navigate technology, you have to map it out.
Q
A prospective student journey is enabled by many types of technology—content management systems, marketing automation, CRMs and digital analytics—but those tools don’t always work together the way they should. What’s your advice for addressing this issue?
system will be more compatible and adaptable.
A
Q
Marketing technology is a fragmented ecosystem and compatibility problems are pervasive. The solution to that fragmentation is usually more tools or plug-ins for each tool. Ironically, plug-ins create their own fragmentation when they’re no longer supported or the version changes. When creating your own martech stack or ecosystem, look for tools that have a willingness to be an open platform and keep your system as open to integration as possible, because when tools change in the future, your
A SUCCESSFUL MARKETING TECHNOLOGY STACK REQUIRES PRIORITIZING YOUR MOVES; IT DOESN’T TRY TO DO EVERYTHING AT ONCE.
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Collegis and its partners have mapped out the way technology works in higher ed by sketching out different components of each system. How has this helped you create more effective marketing plans for your clients, and what lessons can higher ed marketers learn from this?
A
Mapping out marketing technology forces prioritization. We call our mapping process a game board exercise because game boards have boundaries, pieces and rules. To win, you have to prioritize your moves. The move you make now will set up your next move, and sometimes moves involve moving existing pieces or adding new pieces or players. We find that mapping out technology using a game board mindset forces people to think about the whole ecosystem more broadly and strategically. A successful marketing technology
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PA R T N E R C O N T E N T | P R O V I D E D B Y C O L L E G I S E D U C AT I O N
stack requires prioritizing your moves; it doesn’t try to do everything at once. That’s the true benefit of mapping out your technology.
enabled in the future, which becomes the start of the conversation about whether you need a new tool.
Q
What are common mistakes that higher-ed marketers make in martech and how can they avoid them to boost enrollment?
How can mapping out martech strategies and tracking them from start to finish help colleges focus on their broader marketing strategies?
A
During the mapping exercise, we typically find redundancy; more than one tool that’s doing the exact same thing, tools that aren’t being used or unnecessary complexity. Mapping out the technology is truly the start of improving your marketing strategies since modern marketing relies on the technology. You also want to figure out what marketing tools are feeding into the marketing technology system, what parts of the student experience is the current technology enabling and then use that to determine which systems you need to use next. By mapping out your systems, you map out what can be
Q A
A lot of colleges don’t think past collecting data. Data is an important asset that marketing technology can help create and enable, but institutions often focus on data collection and lose sight of data activation or operationalizing that data. When it comes to data, you need three areas for your strategy to be successful: collection (capturing data from the system), connection (integration or getting data from one platform into another) and activation (using data to optimize marketing campaigns or tactics, or getting a report into the hands of marketers that can do something with it).
Q
As technology systems get more complex, how should colleges prepare for the future of martech? What do you think the biggest challenges will be going forward?
A
Marketing technology, without a doubt, will only get bigger and more complicated. There will be new tools, tactics and systems, and colleges should prepare by creating a model for adapting and understanding those tools, and for prioritizing new technology. New technology will always be a part of the conversation and colleges need to think about not just the technology, but also the people. One of the most forgotten components in marketing technology is thinking about who’s going to use a tool and who’s going to maintain a tool. Colleges need to create an internal model for navigating that marketing technology: How does a tool and the people come together and how does the business case to use the tool get made, and accept that today’s technology is going to change tomorrow.
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SNAPSHOT
How a Pancake House Flipped to Burgers Twitter got in a few good jabs, but IHOP got the last laugh when its fake rebrand quadrupled its burger sales BY SARAH STEIMER | MANAGING EDITOR
ssteimer@ama.org Goal People joke that nobody goes to Hooters for the wings. It’s a tongue-in-cheek quip about the staff ’s dress code, but wings are, in fact, the breastaurant’s featured menu item. The same can’t be said about hamburgers at IHOP. Nobody goes to the International House of Pancakes for the burgers—right? Burgers have actually been on the IHOP menu since the restaurant opened 60 years ago. IHOP ran previous campaigns to hype their burgers, but the brand couldn’t build the momentum they wanted for their so-called p.m. menu items. Plus this latest iteration of burgers—called Ultimate Steakburgers— were a little more special: These were 100% USDA choice, Black Angus ground
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beef patties that are smashed on the grill to sear before being tucked into a brioche bun. They deserved an extra-special campaign. Action IHOP’s new line of burgers may be fancier, but they were entering an already crowded market. “It had to be something that was bold,” says IHOP CMO Brad Haley. “It had to be something that was disruptive because A, we wanted people to know that we have this new line of amazing burgers and and B, it had to shake people up to get them to think a little bit differently about us, this House of Pancakes that actually now sells a really good burger.” Haley says a few people in the company
kicked around the idea of flipping the “P” in IHOP to a “B.” They presented the idea to their agency, Droga5, who ran with it. The campaign was broken into two parts, the first being a week of teasers. The brand released video on social and traditional media that showed the IHOP logo on a white background, with the uppercase “P” in flipping to a lowercase “b.” The clip included a hashtag and announcement date, but little more information was offered. “That was really all it was,” Haley says. “And that generated enough interest in what the heck was going on with IHOP that it started trending.” Media outlets picked up the story, doing man-on-the-street interviews asking the public what they thought the “B” could represent. Haley says the company also got reports of office pools and radio contests about the mystery “B.” “There was this gamification aspect to it,” he says. “That was by design. It was all around this notion of making this fun and funny, with a wink and a nod so that people would have fun playing along with us.” There was potential for the secret to get out. To prepare for the big reveal, IHOP sent signage to its franchisees, and some restaurant staff did try and leak the news early. To further muddle the list of possibilities, IHOP posted photos on social media for fake “B” menu items, such as bagels and beer (although the latter does actually exist: IHOP partnered with Keegan Ales brewery to make a pumpkin spice pancake stout in 2018, called IHOPS). The second stage of the campaign was the reveal. At the corporate level, team members changed their LinkedIn profiles to say they worked for IHOb, and some even pulled the theme through to their titles, such as chief burger officer. “We had our letterhead that we pushed out with our press releases (reading) IHOb as well,” Haley says. “Even that was a wink and a nod: The logo looked like someone used Wite-Out to change the ‘P’ to a ‘b’ and used a blue Sharpie to change the logo, so even if someone looked close enough
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SNAPSHOT
they’d (wonder), ‘Are they really serious or not?’” Signage was also changed at one location in Hollywood, California— or, as Haley puts it, the restaurant was “completely burgerized.” Even the restroom names were updated, to “bur-guys” and “bur-gals.” This restaurant rebrand drew enough tourist interest that the franchise owner has opted to retain many of the burger-themed changes. The burger-fication wasn’t as overt in other stores, although Haley says they received a lot of interest from signage companies wanting to participate in the rebrand. A typical IHOP restaurant advertised the campaign via merchandising and menu changes. The second part of the campaign, post-reveal, lasted about four weeks. The company officially said its name change was a joke in an advertisement of its 60th anniversary promotion. Sung to the tune of “Happy Birthday,” the lyrics go: IHOP’s turning 60 With a pancake party And yes we said IHOP with a P Because the B was just a stunt. Results “IHOb is the guy who gets a face tattoo of the girl’s name after 1 date” “Well, IHOB seems like a really smart idea, since there are so few places to get burgers.”
COMPANY
IHOP FOUNDED
1958 HEADQUARTERS
Glendale, California CAMPAIGN TIMELINE
June 2018 CAMPAIGN RESULTS
Burger sales quadrupled at the peak of the campaign; in the first 10 days, the rebrand accumulated 1.2 million tweets, more than 27,000 earned media stories, 42.5 billion impressions and more than $113 million in earned media value.
you’re going to get some people that are confused by it,” Haley says. Other restaurant and food brands got in on the joke on social media. Hot
answers in action
Pockets posted a photo of its logo reading “Hot Bockets,” Burger King changed its Twitter icon to “Pancake King” and Whataburger tweeted, “As much as we love our pancakes, we’d never change our name to Whatapancake.” Despite all the internet razzing, the campaign had notable results: In the first 10 days, the rebrand accumulated 1.2 million tweets, more than 27,000 earned media stories, 42.5 billion impressions and more than $113 million in earned media value. Haley says IHOP quadrupled burger sales at the peak of the campaign, and sales are still double what they were before the rebrand fake-out. Research firm YouGov wrote a report on the campaign (unsolicited from IHOP) about the brand’s ad awareness. Data from YouGov BrandIndex showed the June 11, 2018, rebrand announcement saw the number of U.S. adults talking about the restaurant increased from 19% to 30%, as of June 18, 2018, marking IHOP’s highest wordof-mouth score since YouGov began tracking the company in 2012. It was a win for the brand, either in spite of or because of the massive social media response. “It was all fun stuff,” Haley says, although he never got around to burger-fying his professional title on LinkedIn. m
“You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become IHOB” “it sounds like iHop has a cold! I hobe it gets better soon” “Nobe.” Twitter certainly had its opinions. In fact, the IHOb reveal was the No. 1 national Twitter trending moment that day, beating out net neutrality and the North Korea-U.S. summit. “We knew that there would be some blowback from some people, because anytime there’s something that’s this disruptive,
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answers in action
CORE CONCEPTS
Trust Me: How Marketers and Designers Work Together We asked two marketers and two designers for insights on how they collaborate: the pain points, communication styles and success stories BY HAL CONICK AND SARAH STEIMER
hconick@ama.org, ssteimer@ama.org
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hough marketers and designers seem to fall on different ends of the spectrum, they can have a great working relationship. Those partnerships are on full display when a campaign is visually pleasing and backed by all the right data. Marketing News spoke with two marketers (Rebecca Sears, CMO of Plantation Products, and John Lewellan, senior director of marketing operations at Informatica) and two designers (Amy Brusselback, principal of design at B&B Responses, and Trish Olives, creative freelancer and consultant) about how they can ensure a great working relationship. These conversations have been edited for clarity and length. How is communicating within your discipline different from communicating with a marketer or designer? SEARS: Regardless of who you’re speaking with, it’s always helpful to put yourself in their shoes. How does their brain work? What does this person care about? How are they rewarded? When you understand what makes someone tick, you’re more likely to connect. For example, with a previous design colleague I found it worked best to communicate ideas via visual mood boards versus a written brief because that’s how they processed information best. BRUSSELBACK: One surprising difference
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in communicating with designers and marketers is how tactical conversations vary from strategic conversations. When a marketer talks about a color choice, they’re often talking about their personal preference. When a designer talks about a color choice, they’re usually commenting on strategy. Designers speak in shorthand with each other because they assume the receiver knows the “Why?” behind the choice: “The yellow isn’t working.” But when a designer is communicating with a marketer, it’s critical to connect the design choices to the strategy and user: “The yellow lacks the sophistication needed for this consumer and price point.” LEWELLAN: Everyone is sensitive to
criticism of their work. For marketers, you can point out that they missed an audience segment, that timing a launch during a holiday week won’t drive the results they want, or that they didn’t look at the data of a previous campaign that would inform them on improving this one. Communicating with designers should be no different: If there are data or best practices that the piece doesn’t meet, if there are branding guidelines they didn’t follow, or if they didn’t read the creative brief, point it out. There shouldn’t be hard feelings. Where conversations get heated or people feel attacked is when the feedback they are given is “I don’t like that picture” or “Green isn’t my favorite color.” When your colleague from product or sales approaches you in the hallway and says, “I’ve got a great idea for a campaign,”
we bristle. The same thing happens when marketers approach designers with a bag of personal preferences. OLIVES: I find that designers often
approach their work thinking about the full experience the audience has while taking in the marketing and advertising. Marketers are more driven by the end effect said experience has on the audience. Most of the time, that means: Will they open their wallet? This difference in thought process seems to be even more relevant now as data-driven marketing takes over. Creative leaders need to understand how to balance art and science.
