Marketing News: November/December 2017 by Molly Soat

AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

AMA.ORG

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017

THE

HIGHER ED ISSUE

College enrollment is stagnating, AND ONLY marketing can help

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table of contents AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

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ANSWERS IN ACTION • Snapshot • Core Concepts

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AMA INTELLIGENCE • The Middle Market • Scholarly Insights

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EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS • Lawrence Crosby and Chris Langdon • Dana Drissel • Riley Dugan, Ric Sweeney and James Kellaris • Michael Krauss • J. Walker Smith • Gordon Wyner

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CAREER ADVANCEMENT • Digital Marketing • On the Record

 Can Marketing Save University Enrollment Rates?

University enrollment numbers are predicted to stagnate. Here’s how marketers are coming to the rescue.

#OFFICEGOALS

College Media’s Peter Pan Syndrome

Being a college media outlet means facing an identity crisis when readership graduates and moves on. Digitization of the media landscape compounds the challenge. What’s a student rag to do, and why should marketers care?

 Luxury Housing’s Heyday Has Passed

Colleges raced to update dorms and add exciting amenities in the early 2000s, but what dazzled millennials is now out of touch with Gen Z.

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NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2017

VOL. 51 | NO. 10

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

Mary Garrett Chairperson of the AMA Board 2017-2018

Higher-Ed Hazards

Russ Klein, AMA Chief Executive Officer rklein@ama.org Andy Friedman, AMA Chief Content Officer afriedman@ama.org EDITORIAL STAFF

ollege enrollment is predicted to stagnate. On one hand, this should come as no surprise. College debt has skyrocketed, and Americans are increasingly disillusioned with the value of a bachelor’s degree. But on the other hand, this projected enrollment drop is concerning for the competitiveness of the American economy. As low- and non-skilled jobs are lost to automation, higher education is an important way to keep Americans employed for the long term. Staff writer Hal Conick explores how college and university marketers are getting creative to boost student enrollment. Elsewhere in this issue, we look at why the luxury-dorm bubble is about to burst. Staff writer Sarah Steimer finds out what marketers should be touting on campus brochures instead of the swimming pools and high-end kitchens that have filled those pages for the past decade. Staff writer Zach Brooke takes a close look at college media outlets like The Onion and CollegeOnly. How

Phone (800) AMA-1150 • Fax (312) 542-9001 E-mail editor@ama.org Molly Soat, Editor in Chief msoat@ama.org Michelle Markelz, Managing Editor mmarkelz@ama.org Zach Brooke, Staff Writer zbrooke@ama.org Hal Conick, Staff Writer hconick@ama.org Sarah Steimer, Staff Writer ssteimer@ama.org Bill Murphy, 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

sustainable is a media business model aimed at college students? Should these companies remain focused on 18- to 24-year-olds indefinitely, or should they grow and adapt as their customers age and mature? These are just a few of the many challenges for higher-education marketers. What are yours? MOLLY SOAT Editor in Chief @MollySoat

Michael Gay, Account Executive mgay@yourmembership.com (727) 329-4421 Nicola Tate, Account Executive ntate@yourmembership.com (727) 329-4437 Jordan Berthiaume, Media Sales Representative jberthiaume@YourMembership.com (727) 497-6565 x3409 Marketing News (ISSN 0025-3790) is published monthly 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. 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.

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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 © 2017 by the American Marketing Association. All rights reserved.

DANA DRISSEL

JASON ERICKSON

Dana Drissel is vice president of Kaon Interactive, a leader in interactive 3-D sales and marketing applications.

Jason Erickson is director of the creative division at recruitment and staffing agency Sparks Group.

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. Reprints in quantity are available by contacting Kristy Snyder at Sheridan Reprints: (717) 632-3535. Printed in the U.S.A.

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More Than Half of Consumers Buy or Boycott a Brand Because of Politics

ixty-five percent of consumers say they won’t buy from a brand if it stays silent on an important issue. More than half of consumers—57%—say they will buy from or boycott a brand based on the brand’s stance on a social or political issue, according to the 2017 Edelman Earned Brand report. It’s a branding catch-22, something Edelman calls “no brand’s land, a danger zone where people are more likely to become indifferent to a brand.” “Ideology dominates the cultural conversation,” the report says. “Around the globe, consumers are putting their personal convictions front and center. From the grocery aisle to the car dealership, they’re buying on belief. Willing or not, brands of all kinds and sizes are now navigating this new reality. And in a lightning-quick digital world, the rewards and risks are equally high.” The brand report found: • 60% of millennials are belief-

driven buyers, compared with 53% of Generation Z and 51% of Generation X. • 50% of all buyers buy based on belief. • Belief-driven buyers are more influential outside of the U.S., as 73% of Chinese and 65% of Indian buyers are belief-driven. Brands that have good relationships with belief-driven buyers may see a big reward, as Edelman says these consumers will pay a 25% premium for a brand that supports their position. Forty-eight percent of consumers polled say they will advocate for a brand that supports their position, and 67% will buy from a brand for the first time based on its opinion on a controversial topic. “With all the benefits that beliefdriven buyers bring to a brand, the question brands need to ask themselves isn’t whether or not to answer their call,” the Edelman report says. “It’s when and how they will.” —MARKETING NEWS STAFF

57%

of consumers say they buy or boycott brands based on the brand’s stance on a social or political issue.

SOURCE: 2017 EDELMAN EARNED BRAND STUDY

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SOURCE: “THE FUTURE IS FEMALE” BY HAVAS

Do Consumers Want Gendered Products? Views of gender are shifting dramatically, and more parents are raising children without traditional gender roles

nternational marketing firm Havas surveyed 12,000 people across 32 countries and found that 61% of women and 46% of men believe children should be raised in a gender-neutral manner, compared with 39% of women and 54% of men who prefer to see girls and boys raised with gender-specific products. These rates also varied by generation, with Gen X respondents the most in agreement that girls and boys should be raised with gendered activities, playthings and clothing. Marian Salzman, CEO of Havas PR

North America, told MarketWatch that the retail landscape is beginning to change perspectives on what are considered male or female products. For example, Target released a genderneutral kids collection in July, and U.K. retailer John Lewis is removing gender labels from its children’s clothing. H&M also launched a genderless line and Cover Girl hired its first male model. “We are a country in transition,” she said. “The groundswell is toward this agender lifestyle where gender is something people can pick and choose.” —SARAH STEIMER

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SOURCE: THE CMO SURVEY

CMOs Say Social Media Spending Will Rise 89% by 2022 Social media spending is predicted to rise to 18.5% of the marketing budget in the next five years

ocial media spending is predicted to rise 89% over the next five years, according to The CMO

Survey. Currently, CMOs say social media makes up 9.8% of marketing budgets on average, with social spending expected to rise to 13% of the budget in a year. In five years, the CMOs surveyed expect social media to be 18.5% of the budget. B-to-C products are expected to consume 31.9% of the social media budget by 2022. B-to-B brands will be the most conservative social media spenders. They are predicted to spend 13.7% of their budget on social media in five years. This product category is

currently below average, as B-to-B companies spend 6.8% of their marketing budget on social media.

Social Misses Projections, Impact Remains Unproven

This predicted wave of spending comes after years of CMOs over- predicting social spending. For example, CMOs predicted in 2012 that they’d be spending 19.5% of their budget on social media by August 2017. The actual spending was 9.8%. Integration of social media may be an issue. Asked to rate how effectively social media is linked to a firm’s marketing strategy on a scale from 1 to 7, CMOs responded with a 4. This is down 0.1 points from February 2017. Perhaps even worse is how few

CMOs can prove that social media contributes to their company. When asked to rate the question “To what degree does the use of social media contribute to your company’s performance?” from 1 (lowest) to 7 (highest), CMOs gave a 3.3. Marketers have difficulty proving the value of social media, as 45% say they have been unable to show its value, and 38.6% say they have a “good qualitative sense of the impact, but not a quantitative impact.” The survey, sponsored by Deloitte and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, had a response rate of 349 marketers. The next survey will take place in January 2018 and be released a month later. —HAL CONICK

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Chat Bots Are the Future of Market Research

ust as the adoption of the internet and the spread of social media fundamentally changed the way we interact and communicate, the next wave of change is at our doorsteps, and it’s poised to overhaul our current perceptions and use of artificial intelligence This April, Facebook announced that it would be opening its Messenger Platform API for the development of chat bots, mini-programs designed to interact with customers on a one-to-one basis without the need for a human managing the conversation in real time. Think of interacting with a brand just as you might have a text message conversation with a friend. The bot’s ability to parse text and respond to yes/no questions, multiplechoice requests and natural language is limited only by the programming and the AI engine behind it. With chat bots, brands can fulfill the promise of social media: personal, trackable, scalable conversations and insights directly from the people your organization serves. Rather than send your customers through a call center or hope they’ll find what they’re looking for on

your website, communication with your brand could be as simple and as easy as sending a private text message. Imagine using bots to send notifications about new products, offers, news or shipping alerts to the right people—no standalone app required, just natural conversation with the people you need to reach in the way that feels comfortable to them. Market research is about conversations with people to find out what they think of an idea, product, brand or way of life. It’s about getting to know them. What better way to get to know someone than to reach them where they’re already communicating with their closest friends? With chat bots, respondents can easily answer survey questions within their favorite messaging app or service. When a research company has a new study available, panelists can get a notification via that messenger, without having to download a separate app. Incentives, audio/ visual inputs and live online chats for qualitative research can all be handled through the messenger as well. How do the costs, demographics, survey experience and data collected compare with a traditional online

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survey approach? Research conducted at Michigan State University, in collaboration with YouGov, using identical consumer electronics surveys administered on Facebook Messenger and YouGov’s more traditional online e-mailbased panel, found a sweet spot between the two methods. Brand recognition from current panelists aided in adoption and response rates for the Facebook Messenger chat bot, and the chat bot added significant value to mobile survey-takers’ experience. The survey was structured as a series of yes/no questions about intent to purchase certain consumer electronics products within the next six months, followed by questions about each product. Responses were received through Facebook Messenger’s quick-reply feature (buttons that respondents could tap directly on their phones or click from their computers). Open-ended responses could be received from within the chat function of Facebook Messenger, but the quick-reply buttons kept the experience smooth and easy to use. The experiment explored four hypotheses. Hypothesis 1: Facebook Messenger chat bots have potential to attract mobile respondents and provide an excellent user experience.

Hypothesis 3: A Facebook Messenger-based survey is more likely to appeal to younger respondents. Key Finding: Not supported. While the traditional web-based survey was targeted to a U.S. general population demographic distribution, the Facebook Messenger survey was conducted without targeting to gather demographic data on the respondents who would be more likely to take a survey via chat bot. Respondents to the chat bot survey skewed even older and more female than Facebook’s posted user demographics.

Key Finding: True. In the control group, approximately one-third of respondents (35%) completed YouGov’s web-based survey on their smartphones, and those who did rated their experience lower than those who took the survey on a desktop or a laptop computer. More than three-fourths (76%) completed the same survey via Facebook Messenger on their smartphones, and they rated the survey experience significantly higher than those who took the web-based survey on a mobile device.

Industry Implications: While Facebook advertising can easily target certain demographic groups, it may be more expensive to reach the traditionally hard-to-reach groups such as young men.

Industry Implications: With the exponential increase in mobile adoption, market researchers must provide good survey experience on mobile devices. Many innovative companies have launched mobile apps to appeal to an increasingly mobile base of respondents, but getting users to download and use the apps on a daily basis remains a barrier. Programming a chat bot within one of the mostused messaging apps in the U.S. (Facebook Messenger) addresses those barriers, providing a natural, intuitive and easy-to-use mobile respondent experience from within a mobile-first platform.

Key Finding: True. After weighting the chat bot data to match the control group’s population distribution, there were significant differences in respondents’ intent to purchase certain products within the next six months. What likely accounts for these differences is the number of chat bot respondents who described themselves as innovators of technology products, which was significantly higher than the web-based respondents.

Hypothesis 2: Collecting responses via Facebook Messenger can be more cost-effective than traditional web-based survey collection methods. Key Finding: It can be with an initial investment. For this proof-of-concept experiment, research showed the

sweet spot lies in brand recognition when it comes to the cost of reaching people via this new survey collection method. Panelists were more likely to click on a promoted Facebook post that took them to a conversation with the chat bot. The chat bot methodology becomes a valueadded extension of an already valuable web-based panel of respondents. Once users have opted into receiving messages via chat bot, future survey invitations and recontact requests can be automatically directed to respondents based on their previous answers. Therefore, the more the messenger tool is used and the more respondents opt in, the more cost-effective it becomes.

Hypothesis 4: The data from a Facebook Messenger chat bot survey may vary from the data obtained through a traditional online survey, especially with respect to adoption of new technologies.

Industry Implications: Researchers should use caution when comparing results across survey collection methods. Switching from desktop-/laptop-centric to mobile-centric approaches in online data collection will make benchmarks and trackers tough to navigate, but with an ever-greater number of people spending more time on mobile devices than computers, a mobile-centric approach to data collection may be more representative of the population. —KATE DUHADWAY

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New Student, Who Dis? Presbyterian College used a texting platform to communicate with students and saw improved indicators for enrollment BY SARAH STEIMER | STAFF WRITER

 ssteimer@ama.org Goal In an era of undesirable communication trends (e.g., ghosting), universities and colleges are looking at different ways to reach prospective students—and sometimes even garner a response. “I don’t want to sound too dramatic, but there’s a communication crisis in higher education,” says Dave Marshall, president and product manager at Mongoose, an SMS management platform. “[Schools] can’t reach [students]: They don’t answer phone calls, and they’re not checking their e-mail.” For some context, a HubSpot sample of more than 965,000 e-mails found the average e-mail open rate for the jobs and education category is 32%. Figures from Constant Contact customers are even more dismal: Data from more than 200 million e-mails show the open rate for

higher education is 13.39%. There’s another trend in higher education, Marshall says, making good communication with students an imperative: A smaller population of students is heading to college. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, overall postsecondary enrollments decreased 1.5% in spring 2017, compared with the previous spring. Schools need to work harder to capture a smaller number of students. “Our initial challenge was [finding] a way to communicate to these students,” Marshall says. “Then it became [figuring] out who is a quality applicant, or which applicants are serious and which aren’t. That became the goal.” Action Suzanne Petrusch joined Presbyterian

College as vice president for enrollment and marketing in spring 2016. The South Carolina school was already texting students, but messages were clunky and transactional. Petrusch had previously worked with Marshall, and she asked her new colleagues to consider the Mongoose platform. Impressed by the tool’s usability, the school decided to put it into play. The concept of enhancing communication through text made sense. “Think about studies you may have seen on what students use, or even just anecdotal stories,” Petrusch says. “I’ve heard friends or colleagues say, ‘I used to just call out loud to my son or daughter to get them to come down for dinner,’ but now my friends or colleagues will say, ‘My son or daughter wasn’t responding, so we text each other.’ This is a way of communicating that is very much a comfort and familiarity to these students.” Petrusch says the first step toward adoption was to get the college’s counselors comfortable with the Mongoose platform. The team then made sure this communication channel was open by recommending users opt in to receive texts and verifying the collected numbers were for mobile phones. Mongoose’s application integrates with a school’s student information system, which can include names, intended majors, interests and more. A school can choose custom fields from which to pull information, such as whether the institution has received the student’s high school transcript, and use them to build a segment based on criteria, Marshall says. “That’s how they decide who they’re going to send the text to. That updated student information goes from the school’s CRM into our platform every night.” Presbyterian College uses the platform to send students reminders and ask questions. For example, last fall was the first year for early FAFSA submissions, so Petrusch’s team sent a text to remind those eligible. Counselors may also text prospective students about open-house programs at the school.