Tell me about a time you had great communication with a designer or marketer. What went right?
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CORE CONCEPTS
SEARS: I got to know the designer first before presenting “the ask.” Team performance and ability to meet objectives is ultimately about people and the trust between them. BRUSSELBACK: Across the board, the
best communication with marketers is when there’s a shared vision of the problem being solved and we see each other as equally accountable for getting the best solution. Recently, we were hired to design a new brand and kicked off the project with a working session with the cross-functional team. It was very effective, as each of the team members brought their knowledge of the project as well as their assumptions about the right solution to the branding needs. Together, we looked at mentor brands and current competition and spent our time strategizing different approaches.
Having the marketing partners show up with what inspires them allowed us to understand where stakeholders’ minds were before beginning the work. Many designers are opposed to bringing the marketers into the creative process; we feel the exact opposite. Making design the work of the entire organization and bringing in more diverse viewpoints at the inception of the work makes the solutions more robust, holistic and consumer-centric. LEWELLAN: Every 12 to 18 months,
marketers get tired of the email templates they use and will put in a creative brief to create new ones. It was during a meeting about developing new templates when a designer asked about the results we were getting with the current designs. She asked which were being used and which had better results. She reminded
answers in action
the marketer of the research and testing that had gone into the current set and asked what had changed since then. This all showed that the designer was willing to do the work, but also wanted to make sure she understood the reason behind the change. She was trying to be a partner and deliver what the team wanted, but also what was going to drive better outcomes. OLIVES: Sometimes, it just clicks. There
are some people you have great chemistry with and when that happens, cherish it. But over the course of your long and storied career, that’s going to be the one-off, not the norm. My successful partnerships have come from having high empathy, as well as a lack of fear and self-consciousness. When I haven’t been afraid to say what I don’t know and ask questions from a curious place, the
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CORE CONCEPTS
barriers break down quickly. Not only does the work become easier, but the end result is better. What about the opposite, a time where communication went wrong? In retrospect, what changes would you make?
Empathy is important. Don’t treat your agency or design team like support staff. They are your best strategic thinking partners in a world that is ever more dependent on visual and tactile communication.
SEARS: A junior designer “yes’d” me often but never seemed to bring anything new or innovative to the table. I later learned that they didn’t think they were “allowed” to bring up new ideas. This shocked me at the time, but now I make it a point to tell designers that I want them to challenge my thinking and bring their ideas to the table. BRUSSELBACK: Communication that
falls apart often starts with a common thread: Marketers approaching design as something to evaluate versus a problem to be solved together. We had a working meeting with a client where they’d requested a preview of the work before the formal review. Generally, we love this approach, but everything went wrong this time because the entire session was criticizing what wasn’t working, much of which we already knew because the work was unfinished. It felt personal and unnecessarily harsh to the designers and left the marketer nervous and afraid. In retrospect, we should have managed the dialogue more specifically, starting with close-in options and asking for what’s working and where we should double down. We should have also set up the session to include some “tissue” work, meaning giving the marketer an opportunity to create solutions themselves versus only evaluating in-process design work.
LEWELLAN: I learned to get along with
the creative team early in my career, which is why I’ve been able to manage creative teams from an operations role. But as a young marketer, I had a head full of ideas on how I thought something should look, but not enough reason or words to properly explain why. I breezed
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through the creative brief—it’s long and I’ve got so many other things to do— and hadn’t taken the time to develop a thoughtful strategy. When the first draft was completed, it looked nothing like what I expected and when I approached the designer about it, she pulled up the creative brief. Sure enough, what was on the page I was looking at met the requirements set forth in the brief. I really learned from that experience; the more information you can give the creative team up front, the less time is wasted in multiple rounds of revision. OLIVES: My No. 1 strategy in
collaboration is to ask a lot of questions and to be as transparent as possible in my thought process. This is not an easy thing to do, especially when your brain juices are flowing. When I was younger, I expected people to be able to read my mind when it came to why I made the creative choices I was making. I have to remind myself constantly that those connections my brain makes are why I became a creative in the first place, but not everyone works that way.
How can you avoid tension when working together? SEARS: Tension tends to occur when there is either lack of clarity or misaligned objectives. If you are disciplined about clearly communicating the project vision and objectives, you’ll spend less time on and be less frustrated about revisions. In the end, you should have a positive outcome for the project and a good working relationship with the designer. BRUSSELBACK: Spend time at the beginning
of every project, no matter how small, to get very clear on three questions: What does success look like? How will you measure it? Who is the decision-maker and who are the inputters? Then, bring them along for the entire journey. Share work in development. Give your partners a peak behind the curtain. Get their point of view outside of official presentations and milestones. Ask for their ideas. Lastly,
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CORE CONCEPTS
let your partners know what to expect. If you’re showing something that will scare them, tell them they’ll be scared by this work and tell them why you’ve pushed the boundaries. Tell them if you’re starting close-in or far-out. Tell them what’s working and not with each direction. Despite popular belief, surprise is not a friend of great design reviews. LEWELLAN: Stick to the facts. If your A/B
tests show that the form needs to be at the top of the page and overlap the header image to produce a lift in form fills, tell them. Show the data to inform them of the scientific reason to change the design instead of pushing a personal preference. Also, listen to the designers. Many of them are doing their own research now and looking at best practices for page design. Designers are just as invested as marketers in their work performing well. Finally, give them time to do it right. In every organization I have been in, there is a focus on speeding up the creative process. In today’s agile world, we look for process improvements to reduce time to market. That is fine if there is a bank of preapproved header images and headlines that just need to be married together. But if you need an original, creative campaign developed from nothing, give your team time to go through the creative process. Don’t get upset if you walk in and the creative team is playing a game—it might be what it takes to come up with the next award-winning idea.
OLIVES: It’s important to keep a healthy
distance from your work. I am not telling you not to care about your creative work, but it’s necessary to check yourself every so often and remember that what you create at work is not who you are. You will always have another great idea. There is no shortage of great ideas in that big brilliant creative brain of yours. If you are working with a marketer who isn’t into what you presented, do not take that personally. That is a them problem and not a you problem; now you get to come up with another dope idea. And when it comes down to it, getting to come up with
answers in action
ideas is why we’re in this game, is it not? What recommendations do you have for working closely together as marketers and designers? SEARS: Empathy is important. Don’t treat your agency or design team like support staff. They are your best strategic thinking partners in a world that is ever more dependent on visual and tactile communication. BRUSSELBACK: Remember only one
direction will be used. We often spend the bulk of our time with marketers talking about why most of the design solutions aren’t quite right. Focus your energy on what is working and how to maximize the best direction. Also, have a co-creation session with your marketing partners before design work begins. It will provide the designers with the clearest understanding of the marketers’ assumptions, needs and desires in the work. And get to know your marketing partners as people. It’s just easier to work well with people you know. As a side benefit, the better you know your partners, the better you’re able to read between the lines, identify potential road bumps before they arise and provide the stimulus they need to evangelize your design solutions within the organization.
LEWELLAN: Treat them as a partner.
You both are in it together. There is a symbiotic relationship between marketers and designers—you can’t go to market without both. And the best campaigns will be a collaborative effort between the two.
Designers speak in shorthand with each other because they assume the “Why?” behind the choice: “The yellow isn’t working.” But when a designer is communicating with a marketer, it’s critical to connect the design choices to the strategy: “The yellow lacks the sophistication needed for this consumer and price point.”
OLIVES: Tap into that same empathy you
use when you approach your creative work to understand the motivations of the marketing folks. Even if they’re not able to do the same initially, you’ll be modeling great behavior and, unless you’re working with an actual sociopath, your actions will rub off on them. It’s all about that long game. And it helps to never forget that you’re on the same team and working towards the same end goal. m
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answers in action
ETHICAL MARKETING
Game Apps Are the Latest Battleground in Child Advertising Kids don’t often know the difference between games and ads; they don’t know about advertisers’ persuasive intent until 8 years old. Why, then, is it ethical to advertise in games meant for preschoolers? BY HAL CONICK | STAFF WRITER
hconick@ama.org
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hen Michael Robb’s two kids, 4 and 6, play games on the family tablet, the games are occasionally interrupted by ads. Although they sometimes forget what to do, Robb trained them to look for a red X when ads pop up—short of that, they’ll turn the device face down until the ad ends. This isn’t how most kids interact with ads on apps: Developmentally, children don’t know where games end and ads begin until they’re 8 years old, according to the American Psychological
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Association. Robb says that kids don’t understand persuasive intent, the fact that advertisers are trying to sell them something. Robb has a Ph.D. in psychology and works as the senior director of research at Common Sense Media, an advocacy and education nonprofit supporting safe use of media and technology for children. He’s spent the last 15 years researching media’s effect on children and says that apps have made for a vastly different media landscape. Robb recalls
how Saturday morning cartoon ads in the early 1970s would blend in with TV programming, which gave way later in the decade to clear demarcations that an ad break was coming (“After these messages, we’ll be right back!”). These show-bumpers were a mandate from the Federal Communications Commission’s 1974 Policy Statement, a compromise struck after advocacy group Action for Children’s Television requested in 1970 that no commercials air during programming for kids. But there’s no such bumper between ads and gameplay in free apps; Robb says that there should be, as kids playing free apps often think that ads are just another part of the game. There’s risk of children clicking an ad and making an erroneous purchase. In 2014, the Federal Trade Commission responded to these purchases by filing federal lawsuits against Apple, Google and Amazon for allowing children to spend millions of dollars on in-app purchases. Apple and Google each settled that year; Google refunded at least $19 million to customers and Apple refunded at least $32.5 million. Amazon battled the lawsuit in court until 2017, when it dropped its appeal. Now, Amazon must refund customers approximately $70 million. The FTC can’t decide what is and isn’t ethical, only what’s unfair or deceptive. Mary Koelbel Engle, associate director for advertising practices at the FTC, says that the organization has a policy statement on what constitutes deceptive or unfair practices. If something is deceptive or unfair, they can file a federal lawsuit or an administrative cease-and-desist order. The main question of deception: Is this practice likely to mislead reasonable consumers about something important? The question of unfairness: Will the practice cause injury to consumers that they can’t avoid? “When you’re talking about advertising to children, you look at it from the standpoint of an ordinary child and understanding that kids obviously are less sophisticated than adults,” Engle says. But if young children are less sophisticated consumers, not knowing
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ETHICAL MARKETING
where games end and ads begin, it may not be ethical to advertise to them on apps at all. A Brief History of Tiny Targeting It’s always been considered ethically murky to target young children with ads. In 1984, Lynda Sharp Paine wrote in Business & Professional Ethics Journal that advertising is justified if it helps consumers make wise decisions in the marketplace, but she argued that young children don’t yet have the capacity to make wise decisions. In the 2000s, many studies concluded that childhood obesity was tied in part to ads for snacks, sodas and sugary cereals—most companies cut down on advertising sugary cereals, and later cut down on the sugar content of the products themselves. But as the media landscape changed, so did advertising to children. On smaller screens, parental oversight became tougher and apps took advantage. In 2017, researchers wrote in the journal Pediatrics that online ads are more aggressive in engaging with children through gaming platforms and more aggressive about telling children to reach out to their friends about advertised products. A 2018 study led by University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital and published in the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics found that 95% of apps marketed to or commonly played by children younger than 5 contain at least one type of advertising. Another 2018 study, published in the journal Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, examined thousands of free apps targeting children and found that the majority were in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a federal law passed in 1998 to protect the online privacy of children 13 years old and younger. Most of the apps targeting young children don’t allow users to easily shut off tracking and behavioral advertising, the study found. Worse, 19% of these apps collect personally identifiable information, leaving children’s data at risk.