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“We always are trying to get people to think about the next action step,” Petrusch says. “In many cases, that does have to do with a visit to campus, so I would consider that transactional. But then we started to watch how many students were responding to these texts. Sometimes it was ‘Thanks! I plan to be there,’ or ‘I can’t wait to visit campus.’ ” Some students even responded with questions that were off topic, but still related to the school. At times, responses would come days later, sparking a conversational tone that Petrusch called a pleasant surprise. These questions don’t disappear into the ether; counselors at Presbyterian College log into the system and answer the messages. The school was also careful about the volume of messages it sent because understanding how younger people communicate also means understanding when you might be encroaching on their space. “We have to be very respectful,” Petrusch says. “[A phone is] almost an appendage: You carry your phone with you all the time, it’s very personal. It’s an opportunity to talk to students and engage with them in a medium that’s comfortable for them, but that doesn’t mean we should abuse that privilege. They said, ‘Yes,’ (to opting in) and that allows us to enter into a dialog with them. We wouldn’t want to be hitting their inbox every single day.” Result Using the Mongoose platform not only boosted communication between prospective students and the school, but it also gave Presbyterian College a better feel for student intent to attend. Mongoose and Presbyterian College found the more interested the student, the more likely they are to provide their mobile number: 74% of applicants opted into receiving texts, 81% of accepted students opted in and 92% of those who confirmed attending the school opted in. They also found 40% of confirmed students sent five or more texts to admissions counselors and 80% of

confirmed students sent one or more texts to counselors. The platform also increased the efficiency of the small Presbyterian College admissions staff. Rather than making phone calls to each potential student, the school could send text messages asking if the student or family had questions about, for example, financial awards, and then schedule a call. “It allowed us to much more effectively use our time with those who were interested,” Petrusch says. Scheduling was also beneficial to the student and family, who could ensure they were available at a particular time and had their questions prepared. “You weren’t catching a parent or student off guard.” Marshall says calling young people today can come across as an invasion of privacy. “They have a very short list of people who are—quote, unquote—allowed to call them,” Marshall says. “When somebody else calls them that’s not on that list, maybe a school, it can almost be considered rude. You’re not ready to have a conversation; the medium is not right for that. But when you text them, they have the ability to read the text when they want. They can take as long as they want to respond and they can think about what they want to say. It’s a much better medium to put them at ease.” Other communications with students and their families—brochures, e-mails, campus visits—aren’t going away, nor are the stresses that come with choosing a school. A platform that communicates as a student does, however, adds value for all parties. “For years and years, the sacred cow in higher education in terms of a predictive behavior was the campus visit,” Marshall says. “Schools would say that if they could get [students] to visit, they were very likely to enroll. The behavior of a text response is much more predictive than that. If they’re taking the time to write back, not only does it show that they’re interested, but it also might help them clear up misinformation or get their questions answered.” m

answers in action

COMPANY

Mongoose/Presbyterian College HEADQUARTERS

Orchard Park, New York/ Clinton, South Carolina CAMPAIGN TIMELINE

Spring 2017 RESULTS

Strong correlation between opting into texts and confirming attendance to school: 74% of applicants opted into receiving texts, 81% of accepted students opted in and 92% of those who confirmed attending the school opted in.

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What Marketers Need to Know About Blockchain Blockchain, predicted to be a $7.74 billion market within six years, may flip the business world on its head. Are marketers ready? BY HAL CONICK | STAFF WRITER

 hconick@ama.org

hat is the blockchain? Most marketers would likely answer this question by mumbling something about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, but Jeremy Epstein, CEO of Never Stop Marketing, is a true believer in the technology. “I happen to think that this thing is the internet at exponential levels in terms of importance,” says Epstein, who recently wrote the e-book “The CMO Primer for the Blockchain World.” “My brother always says, ‘Jeremy, you drink way too much Kool-Aid. You’re totally off the deep end.’ There’s probably a lot of truth to that,” Epstein says. Is Epstein off the deep end or simply early to the pool party? The blockchain hype has grown as every marketer, financial expert and CEO struggles to figure out what the technology is and how it will change business. This has meant big expectations: The blockchain market, now worth approximately $600 million, is poised to grow to $7.74 billion by 2024, per Grand View Research. A study by Juniper Research finds that 57% of large corporations say they are either actively considering or in the process of implementing blockchain technology, and approximately 66% expect full integration of the blockchain by 2018. The aforementioned Bitcoin—a peerto-peer digital currency valued at $9 billion worldwide, per BlockGeeks— has been the Blockchain’s main output and most recognizable application. Each Bitcoin is worth $4,385.95, as of October 2017; the cryptocurrency has been called

a “bubble” by executive thought leaders like Mark Cuban and Ray Dalio, and is considered the future of currency by many futurists and excited investors. Beyond the pool parties and hype machines, what does the blockchain look like in marketing, and why does it matter in 2018? A Blockchain Primer An easy way to picture the blockchain is to think of a spreadsheet that is duplicated thousands of times across a network of computers. Changes to the spreadsheet are mandated by a series of rules. Once information is validated, it’s permanently added to the spreadsheet, becoming un-editable. The spreadsheet

is updated on every computer when new information is added. Once updated, the spreadsheet is a publicly available record of each change. There’s no centralized location for this spreadsheet, making it extremely difficult to compromise. Put another way, the blockchain is a growing list of decentralized records— referred to as blocks—secured by cryptography. The bullish Epstein says blockchain will not change the fundamentals of marketing, but it will change business execution and strategies, likely rocking the world of those who are unprepared. With blockchain, anyone can transfer valuable assets from one person to another person without a third-party trust broker. Data is protected by its decentralization, Epstein says; think robbing one house (a data center) versus robbing 5,000 houses (the blockchain). Epstein asks marketers to consider a unit of advertising space as an item of value: “Right now, I go through my 55 different intermediaries [when buying an ad]. You don’t need that in a world of blockchain,” he says. “We’re going to have a way to guarantee that the advertising you’re buying is showing up on the site that you intended it to and your software is going to provide you assurances that it

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is displayed on the space you purchased. … It can be a pretty big game changer for marketers.” For now, blockchain remains an idea in marketing, a hope. There’s no true front-running provider for blockchain marketing technology yet. Why Marketers Can’t Afford to Ignore Blockchain “What’s your blockchain strategy?” will soon become a common question among marketers, says Dave Morgan, CEO and founder of data science marketing company Simulmedia. The marketer, for now, should answer with, “To know what the hell it is,” Morgan says. Morgan is familiar with innovative and disruptive technology, as he’s worked in digital marketing since 1992, just before the internet became a behemoth. Morgan, like Epstein, believes that the blockchain will cause an internet-esque shift in marketing and business. He’s seen the blockchain up close—his company’s investor, Union Square Ventures, invests money in blockchain applications—and has become a believer in the technology. Marketers will be tempted to dive right into the blockchain, Morgan says, but understanding is the essential first step. “Try to spend time with people that understand blockchain,” Morgan says. “Take the time to learn and understand it, even if it seems obtuse and quite boring.” In the 1990s, marketers made a mistake by ignoring the internet until it became omnipresent. Then they spent years playing catch-up, Morgan says. Blockchain is too important to allow this to happen again. “What people need to understand is that this resets the control of data, relationships and value creation,” he says. “[Marketers are] going to see consumers build relationships with companies,” Morgan says. “They will see federations of consumer groups that will leverage blockchain networks to exchange value and buy and sell services. [This will happen] just as people that only sold in bricks-and-mortar didn’t understand how

much they were losing to e-commerce because they didn’t see it until it was too late.” Blockchain’s Marketing Potential Trust: one little word that means many big things in marketing. The 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer finds that trust is down for media, government, NGOs and business. However, Kathryn Beiser, global chair of Edelman’s corporate practice, says business is “the last retaining wall for trust. … Its leaders must step up on the issues that matter for society.” Enter the blockchain, which The Economist has called the “trust machine.” Epstein gives a scenario for how marketers can use the blockchain to build trust with consumers: You go to the store to buy coffee. A brand bragging about its origins—an organic, family-owned farm in Nicaragua—catches your eye. “Imagine an application that lets you put your phone on top of [the coffee], scan it and see the entire supply chain of the coffee bean all the way back to the Gonzalez family in Nicaragua,” Epstein says. “You have total confidence that it’s not just a claim anymore because you have proof; everything has been verified and logged by the shipper.” In this scenario, the cost of lying about a product becomes great while the value of telling the truth about it becomes greater. Marketers can tell the story of their product not simply as a storyteller, but as a documentarian. “That’s a great chance if … you can prove it,” Epstein says. “People will pay for the premium. People pay to be in line with their values.” Now think beyond the product: With verified information on the blockchain, companies can be completely transparent about values and business practices. How many women are employed at Procter & Gamble, for example? How many minorities are employed by Google? Companies self-report this data, for the most part, but only a few people truly know the answers. With this information on a blockchain, consumers can trust that

the company is telling the truth about its values, practices and statistics. “If you’re a marketer, you need to fundamentally understand that the days of total bullshitting are coming to an end,” Epstein says. Blockchain First Steps Large companies should consider going a step further than simply learning about the blockchain, Epstein says: “You should move on this relatively quickly because right now, you have advantages that the startups don’t have: No. 1 you have customers, No. 2 you have a lot more money, No 3. you have global infrastructure, No. 4 you can operate at scale, and No. 5 you have brand; people know who you are and trust you.” If nothing else, companies should instruct some members of their marketing team to research how a chain-based, disintermediated system may affect the company’s industry, Epstein says. Ask and answer questions like: “What does blockchain do to the competitive landscape of our industry?” and “Where are we acting as a thirdparty intermediary? Where are our competitors?” For marketers who prefer to wait and watch, Morgan says to pay attention to how changes in blockchain technology will affect key areas of marketing, such as identity verification and management. “Our use of blockchain is really mapping out our longer-term software architectures and business models, understanding that blockchain is going to have really significant disruptive effects on this ecosystem,” he says of his own business. Marketers who choose to remain incurious about blockchain technology surely exist, but Epstein compares this technology to a “massive wave” that will crash down on businesses whether they’re ready or not. “The genie is out of the bottle,” Epstein says. “You can do what you want with the information, but don’t tell me you didn’t know it was coming.” m

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THE MIDDLE MARKET

Washington Inaction Takes a Toll on Middle Market Confidence Optimism dips as lawmakers struggle to legislate BY ZACH BROOKE | STAFF WRITER

 zbrooke@ama.org

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he real economy sent a message in the third quarter: We are losing confidence and may begin pulling back on plans to hire, raise compensation and increase capital expenditures due to the lack of progress on substantial policy reform.” So begins the summary of RSM Chief Economist Joe Brusuelas on his organization’s most recent index of middle market confidence. The topline number of the RSM U.S. Middle Market Business Index (MMBI)—an assessment of 700 middle market executives’ confidence in the economy—declined

by 6.4 points to 125.7 from last quarter’s all-time high of 132.1. RSM is the world’s sixth-largest audit, tax and consulting network, with a global fee income of $4.87 billion in 2016. The index has always been conducted in partnership with Moody’s Analytics, and earlier this year it gained another partner in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Since debuting at 116.6 last year, the MMBI has averaged well over 100, which is the baseline number for neutral outlook. That means that for the last year and a half, respondents viewed the economy in a positive light, and

continue to do so today, albeit with less enthusiasm. The latest report is the first time in four quarters that the index has dropped. Brusuelas believes the decrease is due to a sentiment that became overly optimistic after last year’s elections, which resulted in single-party control of the executive and legislative branches for the first time since 2010. The assumption, Brusuelas says, was that unity between Congress and the White House would enable major legislation, particularly in the areas of health care, tax reform, immigration and infrastructure spending. That hasn’t been the case. After ten months, the new government has little progress to show toward its declared agenda. Multiple attempts to reform the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act have fallen short. When asked which existing policies were having a negative impact on business, most MMBI respondents point to health care. President Donald Trump and Congress are also attempting an historic rewrite of the U.S. Tax Code—a project still in its early stages. Taxes were the second-most reported policy area negatively affecting mid-market organizations, according to the survey, and failure to act on these priorities could push the MMBI lower. The report warns that the index could dip to around 120 by the next iteration, with the stage set for additional declines that could generate tangible negative effects beyond internalized pessimism. “[Right now] the middle market is outperforming the Fortune 1,000,” Brusuelas says. “Small and medium enterprises are responsible for more than 70% of the hiring. However, you see a misalignment of optimism following the election due to the enduring political polarization and the political realities of our current times. I am somewhat concerned that should the political authorities fail in their attempts to reform the tax system, the health care system

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or engage in substantial infrastructure spending, you could see expectations pull back more noticeably and create conditions where it spills over into hiring, compensation, inventory building and capital expenditures. We are late in the business cycle and this is when these optimism surveys tend to be the most important.” The impact of waning optimism can already be felt in tightened borrowing. There was a seven-point drop in the number of respondents who are planning to borrow, compared to last quarter. Also dropping are perceptions about future economic activity. Seventeen percent of respondents think the economy is worsening and 19% of respondents expect it to shrink in the future. The report highlights both numbers as significantly higher now versus the prior survey. Overall, gross revenue performed the same as the previous quarter, while net revenue declined slightly. The situation may be more dire than these numbers reflect, as Brusuelas notes data were gathered before the violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, sparked national outrage and engulfed the presidency for a number of weeks. The report also doesn’t take into account the effects of three major hurricanes wreaking havoc on wide swaths of U.S. territory, which Brusuelas says might impact upcoming indices. Nor does it include recent actions of the Federal Reserve, which announced it will begin to slow the reinvestment of maturing proceeds of investments bought in the past. “It’s entirely consistent that you can have an economy chugging along at 2% to

2.5% while optimism adjusts back to a steady level following the inflated optimism of the election, when for a brief period of time, our survey participants thought that significant reforms would get done,” Brusuelas says. “What we’re seeing is the paring back of that optimism given seven months of lack of reform or substantial achievement.” MMBI numbers are decidedly more pessimistic than results of the National Center For the Middle Market’s 2017 Middle Market Indicator. That analysis, which covers the same period as RSM’s index, found that middle market revenue growth over the past 12 months clocked in at 6.7%, down from 9.2% in the previous indicator. Furthermore, the NCMM reports that confidence in global, national and local economies remains historically high, and its own short-term index, derived from “executives’ view of the business climate, sales and demand over the next three months” is down slightly from the last quarter but still 20 points higher than in 2016. Shortly after the RSM Q3 report was released on September 19, Brusuelas flew to Washington to discuss results on Capitol Hill with members of Congress and cabinet officials. “The middle market constitutes 40% of the GDP and one-third of the labor force. [The MMBI] gives them a sense of what’s happening on main street,” Brusuelas says. “When I was up on the hill, at the think tanks and the agencies, they got the message. They know they have to succeed. … There is enormous pressure inside Washington right now to get something done of substance. Anything.” Rep. Steve Stivers, R-Ohio, one of four

There is enormous pressure inside Washington right now to get something done of substance. Anything.