“It’s hard to enforce the law, but again: These are apps for kids where they’re clearly trying to better target advertisements to these kids,” Robb says. “In doing so, they’re hoovering up lots of information that they shouldn’t be collecting, parents probably aren’t aware that they’re collecting and kids certainly aren’t aware that they’re collecting.” Many free apps also offer in-app purchases for digital items to be used in the game. The “Strawberry Shortcake Bake Shop” app, for example, is listed as appropriate for ages 4 and older, but features $45 worth of in-app purchases. Robb says that the game asks kids to help the character bake a cake, but it can’t be completed until they buy a special utensil. In the meantime, he says that the app’s character makes a frowny face and looks pleadingly at the screen. “That, to me, is emotionally manipulative,” Robb says. “Trying to extract that stuff from games will be a step forward.” What’s Fair? “The question is, how ethical is it to take advantage of young children’s limited cognitive abilities while they’re playing an app they enjoy in order to sell them something?” Robb said during a November 2018 press conference held by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. During the press conference, Blumenthal said that parents who allow their children to play with these apps are opening their homes to “a Trojan horse.” In a letter to the FTC, Blumenthal and Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., asked the FTC to investigate how children are targeted by free apps. Specifically, the senators want to know to what extent developers, advertisers and app stores comply with COPPA. “I think that the FTC letter was a really good first step,” Robb says two days after speaking at the press conference. “There probably needs to be more discussion between industry and the child development experts about what kids know and at what ages [they know it].” Robb also believes that new research
answers in action
should examine what’s fair for kids in advertising. Should it be easier for kids to take app gameplay offline, away from the reach of advertisers and data collectors? Do ads in apps need to be clearly marked, just as ads during Saturday morning cartoon commercials were? Perhaps there can be an agreed-upon framework by the advertising industry, app stores and childhood development experts, Robb says. This way, everyone can know what kids’ rights are when it comes to online and mobile experiences. “A lot of people who make games or experiences for children aren’t necessarily child development experts, so they may not even realize that they are unfairly manipulating or preying on a child’s psychological vulnerabilities,” Robb says. “And then there’s probably a lot of game designers who don’t care. It’s their business and maybe they don’t think it’s particularly harmful or it’s just what the bottom line is.” Until advertisers and game developers address the problem, it falls to parents. Robb says that parents should try to play on the apps with their kids, teaching them what ads are when they pop up; he says that the most important learning happens between the child and their caregiver. Parents may also consider avoiding free apps for their children—those most ad-ridden—and instead pay a buck or two for the app’s uninterrupted premium version. Changes to app-based advertising to kids will likely come with time, whether from within the app and advertising industries or from pressure outside. But the industry is still adjusting to the changes wreaked by easy access, shrinking screens and advancing technology. FTC’s Engle, who has worked in her role since 2001, says that the business is much different than it was when she was sending her teenage daughter into a TVand computer-free bedroom. Now, kids almost always have a tiny screen within reach, an open window to the world. For now, what floats into those windows is largely up to app stores, game developers and advertisers. m
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scholarly insights
SOCIAL MEDIA
The Science Behind Scheduling Social Media Content A new study reveals the impact of time of day, targeted content advertising and content type on clicks, as well as how these variables interact BY VAMSI K. KANURI, YIXING CHEN AND SHRIHARI (HARI) SRIDHAR
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eaching customers has never been easier—or more challenging. Today’s customers are digitally wired and use social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to connect with friends, family,
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colleagues, influencers and brands. In 2017, users consumed about 5.53 billion hours of social media content per day, up by 264% in the past five years. It’s no wonder that online ad-supported content platforms maintain a significant presence
on social media. CNN, for example, posts about 47 tweets per day. In the U.S., firms are expected to spend more than $37 billion on social media advertising by 2020. Developing strategic social media schedules enables content platforms to generate traffic to their own websites, grow their audiences and increase their online advertising revenues from impressions channeled through link clicks of social media posts. But that’s a difficult challenge: The average engagement is 0.16% with a Facebook post, 1.73% with Instagram and 0.046% on Twitter. A new study in the Journal of Marketing seeks to boost social media profitability by providing managers with the tools they need to fine-tune scheduling to their goals. Content platforms need to consider issues such as when to post content, how
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SOCIAL MEDIA
much content to post and how much to spend on targeted content advertising (TCA). While social media is integral to brands’ digital growth, there is little research literature to guide managers’ scheduling strategies. A social media manager charged with posting 10 stories in one day with a budget to promote four of them can position the posts in more than 7 trillion ways. While existing software can help with automating the publishing of messages on multiple social media platforms, it does not address optimal scheduling of posts for a social media platform and budgeting for targeted content advertising. Our research team drew from literature on circadian rhythms in information processing capabilities to build a novel theoretical framework of social media scheduling and to explain how scheduling attributes affect the link clicks metric. We hypothesized that most users’ working memory availability would be highest in the morning, lowest in mid-afternoon and moderate in the evening, and that their desire to engage with content would follow the same pattern. We also hypothesized that the use of TCA and content type (such as content with high-arousal emotions or content requiring high cognitive processing) would affect link clicks differentially by time of day. We tested our hypothesis using a model based on 366 days of Facebook post data from a top-50 U.S. newspaper, totaling 5,706 posts. We also built an algorithm that allows social media managers to optimally plan social media content schedules and maximize gross profits. Our study findings suggest that online ad-supported content platforms such as CNN, ESPN and The Wall Street Journal can significantly enhance their profits by posting content that follows the biological responses of their audiences’ sleep-wake cycles and help them target content types to when the audience is most naturally receptive to it. Our key findings include: • We reaffirm commonly held wisdom that time of day is crucial to engagement. For example, posting
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content in the morning resulted in an 8.8% more clicks than posts scheduled for the afternoon, and 11.1% more clicks than those scheduled in the evening. • The algorithm demonstrates the impact of time of day, TCA and content type on link clicks and how these variables interact. For example, we demonstrate that employing TCA in the afternoon generates 21% more clicks than doing so in the morning. TCA at night decreases clicks by 9.7%, leading to advertising losses. • Posting content that contains higharousal negative emotions in the morning is 1.6% more effective at generating clicks than posting it in the afternoon or evening. • Simply arranging posts without allocating additional budget for TCA can help the firm increase gross profits by 8%. Our research will help managers optimize their companies’ social media strategies by making posting decisions based on brain science as opposed to “spray and pray” techniques or arbitrary rules of thumb. About 73% of the managers we interviewed were interested in using this tool to improve scheduling effectiveness. In addition, this research can help these managers make a case for targeted advertising investments and then allocate budgets effectively across multiple initiatives, using data to drive profitability. Given that companies are increasingly running analytics-driven businesses, these metrics and tools can help win approval for strategies, defend budgets and deliver on commitments. m
While social media is integral to brands’ digital growth, there is little research literature to guide managers’ scheduling strategies.
VAMSI K. KANURI is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Notre Dame, Mendoza College of Business.
YIXING CHEN is a doctoral student in marketing at Texas A&M University, Mays School of Business.
SHRIHARI (HARI) SRIDHAR is an associate professor of marketing and Center for Executive Development professor at Texas A&M University, Mays School of Business.
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executive insights
MIDDLE OF THE FUNNEL
Content and Conversion When Stakes are High Middle-of-funnel content is important in high-consideration, high-stakes decisions
BY ANDY CRESTODINA
andy@orbitmedia.com
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2B vs. B2C: There is a big difference, right? We often think of B2B decisions as big (milliondollar enterprise software) and B2C decisions as small (tube socks). But that’s not always the case, as illustrated by these two decisions: • B2B: Office supplies such as paper clips. • B2C: Senior housing. One is B2B but trivial, the other is B2C but critical. Yes, you can differentiate between B2B and B2C marketing, but a better distinction may be in the weight of the decision. Is it a high-consideration, high-stakes decision? Or is it a low-consideration, low-stakes decision? When the stakes are high, people need more time to decide and there may be several people involved in the decision. They do a lot of research, have more decision criteria and require more expert advice. It’s likely a consultative sale. When stakes are low, people decide quickly. There are few decision criteria, with the process often simply a click. It’s likely a transactional sale. The type of decision determines the content you should create. When the decision process is long, you just can’t expect the visitor to become a lead on their first visit. And you can’t expect them to remember you and come back soon for more information. This is why middle-of-funnel content is so important. If you can nudge your visitor and get them to take a small action—download the ebook, register for the webinar—you’ve captured the email
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address and the nurturing can begin. Now you’re in the game. The Content Cycle Begins The content cycle starts with a welcome email series, which is that series of automatic messages they receive after the ebook download or the webinar registration. The emails in this series often have high open and click-through rates because the subscriber is engaged and expecting something • Immediately: The first email is a thank you and a follow through on the promise of content. • Later that week: A quick follow-up with a link to more content that would logically follow the first piece. • A few weeks later: Hello! Here is the most valuable thing we have ever published. Often, this welcome series can include five or more messages. They’re automated, valuable to the recipient and a powerful mechanism for the brand to keep in touch. The final message may even be a direct sales pitch.
Alongside that welcome series is the newsletter. This is where the difficult, ongoing work of the content marketer comes in. Once per month at least, you put a message in their inbox. The sender name is a person (not just a brand) and the subject line specifies the topic (not just something clever). The body text of the email is an invitation to click and read an article. That article is a lovingly crafted, easily scanned and detailed explanation of something helpful, insightful or entertaining. Anything less and they’ll slip away. It’s hard work, but it gives you a shot at being top of mind when the key moment comes. Structure of a High-Converting Page The engaging emails will likely lead consumers back to your website once they’re ready for help. The structure and flow of your sales page will be critical at this point. They must include each of these elements: • Content that answers top questions and addresses objections. • Evidence that supports that content. • Clear, specific calls to action. Ideally, these elements appear in the general order of importance to the typical visitor. The content guides the eye down the web page, answering questions, addressing objections and adding evidence to support each message. Address the ‘Why Not?’ Bad websites toot their horn and ramble on about how great their offer is. Better websites answer visitor questions and provide the answers they’re looking for.
The key to visitor psychology isn’t to just address the why, it’s to address the why not. They know that even a small amount of uncertainty can kill the lead.
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MIDDLE OF FUNNEL
executive insights
High-Consideration Decisions
Low-Consideration Decisions
• • • •
• • • •
Long sales cycles Multiple decision-makers Many decision criteria Example: ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE
Short sales cycles One decision-maker Easy and fast are important Example: TUBE SOCKS
AWARENESS
CONSIDERATION
Focus on content that builds trust • • • •
Detailed articles Ebooks, case studies Webinars, events Collaborate with experts
The best websites address the underlying motivations of visitors, addressing the hidden objections in the mind of the visitor. Conversion copywriters know a secret: The key to visitor psychology isn’t to just address the why, it’s to address the why not. They know that even a small amount of uncertainty can kill the lead. The best copywriters address objections such as: Will it be hard? Expensive? Time consuming? Will it connect? Will it break? When will it be ready? Will this choice make me look foolish? Only after the main objections are defeated will the visitor become a lead. How Do You Know The Audience’s Triggers? The sales team can help marketers get into the mind of the prospect and locate their
ACTION!