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co-chairs of the Congressional Caucus for Middle Market Growth, agrees with that assessment. “There is no doubt that all businesses—including middle market companies—are in need of regulatory reform and tax relief,” he said via e-mail. “That’s why at the beginning of the year, the 115th Congress prioritized cutting red tape and reducing many of the onerous regulations on businesses. Now, we feel the urgency to reform the outdated tax code, and [on September 28], a framework was released for comprehensive tax reform. This framework includes policies such as a maximum tax rate of 25% for S corporations.” Stivers added that, “I believe Congress can get tax reform done. Updating the tax code will unleash our economy, allowing all businesses to grow, thrive and create more jobs in our communities.” The other three caucus co-chairs, Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Rep. Tom Rice, R-S.C., did not respond to requests for comment. Brusuelas reported that policymakers are particularly interested in responses pertaining to this edition’s topical survey questions, which contain insights unique to each survey. Improvements to America’s telecommunications network and interstate highways garnered the biggest consensus of the 20 infrastructure categories with 72% of respondents saying they see business opportunity there. Fifty-nine percent of respondents that ranked more than one category as a significant opportunity also say they would participate in a bidding process to receive government contracts to perform the upgrades. The upshot is that many middle market executives anticipate direct and indirect windfalls from the passage of a mammoth infrastructure bill, once purported to total $1 trillion. It’s another reason for the government to deliver, and another cause of middle market frustration if it doesn’t. m

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SCHOLARLY INSIGHTS

Can Encouraging Picture-taking Increase Donations of Used Goods? New research could provide strategies for nonprofits seeking donated goods BY KAREN PAGE WINTERICH, REBECCA RECZEK AND JULIE IRWIN

he average American has at least 50 unused items in their home, including clothing, electronics and toys. Many struggle to part with unused possessions, as evidenced by the increasing number of books, blog posts and magazine articles devoted to decluttering. But these unused items could be valuable to the second-hand goods market, benefiting nonprofit

organizations as well as their customers or donor recipients. The authors of recent research published in the Journal of Marketing were interested in understanding why consumers struggle to part with possessions they no longer use. When people struggle to part with a special outfit that no longer fits but was associated with a first date or successful

job interview, the research reveals that they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to lose the associated memory and the identity it represents. If people give up the special outfit, it would feel like giving up a piece of who they are. In initial studies conducted online and in a consumer behavior laboratory setting, consumers reported that they would experience less identity loss from donating a good with sentimental value if they first took an action to preserve the memory of the good. In these studies, consumers chose how they would preserve the memory. The most popular method was taking a photograph of the good (62%), although other techniques chosen included writing a note/journal entry about the good (13%) or creating a scrapbook page about it (22%). Given how easy it is to take pictures with smartphones, this method of memory preservation can be easily implemented by nonprofit marketers and consumers. As a follow-up to this survey, two large-scale field studies in Pennsylvania

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SCHOLARLY INSIGHTS

State University residence halls offered a clearer understanding of how memory preservation can drive increased donations. The researchers placed signs for an end-of-school-year donation drive in coed residence halls, suggesting that students take photos of sentimental items they no longer used before donating them rather than just asking students to donate. There was a 35% increase in total donations. A similar study was conducted at the end of the fall semester in all-female residence halls. Though less than half of the students were moving out, the campaign still garnered 15% more donations than those just suggesting donation of sentimental items.In a separate field study, adult donors dropping off items at a local St. Vincent de Paul thrift store were asked to identify whether any of the items they were donating had sentimental value.

About half of these donors were then given a picture of the good they were donating. Afterward, all the donors were asked how much they felt like they had lost a piece of themselves when donating their item with sentimental value. Those who got a picture of their item reported significantly less identity loss, suggesting that the act of taking a photo reduced their sense of loss when making a donation. Taken together, the results of nine studies suggest that phototaking can help consumers let go of their sentimental clutter. Many nonprofits depend on used goods to execute their charitable missions (e.g., Goodwill), and some rely on clothing likely to have some sentimental value such as prom dresses (e.g., Becca’s Closet) or professional attire (e.g, Dress for Success). Based on the results of the two field studies, the easiest tactic for

nonprofit marketers to increase donations may be to suggest donors take photos of sentimental items before considering what to donate. Once potential donors have gathered their unused items and taken a photo that can preserve their memories and identities associated with the item, they’re more likely to pack them up for donation. Of course, not all consumers may actually make the effort to take the photo, but we suspect that this may not substantially limit the effectiveness of such a campaign because photographing sentimental items helps consumers recognize they are hesitant to part with the items due to the memories rather than the utility of the items themselves, increasing their likelihood of donating sentimental items. Another option for nonprofits would be a photo donation drive, where volunteers take pictures of sentimental

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items when donors are dropping them off. Though this approach targets donors who have already decided to part with their items, the photo may reduce any negative feelings associated with the donation and make it more likely that donors will return to donate more items, including those of sentimental value, potentially building more positive longterm relationships with donors and creating donor “loyalty.” Managers of nonprofits seeking category-specific donations could also consider implementing tactics to reinforce consumers’ past identities or highlight current identities to minimize the loss consumers may feel when considering donation of certain sentimental items. For example, when a new retirement community hosts an open house and discusses downsizing, it could show empty-nesters enjoying travel

and the simplicity of a downsized home to make it easier for potential buyers to part with long-held items. Additionally, a college or sports team could host a fan rally to reinforce the fan’s identity while gathering donations of memorabilia from these fans. One concern may be that not all nonprofits that accept second-hand goods are in need of more used goods. Some may already have more donations than they can manage or an excess supply of lower-quality donations without the supply of high-quality items they need. Implementing photo-taking may increase donations of well-loved and tattered items that are not particularly useful. However, many sentimental items may also be from higher-value categories or of higher quality due to careful preservation. Ideally, a nonprofit organization suggesting photo-taking

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would be prepared to deal with an influx of donations and have processes in place to recycle tattered clothing and stuffed animals while using the higher-quality donations to increase thrift store sales or benefit donation recipients. Sometimes the solution to a complicated problem can be simple. Taking photos of or writing a note about a sentimental good can help people reduce clutter in their homes and help nonprofits increase used-good donations. m KAREN PAGE WINTERICH is a Frank and Mary Smeal Research Fellow and associate professor of marketing at Pennsylvania State University.

REBECCA RECZEK is an associate professor of marketing at The Ohio State University.

JULIE IRWIN is a professor in the department of marketing at The University of Texas at Austin.

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TECHNOLOGY

Why Marketers Must Keep Pace With Smart Technology As connected smart devices become more skilled, marketers must take an active role in leveraging them to reduce friction in the customer journey

BY LAWRENCE A. CROSBY AND CHRIS S. LANGDON

 lawrence.a.crosby@gmail.com  csl@pacificcoastresearch.com

ince the time we lived in caves, man’s basic needs have remained the same: food, shelter and security. We originally satisfied those needs with our bare hands. With the division of labor came services. (“You do the hunting, and I’ll gather the roots.”) With the discovery of tools, we found ways to better accomplish tasks. For much of human history, the operation of those tools and their adaptation to the specific task was under the control of human intelligence. As society progressed and our needs became more complex, marketing arose to facilitate exchanges.

Now in the unfolding age of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, connected smart products and robots, we’re still on that same journey to satisfy our needs, but with the assistance of these evolving capabilities and objects along the way. These capabilities and objects are organized into systems that can deliver a high level of personalized service, and they offer relief from numerous control and decision-making activities. It’s not just the consumer’s journey that’s been impacted by these technological advances. Below that journey, agriculture and the supply chain have been increasingly automated as well. What emerges are complex adaptive systems that pose an existential threat to marketing if the field cannot define its role.

Nature of the Beast Connected smart products (aka internet of things) embody certain capabilities and skills. These objects can be physical and virtual and are often combined in a product-service system that addresses multiple steps in the customer journey. The objects can communicate with one another and their users via circuits, signals, the cloud, various devices and their associated interfaces such as touch pads and microphones. While there are different opinions on what makes a product “smart,” it’s fundamentally about the ability to learn, adapt and operate autonomously. Analogous to human actors, smart objects take in data from the environment via sensors and receivers. They use processors

to recognize patterns in the data and make predictions. These objects respond along reinforced pathways, sometimes with actuators that convert energy to motion, and they adapt when the response doesn’t produce the expected outcome. The attributes that make products smart rely heavily on engines and user interfaces (UIs). An engine is a core program that coordinates the operation of other programs. Search and recommendation engines are probably the most well-known, but there are many others. The UI receiving the most attention today is the voice-enabled user interface, which requires natural language capability. We’re all familiar with Alexa and Siri, but consider Garmin’s recently introduced GTN Telligence for the general aviation market. GTN Telligence provides voice control over panelmounted avionics, which reduces pilot workload and is a step toward the digital copilot. In terms of development, facial recognition (iPhone X), augmented reality (“Pokemon Go”) and even virtual reality are not far behind voice recognition. These UIs will drive the evolution of customer relationship management from personalization to personification. Marketing Myopia Redux? The question remains: Where is marketing in all of this? Much of the discussion in marketing dealing with AI and machine learning is centered around impacting the buyer’s search. It makes sense that new technologies would gravitate first to the datarich area of search and promotion, where considerable inefficiencies exist due to mistargeting, and ROI can be quickly realized. That supposition is supported by a recent survey of AI and machine learning suppliers conducted by TechEmergence. The respondents identified search as their No. 1 mostprofitable application today and over the next five years. Their primary value proposition was generating new revenue for their clients with a focus on e-commerce, digital media and retail.

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Product development received limited mention, as did customer service, despite the widespread adoption of chat bots. Perhaps as the application of smart digital tools to search begins to show diminishing returns, marketers will realize the need to take ownership of the entire customer journey, or risk marginalization. That involves assuming responsibility for the integration of new technologies at every step of the journey. Paramount among those steps is understanding use. Smart products will be the competitive weapon of the future. When the most convenient and intuitive option is affordable, customers will choose it. Some smart products address convenience by providing intelligent assistance so that the customer need not open a user manual, call a helpline or make an appointment at the Genius Bar. A smart product in one domain can supplant unintelligent products in another. With Google Maps on your smartphone, do you really need a dashboard-mounted navigator? Moreover, incumbents in traditional industries face the risk of disintermediation (cutting out the middleman) or “Uberization,” when a competitor wedges a smart product into the relationship with the customer.

behavior is distinct from its subparts. Think of a school of fish. A CAS lacks clear boundaries. It is self-organizing, often nested with memory; feedback loops; and behaviors that are chaotic (butterfly effect), nonlinear, unplanned and unpredictable. But the most distinguishing characteristic of a CAS is its ability to adapt and learn. To get a feeling for a CAS, visit the Alexa Skill Store to see the many ways that Amazon has encouraged developers to create skills that leverage Alexa’s built-in capabilities. There are currently more than 15,000 skills. Skills extend the capability of the smart product to perform additional tasks, which creates a more personalized experience for the user. Alexa skills now direct and control other smart devices like home environment and lighting.

Finding Marketing Magic Decades ago, Peter Drucker said, “It is the aim of marketing to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.” This sounds like a lofty ideal, but today’s smart products are increasingly able to get intimate with customers, learn, adapt to their habits and changing needs and nearly sell themselves. Nobody is claiming that promotion will disappear, but less promotional effort is required for products that break the mold, delight early adopters and go viral (or at least receive a ton of free coverage), such as Amazon’s Echo and Echo Dot. Alexa is a textbook example of a complex adaptive system (CAS) that marketers need to wrap their heads around. A CAS is a network of interacting entities whose collective

Getting Started Most firms are not at the cutting edge of new technologies, and some have yet to dip their toes in the water. If your industry or company is among those late adopters, here are some ways that you can get things moving. Examine the customer journey horizontally to identify where the insertion of smart technology can add convenience and/or personalization and perhaps reduce costs. Journey analytics and mapping is a good place to begin. If a smart product is the answer, think of the offering as having three parts: your traditional product, a smart system addition and one or more UIs. The smart system will likely be hosted in a third-party cloud (such as Amazon Web Services) and will be composed of skills. Among the choice of UIs, you would be

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remiss not to consider the smartphone, as mobility is key. Add a smart adapter to connect your product with its smart system. One option is a small streaming USB stick like Roku. These sticks provide Wi-Fi connectivity and some processing power to run apps. While Wi-Fi modules and UIs are available off the shelf, skills create the unique customer experience that builds loyalty and continued engagement. Of course, someone must create those engines and skills. While writing code may not be your bailiwick, marketers should participate in software requirements specification. This involves assembling the whole (the CAS) out of building blocks such as user profiles, matching rules and learning algorithms to improve matching. Our experience working with large automakers as well as startups suggests focusing on a specific application or skill first. While creating a platform is the holy grail in business strategy, traditional product companies and marketers are well-advised to begin with a specific application using as many components off the shelf as possible. Put a premium on collecting feedback data on your first skill and run it through analytics and a rapid prototyping process to optimize the customer experience. m LAWRENCE A. CROSBY, Ph.D. is the retired dean of the Drucker School of Management and currently the chief data scientist at the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society.

CHRIS S. LANGDON, Ph.D. is president of Pacific Coast Research, Inc. and a research associate professor at the Drucker School of Management.

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AUGMENTED/VIRTUAL REALITY

How to Convince Your CMO to Adopt AR/VR Augmented and virtual reality can unlock the potential of hard-to-market products or services, but you’ll have to get leadership on board first

BY DANA DRISSEL

ugmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are not just for gaming. You’ve heard of Snapchat filters and “Pokemon Go,” but you may not know that AR and VR have the potential to transform your business operations if adopted for sales and marketing.

AR allows users to insert a digital object into the real world via AR-enabled devices, such as smartphones. VR differs in that it instantly fully immerses users in a digital or virtual 360-degree space, using a headset, such as Oculus Rift. Beyond games, these technologies are reshaping how Fortune 500 companies conduct their marketing efforts. For example, IKEA created an AR application in 2013 so that customers could visualize what a piece of furniture would look like in their homes before buying. The Swedish home furnishings chain recently announced its IKEA Place app, which is now available via Apple’s ARKit on iOS 11. These AR solutions help bridge the gap between virtual, on-demand shopping and the emotional connections made when one sees a product in person—and they’re only going to get more widespread.

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In the world of B-to-B, the opportunities are ripe for the taking. B-to-B products and services are typically complex and hard to define, especially for global sales and marketing teams trying to communicate a consistent message. Mixed reality (a term for both AR and VR) allows marketers to simplify their company’s unique value story while keeping customers engaged throughout the buying journey. It allows users to take prospects into environments they would otherwise be unable to enter (an oil rig, data center or laboratory) and demonstrate how their solutions can aid a business. Using AR and VR requires convincing the C-suite. There are five steps you should take to make the best pitch for implementing AR and/or VR in your business.

Define the Problem Before you recommend that your CMO let you build an awesome AR/VR app, clarify the problem you’re trying to solve. Is your product too big to ship to trade shows? Are your product lines too complex to communicate in a two-dimensional way? Whatever the problem may be, you need to define it and ask yourself if AR or VR will help you solve it. If your goal is to tell a story in a visually engaging way, then the answer is probably, “Yes.”

Get Input from Users Once you’ve determined that AR or VR is right for your company’s needs, get input from the people who will be putting it to use. Folks working the trade show floor or the sales and marketing team responsible for selling need a more effective way to market your products. Your case can only be strengthened by truly understanding their needs.

Analyze Cost Who’s going to build this AR/VR application? Any good argument must

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be backed up by research. Many people have tried to build their own AR/VR applications in-house, but few have been successful. More digital agencies are now offering AR/VR capabilities, but it’s often not their sole focus. Find a company that specializes in mixed reality and in your specific industry.

Demonstrate the Potential Results No one, especially not a CMO, is going to buy into your mixed reality dream unless you demonstrate that it can work. Companies that adopt interactive applications, for example, see about an 85% reduction in trade-show shipping costs and increased product win rates by up to 33%. Come prepared with statistics and case studies. Case studies are a great way to show your CMO that similar companies—competitors, even—have adopted AR/VR and seen tremendous results.

Schedule a Meeting Once you’ve prepared with the steps above, schedule a meeting with your CMO to talk through your findings. Review your presentation beforehand so you can come prepared to answer questions and counter any skepticism.

Companies that adopt interactive applications see about an 85% reduction in trade-show shipping costs and increased product win rates by up to 33%.

AR and VR are already penetrating the B-to-C and B-to-B markets, becoming a significant component of marketing strategy. But it’s more than just a trend—it can lead to serious ROI. As long as you know what problem you’re trying to solve, how your team will implement the technology, what resources will be needed and the results you hope to see, your CMO might warm to the idea of embracing AR/VR as a marketing tool. m DANA DRISSEL is vice president of Kaon Interactive, a leader in interactive 3-D sales and marketing applications.

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HIGHER EDUCATION

What’s Boring Blossoming Marketers? Boredom in the marketing classroom is pervasive and indicative of an unmet need: interactive and professionally relevant education BY RILEY DUGAN, RIC SWEENEY AND JAMES KELLARIS

 rdugan1@udayton.edu  ric.sweeney@uc.edu  james.kellaris@uc.edu

t is often said that each generation has its song, three minutes that encapsulate the era. In the 1960s, many songs could lay claim to this mantle, but that tumultuous decade may have been best captured by Bob Dylan’s classic, “Blowin’ In the Wind.” With lyrics that speak to civil rights struggles and the horrors of war, the song personifies the heaviness and seriousness of the era’s engaged youth. The song that best personifies today’s college student is the ironically titled “Very Busy People” by The Limousines. Rather than war and civil rights, the lyrics detail young people plagued with ennui. When they manage to get out of bed, they busy themselves with their voluminous digital music libraries and watch the same movie over and over again. Despite the wealth of information made available by digital technology and the comforts afforded by modern life, many of today’s marketing students are simply bored.

Boredom as a pervasive feeling is a relatively recent phenomenon. Our forebears didn’t have the luxury of boredom; crops needed to be harvested, factories needed to be staffed, danger and disease loomed frighteningly. There simply wasn’t time to be bored. Classical literature provides us with the trope of the superfluous aristocrat who spends all day in insipid idleness, but boredom was a foreign concept for the majority of people. Today’s marketing student is certainly no stranger to boredom. Whether it’s digital distraction or something more existential, such as a feeling that there is

nothing great left to accomplish, many college students seem to be unexcited about what’s happening in the world around them. Not surprisingly, this feeling of boredom is evident in the marketing classroom. Students checking their phones, stifling yawns or staring vacantly into oblivion are familiar sights to the vast majority of marketing professors. While previous generations may have viewed college as a time for exploration, many of today’s marketing students view college as four years that must be endured before they can start making money.

To provide insight into the causes and consequences of boredom in the classroom, we recently conducted a survey of business students from public and private universities. The results of our research were extremely interesting: Although the majority of students indicated that they sometimes felt bored during their classes, a significantly higher percentage of marketing majors (versus non-marketing majors) say they often experience boredom in the classroom. Marketing majors were also more likely than non-marketing majors to find quantitative courses (e.g., marketing research, statistics and analytics) boring. Marketing majors were also more likely than non-marketing majors to make external attributions for their feelings of boredom. They don’t believe it is their fault that they are bored, rather it is someone or something else in the classroom that contributes to their feelings of boredom. Sometimes it’s their classmates who, because they don’t participate in class discussion, create a more boring environment. Other times, it’s the classroom environment itself, marked by large lecture-style auditoriums or antiquated technology. However, according to our respondents, it’s often the professor who contributes to a boring environment. This happens when the professor lectures too much, or when the pace of the class moves too slowly for students’ liking. Whatever the case may be, these results might be explained by some interesting psychological differences between marketing and non-marketing majors. For instance, marketing majors score higher in the personality trait called “need for arousal,” which may help explain their persistent feelings of boredom. Regardless, the downstream consequences of boredom can have deleterious effects on marketing professors and their departments. Marketing majors are more likely to punish the professor when they felt bored by slamming them on course evaluations. Moreover, students are more likely to tell other students not to take a class with

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a boring professor, which has financial ramifications for departments that often have to justify their budgets on the basis of enrollment. However, while the natural reaction from professors might be to assume that these results are “sour grapes” from less-than-dedicated students or, like the students, externally attribute the evaluations to their colleagues, the truth is that we can mitigate these feelings of boredom in how we structure our classes. For instance, marketing majors are more sensitive than non-marketing majors to whether course content is perceived as relevant to their career goals. Furthermore, just as marketing majors have higher needs for arousal, they are also more open to new experiences, which implies that they may be more receptive

to professors trying new pedagogical strategies in the classroom. Hands-on, experiential exercises that simulate some of the experiences they will face in their entry-level jobs would likely be perceived positively. Breaking up lecture halls into various activity centers and encouraging Socratic, small-group sessions might be particularly appealing to marketing students. We do not advocate devolving marketing instruction into “edutainment,” but we believe more effort should be made to align content with different learning modalities and trends in industry. Like the protagonists in “Very Busy People,” bored marketing students have many distractions competing for their attention. It’s incumbent that we use the

executive insights

marketing classroom to gain and hold attention, stimulate interest and provoke engagement for the benefit of boredomprone students. Boredom is the enemy of learning. Overcoming it would serve the best interests of students, higher education, employers and the marketing profession. m RILEY DUGAN is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Dayton.

RIC SWEENEY is an associate professor of marketing in the Lindner College of Business at the University of Cincinnati and is a past chair of the board for the American Marketing Association.

JAMES KELLARIS is the James S. Womack/ Gemini Corporation Professor of Signage and Visual Marketing at the University of Cincinnati Lindner College of Business.

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AT C-LEVEL

Is Silicon Valley Killing Democracy? One author argues the unchecked pursuit of innovation is not as beneficial for the economy as we think

BY MICHAEL KRAUSS

 michael.krauss@mkt-strat.com

here’s talk about whether five major technology innovators—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple—have achieved such market dominance that they should be regulated. As with Standard Oil at the turn of the last century or AT&T in 1984, have these five technology leaders achieved too much power and market influence over our society? These firms are the drivers of innovation and growth in the global economy. They provide lower cost, greater efficiency and enormous consumer benefits, but Jonathan Taplin, director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California, argues that Google, Amazon and Facebook have “hijacked the original decentralized vision of the internet” and created monopolies that “now determine the future of the music, film, publishing and news industries.” Taplin’s book, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, offers an important perspective on the technology revolution to which marketers should be alert: Revolutions, whether the French Revolution of the 18th century or the Russian Revolution of the 20th century, often overreach and fail to achieve their original vision. The internet revolution, Taplin

argues, was supposed to bring us more democracy; instead it has concentrated power and wealth in fewer hands and created oligarchy. Move Fast and Break Things will challenge your views about free-market economics, digital disruption, antitrust regulation, industry consolidation and whether the internet is as positive for society as was hoped. What intrigues me about Taplin and his book is the combination of thoughtful argument, individual passion for the subject and marvelous storytelling by an observer who has lived through the digital disruption of his industry. Taplin isn’t bitter; he’s prospered and succeeded. Yet he clearly fears something important is being sacrificed in the digital revolution. Taplin believes that artists and content creators have suffered at the hands of the digital platform providers, making society the loser. He argues that government funding created the internet revolution, yet the returns of those investments are

being earned by a few individuals. Taplin began his career after graduating from Princeton University in 1969. He got a job working for Albert Grossman, one of the most influential managers in the music business at the time. He cut his teeth in the music and entertainment business as the tour manager for The Band. Taplin laments that power has unfairly shifted from the artists and producers of content to a small number of hyper-rich entrepreneurs. Where a musician might have made a reasonable living as a performer in years past, today’s technology, along with misguided public policy, has diminished and stripped power from the creators. Taplin believes society will suffer from this loss. Taplin explains how our approach to copyright laws failed to support performers like the late Levon Helm of The Band. Unlike his bandmate Robbie Robertson, Helm received no credits for writing songs. Helm was purely a performer who earned royalties from the recordings of his performances until the internet arrived and file-sharing technology destroyed his income stream. While entrepreneurs argued that “content wants to be free,” Helm, suffering from throat cancer at age 70, had to return to the road and give performances to keep a roof over his head. “The tech elite’s jealous guarding of its own monopoly is built upon the blatant disregard for the artist’s intellectual property,” says Taplin. Taplin explains that we’ve allowed enormous industry consolidation because federal regulators cared more about the consumer market price results than potential dominance and predation. He also has plenty to say about the failures of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Taplin’s take on Google is equally compelling. He views Google as failing to live up to its motto of “Don’t be evil.” He says Google is hypocritical for aggressively protecting its own intellectual property while not respecting the intellectual property of content creators. Taplin criticizes Amazon and Jeff Bezos, describing at length how Amazon

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can selectively punish the publishing houses that fail to yield to its marketplace power. He challenges Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his aproach: “Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you aren’t moving fast enough.” When I was growing up in the 1950s, I remember watching a television report about the impact of computer technology and factory automation. In the technology world, we’ve always assumed that innovation and disruption would create more benefits than costs. Jobs would be lost to technology, but workers would adapt, retrain and ultimately everyone would be better off, including the workforce that was disrupted. In Move Fast and Break Things, Taplin asks us to reflect on the technology revolution and explore whether our perception of innovation and disruption may be damaging our fundamental institutions. Are we properly applying laws and traditions to the technology industry? Personally, I’m all for technology innovation and growth. I suspect Taplin is, too. His book simply reminds us we might want to move just a little slower and not break things quite so much. Otherwise, we might not like the results. m MICHAEL KRAUSS is president of Market Strategy Group based in Chicago.

The internet revolution was supposed to bring us more democracy; instead it has concentrated power and wealth in fewer hands. 30

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DIGITIZATION

4 Steps Brands Must Take to Survive Digital Disruption Digital disruption has radically transformed music from a product to a service, and the evolution of that industry offers guidance for every category

BY J. WALKER SMITH

 jwalker.smith@kantarfutures.com

he digital disruption of the music industry has been widely touted as the toppling of major labels by digital insurgents, yet major labels remain at the center of the industry. In all industries, digital technologies are enabling challengers to contest incumbents with new business models that bypass the centrality of a product in creating value and growth. From its earliest days, the recorded music industry revolved around a product: sheet music and cylinders, then records, then CDs and eventually downloads. Napster dealt the first digital blow; file sharing meant consumers no longer had to buy or own a music product to listen. Major labels took legal action, but the impact could not be outlawed. U.S. recorded music revenues peaked in 1999, the year Napster launched. Steve Jobs seized the moment with iTunes and the 99-cent song. But even downloads have been unable to check the sales decline of music products. Streaming has overtaken the music industry as the engine of growth. Streaming is not another product. It is a business model that uses digital technologies to sell music as a service, meaning access without ownership that is available on-demand and paid for by use or by subscription. The two biggest services are Pandora, a personalized radio service, and Spotify, offering a catalog of music. Service-based offerings are not new,

but technology has made it possible for such offerings to make inroads into categories that have long been exclusively product-centric. Digital disruption does not reward traditional centers of power. It re-channels the flow of industry revenues. Unless incumbent brands give up old ways of operating, new sources of value and growth will elude them because the new flow of revenue will not renew existing streams or automatically redirect new streams to incumbents. Consumers can get the benefits they want in new ways. The old ways aren’t coming back. As it will in all categories, digital

disruption is forcing the music industry to remake itself. There are four critical lessons brands can learn from the digital transformation of the music industry.

Look to Experiences for Value and Growth In music, this is seen in the booming opportunity to build value from live concert experiences. Music festivals have become a worldwide cultural phenomenon, to the point that observers now worry about “peak festival.” Clubs, live streaming, awards shows and house concerts are part of this, too. Live music is buoying an interrelated ecosystem of auxiliary revenue streams such as food, transportation, lodging, clothing and other merchandise. The service-based business model of live concerts offers value and growth that premium music products can no longer command. Historically, music ticket prices have risen faster than inflation. This continues, even as the value of recorded music products is falling. In 2015, the average live music ticket price hit an all-time high. Technological innovation in virtual and augmented reality will add even more value to live experiences. Brands in all categories can include an experiential layer, even for low-involvement products that are purchased habitually. This could entail things like personal curation or concierges, instruction, insider access, collaboration or technology enhancements. Brands must look at the future differently and think about how to use experiences to build more value.

Relationships Win Out Over Branding This is obvious in music, where the shared experience has always been powerful. But music is not the only thing that people want to share. People rely on social guideposts for everything. Digital disruption brings relationships to the forefront in all categories. In fact, building closer, stronger relationships with customers is critical for brands that want to compete for

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experiences. In the world of digital platforms, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all about winning the competition for relationships, which is why Amazon has a soup-to-nuts ecosystem of customer engagement. Amazon uses brands to build its own relationship with customers. No brand is safe unless it secures its own relationships.

Small Brands Have a Bigger Opportunity in a Marketplace Upended by Digital The prevailing narrative about digital is that it is winner-take-all. Indeed, this has been borne out many times. Network effects are the reason. They create natural monopolies. The more people in a network, the more value it has to people. So people migrate to the biggest networks, which makes them even bigger and thus even more valuable, which in turn, attracts even more people. Pretty soon, almost everybody is in one network.