Focus on content that builds awareness • • • •
Social content Search-optimized guides Infographics, fun visuals Collaborate with social influencers
hidden objections. Tap the sales team to answer the questions of why leads buy and why they don’t. For complex offerings and high consideration decisions, the sales person acts as a guide. They’ve had hundreds of conversations with prospects, learning their hopes, fears, goals and objections. Ride along on some meetings, listen in on some calls and dig into the sent mail folder of the sales associate. Ask your top salesperson to search their sent mail folder for question words such as why, how, when and who. You’ll find it’s a goldmine of questions answered and objections addressed. These insights will help write better copy for sales pages. It will also give you ideas for the next newsletter, webinar and ebook. Once those pieces are produced,
they can be shared with the sales team who can share it with the next prospect. You’ve given the sales team a reason to follow up with current prospects during that long sales cycle, prompting them to offer solutions such as: “We just published an ebook that addresses some of the questions you asked in our last meeting. Would you like me to send it along?” Remember, they’re hanging out in your sales funnel for weeks. Content keeps them warm and you’ve got time to make something just for them. This isn’t tube socks, after all. m ANDY CRESTODINA is the co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media. He’s an international keynote speaker and the author of Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Guide to Content Marketing.
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DIGITAL MARKETING
The 4 Marketing Tactics to Stop Using in 2019 Most marketers have a long list of new things they want to try in 2019, but everyone has a limit. Here’s what top marketers say they’ll stop doing in 2019.
BY PAM NEELY
pamneely@gmail.com
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arketers tend to focus on more: More leads, more content, more website traffic, more engagement. We have to adapt quickly as digital marketing evolves, but there comes a point where you give up certain tactics. You aren’t still doing fax marketing, are you? Rather than add to your everlengthening to-do list for 2019, I created a list of what your fellow marketers plan to stop doing or to do less of this year. The answers come from about 40 marketers who responded to an informal poll in late December 2018. B2B marketers made up more than half of the respondents. The answers below are ranked in order of how often specific tactics were mentioned. Remember that what has stopped working for one person might just be ramping up for another. But some of these suggestions might be right for your marketing strategy, too. Who couldn’t use one less thing to do?
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Facebook Advertising If you happen to own any Facebook stock, this change might give you pause. But the most common answer from marketers in the survey is that they plan to do less Facebook advertising in 2019. This was far and away the mostmentioned tactic that marketers plan to stop or do less of. Although Facebook’s privacy missteps are a concern, that’s not why marketers
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are backing off the platform: Facebook ads just don’t work as well as they used to. Marketers are practical people—when something stops working, they tend to move on. Two marketers mentioned one metric specifically: The cost of acquisition for leads is rising. Another mentioned that the marketing qualified leads from Facebook are increasingly bad. Many other marketers didn’t cite specific metrics, but said that the Facebook advertising platform in general is getting more expensive and competitive.
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Cold Outreach Cold outreach is an umbrella term covering LinkedIn Inmails (two marketers mentioned Inmails expressly), cold emails and cold calls. The dreaded sales pitch that comes immediately after connecting on social media was also mentioned several times. Most survey respondents did not say they planned to stop doing instant sales pitches themselves because it’s not a tactic any of them have ever found to be useful, they just wish other people would stop doing it. It’s a nice wish, but don’t hold your breath. Most of us are still getting two to three of these auto-reply sales pitches every week. The response rates are probably abysmal, but because these messages can be automated and take little effort to send, the offenders may just keep sending them—even if it annoys the rest of us.
Kevin Thomas Tully, North America senior vice president at Creation Agency, has some advice for people who want to use cold outreach: “Would you respond to the email you just sent if it appeared in your inbox? Would you even open it? If the answer is a resounding ‘No!’ it’s time to start over.” I’ve got one more suggestion for you, too: If you must use cold emails, at least use a signature with links to more information about you. People often click the links in those signatures to check out who you are. If they like what they see, they might reply. As Gail Gartner, a small business marketing strategist, says, “I like to vet the people who contact me via email. The ones wise enough to include their LinkedIn or other method of contact outside of email are far more likely to get a reply.”
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Social Media This isn’t something people intend to quit so much as they plan to scale back on. Consultant Sophia Le spoke for a lot of our respondents when she described the situation this way: “Social media is heading toward a phase where less is more.” Facebook takes a hit here, too, with marketers naming it as the No. 1 social media platform they plan to scale back on. Four marketers said they were scaling back specifically on Facebook posts, either for their clients or for their own companies. This is consistent with cutting back on Facebook ads, too: Organic reach is mostly gone, so if you’re trying to make organic content work on Facebook, you’re probably using advertising to amplify successful posts. The disillusion with Facebook is tipping into Instagram as well. About half of the people who said they were stepping back from Facebook tactics also said they were going to cut back on Instagram. Then there’s the issue of video on Facebook. Social Media Examiner cut back their Facebook video efforts recently, to much ado, and they’re not the only
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DIGITAL MARKETING
ones: Conversion optimization consultant Nils Kattau said he plans to step back from Facebook’s live streaming in 2019. As he explains it, “The reach got killed by the platform. Where I used to have up to 10-50,000 views, I now get like 2,000, although 20 people share the stream.” There were also a few marketers who said they’ll tweet less often in 2019, although two B2B marketers said they’d be refocusing their social media efforts on Twitter and LinkedIn. One person mentioned cutting back on Google+, which is clearly not worth investing in going forward, at least not until Google decides what to do with it. Shaheen Adibi, president of Web Upon, hopes Google will turn Google+ “into a social platform on a local level,” especially now that Google Local posts aren’t effective anymore. LinkedIn isn’t safe from the chopping block, either. No one said they planned to stop using it entirely, but they did plan to cut specific tactics. Most notably,
LinkedIn expert Brynne Tillman said, “I have stopped using LinkedIn Groups. While these were at one time one of the best ways to find and engage a targeted audience, the new redesign has done away with all that was good about Groups.” None of the marketers I spoke with mentioned SlideShare specifically, but other sources have noted that it has gone out of vogue.
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Blogging (Mostly on Third-Party Sites) Three people mentioned cutting back on various types of blogging. The most interesting comment came from Kathryn Aragon, a content marketing pro who says she plans to do “less blogging and a lot less social media. Trying to keep the focus on tasks with a higher return.” Cheval John, founder and CEO of Vallano Media, said he’ll stop guest posting and put more content on his own site. Speaker and author Matt Sweetwood says he’ll stop writing articles for
executive insights
LinkedIn Pulse: “They have (made) the algorithm so restrictive, essentially no one sees your articles. Publish on your own blog and promote instead.” One Last Thing… I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that 20% of respondents specifically said they don’t plan to discontinue any tactics, but that’s only one in five people. Eighty percent said they plan to stop doing at least one thing. Are there any specific marketing tactics you plan to step back from in 2019? m PAM NEELY has been in digital marketing for 20 years. She’s a serial entrepreneur and content marketing enthusiast with a background in publishing and journalism, receiving a New York Press Award and a Hermes Creative Award for blogging. She has a master’s degree in direct and interactive marketing from New York University. Follow her on Twitter @pamellaneely.
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A LIFE, REDESIGNED Amy and Jason Schwartz have a new baby and run their own agency, Bright Bright Great, which they’re rebranding. As life has changed, so has their work. By HAL CONICK Photos by ALYSSA SCHUKAR
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my Schwartz sits on a couch next to Lucas Nelson, a young designer on her team at Bright Bright Great, a design and branding firm in Chicago. A cold, bright November day shines through BBG’s frosted windows as Amy, creative director of BBG, taps her fingernails on a coffee cup and sings aloud to herself. “OK!” Amy says, focusing on Lucas’s laptop screen; he’s pulled up illustrated icons he designed for Health Champion, a startup client whose website and brand BBG is building from scratch. Health Champion will be an app that collects patients’ health data, making medical records portable— Amy and her husband Jason Schwartz, founder and managing director of BBG, are fresh from the belly of the healthcare system, having given birth to a child three months prior. They felt a personal connection to the startup’s mission of easy access to medical records. Part of their work philosophy is
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to collaborate with people who are innovative and passionate, another is to put good work out into the world. If you’re creating something that’s bad, Amy says, you’re a jerk; if it’s neutral or mediocre, what’s the point? “If we add multicolor icons, do you think it’ll be all over the place?” Lucas asks Amy. “I don’t think that it’ll be good for these,” says Amy, 28. She has a cherubic face and wears a hoodie with torn jeans. “Keep it single color.” Health Champion will need more icons for tools, she says, like BMI calculators and plannedconception calendars—maybe those can be multicolor. Lucas nods; Amy talks aloud as she types into the company’s task management system; “Icons… needed… for… the tools. Perfect!” For the rest of the morning, Amy has to qualityassurance (QA) test a development website and Lucas needs to move on to designs for other clients.
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They’re both doing the jobs of multiple people— Jason says that everyone at a small firm should be maxed out—and use a triage system to peck away at projects for each client. Clients come first; the year-long rebrand that BBG has been working on comes last. The rebrand’s delay has been frustrating for Amy and Jason, but they can’t sacrifice client quality for their own sake. And if quality goes, what do they have left? Jason believes that high standards are the only true incentives for creatives. The heart of Bright Bright Great—ceilings covered in copper and aluminum pipes, walls decorated with murals, awards, wacky toys and bizarre photos of women pouring mustard into a high-heel hot dog—is a rectangular group of 10 white desks bunched into the middle of the room, including Amy’s desk, which is filled with halfsheets of paper, a purposefully misspelled pennant that says “problmes” and a note to herself posted to her monitor that says “green is not a creative color.” Jason’s wooden desk sits just 15 feet east, a sparse arrangement highlighted by a brightpink Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. Jason’s slightly graying beard rests in his left hand as his right hand scrolls his calendar, which looks like a disastrous game of Tetris. At 39, Jason is the BBG patriarch, a veteran compared to his young staff. He wears a black hoodie and cuffed jeans, his legs pumping like pistons underneath his desk. Amy turns around and asks Jason if he has time to take another call today. “I’m booked at 10, 11, 1, 2, 3…” “It looks like you’re free at 2, actually,” she says, scrolling Jason’s schedule and finding an empty space amid the falling blocks. “Should I just tell them you’re busy all day?” “I have time, then,” he says, quickly looking back at his screen as a new block is shoehorned in. What others may see as terse communication, Amy and Jason see as necessary amid hectic schedules. Earlier in the week, Jason was out of office for a day—not even a vacation day, but a day spent visiting the new McDonald’s headquarters—and came back to a schedule filled with meetings, contracts to review, clients to pitch and designs to approve. It would have been easier to be in the office, he thinks. “I think I had a dream about hiring last night,” Jason tells Amy, rubbing his eyes
The rebrand’s delay has been frustrating for Amy and Jason, but they can’t sacrifice client quality for their own sake. And if quality goes, what do they have left? Jason believes that high standards are the only true incentives for creatives.
and loudly exhaling before clicking through his messages, rapidly responding to each. BBG’s design team is short-staffed by one and Jason had recently hired a new director of technology. Jason, the man who used to stay in the office for 12 hours, must fit as much as possible between 8:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. He’s a dad now and wants to be there for his 3-month-old son, to watch him squirm and crawl and grow and see his first horror movie—a passion he and Amy share, branding themselves at speaking engagements as the Dracula Family. Amy’s schedule has changed, too, simply by force of nature—she’s a breastfeeding mom and spends at least an hour each day pumping. Sometimes when she’s gone, Jason looks at her empty desk and frets about how much time they’re losing from an already dwindling day. Sometimes, Amy makes do by pumping while working, muting her computer’s mic and aiming the camera up at her face during video meetings. Finding time in a short day is an experiment for Amy and Jason, but it’s one that must succeed. Their new life depends on it. “Hooo,” Jason says to himself, looking back at his calendar. “What?” Amy says, swiveling around, eyes on her husband and hands on her work. “Nothing, just my next meeting.”