But network effects matter only when networks are essential to the value of the brand, which is not the case for most brands. Music demonstrates this because digital disruption has opened up the industry rather than narrowing it down. More artists, not fewer, can get a share of the business nowadays. In 2000, the top 100 tours commanded almost 90% of annual concert revenues. In 2014, this figure was halved to 44%. Certainly, the biggest artists still command the lionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s share of revenues from music product sales and streaming. But artists are more likely nowadays to see more types of opportunities to build a steady, long-term career, rather than having just one long shot at success. The transformation of categories by digital has shaken loose a lot of new opportunities for brands and companies willing and able to pursue value and growth in new places.

executive insights

Brands Must Get Outside of the Data Streaming services and other digital music platforms use algorithms to classify peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tastes and then predict what people might like to hear. Such algorithms are not unique to music. Recommendation engines, to mention one example, are commonplace. One criticism of algorithms is that they lock people into echo chambers of existing tastes, thereby shutting people off from new or different things. In fact, this is exactly what digital delivery and distribution platforms are trying to achieve. To survive, brands need to get outside of the data. This is the paradox of the digital era. Old-timey analog or non-digital connections have become more, not less, important. Analog is critical to mastering digital. Brands want to drive algorithms, not be driven over by them. The good news is that brands have many options for doing this, some of which are already familiar, like traditional media, sponsorships, partnerships, placements, apps, tie-ins, opinion leaders and personal solicitations. Digital makes these more important, not less, as it ushers in an era of algorithms. Brands must find ways to escape the commoditizing pull of algorithmic modeling. The music industry is learning as it goes. The marketplace of music as a service is a work in progress, but it is the future. Brands in all categories must rethink their propositions and business models. Music offers some lessons and guidance, but brands must approach the digital future with a willingness to experiment and a commitment to reinvention. As every musician can attest, perfection takes lots of practice. That is perhaps the biggest lesson that music has to teach brands. m J. WALKER SMITH is executive chairman of

Kantar Futures, part of the Kantar Group of WPP, and co-author of four books, including Rocking the Ages. Follow him on Twitter at @jwalkersmith.

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MEASUREMENT

How Does Technology Change the Way Marketers Measure Outcomes? As marketing advances with technology, businesses must reconsider how they evaluate its ROI

BY GORDON WYNER



gordon@msi.org

arketers have focused on the links between their actions and financial performance for two decades. There’s been considerable development of tools on the practitioner side, as well as implementation of financial management within companies. Academic researchers have improved their strategic understanding of the role of marketing by studying its impact on customer behaviors and financial measures. They’ve gained clarity on how marketing experience and skills contribute to successful financial management. However, marketers may see a new set of priorities emerge due to technology. What made sense in the past may not work for marketers in the future. Accumulating studies pinpoint the impact of increasing numbers of marketing drivers, customer behaviors and resultant financial outcome metrics. For example, the list of potential drivers has expanded to incorporate many digital and mobile marketing investments in new formats, delivered through new media platforms and sales channels. We understand more about intermediate steps in the process leading to financial outcomes, such as customer satisfaction. Our comprehension of the effects of marketing is becoming more refined, often including both impact on financials

and how marketing responds to financial performance. Understanding marketing impact often includes both the macro view at the market level over time, and the micro view at the individual level, such as customer segments or purchase occasions. Understanding costs is also becoming more explicit in research, where cost elements are identified within total economic value measures to isolate marketing’s impact from things that are outside of its domain. Converging evidence shows that management executives and board

members with marketing experience contribute in positive ways to business performance. This has implications for recruiting, selecting and training people in marketing to achieve business improvements. Going forward, we need more insights on business questions as currently defined, based on research of new strategies, drivers and talent. However, we may also need to get new perspectives on what marketing ROI is by asking different questions. Business decision-makers need guidance to manage financial performance. This can come from tools that enable them to experiment with alternative actions via simulation or further data analysis. Research into data visualization and dashboards could be useful for this purpose. Flexibility in changing inputs and assumptions is key. Precision is less relevant since this is about predicting an uncertain future. The priority is potential financial benefit and risk to the business under alternative scenarios. No single marketing analysis tool will be the determining factor in decisionmaking. Companies have a portfolio of decision options. While some may represent large investments and happen quickly, others will unfold over time and require numerous adjustments. Implementing a strategic decision may require another level of support to manage the intervention. For example, when J.C. Penny switched to everyday low prices and discontinued price discounts, its executives didn’t consider potential resistance from customers. When Netflix pivoted to online streaming, its executives didn’t anticipate the impact on the legacy business. These interventions might have been more effective if marketers had gamed out unintended consequences and how to work through them. Much of the available research on financial performance is based on relatively stable markets and companies. This stands to reason since there’s a compelling need to draw on historical data to understand what works. However,

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digital marketing, mobile marketing, Big Data and artificial intelligence are fundamentally different from history. Ad spending, for example, has shifted toward digital, which now exceeds TV ad spending. The change is shifting the variable costs of advertisers for different types of impressions. More ad buying is taking place on digital platforms. The nature of creative development is changing to adapt to new media. The number and types of people required to work on this part of the marketing process are different. From a marketing ROI perspective, the cost base of existing business models is changing for advertisers, creative and media agencies, research firms and support services. At some point, this is a change in kind, not just degree. This type of structural change should be examined for all of the cost drivers in marketing ROI work. The sales force is one of the most powerful elements of the marketing mix. How does this change when digital technology influences B-to-B selling with more digital content, more AI and CRM software and fewer salespeople? A more radical change in kind is the shift in business models by disrupters. How many companies will fundamentally alter the structure of the market like

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Netflix and Airbnb? These companies created new industries and new competitors, and they impact the marketing activities of other industries. Facebook now leads the mobile advertising category, something that barely existed five years ago. How many successful disrupters will continue to disrupt? Which of the large-scale moves—such as Amazon’s foothold in bricks-and-mortar stores or Google providing ordering services for Walmart—will endure? What’s the likely impact of new business strategies reported in the press? Will Facebook invest substantial sums in acquiring video content and compete with Netflix, Amazon and HBO? Would this change Facebook’s revenue model from its current base in mobile advertising to other forms, such as consumer subscription? How would this change advertisers’ plans for content creation and implementation? Apple is poised to make significant investments in augmented reality for its phones. In addition to stimulating demand, how will this feature impact advertising, sales and customer management applications for marketers? Marketers must still answer traditional ROI questions in markets that are less

executive insights

affected by digital transformation, but more firms will be touched by structural changes, requiring new questions to be asked. It’s likely that the available marketing mix will be quite different five years from now. Once companies accept that marketing expertise is valuable, what do they do next to outperform their competition? How should they deploy their resources to build or buy organizational capabilities? This entails costs for recruiting, training and acquiring companies with marketing skill. This requires different managerial skills to manage such talent, especially if it’s new to their company culture. How do they ensure that the marketing orientation they are seeking gets infused into the daily operations of the business? Lots of progress has been made in linking marketing with financial outcomes of firms. The future promises more change, both evolutionary and revolutionary. Marketing experts need to be open to more development in the thinking and tools needed to create insights for a future that is increasingly hard to predict. m GORDON WYNER is research director at the Marketing Science Institute.

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PA R T N E R C O N T E N T

TIPPING THE SCALE: How Promotional Products Compete in a New Era of Advertising

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BY MOUMITA DAS

rands spend billions of dollars each year on efforts aimed at influencing consumers by following a traditional marketing model. The U.S. alone accounts for an estimated $298 billion in ad expenditures annually and was recently named the world’s largest advertising market. Developed in 1898 by one of advertising’s founding fathers, Elias St. Elmo Lewis, the traditional marketing model narrows the consumer decisionmaking process into four key stages: awareness, interest, desire and action (AIDA). This model helps marketing strategies steer the consumer through each stage of the decision-making process. Historically, advertising has been considered the most creative influencer for brands—a belief that is protected by many of the world’s leading ad agencies. Today consumers have access to information to form their own opinions of brands. They are more informed, engaging faster and expecting convenience and speed in every aspect of life. Marketers who once followed a linear, predictable progression to deliver their messages are now placed in an oversaturated, erratic maze they must navigate. The shifting consumer purchasing path is shaking up competitive dynamics in nearly all industries, including advertising. Marketers must adjust to the new consumer expectations or they will be left behind. The end of the linear consumer journey can be pinpointed back to 2015 when Google introduced micro-moments, which give brands exactly one minute to be meet the customer’s need. This drastically alters their approach to consumers, but most importantly the way they understand them. Advertising strategies were once based on a gut feeling or on the person who made the most convincing argument; today, advertisers need to adopt consumer insights. This new era of advertising has created a headache for advertising buyers and sellers and for those who measure it. Twenty years ago,

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Source: 2017 Ad Map, PPAI Research

broadcast was king and online was an emerging fad. Since the turn of the century, there has been an explosion in the availability of data. From CRM systems to Big Data, companies have become increasingly data-driven. Mobile advertising is the fastest-growing medium, although broadcast still holds the greatest market share in ad spend (Figure 1). This is largely due to mobile’s

integration of data and marketing strategy. Technology has evolved in the past decade to reveal a trail of bread crumbs that follows consumers as they navigate their path to purchase. They are on tablets while watching television. They use smartphones to price compare while they shop. Crumbs are dropped at every stop. This produces a granular, nearly infinite record of what consumers see and

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PA R T N E R C O N T E N T

Source: 2017 Consumer Study, PPAI Research

do, which in turn gives marketers an unprecedented level of precision. This streamlined approach, however, treats advertising touch points in isolation, causing many marketers to get lost in an unlimited flow of unfiltered data. Our data-rich world is not necessarily information-rich. Customer demographics and buying patterns tell us what people purchase but not why. To get ahead, marketers must capture a clearer understanding of consumers, their needs and desires. Using numbers that truly quantify impact across platforms will be irresistible to advertisers who want the full story—and might just tip the scale as we know it. More than ever, consumers avoid ads (Figure 2). A reported 91% of consumers believe ads are more intrusive today compared to two or three years ago, and 87% agree there are more ads in general. They are making decisions in everyday life that revolve around whether they will be interrupted by unwanted distractions, such as paying for ad-free services. For example, Netflix users grew to nearly 94 million earlier this year, and music streaming subscriptions have surpassed 100 million users. According to a recent study, 42% of consumers say they are “planning to pay for new solutions to remove ad interruptions” within the next year. And the desire to see fewer ads is motivating these purchases. Earlier this year, Paige Fair reported that mobile ad-blocking software has grown to an estimated 380 million users and 236 million active

Source: 2017 Consumer Study, PPAI Research

desktop devices, indicating interruption as the leading reason for consumer use. Paige Fair also reported a staggering 74% of consumers will abandon

websites that require them to disable their ad-blocker software. An evolving challenge for marketers is overcoming ad blocking to successfully connect with the target audience. Yet ad-blocking behaviors are symptoms rooted in a larger problem: consumers no longer enjoy their advertising experiences. Despite this growing pattern of ad avoidance that we see among consumers today, 83% agree that not all ads are bad, but “they want to filter out the really obnoxious ones,” as one report stated. They want messages to catch their eye and clearly deliver a message that they can relate to and makes them think (Figure 3). As Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.” Rather than forcing more unwanted advertising on consumers, it is time to reinvent how marketers communicate their messages. Following the release of a new consumer study earlier this year, PPAI has published the 2017 Ad Map, presenting a comparative analysis across brand touch points. These are grouped into five advertising channels to better examine and compare the role each plays with consumers. Armed with this knowledge, marketers can make more informed decisions about where to invest their advertising budgets and grow their businesses. Promotional product reach is measured by consumer ownership. It is the percentage of consumers who have received a promotional product. The measurement of reach across

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PA R T N E R C O N T E N T

advertising channels sings a different tune. Broadcast advertising chases after consumers being in the right place at the right time. Consumers must be watching the right channel or listening to the right station at the moment a commercial airs to receive the branded message. Print advertising, on the other hand, relies on the consumer accessing the material and coming across the advertisement in the placement position. Mobile advertising requires the consumer to download the right app in which the ad was placed, and online advertising needs to have initiated a load onto a browser to be counted in the reach calculation. Eighty-nine percent of consumers have received a promotional product in the past six months—that’s nearly nine in 10 walking billboards for a brand. Promotional products provide brands with a reliable path to reach the target consumer group by positioning their message as it will be best received. In fact, according to PPAI research, promotional products are the most welcomed form of advertising by all generations (Figure 4) and considered most effective in providing a rationale to respond. Promotional products not only allow brand messages to effectively reach their intended audience, they also spread the word to anyone who sees the product displayed, used or shared. Promotional products are used daily, and 83% of consumers use them more than once a day. The longer a promotional product is kept, the longer a brand’s message is communicated. And if a recipient does not want or need the promotional product, eight in 10 pass it along (nearly seven in 10 give it to someone they know, and one in three will donate it), ultimately furthering the brand’s reach. Because of their extended shelf life and their ability to be used in everyday activities, promotional products allow consumers an opportunity to absorb the content at the pace and time they choose. This presents a greater opportunity for brands to engage with consumers without forcing unsolicited advertising. The race to win the consumer path to purchase is contingent on consumers being able to actually remember the brand at the point of purchase. If they can’t recall a brand, they are less likely to buy the

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brand. Ensuring recall relies on building consumer memory, which can be carried out by brand exposure (through advertising) or brand experience (through using the brand’s products or services). Promotional products have an upper hand on other forms of advertising because they are the only medium that offers an additional opportunity to heighten consumer memory. By replacing everyday items with branded promotional products, advertising assumes a functional role in consumers’ everyday lives. This heightens both brand exposure and brand experience, allowing a greater memory recall. The PPAI study shows nine in 10 consumers recall the branding on promotional products they have received—a 67% greater rate than broadcast advertising and 78% higher than online, print and mobile advertising. It’s clear that promotional products pave the way for brands on the consumer path to purchase. Reaction measures consumer purchase influence, actions taken as a result of advertising; however, there is no longer one large platform holding the majority of consumer influence. Marketers are now faced with a consumer group seeking to enrich themselves and explore their interests so they can build and pursue their purpose. They don’t just consume; they create their own content and curate that of others. As a result, consumers are choosing to engage only with content that is personally relevant to

them, their passions and their purpose. This new mindset directly translates in the path to purchase—consumers shop and consume with the same purpose, and the path to purchase becomes the consumer’s path to purpose. To remain competitive, advertising must relate to the target audience and provide purpose. This allows a greater opportunity to facilitate engagement and build consumer trust, leading to purchase. Promotional products engage and influence consumers—83% of whom say they would be more likely to do business with brands advertised on promotional products—and help brands offer experiences that bring people’s passions to life. Consumers not only welcome these experiences from brands, they expect it. If you ask an advertising professional what the key to success is, you might get a version of the answer once given by Ogilvy & Mather’s chief creative officer, Stephen Vogel: “Nothing is more efficient than creative advertising. Creative advertising is more memorable, longer lasting, works with less media spending, and builds a fan community ... faster.” Advertising isn’t rocket science, but there is a science to it. Knowing your client’s target audience and how they respond in the overall advertising landscape will not only help them prioritize spending and secure your place in their budget, but also arm you with the right tools to stay ahead of the game and prepare you and your business to adapt and innovate.

Source: 2017 Consumer Study, PPAI Research

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College Mediaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

Peter Pan Syndrome Being a college media outlet means facing an identity crisis when readership graduates and moves on. Digitization of the media landscape compounds the challenge. Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a student rag to do, and why should marketers care?

By Zach Brooke

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his fall, 20 million students enrolled in America’s universities, representing roughly 65% of the estimated 30.8 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 24. In college they are thrust, like generations before them, into uniquely enclosed environments where, regardless of their educational path, they’ll forge behavioral patterns that shape their consumption habits for the rest of their lives. The evolving personae are largely the result of media diet. Though they carry to campus many content preferences first realized during high school, the next four years are a time of discovery, owing to the influence of new peers and a healthy dose of targeted marketing. It makes sense that marketers want to reach these young adults just as they are beginning to manage their own spending and develop allegiance to brands. One of the best ways to reach them, until recently, was by placing ads or holding events directly on campus, as well as showing up in the media outlets they consume. COLLEGE MEDIA THEN AND NOW College-directed media has long swirled inside the milieu that is university culture. At least eight present-day student newspapers jockey for the title of America’s oldest campus outlet, the eldest of which claims a lineage dating back to 1799. The most cutting-edge outlets not only exist without paper, but without websites. One startup, FlockU, has replaced its homepage with a meme

reading, “Websites suck. Hit us on social.” In between the ancient and modern bookends lies the advent of satirical publications, and it’s here we see the creation of the college-student marketing model. These early outlets were student-run, single-campus affairs, but they eventually gave rise to professional intercollegiate publications. Beginning in the 1960s, Harvard’s then-90-yearold hybrid humor publication/social club, the Harvard Lampoon, embarked on an impressive run of nationwide success when it produced full-issue spoofs of popular print media of the day, including Mademoiselle, Esquire, Playboy, Time and Life. The Lampoon went national in 1969 when two staff writers decamped from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to set up shop in New York, backed by $350,000 in start-up capital ($2.3 million in today’s dollar), following the success of their novella-length J.R.R. Tolkien satire, Bored of the Rings. Five years later the National Lampoon was averaging a monthly circulation figure of 830,000 with one issue, October 1974’s “Pubescence,” moving more than a million copies.

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A front page for The Onion, which would become one of the most definitive college media properties.

The next generation of satirists took the baton from baby boomers and positioned it in the realm of straight-laced, biting media parody with the debut of The Onion in 1988. Now it’s a digital property controlled by Univision. A look at an issue from the publication’s first year exposes its funky low-fi college roots. One top story features a Nessie-type monster roaming a lake near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, where the publication was launched, above coupon space for local readers. Since then, thousands of media startups sought to replicate the success of student publications. Most have failed, fizzling shortly after inception if they were lucky enough to catch any buzz at all. Even the two aforementioned giants of college humor have changed in astounding ways. The National Lampoon ceased operations in 1998 following years of decline. And in 2013, The Onion ended publication of its free print edition, which had once circulated half a million copies in 20 cities across North America. Clearly, technology is a prime driver of media evolution. The rapid digitization of print media has remade the industry many times over, and the death of college print publications mimics tectonic shifts occurring in the field at large. But is there something else going on? Could it be that the reason many erstwhile college media outfits fall out of fashion with student bodies is that the readers grow up? Professional life requires a radical departure from student life, and after a few years of corporate climbing, the campus experience is viewed through a lens of novelty and nostalgia. This raises uncomfortable questions for any student-centered publication fortunate enough to cultivate a loyal readership. Should it say goodbye to readers upon their graduation and recalibrate appeal in a bid to lure the next crop of freshmen?

Or should college media companies grow with their readers and reconfigure for adults? Is it possible to appeal to both groups? A BRAND THAT EXPANDS “Our target age range is roughly the same as it’s always been: We’re an 18- to 34-year-old brand,” says Joseph Fullman of The Onion, where he is vice president of marketing. “The upper bounds of who we’re going after creeps up because we’ve retained some people who started with us as young readers. On The Onion site, our strongest demographic is 25 to 34, if we’re just talking about total penetration in audience size.” Fullman understands well whom the site is targeting. He says college students remain part of the mix, but they’re not the whole enchilada. This unsurprising admission nevertheless represents a departure from The Onion’s traditional path-todiscovery marketing. In the ’90s and early 2000s, print copies of The

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Onion blanketed campuses across North America. The papers were a dorm room rite of passage. Now The Onion only exists online, no longer central to collegiate mise-en-scène. “Being on campus is difficult to justify,” Fuller says. “The value of a reader who doesn’t have some kind of financial relationship with us is not high enough to have a physical touch point. For our physical event strategy, we are focused on a slightly older audience, let’s say 21 and older, because a lot of our event strategy ties in with alcohol partnerships.” Fuller says The Onion segments its audience similarly to the divide among undergrads at fouryear schools. At 33, his own history interacting with The Onion might be totally different from readers a scant five years younger than him. “If you’re looking [at the 18- to 44-yearold demographic], you now have three distinct generational splits,” he says. “You’ve got your Gen X, who act very different than older millennials, then younger millennials that act differently than older millennials. It’s become a spectrum across all these audiences. We try to think about all these different groups of people and our financial opportunities not as separate strategies necessarily, but distinct objectives.” Fullman says the most visible cleavage among The Onion’s readers is not between undergrads and professionals. Rather, it’s between people who are still reading content on site and those whose attention is captured by social media. “There’s a whole generation of people we never reached in print who are coming of age and learning what The Onion is based on their experiences exclusively with our Instagram or Facebook presence,” Fuller says. HOW STUDENTS CONSUME MEDIA Despite the long history of student publications, college students’ overall news consumption has been on the decline. A 2016 study conducted by OnCampus Advertising at 25 large universities shows how far media consumption has shifted in a

generation. Sixty percent of respondents reported spending between two and 10 hours per week on social media, and another 17.1% said they use social networks even more than that. Compare those findings to more than three-quarters of respondents who said they watch fewer than two hours of live television per week and 88.5% who report listening to fewer than two hours of broadcast radio per week. A longitudinal study evaluating media habits of the graduating class of 2015 conducted by Dr. Sylvia Chan-Olmsted in partnership with Nielsen provides further insights. Tracking the participants over four years using surveys, interviews and reality show-style video diaries, Chan-Olmsted noticed that college students tended to be ahead of the curve in their media habits, if not outright driving trends in media consumption. “When they talked about what’s in and what’s not cool, we typically saw that [reflected] six to eight months later in trade reports,” she says. A big difference between these students and their predecessors is the way they consume news. The participants reported consuming news on demand or when it turned up as the solution to a query. “For this generation, [media is] more like part of their daily lives in solving a problem,” ChanOlmsted says. Chan-Olmsted’s research appears to be borne out in application, attested to by long-time college marketing experts such as Tom Borgerding, CEO and president of Campus Media, which specializes in targeting college-aged adults for marketing campaigns. Borgerding is hyper-aware of the changes in the college media landscape over the previous generation. There are two main ways that college students are engaging these days, he says: digital and face-to-face interactions. The new reality presents significantly more opportunities to target students than when Borgerding attended college in the mid-’90s. He says advances to backend martech are an important driver of enhanced college demographic tracking. Ultimately, improved data-gathering and analysis

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are just as important as improvements to the user interface. But what’s better for the marketer isn’t necessarily better for the college media outlet, and the improvements helped usher in the collapse of a generation worth of college-specific sites. “Now you can target subsets of content based on traffic patterns, registration information and IP addresses,” he says. “You can go to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and subset who’s coming from a college campus.” “The programmatic share of total display ad revenue will continue to grow until direct is a relatively minor factor,” Fuller says. “The long-term trend is towards premium programmatic. I don’t think that’s confined to the college audience. You see a lot more direct advertising in regulated industries like alcohol or event-oriented [industries].” This shift has necessitated the evolution of publishing platforms, but also the nature of media companies’ relationships with marketers. That was partially the impetus behind Onion Labs (the company’s in-house ad agency). “We saw the need to grow that branded content business because while the market is likely to shift to programmatic overall for display, the opportunity to work with brands or agencies directly on content is only going to get bigger over time,” Fuller says. THE SUPREMACY OF SOCIAL It’s easy to forget that there was a time when the world’s largest social media company, Facebook, traded on its exclusivity. For the first three years of its existence, if you wanted to set up a Facebook profile, you needed a university e-mail address. Perhaps Facebook had the right idea by expanding to everyone. A few years after it opened the platform to the world, another group of entrepreneurs tried to reclaim the college-only social network space and failed. Josh Weinstein, fresh out of Princeton, launched CollegeOnly in 2010, financed by $1 million in capital from investors including Peter Theil, the doyen of Silicon Valley who bet on Facebook early. CollegeOnly was primarily a social network, but the fledging company’s portfolio also

included a video chat site, RandomDorm, and a college dating site, GoodCrush. After a glitzy public relations rollout, the company had 25,000 signups. It folded within three months. Although it appears that the door has closed on a just-forcollege social network, college students aren’t showing up across all platforms in equal numbers. If they were, marketers would still host panels on how to reach Gen Z through MySpace. Instead, students are establishing a presence across several social media sites, but using each selectively to cater to specific motivations. Take Facebook: There has been a well-documented loss of appeal among teens and young adults, who view the site as something akin to the white pages. “It’s not cool to be on Facebook,” Chan-Olmstead says, but adds she saw many study groups and social clubs still find utility in it as a free and accessible place to congregate digitally during her study of college student media habits. Instead, Chan-Olmsted says, Snapchat and Instagram are becoming the preferred venues for young adults to indulge in unguarded communication. Snapchat’s topline value proposition of temporary messages and videos is coveted by a cohort of young adults with one eye on their longterm career prospects while they enjoy the freedom of being away from home for the first time. The company seems to know this, too. Snap Inc. announced in September it was partnering with student newspapers around the country to create campus editions in the app. The stories appear in users’ feeds when they are on or near campus and can be found using the search bar. A top story on the Snapchat account of the UW-Madison Badger Herald, for example, showed a large headline, “Amazon HQ Comes to Madison?,” across a sliding photograph of the Wisconsin Capitol building. Swiping up brought up a Badger Herald story on the city’s push to secure the facility. Tapping the screen’s right side flipped to separate stories about UW athletics, dining hall hacks, Madison’s

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best hangover recovery brunch and a video announcement from the “Pod Save America” team hyping its upcoming show in the Madison area. Snap plans to monetize these college editions by inserting video ads in between stories. The Onion is also getting ready to establish a major presence using Snapchat. Whereas the site’s properties have huge reach on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, penetrating Snapchat has proven elusive. Fuller says the company’s not ready to divulge details, but he does concede Snapchat has been an enigma for the brand. “It’s been a learning experience over the past year working closely with the Snapchat team to figure out how to create a product that is both The Onion and also fits with the voice of Snapchat,” he says. “It’s a place that is especially challenging because we are, in some ways, a satire of The New York Times or The Washington Post news style, and [that] style is thrown out the window as news organizations get into the world of Snapchat and Instagram.” A NEW MODEL STUDENT ARMY The flipside to social media becoming the gathering place for college-aged adults is that they can like and share relevant content within their network of peers, which, if it’s consistent enough, might provide enough revenue to support a collegefocused media company.

Jack Rivlin runs one such company, The Tab— short for “tabloid”—which he and two classmates founded in 2009. Focused on student life and controversies happening at their school, the University of Cambridge, The Tab’s punchy and provocative reporting quickly caught the attention of the U.K. press, which referenced the campus outlet many times during its first year of operation. Three years later, the trio finished their studies, but they weren’t ready to leave The Tab behind. Instead, they set up editions on 12 other British universities and courted investors to further expand their operations. At the start of the 201718 academic year, The Tab operates on 80 total campuses in the U.S. and the U.K., and in early September, Rivlin announced a $6 million round of funding, led by Rupert Murdoch. “We took The Tab to other universities because we felt student newspapers were poorly serving their audience,” Rivlin says. “This is particularly true in the U.K. They would be covering Middle Eastern politics or Premier League Soccer—topics that the journalists really wanted to write about, but the audience didn’t necessarily want to read. As we spread across the U.K and later U.S., we saw there was real demand for that.” Rivlin, 28, claims The Tab’s monthly audience averages 51 million young people, sought by dozens of advertisers. Following the lead of The Onion and others, The Tab works closely with

Snapchat stories from the University of WisconsinMadison’s Badger Herald.

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sponsors to create branded content that runs on the site and social channels. Brand stories feature real students acting out life with the sponsored product. About 15 of these branded stories run each month, and in the past, The Tab has guaranteed 25,000 pageviews per story, the majority of which Rivlin says are organic. Branded content accounts for approximately two-thirds of the site’s revenue, with the last third coming from display advertising. Forty million visitors watched Tab videos through social in August 2017, and 10 million visit the site directly. ComScore stats shared by Rivlin show that The Tab is the second-biggest publisher for the 18- to 24-year-old audience in the U.K. behind BuzzFeed, and U.S. data reveal that 53% of The Tab’s stateside audience are between the ages of 18 and 24, compared to 22% for BuzzFeed and 12% for all digital media on average. “We found a lot of these big millennial media companies, like BuzzFeed, Vice or Vox, don’t actually have a high concentration of audience in that demographic. For most of them, the majority of their audience is over 30,” Rivlin says. Unlike direct competitors aggressively targeting college-aged youth, such as Her Campus and The Odyssey (which gifted the world the infamous “Dad Bod” essay in 2015), The Tab invests heavily in hardnosed, original reporting to break news rather than curate blog posts or lifestyle essays. Audiences get the first-reported lowdown on campus happenings often before the news trickles out to the student newspaper and well in advance of nationally curated college sites. The Tab’s student-reporters prowl their campuses, working solely for experience—an experiment offering cash to authors of viral stories was discontinued after Rivlin decided it wasn’t incentivizing the best journalistic outcomes—while The Tab’s national homepages employ a paid staff with an average age of 23. The youth of the writers and their readers has allowed the site to break stories hidden from the mainstream media. “I don’t think that any other media company can really build a connection with people under 25 unless they are

Original reporting has allowed The Tab to break several stories before mainstream media, such as Malia Obama’s university selection.

willing to hand over a lot of the editorial to people that age,” says Rivlin. Rivlin doesn’t intend for The Tab to operate a chapter on every campus in America, but he forecasts expanding to as many as 150 U.S. universities. One thing he doesn’t see, however, is maturing the site’s content with its readers as they age. “There are two ways a media company can go: You can either be generational in the way Vice has been— … that audience is generally in their early 30s—or you could be a media brand that is tied to a period in people’s lives, and be prepared to let them go at the end of that. We’re in that latter category,” Rivlin says. It might be heresy to abandon readers after they’ve converted, but brands often have to pick who they will serve first and best. Rivlin has no problem saying goodbye to readers no longer young enough to relate to the college experience. “We’re happy that once people exit their 20s, we’re not going to be their media brand of choice,” he says. “Maybe I will change my mind in the future because it’s always tempting to keep going, especially as it raises questions about my ability to run the company when I’m much older.” Until that day, Rivlin and his youthful cotemporaries jockey for position in the college media landscape, hoping to swoop in beneath aging millennial brands and catch fire as the voice of Gen Z. m

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Luxury Housingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Heyday Has Passed

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Colleges raced to update dorms and add exciting amenities in the early 2000s, but what dazzled millennials is now out of

By Sarah Steimer

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touch with Gen Z

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‘T

he millennials are coming.” So rang the rallying cry of everyone working in

higher education in the early 2000s. This enormous generation would need

degrees, not to mention a place to rest between classes, jobs and socializing. The schools responded, spending large sums of money on residential housing. Investment peaked in 2010 at $12.94 million spent on students’ residences and recreation buildings. Osprey Fountains at the University of North Florida, where units range in price from $3,300 to $5,000 per semester and include a video gamer’s retreat, putting green and lazy river.