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my had a crush as soon as she saw Jason speaking at a design event in 2011. She was a design student on break from college, he was a professional designer in Chicago. This guy knows what he’s talking about, she thought before tempering herself: You’re a college student still living off cereal, he’s a business owner working on huge projects—why would he like you? But in what felt like an instant, their lives merged: She introduced herself at the event, he liked one of her tweets, she sent him an email that turned into dozens between the two of them. In 2012, Amy applied for an internship at Jason’s company and, within days of starting work together, they fell in love. Two years later, they married. By 2014, Amy had earned her master’s degree at the Cranbrook Academy of Art—her dream school—and worked full time as a designer. She soon landed her dream job as design director of game company Cards Against Humanity.
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Meanwhile, Jason’s company, Bright Bright Great, was growing rapidly. Amy marveled at it all; there was no single, sweeping change, but a series of small changes that swelled into their new lives. Those changes never seemed to stop; in 2017, Amy became creative director of BBG, the firm Jason founded 12 years prior. Jason gave Amy creative control, but he kept final creative approval and became managing director, now dealing more in contracts and phone calls than fonts and pixels. She and Jason would now be working 15 feet apart. Jason was and is one of Amy’s mentors, but she had also become a respected designer. They were growing together and would push each other without filter, never quite arguing but always freely disagreeing without worry of hurting each other’s feelings. Like Amy and Jason’s lives, BBG had also changed amid a flurry of small refinements. Jason and his employees would work on new projects, gain new skills and slowly feel comfortable offering those skills to clients. What was once a design firm turned into a marketing, strategy, research, hosting, digital tools, content development and design firm. No matter the skill, Jason says that BBG’s mission is to create a usable experience, one easily perceived by users and well-liked by clients. But BBG’s website gave little indication of these refinements. By 2017, BBG’s 4-year-old website barely mentioned marketing, research or strategy— it’s out of date in both design and information, and it needed to be updated. In the meantime, Jason filled the gap between BBG’s old identity and its new reality on pitch calls to potential clients.
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When you’re designing an image for yourself—one that will tell your story and sell your services—the process is slower. As a designer, you become your own toughest client, as finding your story can feel like an endless soulsearch.
Jason would tell potential clients that BBG has worked with everyone from startups to giants like Comcast, but no matter the client’s size, BBG wants to figure out the bigger picture: What’s the client’s brand identity? What story does their website tell? BBG focuses on four brackets, Jason says: design, research and strategy, development and technology, and ongoing marketing support. Whatever you tend to need, he’d tell clients; we’re a thinking agency, and that goes beyond design. BBG won’t stop working for a client after launching a new website, Jason tells them, as he wants his team to bring clients new ideas and push them into the future. BBG’s staff is small, nimble and mostly Chicago-based; it doesn’t outsource its work to India, Jason says. He’s worked as a designer at Fortune 500 companies and there was too much talk and not enough work—Jason wants to cut the red tape from the design process and make the client’s life easier. But Amy and Jason needed to figure out a way to say all of this on their website. The company had tried in 2017, working with its young team to design a new brand. After excitedly gathering the ideas as a team, the ideas suffocated and the rebrand died. It was a 7.5 out of 10, Jason says; why would we launch a mediocre design that didn’t feel 100% like us? When you’re designing an image for yourself— one that will tell your story and sell your services— the process is slower. As a designer, you become your own toughest client, as finding your story can feel like an endless soul-search. Amy and Jason set a deadline of July 2018 for the rebrand. But then, one afternoon in December 2017, Amy and Jason’s life took another sharp turn. Before lunch, Amy extended her hand toward Jason. He looked toward her hand and saw what he believed was a candy bar, then realized was a pregnancy test. Two stripes; positive. They’re going to be parents. Jason felt ecstatic and nervous and afraid and… He was going to be a dad. How do you take care of a baby? How do you balance that new life with your business? But there was also beauty, and that was obvious when he thought of Amy becoming a mother. They figured everything else out together, he thought—raising a baby would be no different. It’s the next phase of life, he thought. His fear turned to joy, his nerves to excitement. Amy and Jason wrote a list of baby names, searching for a boy’s name that wasn’t boring, winnowing the list from dozens to one: Hyperion
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Wolf Schwartz, due August 2018. Hyperion is a Marvel superhero and Jason is an avid comic book collector; Hyperion Avenue is also where Disney’s first art studio was built, with Disney being Amy’s biggest creative inspiration. Their son, Hyperion, would be born a month after the BBG rebrand was scheduled to go live. By the end of summer, Amy and Jason would have a new house, a new brand and a new baby. They were designing a life together. On the night of Thursday, Aug. 2, 2018, Amy and Jason drove to the hospital. Amy recalls sending messages on Slack until she was 10 centimeters dilated, ready to push. On Friday morning, Hyperion—Hype, as they call him—was born. They took a few hours to be alone as a family before Jason sent out messages announcing the birth. On Monday, Jason once again took over as creative director of BBG, while Amy stayed home with Hype for six weeks. They had missed their deadline to rebrand BBG—that was supposed to be
independent of the baby, Jason says—but it could wait. Amy became a mother, Jason a father; their living story became more important than how they told their brand story.
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ason wipes exhaustion from his eyes, a cowlick sticking up on the back of his head. He plops into his chair and shakes his leg under the desk. It’s November 2018 and Hype, who barely let Jason sleep last night, is 3 months old. Jason carried Hype around all night, trying to calm him, but the baby awoke, screamed and puked. “How could you throw up on me?” Jason continues to wonder hours later at his desk. BBG’s 9 a.m. meeting will start in five minutes and Amy hasn’t arrived yet, nor will she until she finishes feeding Hype and hands him off to the nanny. Across the office, someone whispers that the baby may be teething. Employees slide their chairs toward Jason’s desk; Amy and two others join the
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meeting through video chat as Jason lists the today’s work: More illustrations for the development site of Health Champion, which will launch in January. Another client, Stern Pinball, is launching a full site within a month and needs to be QA tested, as does the website for Cranbrook Academy of Art, Amy’s dream school and now dream client. Another client needs to be prodded to pay before their demands for early launch are met. Jason also wants Lucas to work on a font, one that may be used for the rebrand but will likely be sold as a font by Avondale Type Co., a typeface company and one of BBG’s offshoots (they also run a videography and photography studio called MLMTR). Just after the meeting ends, Jason’s smartwatch buzzes—his and Amy’s watches alert one another when they leave home or the office. Amy arrives 30 minutes later, tired, with two cups of coffee. She hands one to Caroline Ruark, the company’s accounts and project manager. Hype kept Amy awake, too, but she already misses him. When Amy first came back to work after maternity leave, she wanted to cry. He needed so much from her; how do people leave their babies? But Amy also missed working and talking to people and being creative;
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she wanted the balance of raising her baby and practicing her passion. Hype is well taken care of by the nanny and Jason’s mom while Amy and Jason are at work, it’s just hard to pull away from snuggling with her perfect little baby. BBG’s ringtone, a bleeping electronic beat, gets the once-tired Amy up and grooving. “Doesn’t it just make you want to dance? Doo doo doooo…” She dances on one leg toward the phone, but Jason rushes over and answers, taking the phone into the conference room, beckoning Caroline to follow. It’s the client who has yet to pay but wants to launch early. Jason doesn’t think that the client has been respectful to his employees—the client has been sending discouraging emails to Caroline and the account’s designer, Kara Shim—but as BBG’s client list grows, he must trust employees to take care of client demands, good and bad. Caroline tried handling this client with an email, but the client quickly called BBG’s office. Jason’s voice—declarative, nasal and firm— echoes from the conference room into the office: “You don’t understand that we’re working double for you on an unreasonable launch date,” he says. Employees soften their typing, eyes locked on their
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screens. After a few minutes, Caroline leaves the conference room and heads out the office’s back door, Amy leaving her desk to follow. Perhaps Jason’s defense of Kara and Caroline was paternal; after all, BBG was his first baby. One of Jason’s goals at BBG is to foster the same atmosphere he experienced as a student in Wheeling High School’s art room, a place where he refined what he calls “The Eye.” He’s had The Eye— others might simply call it artistic taste—since he was 5, when he’d sit transfixed by attractive road signs, action-packed comic books and grotesque Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. Jason likes helping young designers develop their Eye, allowing them creativity with clients. He’ll coach them and quickly sketch ideas to illustrate what he’s looking for in the next version, allowing young designers to meld their ideas with the client’s desires. But sometimes, like today, Jason needs to take control. Fifteen minutes later, Caroline and Amy are back at their desks. Jason’s voice echoes into the office— the conversation seems to have ebbed. “I assure you,” Jason says, “if everything stays constructive, everyone stays happy.” Their relationship can stay good with better communication, he says. “Let’s keep everything productive,” Jason tells the client, reminding them how much work his staff puts into their website. Caroline and Kara laugh at Jason’s comments from their desks and Brandon Hammer, BBG’s director of marketing and strategy, smiles. “I love how hard he’s standing up for this team,” Brandon says. “Yeah, I’m really glad for it,” Caroline says. “This man has earned a standing-O when he gets out here,” Brandon says.
In creative work, clients are frequently late— Jason recalls that one client took 29 days to decide if they wanted a truck as their logo.
Jason hosted family at their new house—a grinning niece holds Hype, Jason pours chocolate sauce into a nephew’s mouth, a smiling Jason holds a smiling Hype. “I love this baby,” Amy says. “I miss him already.” A year after the first attempt to rebrand BBG, Amy and Jason are still stalled. It’s hard for Jason to stop tinkering. He’s frustrated that the rebrand isn’t finished, Amy knows; she’s frustrated, too. It’s hard to give yourself a new face, to find who you are visually and be satisfied with the result. Amy and Jason work through the frustration, each designing their own unique mock-ups, then attempting to blend their drafts into something they feel looks like BBG. Amy says that the process is akin to two crossing streams moving apart, then crossing again later before hopefully flowing together. It’s much different from their usual process for clients, where multiple BBG employees work on the same files. But after their last rebranding failure, Amy and Jason must finish the job themselves. But they’re just so damn busy. There’s Hype, the clients, the employees, the job vacancies, the new house, the groceries and exercise and sleep and commute—then there’s everything else, the gigs and side-hustle and volunteerism endemic in the ambitious. A friend of Amy’s, a man who also works with his wife, once gave Amy some advice:
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he following week, Monday morning, Health Champion approves BBG’s design work on its development website. “The changes you made were perfect,” the client tells Amy and Caroline over speaker phone. Health Champion is nearly three weeks late with content and Amy handles it gently. “We just want to do really good work for you,” Amy says, asking the client to send the content by the end of November. In creative work, clients are frequently late—Jason recalls that one client took 29 days to decide if they wanted a truck as their logo. As the call with Health Champion ends, Amy sighs, “I love them.” Then her mind moves back to her baby. Amy shows Caroline photos from the weekend when Amy and
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Never talk about business when one of you is wearing something with a drawstring or an elastic band. Sometimes, like last night in bed, Amy and Jason break that rule. Jason says that he told Amy he worries she has too many ongoing tasks outside of caring for Hype and BBG—she works as adjunct design faculty at DePaul University and, until recently stepping down, served as vice president of member experience for the American Institute of Graphic Arts Chicago. Jason fears that she’ll spread herself too thin if she teaches again. Over the past couple years, Jason has quit or paused most of his hobbies and sidegigs—his band, his work as director of marketing for the Chicago Design Museum, his role as co-chair of design-student resource The Secret Handshake—but Amy says that she isn’t thinking about quitting anything yet. She wants to be the one to decide what’s too much for her, to know herself that she’s is being spread too thin. Amy describes herself as impatient, as someone who will do something she wants to do no matter what, but anything she does will have to give her more value than being with Hype. Even
In the past, Amy would work nights and weekends until a project like this was finished; now, when her workday is over, Amy just wants to go home to snuggle with Hype.
so, Jason worries about time; the baby keeps them awake now, but soon he’ll be potty training, having friends over, going to school… Everything will change so quickly. Time is Amy and Jason’s most in-demand resource, especially as Hype grows. Plus there’s the matter of the rebrand. If it isn’t done by Thanksgiving break, Jason says that he’ll just finish it himself. Who knows when he’ll find the time, but it needs to get done. The new site’s logic will need to be impeccable, Jason says, a cleaner look with sub-sites that explain what BBG does. It’s also going to be a big stylistic change, which is what they’re hung up on. A lot of the style will be on Amy, he says, but she’s slammed at work; her design team is short one employee, which can devastate a small team. Jason may have to finish the rebrand for his sake and Amy’s, who’s looking forward to time with Hype over a long Thanksgiving weekend. But Amy doesn’t want to stop working on the rebrand; BBG is Jason’s baby, but it’s her company, too. In the past, Amy would work nights and weekends until a project like this was finished; now, when her workday is over, Amy just wants to go home to snuggle with Hype. Amy loves design work, but being with Hype fills her with a joy like nothing else—she no longer works for fun until 7:30 p.m. because her perfect little guy is waiting back home. Even on nights when Hype keeps her awake, there’s nowhere else Amy would rather be than with him.
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t’s early December now, night cannibalizing the day. Amy and Jason worked together on the rebrand over a quiet Thanksgiving weekend. Amy scrolls through one of her design concepts for BBG’s new website and presentation deck; gone are the photo and video backgrounds of the old website and deck—they’ve been replaced by a minimalist white background and black text. Gone is the “BBG” logo with the bubble-rounded corners—it’s being replaced by a logo that’s sleek and slashing. The old layout was busy, she says. None of this new layout is live or approved, but both Amy and Jason say they’re close to something that feels right, a sparse design that gives space to their work and story.
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They extend BBG’s rebrand deadline to the week before Christmas.
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wo weeks later, the BBG office is quiet, as some employees have left for the holidays. By the end of the year, many of their current clients—such as Cranbrook and Stern Pinball—will have new websites live and BBG will have a new list of clients and projects. Appointments are still stacked like bricks in Amy and Jason’s calendars. BBG’s rebrand will now be done by 2019, Jason says. Working together over the break will give he and Amy time to focus, just as they were able to over Thanksgiving weekend. Amy and Jason meet with Caroline to go through the various designs for the rebrand. Amy shows a classic Tiffany’s-style design, sparse and minimal. Another design is too refined for their brand, all agree. Another is too gothic, but they all laugh— Amy says that this could be their Sabrina the Teenage Witch look. Then Jason shows his work, a similar clean style that’s sparse, largely black and white with flares of faded, neon rainbow colors along the borders of the page. They discuss whether to have headers on the page or go straight into the content. Should they add a third color like gold or
coral? Should the rainbows stay or go? Jason shows one idea that he’s particularly proud of, a series of cards that users could flip to read about BBG’s services. “When you touch it on an iPad, the tile could raise a bit,” Jason says. “Cool, I dig it,” Amy says. “I think we have the elements,” Jason says. “We should try to do a content or blog post page. Most of the stuff that’s designed isn’t going to change all that much.” “OK,” Amy says. “Do you think we’re still each working on different ones?” “You could try to pull it together,” Jason says. “I think it’s gonna happen between Christmas and New Year’s.” “Well, I need things to work on now,” Amy says. “Also, I don’t know how realistic it is to say that the whole website is going to be designed between Christmas and New Year’s, because who’s watching the baby?” Amy and Caroline laugh. “All of the pages are designed,” Jason says. “It’s just converting some styles. We’re not going to reinvent how we do blog posts.” “True,” Amy says. Over the next few days, Amy
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will try different styles and fonts on BBG’s new content page. She says that Kara and Lucas also have ideas for changes. “My goal would be to get through one of these and show them so they can jump in on this, too,” she says. “I want everyone to have some say and involvement to put into all this.” “Just be careful,” Jason says, “because of what happened last time.” “I know,” Amy says. “I think that we need to know what’s on the table for changing and what’s not.” “Yeah,” Jason says. “Opening this to everybody, what will happen is we’ll have everybody’s perspective back in the mix, which for better or for worse, it’s good to have that perspective. But at some point, because we have been working on this for so long and we have heard the perspectives and we know where people’s feelings are on pages, we don’t need to reopen it to every single person. But we absolutely can ask for opinions on stuff like, does this feel more like us or less like us than in the past?”
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“Cool,” says Amy. She has a lot of rebrand work to do but must now QA test a website, eat lunch and then pump, all in the 70 minutes before her next meeting.
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he BBG office was closed between Christmas and New Year’s, and the rebrand went unfinished. Jason planned to work the entire holiday, just like he had in years past, while Amy expected not to work at all, save for taking care of Hype. By January, Amy and Hype had won—Jason, mister 12-hour workdays, worked the first and last days of their time off, spending the rest of it with his family. Amy was relieved to have the time with Hype. Taking care of Hype is still work for Amy, but being with him feels natural. Jason, on the other hand, felt anxious—not because of Hype, but because of the “stress of waiting to work.” Working has always been his advantage; BBG’s success didn’t come from luck, he says, but rather a lot of hard work. Those long holidays allow Jason to get out the ideas that
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have been in his head the whole year—he once completely redesigned the Avondale Type Co. website during his time off. Even with Jason’s anxiety, Stern’s and Cranbrook’s websites launched over the holiday. There’s still more work to do on the BBG rebrand. Amy and Jason have been slowly pushing out copy changes and believe that they’re close to finishing a design; Amy says that Kara and Lucas liked what they’ve seen so far. But the rebrand wasn’t the focus of Amy and Jason’s holiday. While the office was closed, they took care of Hype, who was teething and, for the first time, sick. Jason and Amy doted on Hype, who needed to be held to fall asleep—they never knew whether he’d sleep for three minutes or three hours. But they played with Hype, too, and he reached new milestones: rolling over, scrolling through an iPhone, putting two fingers in Jason’s nose and one in his mouth. As soon as Hype learns to answer messages, Jason jokes that he’ll be on the clock. As Hype grows, Jason and Amy will be there to teach him about the family business, about the way things can be arranged seamlessly. Though Jason was anxious about not working, he felt that the time spent with Hype was better than work. Family time is his present, but also his future; he believes that these holidays will now be spent with Amy and Hype. What he once called the next phase of life is now just life. Rather than filling their time off with work, they lived simply and minimally, slowing the pace and watching life’s little changes in real time. BBG could launch any of the art-direction concepts they’ve created, Jason says, but they only want to launch what truly feels like them. What felt like them over the holiday was being in the moment with Hype, watching as he discovers the world for the first time, free of the distractions of work. You only get one chance to enjoy the days where everything is new, where the rewards are better than launching a new website and richer than money. In those moments, you see life anew. m
As Hype grows, Jason and Amy will be there to teach him about the family business, about the way things can be arranged seamlessly.
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A MAP FINDS MORE
TREASURE
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THAN
A FUNNEL
Creative teams need to meet customers where they are and stop expecting them to step into the funnel. Data-driven marketer Jessica Best explains how involving more teams in the experience design process can highlight more on-ramps in the customer journey. BY SARAH STEIMER FEBRUARY 2019 | MARKETING NEWS
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W
hen Jessica Best describes Wingstop’s campaign for April 20—better known as 4/20, the unofficial holiday for cannabis consumers—it elicited chuckles from her HOW Design Live audience. The 2018 iteration of the campaign featured a twist on the classic “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” jingle from the 1950s, with the update featuring the restaurant’s products dancing to “Let’s all go to the Wingstop.” Each version of the commercial, released throughout the day, gets a little trippier. While giggle-inducing, the campaign is a great example of following the customer journey, says Best, director of data-driven marketing at Barkley. The quick-service restaurant never would have known to target this demographic had they focused exclusively on the marketing funnel, which Best says is more keyed to what the company wants consumers to do. The customer journey, on the other hand, flips the script to learn what the customer is doing and what they feel at each stage of the process. The company was listening to consumers online, finding the terms “weed” and “Wingstop” frequently mentioned together and pointing to a new route in the customer journey—and an experience design opportunity. This is Best’s passion as a data-driven marketer, to locate customers and meet them where they are. She hypes the benefits of designing a customer journey map, which includes design in the literal, creative sense. She presented on the topic at the 2018 HOW Design Live conference in Boston and will speak again at this year’s event in Chicago. Best’s presentation is for an audience of designers, to illustrate how important it is that they understand the consumer’s motivations. But it’s also a reminder to marketers to involve their design teams earlier in the process. The Wingstop insight came by way of the customer service team, an example of what can happen when more teams have a hand in solving the “why?” in a customer journey.
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Anytime I read about design and marketing, much of the focus is on individual assets: video, logos, infographics, things like that. It seems as though marketers might be missing an opportunity to get the design team involved in the full customer journey. Have you found that a lot of markers aren’t thinking about how design works in the bigger picture, versus individual assets?
MN
Yeah—it’s easy, right? It’s easy to focus on the piece at hand, it’s easy to focus on the brief, the design assignment instead of focusing on the design opportunity. In a lot of cases, the design assignment is for the logo on the outside of the takeaway bag, but the design opportunity is, “How do we surround that pickup experience for a to-go bag at a quick service restaurant? What are the pieces of that experience that have design components?” Just staying within the design space, there’s point of purchase, there’s window signage, there’s everything from how you’re greeted when you walk in or what materials you see when you’re sitting there considering your order. It’s easy to focus on what projects have been assigned to you as a designer or even as a marketer instead of thinking about what the more holistic opportunity might be.
JB
That sounds like the difference between people working in silos and actually crossing departments.
MN
That’s a big piece of this. We talk a little bit about the difference between capital D Design and lowercase d design. Lowercase d design asks, is it beautiful? Does it add beauty? And capital D Design
JB
is more like, does this solve a problem? Wayfinding signage, for example, would be both lowercase d design but also design with a capital D, meaning it’s solving a problem. Is it useful? Is it intuitive? Those types of words are where we start to really fall into the larger design system and not just creative design. When I think of the intersection of marketing and design in the customer journey, I think of the mobile. We hear all the time about how poor mobile experiences keep customers from engaging with the company. Would you say that mobile is one of the best examples of how good design matters in the customer journey?