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Colleges weren’t the only organizations getting in on the student boom. Private companies also jumped in where schools were unable to keep up with demand. Some companies partnered with schools for on-campus housing while others built nearby. The competition rose as buildings went up, chock-full of tanning beds, pools and air hockey tables. This so-called “amenities arms race” in higher education is well-documented, with some people championing its improvements to old, soulless dorms even as critics argue the luxuries overshadow the academics. The necessity for more room certainly existed as the millennial generation entered college. Millennials are the most likely employees in American history to have a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to Pew Research Center (40% of employed millennials have at least a four-year degree). This generation, however, is nearly done with college, and the next is already proving to be much different—quite possibly to the detriment of luxury student housing.

The Student Housing Boom Building new student housing, both on campus and off, wasn’t just about keeping pace with increasing high school graduates. It was also about keeping up with the Joneses. According to Kelly Ruoff, partner and chief creative officer at Ologie, the average student goes on about seven college campus visits. These tours used to be the litmus test for schools to determine a student’s intent to attend, but now they’re used by students and families to weigh their options.

“There’s always going to be a school with a much better housing option, but you don’t want to be the one who has the worst,” Ruoff says. “Knowing that it’s competitive, [prospective students] are going on these tours and seeing a lot of the same thing. [Schools] need to have housing that holds up in the same way you see schools in an arms race with their athletic facilities, too. You’ve got to keep pace with your competitors.” Sometimes uscale housing is just for show, she says. A prospective student may never live in the luxury dorm, work out at the high-end gym or attend a single game at the state-of-the-art stadium, but these amenities can attract them. Ruoff says these updated buildings and amenities can give the impression that the university is on trend and makes the overall package more appealing. Despite the effort to appeal to students and families with a little flash and pizazz on campus, there’s no proof that the buildings are able to influence students. Kevin McClure, assistant professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, who studies campus housing, says there isn’t good data to suggest housing is a determining factor in choosing a school, at least not compared to familial influence and location. Some luxury accommodations were built out of necessity. There are states with policies that prevent colleges from using state money to build self-support structures, which would include residence or dining halls. In other cases, capital funds from the state may be restricted or shrinking. Thus, the only way for some schools to afford new or upgraded residence buildings is to

espite the effort to appeal to students and families with a little flash and pizazz on campus, there’s no proof that the buildings are able to influence students.

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partner with a private company. In turn, these companies may choose luxury models because their investors want to ensure they’re getting a return on their money. A 2013 working paper published by The National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed students are willing to pay for amenities. It also reported that colleges respond to this preference by increasing their spend on amenities. But McClure’s research hasn’t shown a direct correlation between amenities and student interest in a school. Although these partnerships could save institutions money, it’s impossible to market the properties as amenities-rich and fiscally responsible. According to McClure, there has been no great evidence of the savings realized by schools trickling down to students. “Most of what I’ve seen suggests the opposite,” McClure says. “Because of the structure of public-private partnerships ... students are signing leases and ... paying

closer to what we might expect the market rate for an apartment to be. They can be more expensive than what students would pay for a traditional residence hall.” Think of it this way: Improving a restaurant’s aesthetic or adding more booths doesn’t change the number of consumers looking for a meal, especially if the restaurant has to increase the price of a hamburger. In the effort to keep up and even outdo their competitors, schools may have overshot their goals. “2016 Benchmarks, Best Practices and Trends,” a report from higher-education construction consulting firm Sightlines, found campus enrollment flattened between 2013 and 2015, with evidence suggesting continued leveling— or greater decline—into the 2020s. Many campuses, the report found, are still operating on pre-2013 enrollment projections, building new construction and outpacing enrollment with vacancies. Indiana University of Pennsylvania is

Dorms in Morgens Hall at the University of Cincinnati range in cost from $4,241 to $4,497 per semester.

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hen you’re 18 years old and you’re doing a campus tour, it’s wonderful that you have a brand-new residence hall and dining hall, but once you’re there paying for it, it’s a very different set of considerations.

one school that made a big bet on housing that failed to pay off. The school spent $270 million to replace all of its student housing on campus with apartment-style suites. As The Atlantic reported, its undergraduate enrollment has dropped 17% to roughly 10,000 students since 2010.

The New College Student The first point to realize about today’s incoming college class is quantitative: There are fewer students graduating high school. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projected a decade of stagnation from 2013 to 2023 that places the average graduating class size below where it was in 2013. This year’s high school graduating class will drop 2.3%, or 81,000 students, ending a 15-year period of consistent increases. There are fewer students to fill the luxury dorms, and those arriving at colleges may not even be interested in such spaces. “The things [Gen Z] values are experiences, creativity, being connected to lots of different people, and they’re frugal,” Ruoff says. “These high-end luxury offerings don’t allow for that. Five years ago, millennials may have wanted these items; Gen Z does not. As far as we can tell, that’s only going to increase.” Today’s college applicants document the things they do, not the things they have, she says. This flies directly in the face of an amenities-rich campus or housing environment. For example, college students are priding themselves on their beforeand-after shots, taking sparse, white rooms

and turning them into places that reflect their personalities. This self-expression is celebrated on social media (try an Instagram search for #dormdecor or #dormgoals) and websites such as BuzzFeed and Apartment Therapy. Gen Z is showing an affinity for old dorms with opportunity for personalization, Ruoff says. “There’s a lot of pride in creating these rooms that don’t look anything like an old dorm room. It speaks to a lot of what we see happening even in popular TV shows and the housing market. It’s a lot of makeovers.” Another defining factor for Gen Z may be their frugality. The cost of college continues to climb, increasing 2.4% on average for in-state students enrolled full-time at public four-year colleges and universities from the 2015-16 school year to the 2016-17 session. “For both the parent and the student, cost is always one of the first things they’re looking for,” Ruoff says. “The costs continue to go up, and these luxury apartments add to that.” Luxury housing can also have a negative impact on student retention. In a paper for the Journal of Student Financial Aid, McClure and his colleagues report that some students feel there’s a bait and switch happening at schools. They’re lured in by sparkling new facilities, only to learn those facilities are financially out of reach. It can taint the student’s relationship with the school. “They are in the presence of these wonderful amenities and shops and restaurants, but once they’re here, the money has a way of going really quickly,” McClure says. “They must make some hard

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choices, and for some that means working more, which is not necessarily good for their academics. Sometimes it means they go into credit card debt. When you’re 18 years old and you’re doing a campus tour, it’s wonderful that you have a brand-new residence hall and dining hall, but once you’re there paying for it, it’s a very different set of considerations.” Some schools are responding to the need for cheaper options. This summer the Atlantic reported that Georgia State University, which built one of the country’s most expensive student-housing projects, discovered that a student was 12% less likely to graduate for every $5,000 in unmet financial need. In response to this pricing concern, the school built a simple and smaller dorm. This cheaper, scaled-down option has filled up faster than other campus housing since the day it opened. McClure says the trend is also a reflection of the fact that luxury accommodations are less conducive than traditional housing to community and relationship building, a core tenant of the college experience. “The trend that we saw over the past decade, where developers try to one-up each other with better or more amenities, is coming to an end,” says Benjamin Modleski, COO of education-markets real estate firm Core Spaces. “But I’m not convinced it’s because of decreased enrollments or the increased cost of education. We see now in our industry the new shift for developers to right-size amenities and to put a focus on design.”

Shifting How Campus Housing is Marketed If creativity and frugality are the new college

student passion points—and if schools have seen success in offering stripped-down dorms—it may be in a college’s best interest to feature how students transformed these blank canvases. The most obvious channel for promotion is social media, which some student housing departments are embracing as part of their outreach efforts. Not only are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter a great way to alert students to events and other pertinent notifications, it’s also a way to highlight campus life to prospective students. For example, University Housing at the University of Georgia has a YouTube channel that features tours and contests of dorms that “showcase who you are.” The housing department’s Instagram page incorporates hashtags, such as #homeiswherethearchis, that students use as well. UGA’s housing department also gave a few students the opportunity to serve as brand ambassadors by way of creating dorm vlogs. “Students are more likely to trust fellow students about campus living, versus communication from the university,” Ruoff says. Social campaigns are also an opportunity to retire traditional dorm and campus photos, especially if Gen Z students are more interested in experiences. Ruoff says schools need to focus on showing the social side of campus living, not just where students lay their heads at night. She says the schools that accurately portray where students spend their time are the ones connecting with their audience and being honest about the experience. “[Schools] feel like they have to make sure to show the beautiful brick building with ivy on it, or the traditional archway and a

eorgia State University discovered that a student was 12% less likely to graduate for every $5,000 in unmet financial need. In response, the school built a simple and smaller dorm. This cheaper, scaled-down option has filled up faster than other campus housing.

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Stills from the University of Georgia’s University Housing vlogs, which feature student residents.

very technical lab,” Ruoff says. “They’re not necessarily showing the makerspaces or the lounge spots or people just authentically relaxing in them.” Schools have a competitive advantage in showing the proximity of campus housing to classes and their learning communities. McClure’s research found the upper hand for all on-campus housing came via live-in learning programs, providing residence assistance and extracurricular programs, and course-corrected strategies are reflecting that. It might also be in a school’s best interest to promote some of its other student life offerings, such as food. Ruoff says dining halls are becoming more of a selling point than dorms, with Gen Z spending the majority of their allowance on food and 58%

willing to pay more for organic and natural products. She says admissions counselors hear students and families ask about food more often than housing. “Selecting the right school is about … the feel,” Ruoff says. “Does this feel like me? Does this feel like who I want to be in the future? Does this feel like the people I want to be around? A checklist of amenities isn’t going to tell you that. They want flexibility and options.” The sweet spot in student housing may be showcasing a variety of price points, amenities or academic and social opportunities. Rather than finding the Goldilocks mid-point, it may be about showing the variety (and creativity) of all three bears. m

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Can Marketing Save University Enrollment Rates? University enrollment numbers are predicted to stagnate. Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s how marketers are coming to the rescue. By Hal Conick

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ach new school year, the same boastful platitude rings out across American universities: “The largest class ever!” The campus cliché may be warranted. In fall 2017, 20.4 million people enrolled in colleges or universities, per the National Center for Education Statistics, which is equivalent to 6.2% of the American population. This was an increase of 5.1 million students from the fall of 2000. However, the safety in numbers and clichés may be in danger. Public and private high school class sizes are stagnating, leaving university enrollment poised to drop. Amir Rasool, managing content director of higher education at Hanover Research, says enrollment numbers are predicted to be flat or decreasing over the next 15 years, save for an uptick in 2023. And universities can’t only worry about the future: Estimates from National Student Clearinghouse Research Center show that enrollment was down 1.5% from spring 2016 to spring 2017 at U.S. institutions. When pulling back to 2015, nationwide enrollment is down 2.9%—a loss of more than 500,000 students. “We typically find that when the economy is faring poorly, enrollments go up,” Rasool says. “We saw this most recently in response to the 2008 recession. Conversely, when the economy is thriving and jobs are more plentiful, enrollments tend to fall.” Each region will feel the enrollment drop differently as student populations change, Rasool says. For example, the

Northeast and Midwest will likely see drops in enrollment, while the South and West may see increases. The Northeast, he says, may be most affected because of its greater concentration of higher-education institutions and a projected drop in student population. National predictions don’t tell the whole story; each university needs to do its own math on how to fill seats. How universities will solve that math will differ by institution. Hanover Research’s 2017 Industry Trend Report for Higher Education found that universities will attempt to redress the enrollment problem through tuition fee review and discounting, reviewing the university’s portfolio and recruiting out-of-state students. That third option appears to be the de facto formula for many universities. Schools winning over out-of-state students is a popular option because it’s the easiest way to address the enrollment—and therefore revenue— crisis. Each year students pay billions of dollars in tuition, and universities can’t afford to lose that revenue, especially as threats of diminished education funding loom at both state and federal levels. If tuition isn’t the raison d’être of a university’s business, it’s close. David Burge, George Mason University’s vice president for enrollment management, says private universities have regarded enrollment numbers as dollar signs for years, but the notion is a recent revelation—perhaps 10 to 15 years old—for public institutions. Winning new students is now “core to the work” of all universities, Burge says. This renewed focus on enrollment falls heavily on the shoulders of university advertising and marketing departments. The proof is in the ballooning budgets: A report from Educational Marketing Group and Kantar Media found that advertising spending at universities grew 22% from 2013 to 2016. However, as Rob Zinkan, associate vice president of marketing at Indiana University, wrote in a piece for Inside Higher Ed, outspending the competition isn’t a viable advertising

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strategy by itself. Instead of using blunt-force spending, university marketers must use guile, creativity and a bevy of marketing tools. Here’s what some successful university marketers have done to keep enrollment high.

Know Your Geography

Before marketers reach out to students on the other side of the country, universities should be sure they have a need unmet in their own backyard. For example, Zinkan is still able to comfortably lean on bromides, saying that Indiana University Bloomington has a “recordsetting class” of incoming students, 70% of whom are from Indiana. While this doesn’t mean Indiana can stop worrying about its enrollment rates, Zinkan says the numbers have allowed the university to divvy up its marketing budget “fairly evenly” between in-state and out-of-state students. Despite the national trends, George Mason’s Burge says his university has seen an uptick of high school graduates in parts of Virginia. However, the university is forecasting a “substantial decline” of students within 10 to 15 years. This decline shows why each university must understand its own market, Burge says, as a local enrollment rate may be high this year and desiccated the next.