MN
It can be. The bigger picture is to see the impact of how a bad mobile experience can make a difference in how a customer sees your brand. It’s one of those things that didn’t exist 10 years ago that we have to think about now. The lack of attention to that becomes really noticeable. The loss of customers, the loss of traffic, the loss of the purchase becomes really noticeable on that end. We just haven’t gotten our brain around experience design. That’s the opportunity of not just how do they make the purchase, it’s how do we help put them on their own journey to purchase our product—as hopefully our product is part of the solution for their own journey.
JB
How can marketers better involve design within that? How can those conversations change?
MN
JB
The easiest answer is to bring (designers) in first. Bring them in
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earlier than we’re currently doing. That’s something that you’ll hear the lead designer at Barkley’s say often: The earlier that you can bring him in, the more we are thinking about the design opportunity and not just trying to fill the design project on a deadline. What is the challenge that we’re trying to solve? Well, we need a menu. OK, what does that menu going to do? It’s going to help people choose what they want to order. OK, in that case does adding pictures to that menu make it easier for somebody to just choose what they’re looking for? We had a quick service client, for example, people would come in, they would see the menu and they would physically take a step back because it was so overwhelming. That’s not just a lowercase d design problem, that’s an experience problem. We have the wrong things on that menu. If you take that to a designer at the point at which you’re saying, “We’re noticing that we’re not selling the highest return on investment item,” or “We’re noticing that customers aren’t having a positive experience,” or “We’re noticing that the time that somebody spends in our restaurant is five minutes longer since we’ve rolled out this new menu design—so how do we redesign that?” Well if we asked that question first, if we bring in a designer at the “why?” stage instead of just the “what?” stage, then they have the ability to solve for that bigger problem. Can you give me an example of when a designer was involved with some of the initial conversations and they noticed what none of the marketers on the team had thought about?
MN
Blue Cross and Blue Shield, an insurance company, one of the things they were working on is, what does the American consumer need and want from their insurance and health care providers? Not “What is the right way to market our insurance services?” I have to quote [Executive Design Director Paul Corrigan] here: “Ask a more beautiful question.” Back all the way up. We’re not selling this insurance product. Why? What do consumers need from their health and insurance providers? We can’t sell something that isn’t the right product for your audience. We’ve got to come at the “why?” stage. We’ve got to come in at this stage where we listen to what customers are looking for, what they hate about their current insurance provider or their healthcare provider, how sterile doctor’s offices are or how you have to deal with somebody different when you go to a doctor, versus when you get your claims reviewed. All that was very separate. Blue Cross decided to open their own primary care clinics. And that’s what Spira Care is. We got to be part of everything from naming it to what the insurance packages look like and what the benefits look like in that package. The spaces are designed by our experience design
JB
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team here at Barkley. It was very different from a typical marketing team task, but we got to start with a bigger, earlier question. Can you give me an example of the opposite happening: when the marketing team started to drive forward without the design team and the result maybe wasn’t cohesive?
MN
Unfortunately I have a lot of those examples. I don’t have to call out any names but the symptoms of that are more like, say, when you’re in the fifth round of creative revisions. That means we didn’t understand the problem well enough. We didn’t ask the tough questions or we didn’t start early enough. Maybe it wasn’t outlined well enough for us to internalize it and for the design solution to actually solve the problem.
JB
A lot of people look at design in terms of the logo, using the right colors, the right font. How does it go beyond that and help create a cohesive customer journey?
MN
Brand system is what we call the font, the colors, the sizes, the treatment—that type of thing. For example, I’ve worked with Hallmark before and they did a project launch for baby clothes and they dictated hue or the tint or the exposure level of the photography they wanted us to use across all channels. As they were preparing social and email and cross-channel assets, they had an Instagram filter that made it look like their brand. That specific, bright, crisp color, smiling faces, all of that is really part of your design. If we stretch that one step further, then the messaging is part of the system, too. At Barkley we call it your editorial authority: What is yours to talk about and what is not yours to talk about? And this is kind of in the wake of news-jacking, when something that had nothing to do with your company would be popular on Twitter and a brand would be like, insert a funny quip about that thing here. If you don’t have the authority to speak on politics or you don’t have the authority to speak on travel, then don’t. Spend your time with the influencers or the topics or the messaging and the tone that really fits your brand. Designing that up front is one of the things that’s most prevalent across most channels, because copy rarely changes as often as design does.
JB
Have you ever seen examples of brands trying to hide something that doesn’t work with their brand voice just by designing it to look or sound like them?
MN
JB
I can’t think of an example off the top of my head but I go back to that news-jacking thing. Do you remember, there was
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an AT&T ad on the anniversary of 9/11? I thought yeah, it looks exactly like an AT&T ad, but it’s way outside their editorial authority. You do not sell cell phones because it’s the anniversary of 9/11. I mean it was just so far off. The tone didn’t match, the reverence didn’t match. And it stinks of advertising. It doesn’t take a skeptical millennial to smell that of advertising. It’s icky, that’s the most formal way I can say it. That example sounds like a conversation didn’t happen between the marketing team and the design team.
MN
That is the whole reason for a design team to not be just taking orders, but to be part of the kick-off, part of the solution. That is how we fix it. You have more people in the discussion earlier on and frankly it also should be something that you run by the person who doesn’t work at an ad agency.
JB
What got you thinking about how design really plays a role in the customer journey?
MN
I have become a representative or the voice of the customer journey because my path to being a data-driven marketing director was through database marketing, email marketing specifically. I sit between the social media team, the creative team, the video team and the paid media team.
JB
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One of the things that has always been owned by that CRM or data-driven person is the idea that you don’t just have ads based on what somebody just did, but based on your relationship and the history of that relationship and where in that relationship you are with that person. In that sense, email has always been prepped for the customer journey. That sense that you change your relationship with somebody over time has always been my M.O. Then we ladder that up and talk about how an email address can be key to curating the content in social or in paid media along that person’s journey. Because we had a key, we know who that person is now and we can help follow that person with what they need at that point in their own journey. Three years ago Forrester really started taking off with this idea that companies that focus on the customer journey and not necessarily the sales funnel are the ones that are finding the most success. Those people who understand the customer’s ethos and what they need and when or what they’re thinking or feeling—and that sometimes it’s not even our turn to talk. Can you talk more about the differences in customer journey versus the traditional funnel?
MN
I have a client that is a nonprofit for higher ed loans. The mission of the company is to try and drive down the number of people who graduate university
JB
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or leave university with crippling debt. In this case, we could wait until somebody is looking for a loan and then target them and hope that they are finding all these great resources for how to borrow. Or, we realize that the point at which they are picking a school is actually a better entry point for us because the same mission-driven organization doesn’t believe that every school is equal and that your return on investment in going to a university on the beach in Florida for $50,000 dollars a year is not likely to pay you back the dividends that you’re investing when compared to a state school. On the flip side, there are entire parts of the journey that are not ours as advertisers to own. When you think of the sales funnel, what do we say to people when they’re researching? What do we say to people when they’re shopping? What do we say to people once they’ve bought? What do we say to people to get them to buy again? That’s the sales funnel. That is what we want them to do at different stages of their relationship with us. The customer journey flips that around and says, what is the customer doing? What are they thinking and what are they feeling at each stage of their process? Are you designing a new customer journey with each new product?
MN
What we found is that personas vary it more because the customer journey is consumer-focused. It’s from their perspective. A, it should always be researchbased, but B, it should be something that a customer sees and goes,“Yeah, that’s exactly what I do,” as opposed to when we go through a sales funnel. We build an awareness, preference or consideration, purchase and retention, those are sales funnel stages. The customer might not even recognize those or they might have off-ramps that we’re not even considering because all we’re looking at is the happiest path. There are off-ramps for a journey, too, but the customer journey should always be
JB
from the perspective of the customer: What do they need, when, how are they feeling about it, where are they researching it? Then we as marketers go, “Oh, you’re looking for information like this in this place?” That’s a brief. Now it’s marketing, but we’re letting the customer research drive that, we’re letting the customer’s mentality and needs drive that instead of saying, “Well, first I need somebody to be aware of me.” That sounds like it could be a little bit scary for marketers, letting go of the funnel template. How do you get people comfortable with allowing the customer to lead?
MN
The biggest ammunition that I’ve had in that vein is if what we build ends up having exactly what the customer is thinking, what they need and where they’re looking for it, no marketer would say no to that. Everything that we do, every client that we have is a solution to some challenge. Sometimes it’s Dairy Queen soft serve solves the challenge of, “I want something sweet to eat.” It’s not always lifesaving, but there is always a purpose or a solution and they have other solutions that they could consider. If we take a look at what the customer is looking for and where they’re looking for it, I’m literally sitting next to 50 people that would die to have that information. Where we market, how we message to that person and what we offer them, it writes itself. The marcom plan writes itself at that point. It does take more effort, it does take research, even if it’s a single survey, but even if you get into the brain of the consumer with a survey and use that information and quotes from those people in your journey map, that can be where you start to get real.
JB
Does this look like one massive map with maybe a few different starting points and then they’re branching off in a zillion different ways? Or do you create separate maps depending on the persona?
MN
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I’ve done both. If we have different products for different personas, then they can do two different ones. The one that we kept coming back around to where we only do persona nuances is the idea that somebody gets into the funnel or into the journey then they might fall out and come back in. Instead of just one line, it’s a line and then a loop. We have to think, how do we get away from the tried and maybe still true method of the funnel? At that point, your map starts to look a whole lot like a funnel, it’s just the information that’s in it is more customer-centric.
JB
When you’re speaking at HOW Design Live, on designing for the customer journey, you are talking almost exclusively to designers. How are you explaining this concept to designers and what are some of the big takeaways that marketers can pass along to their design team?
MN
The biggest thing is for designers to know that this is where marketing should be coming up with some of this stuff and to expect the insights from that journey. Even if it’s as simple as your brief for a design project should include what we know about our customers: What do we want them to do after interacting with the campaign or program or whatever? That customer insight in every brief should come from knowing your customer’s journey.
JB
MN JB
What was the reaction after you gave your presentation?
I started my presentation with saying, “I’m just going to have to pay [the opening keynote] to speak before me.” He basically set me up for success because his whole M.O. was that brands don’t own their own brand anymore. They don’t own their message. They don’t own their communities. Everything is in the hands of the customer at a point. It basically keyed me up. A ton of people stayed afterwards because I took his theory, his approach, and was like, don’t think inside the box, don’t just design something: Make a different experience and know that your customer is really the one both co-designing that with you and expecting that of you.
Was there anything else that you wanted to add about the customer journey or how marketers can talk to their design team a little bit better about designing for the customer journey?
MN
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No matter how much research you do, the people who are on the front line talking to your customer every day, that voice, a customer representative inside your organization can absolutely change the direction of your marketing campaigns. A perfect example of that is our content management team, our social media platform managers, the people who were listening to conversations for our quick-service restaurant client Wingstop. Three years ago about this time, one of the trends that they saw was that there were over 30,000 instances of the word “Wingstop” and the word “weed” being mentioned together in tweets. We all get a good chuckle out of that and go about our day—except that then 4/20 rolls around and before it was cool for brands to do this, we realized that we have an opportunity. As our creative director said, that is a giant invitation. We knew that people already associated our food, our experience with a certain culture. We basically had this invitation to participate in this discussion and ended up, three years running, doing some very fun content around 4/20. It’s even more relevant now as marijuana is becoming more available. Everybody got a good laugh out of the fact that we’re working with this [large] brand that is putting together a marijuana-based campaign. But people loved it because we were listening to the organic conversation that was happening on that front line. We would never have asked, it’s not going to go on a survey. We’re never going to say, “What do you think about a 4/20 campaign for Wingstop?” We wouldn’t have even known to ask that. That’s what bringing in the customer service team at the initial strategic kick-off can do. They tend to have their thumb on the pulse of things before us marketing folks ever get a hold of it. m
JB
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career advancement
MARTECH
HR Can Use Martech to Boost Employee Engagement Just as martech can help marketers better reach consumers, HR can use the products to elicit a higher rate of response from company employees BY DEBBIE QAQISH
O
ne of the outcomes of companies adopting a customer-centric approach is a new view for sharing technology across internal functions. Once the blinders are off, conversations about additional practical uses of technology can take place. One such example is marketing working with human resources and using the power of marketing automation to better engage with employees. As marketing begins to transform from the pens and mugs department to a revenue contributor and partner, I advise marketers to create a cross-
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functional communication plan based on personas and launched from the marketing automation system. This allows them to see the digital body language of the stakeholders and to course correct through a variety of communication vehicles. Given the success of these programs, it makes sense to use the same strategy with HR. HR Struggles with Communication OK, admit it: The last email you typically want to open is from HR. You are already buried in email and this just adds to the
pile. Plus, you know it is a mass e-mail and you can look at it later. HR doesn’t know you, and how you respond or don’t respond represents their lack of knowledge. Your lack of attention to emails from HR creates a communication nightmare for HR. All they have control over is writing and sending the communication. They hope you see it, read it and take action —but hope is typically their only strategy. If you are a marketer using a good marketing automation system, you should be jumping up and down saying, “I’ve got the answer!” The answer is to treat employees like prospects and customers : engage them with personalized omni-channel campaigns. Campaign Basics: Build Personas Employees can definitely be grouped by persona. Think about it: You might have a persona for executives, for functional groups such as sales and service, for states, for age, for benefits, for preferred communication channels…the list goes on. While HR has to be careful in what they write in a communication, there can still be some amount of personalization that will improve open and click-through
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MARTECH
rates. Plus, HR can see who is engaging and who is not. This allows them to make course corrections quickly and based on data. Campaign Basics: Define Campaign Types Your next task is to help HR define campaign types. Elements that define a campaign type include the intent, topic, cadence, source, target group, channels, call-to-action and measurement. The intent of the campaign might be to inform, educate, influence or collaborate. HR sends a wide variety of communications, so identifying the general intent of the communication is a good place to begin. In the context of HR communications, there are lots of different topics. These also need to be categorized into areas such as updates, surveys, stories, general health and resources available. For example, imagine how much easier it would be to have a campaign template developed for large web meetings. The invites go to targeted groups and all follow-up attendance communications are automatic. Plus, HR can see who attended and who did not and can correct course in a timely manner. Your campaign type will dictate the cadence. For example, HR might send communications, as needed, on topics such as a change in leadership. They may also plan a short informational series of regular communications at certain times of the year around open enrollment for employee benefits and a longer series on general wellness tips year-round. An additional element characterizing
the campaign type is the source. Similar to marketing emails to prospects, the open and click-through rates improve if there is a name and a picture of the sender. The target group should be based on your personas. You may communicate differently based on the personas. Channels will vary by employee and by persona segment. Thinking creatively and taking an omni-channel approach is an excellent way for HR to better engage with employees. As marketers, we know the value of a well-written and well-placed call-toaction in an email. This one lesson would probably improve HR communication and actions required. Finally, measurement is now possible. HR can develop an entirely new series of employee engagement metrics that will help them improve communications and make it more employee-consumable and -actionable. They can see how different pieces of content performed by persona, they can see who is engaging and what topics are most engaging. They can see the average number of automatic reminders required or what channels are preferred. Campaign Basics: Track and Improve Campaign Performance By using a marketing automation system to send communications, HR can test, track and improve the actual campaign performance. Just because we think we wrote the right message, created the best piece of content or had the perfect call to action, chances are we didn’t —and neither will HR. Just using basic campaign performance metrics
HR can improve their communications with employees; they can improve their understanding of employees and they can share valuable employee data with decisionmakers.
career advancement
allows HR to improve communications. Creating a basic dashboard for campaign metrics will help HR adopt a measurement mentality. Getting Started It will take time to ensure the quality, correctness and legal compliance for all emails. In this case, the marketer is acting as a consultant and you will need to conduct a discovery project to better understand pains and issues. Once you have gathered this information, you can suggest a set of use cases so HR can test the idea. The simpler and easier to measure, the better. The use case is a written document outlining how HR would use marketing automation in a specific and limited way. The outcome of a use case is agreement to try. Another outcome is helping HR see if and how this works. This educational process will be critical for HR as they do not have a marketing background. Use cases might involve a single communication such as an update of benefits. They might involve a short nurture stream such as open enrollment or a long nurture stream such as a monthly company newsletter. The key is to select a use case that will highlight the possibilities and produce quick wins. Whatever the use case, the idea is that HR can improve their communications with employees; they can improve their understanding of employees and they can share valuable employee data with decision-makers. For marketers, working with HR represents a new group to consult with and a measurable way to make an impact on your company. Marketing depends on HR to hire talent, so it makes sense to help them communicate effectively and recruit the best employees. m DEBBIE QAQISH is principal partner and chief strategy officer of The Pedowitz Group. She manages global client relationships and leads the firm’s thought leadership initiatives. She has been helping B-to-B companies drive revenue growth for over 35 years.
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career advancement
AGENCY TO IN-HOUSE
Design Catharsis from Agency to In-House Our cover designer Jessee Fish shares a few thoughts on her career and how sensitivity can propel creative work BY SARAH STEIMER | MANAGING EDITOR
ssteimer@ama.org
Q
Did you always intend to work in advertising or branding design? What drew you to this work?
A
The short answer is no—I originally wanted to be a vet and a musician. Long answer is my first foray into design actually occurred in high school when I was on the yearbook team. It forced me to be super familiar with Adobe programs and it’s also the reason I applied to a bunch of journalism schools when I was looking at colleges. I ended up studying visual art at the University of Chicago instead. It was a very conceptual, theory-heavy program and I was mostly focusing on largescale installations, sculptures and painting, so I’ve never actually had any formal [design] training. By the time I graduated, I knew I wasn’t interested in pursuing a career in the contemporary art world and was better suited to design, which is something I had been pursuing on my
own time outside of my coursework. I do feel very strongly about maintaining a kind of analog, organic touch in the digital work I do. As an artist and designer, it’s important to bridge those two worlds, and what draws me to digital design is that it’s perpetually shifting in response to culture in the same way art always has.
Q
When you receive a client brief for a new campaign, what are the key pieces of information you’re drawn to?
A
So much of this process is very emotional, for all parties involved. I frequently work with clients who have no idea how to verbalize exactly what they want, so a big part of my job is to be super sensitive to the overall feeling propelling the creative and where they’re coming from. I’ve compared the design process to therapy more than once—in that it’s cathartic but can also be agonizing—because it’s a
I frequently work with clients who have no idea how to verbalize exactly what they want, so a big part of my job is to be super sensitive to the overall feeling propelling the creative and where they’re coming from.
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very personal, extractive process that goes beyond colors and specs.
Q
Where have you felt pain when working with marketing teams? How have you overcome any differences in communication or focus?
A
The biggest struggles I’ve run into usually occur in one of two situations: There are too many stakeholders in any one project, or you’re dealing with someone’s immovable ego. If you’re reviewing the creative for a newsletter with a room of nine people, there’s a chance you’re going to get an unproductive amount of feedback and the rounds of review will be eternal. Having a thoughtful process and internal hierarchy is critical no matter how big your company is, as well as making sure that everyone feels heard.
Q
I see that you recently moved from working as a designer at an ad agency to working as art director of the brand Winc Wines—congrats! What are some of the changes you expect in this new role? Will you miss working for different brands?
A
Thank you! Two weeks in and it’s frankly been wonderful. My stint at the agency was an incredible learning experience that allowed me to create wonderful stuff for some huge brands, but I found myself missing the energy and control that comes with smaller startuptype brands and I decided to move in-house, which is a trend I’m seeing with a lot of brands and designers. I tend to always have a few freelance projects on the back-burner no matter where I am, just to keep things interesting, so I’m not too concerned about getting bored.
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AGENCY TO IN-HOUSE
Q
Now that you’re in this new role, what are you focused on learning about the brand that will help in leading Winc’s art direction?
A
The nature of working with a company in-house is that you have a finger in every pie—instead of only being concerned with social, I have to touch base with the email folks, the web folks, the paid media team and the social media manager. It becomes an exercise in being aware of everyone’s different needs and making sure the creative feels cohesive despite the variety of platforms.
Q
You do some freelance work and personal projects in your
career advancement
own time. How has that impacted your professional work, be it creatively or time-wise?
A
It’s important for every creative to have some kind of side project that brings you joy. In the past, it’s been a money issue, and while I was in college I was picking up absolutely everything that came across my desk. As I got older and more experienced, I was able to get more selective and take on pro-bono work or freelance projects that just made me happy. I’m always on the “I should just quit and freelance out of a van and travel the country with my dog” fence, but for now I’m perfectly happy with that nine-to-five, queen-size bed, indoor plumbing life. m
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advertisers’index
ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Quick source for contacting the suppliers in the February 2019 issue of Marketing News. 2019 AMA Marketing + Public Policy
AMA Professional Certified
Conference . .............................................................. p. 21
Marketer® Content Marketing
URL: a ma.marketing/MPPC
Program . .................................................................. p. 23
2019 AMA Winter Academic Conference Thank You to Sponsors and Exhibitors ......................................... p. 9 URL: a ma.marketing/winter2019
URL: ama.marketing/PCM-CM HOW Design Live ......................................... back cover URL: howdesignlive.com AMA White Papers ................................................. p. 54 URL: http://www.ama.org/whitepaper
AMA Digital Marketing Bootcamp . ....................................... inside front cover URL: a ma.marketing/Bootcamp19
AMA’s Marketing Resource Directory .................................................................... p. 7 URL: marketingresourcedirectory.ama.org
AMA Marketing Management
Marketing News ...................................................... p. 55
Bootcamp . ....................................... inside back cover
Email: sales@ama.org
URL: a ma.marketing/MMbootcamp19
URL: mediakit.ama.org
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#OfficeGoals A peek inside the marketers’ offices that make us drool
When it came time for creative modern agency DEUTSCH to outfit a full-service production studio for Steelhead Productions, they called upon HLW’s Los Angeles studio to reimagine nearly 48,000 square feet of a previously underutilized building. The adaptive reuse project in the heart of Silicon Beach included a full rehabilitation of an existing structure and the addition of a new second floor with offices, a post-production house and a full-capability shooting stage. HLW transformed the existing warehouse into stunning office and technical spaces, including three new dynamic mezzanines connected by a series of bridges. The overall look and feel of the space is creative with both artistic and cultural elements. The completed space consists of reception, offices, conference and meeting rooms, workstations, community areas, café and pantry, broadcast studio, as well as other types of broadcast functions.
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF HLW
Design: HLW
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