Data and Measurement

The University of Alabama is one of the success stories of out-of-state student recruiting. In the past decade, Alabama’s attention to data seems to have paid off: In fall 2006, 15,761 students applied to Alabama; in fall 2017, there were 43,693 applications, a 177.2% increase. Approximately 5,000 students from this year’s freshmen class of 7,407 were from outside of Alabama, says Linda Bonnin, vice president of the University of Alabama’s Division of Strategic Communications, who joined Alabama in 2015. Data and measurement have played big roles, Bonnin says. About 15 years ago, Alabama executives noticed a

n bachelor’s degrees n master’s degrees 1.9M

n doctoral degrees

U.S. Degrees Skyrocket 1.2M

790,000 473,502

2017-18: U.S. colleges and universities are expected to award 1.9 million bachelor’s degrees, 790,000 master’s degrees and 183,000 doctoral degrees. 2000-01: U.S. colleges and universities awarded 1.2 million bachelor’s degrees, 473,502 master’s degrees and 119,585 doctoral degrees. *S tatistics per National Center for Education Statistics

183,000

119,585

2017-18

2000-01

decreasing number of in-state students and started digging into the data. What the school found was clear: If the school was to create a sustainable model, officials needed to aggressively recruit out-of-state students. “We know exactly how we can drill down to high schools and determine what the plausibility is of students from that high school choosing the University of Alabama,” Bonnin says. “It can get quite specific in the data. And to me, that’s what’s exciting. It’s not a guessing game. You can determine that you know the viability of being successful with a particular market.” At George Mason University, Burge says data and segmentation have played a similar role in building “the largest freshman class” ever this year. Approximately a quarter of the new class, 753 students, were from outside of

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Virginia in 2017, up from 626 out-of-state students in 2013. “We expanded our marketing operational capacity to allow us to segment communications and we thought critically about how we identify students in the college selection process,” Burge says. Data is especially important for George Mason, as the school has a growth aspiration of 100,000 careerready graduates over a 10-year-period. Burge says the school uses metrics to review potential student conversion from lead to application, application to admission offer and admission offer to attendance. “We begin each year with very specific targets of new student enrollment, which we have arrived at through a backwards calculation of the number of graduates that we want to achieve over time,” Burge says. “We then break that down by market.” By this point, Burge’s team can figure out which students should come from Virginia and how many students need to be recruited elsewhere.

Arriving in the Digital Age

Before Bonnin arrived at the University of Alabama in 2015, the school was “not in the digital age.” This had to change, she says, as digital marketing is essential to win over the generation aptly referred to by some as the iGeneration. “They have everything in the palm of their hand, so the more you can put in the palm of their hand the better,” she says. Now, Alabama has joined the digital age, and digital marketing is the most impactful piece of Alabama’s marketing plan, giving the school a tool that is both effective and inexpensive, Bonnin says. Alabama has tried social media ads, geotargeting, retargeting, rooftop targeting, geofencing and “every other kind of targeting you can think of,” Bonnin says. These tools can track ROI to show universities what is working and what to scrap. “You can adjust it as you need to, based on what you’re learning from the metrics,” Bonnin says.

Adding a Personal Touch

No matter how important digital marketing is, students won’t be won over by e-mail and retargeting alone. A personal touch is needed, Bonnin says, and Alabama reaches out with receptions held across the country. These personal touches need to be “50-50” with digital marketing, she says, lest the digital effort be wasted. The personal touch has become nearly inseparable from digital marketing; Bonnin says Alabama recruiting events surge in attendance—anywhere from 30% to 200%—when they’re bolstered by targeted digital marketing.

Recruiters Across the Country

Just as Alabama’s football coaches recruit the best athletes from across the country, the university’s enrollment and marketing departments recruit the best academic students from across the country. Like many U.S. universities, Alabama has recruiters stationed in multiple states. Their job: convince America’s brightest students to come to campus for a tour. “We have a very organized, strategic and focused effort to recruit out-of-state students,” Bonnin says. “This is from the top-down, all the way to recruiters on the ground. Everybody on our campus recognizes the importance of recruiting students. We don’t want to lose one single student to another university, so all our efforts reflect that commitment to recruitment. We go after the best students in every market.” Bonnin won’t comment on how many recruiters the university employs, but says they’re in every U.S. state, with multiple recruiters in Alabama. Each recruiter has a set number of students they’re expected to recruit, with the data-determined goals varying across the country. George Mason’s recruiting arm isn’t on the same scale as Alabama, Burge says, but the university does place recruiters in regions of the country where they’ve found potential for enrollment growth, including Texas, California and the Southeast region. Although recruiting works for

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George Mason, Burge says it must be done alongside other key investments to successfully develop a new market. University officials must ask themselves questions such as, “Are we buying ACT and SAT names in greater numbers from this area?” and “Am I investing in the right messaging?” to have a successful recruiting program. Plunking a recruiter with vague goals into the middle of America reduces a program’s chance of success.

Having a Consistent Message

The digital marketing, the data research, the recruiters—all go to waste without a consistent, central message. “It’s essential,” says Burge, who adds that his position—vice president for enrollment management—was created to work toward better recruiting and a unified message. “You need to have a smart and thoughtful process to develop the right lead marketing messages,” Burge says. Put differently: Your talking points can be amazing, but they won’t do anything if they aren’t thoughtfully crafted for each market. Good, unique messages must be delivered to different markets, but the messages must be on brand. “Both have to be in place for success,” Burge says of good messages and good strategy. “You can’t be successful without them. Period.”

Word of Mouth and Authentic Branding

States like Alabama, Virginia and Indiana may not sound like magnets for young people, but branding and word of mouth can do yeoman’s work in spreading a university’s message. For example, many Alabama students come from the Northeast and the West Coast, Bonnin says, two regions rife with prestigious universities. No matter; Alabama students, alumni and parents move back to these regions and hype potential students with stories of their college glory days. “It just begins to spread,” Bonnin says. Word of mouth comes easily to universities that are authentic in their messaging and actions. Whether students

Out-of-state Students at Featured Universities INDIANA UNIVERSITY BLOOMINGTON n 55.1% Indiana residents n 36.3% from other U.S. states n 8.6% international

UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA n 41% Alabama residents n 56% from other U.S. states n 3% international

GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY n 80.7% Virginia residents n 19.3% from other U.S. states or international (not separated by GMU’s Office of Institutional Research and Assessment)

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The University of Alabama markets to the smartest students in the U.S.

visit for a campus tour or consider enrolling in classes, their impression of the university must match the messages preached during the marketing campaign. “You shouldn’t go into a market trying to be something that you’re not, changing your message from place to place,” Bonnin says. “Just own who you are. Make everything that you do authentic.” George Mason doesn’t have the same coast-to-coast name recognition as Alabama; the farther potential students live from George Mason’s Virginia campus, the harder it becomes to deliver the brand’s message. George Mason’s staff must work harder to get a potential student’s attention, keep their attention and inspire them to apply and enroll. Less-recognizable schools must take an authentic assessment of themselves to create branding that draws students’ attention, Burge says. In George Mason’s case, this may be reminding potential students from California or Texas about the university’s proximity to Washington, D.C. “We remind them [by saying], ‘Here’s how that proximity improves your college experience,” Burge says. “Each institution [needs to] have something like that.”

Bright Lights, Big Reach

Alabama’s football team has given alumni and students plenty of reason to yell “Roll Tide”—the school’s rallying cry—as the team has rarely lost a game over the past few years. Bonnin is right there yelling with them, as Alabama’s athletic success has helped her spread the university’s message. In December 2015, for example, Alabama was playing against Michigan State in the Cotton Bowl, giving Bonnin a chance to demonstrate the power of digital. “The excitement was peaking and the football team was there for the game, so we went into both markets with a strong digital presence,” she says. “We began to carry our messages to prospective high school students and their parents. It was really effective for us.” While sports can mesmerize prospective students, Bonnin says athletics should only be a piece of the wooing process. “It gets a lot of attention at certain times of the year, but we also want them to understand the academic quality of the institution,” Bonnin says. “That’s a message that we drive pretty consistently across the country.” Even so, the hollering of University of Alabama’s rallying cry is likely a draw for students across America who see the excitable crowds, convivial atmosphere and thrilling games. More than 25 million viewers watched the Alabama Crimson Tide defeat the Clemson Tigers in the 2016 National Championship game. You can’t buy that kind of reach.

Remember Your Mission

Universities can recruit new students from across America to bolster their enrollment numbers, but Burge says university officials must remember their school’s core mission and values. For example, two of George Mason’s core values are diversity and accessibility, which Burge says dovetail with producing great outcomes for graduates. This means George Mason officials look for “the right applicants … for the long-term growth of the institution” as it pertains to the university’s mission.

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“I counsel anybody engaged in this work to think critically about who they are and who they set up camp with to help them achieve this goal,” Burge says. “And to remain true to their mission.” Part of George Mason’s mission is targeting the neediest students— especially from Virginia—and offering them merit scholarships. When the scholarships aren’t available, Burge says there’s an ethical question of whether a student can afford a four-year degree, which is $34,370 per year for out-ofstate students as of 2017-2018. Telling students the truth about money is important, so students don’t feel like they’ve been bamboozled, Burge says. Alabama’s mission—to “advance the intellectual and social condition of the people of the state, the nation and the world through the creation, translation and dissemination of knowledge”—also shines a light on how the bulk of the school’s scholarships and discounted tuition are allotted: to students with high academic achievement. Bonnin says more than 40% of this year’s freshman class scored 30 or higher on their ACT (on a scale of 36). In addition, 30.8% of this year’s freshman were in the top 10% of their graduating high school class. “We definitely want the best and brightest students here because they have better chances of being successful,” Bonnin says.

Celebrations are Temporary

What’s the Downside? “Some state institutions are experiencing a negative public reaction from in-state students and their families. These groups feel that their tax dollars are helping to fund in-state universities, and therefore they (or their children) should get priority admission. Additionally, some states (North Carolina, for example) have laws capping the number of out-of-state students a public university can admit, and institutions risk losing state funding if they exceed that number.”

– Amir Rasool, managing content director of higher education at Hanover Research, on the tribulations of recruiting out-of-state students.

University marketers can celebrate, but they can’t forget the work ahead, Burge says. He and his team had a temporary celebration after learning this year’s incoming class was the school’s largest ever, but he says no marketing professionals can rest on their prior successes. “Last year, I gathered everybody together and we celebrated the numbers,” Burge says. “I said, ‘We should all feel really good about what you did. Now let’s go do it again.’ That’s the nature of enrollment. It has a very clear beginning and end.” m

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There are nearly 5,000 higher education institutions in the United States, and they are all trying to convince prospective students, and their parents, that they are the right choice. With the cost undergraduate and graduate degrees at an all-time high and increased competition from non-traditional and overseas universities, higher education marketing departments are more pressed than ever. Finding the right higher education marketing partner can mean the difference between success and failure. Whether you are looking for an agency to create and plan your next marketing campaign, a software company to manage your social media efforts, or a research company that specializes in the higher education market, AMA's Directory of Higher Education Marketing Providers is the perfect place to start your search.

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Directory of Higher Education Marketing Providers

160over90 160over90 is the unparalleled leader in higher ed branding, setting the bar for authentic storytelling and results-driven strategy. Anticipating the emerging needs of top institutions, pro sports teams, nonprofits and lifestyle brands, 160over90 is constantly evolving its capabilities— from research and planning through execution and activation.

Acquia

Adobe

Acquia is the leading provider of cloud-based, digital experience management solutions. Forward-thinking organizations rely on Acquia to transform the way they can engage with customers in a personal and contextual way, across every device and channel. With Acquia, thousands of customers globally are delivering digital experiences with transformational business impact. Visit https://www.acquia.com or call at

Adobe is the global leader in digital marketing and digital media solutions. Adobe tools and services empower faculty, staff and students to create groundbreaking digital content, deploy it across media and devices, measure and optimize it over time, and achieve greater success. Through integrated software, resources, and affordable purchasing options, education institutions can provide their campus with the tools to optimize learning and elevate administration.

+1 617-588-9600.

http://www.adobe.com/ experience-cloud.html

Campus Sonar

Capture Higher Ed

Institutions of higher education around the world recognize a strong reputation leads to high quality faculty, an edge in recruiting a dynamic student body, supportive and active alumni, a competitive edge in research and grants, and the support of local communities and government authorities. Blue Moon Consulting Group can help you take a proactive approach to protect your institution’s hard earned reputation.

Campus Sonar is a specialized social listening agency that empowers colleges and universities to find and analyze conversations that matter, seize engagement opportunities, and develop data-informed strategies. We draw on thought leadership, higher education expertise, and modern technologies to provide actionable insights and ignite campus strategy.

https://capturehighered. com

bluemoonconsultinggroup. com/highered/

https:// campussonar.com/

http://160over90.com/

Blue Moon Consulting Group

Capture Higher Ed is the world’s best at using big data and cutting-edge technology to attract, engage and recruit mission-fit students. Capture maximizes engagement at the most influential times, delivering a better ROI to its partners. Capture’s technology provides highly customizable, on-demand data, to easily measure outcomes in real time. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017 | MARKETING NEWS

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Directory of Higher Education Marketing Providers

Carnegie Communications Carnegie Communications has been at the forefront of integrated, response-driven enrollment marketing and recruitment for over 30 years. Through customized, cutting-edge digital solutions and a multi-channel lead generation platform, Carnegie connects higher education institutions with the target audience they seek. http://www. carnegiecomm.com/

Chronicle of Higher Education www.chronicle.com For 50 years, The Chronicle of Higher Education has independently and intelligently delivered higher-education news and information to the faculty and staff of our worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s colleges and universities. More than 215,000 dedicated professionals in higher education read our print edition, and our website reaches more than 1.9 million unique visitors.

Centro CCA / Creative Communication Associates CCA is the nation's leading full-service marketing communications and branding agency, specializing exclusively in higher education. From the Ivy League, to large public universities, to small private colleges, to specialty schools, CCA's more than 30 years of strategic and creative expertise has built some of the best brands in higher education today

http://ccanewyork.com

Collegis Education Collegis Education is an integrated enrollment growth management company that helps colleges and universities attract, enroll and engage students through customized marketing and technology solutions. With more than two decades of experience in higher education, the Collegis team develops industry-leading strategies that enable institutions to achieve long-term, sustainable enrollment growth. From portfolio marketing services to technology solutions, enrollment growth management as a system has helped the majority of our Collegis partners across the country achieve double-digit rates of enrollment growth. collegiseducation.com

Centro provides enterpriseclass technology for digital advertising. Its solution, Basis, fuels business performance for marketing teams. It is the only advertising technology platform that seamlessly unifies digital media planning, buying and optimization across publisherdirect and programmatic ad-buying. Its integrated omnichannel demand-side platform connects to tools that automate the entire digital media process. By automating operational tasks and media buying on a single platform, Centro customers can deliver better performing campaigns and leverage successes to grow budgets and ad spend. Learn more at www.centro.net.

University Promos and Print, powered by Consolidus UniversityPromosAnd Print.com, powered by Consolidus, is a dedicated promotional product site for higher education. We have designed and delivered over 15,000,000 custom products with 99% satisfaction. Check out our site today to see top products for the university market! www. universitypromosandprint. com

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Directory of Higher Education Marketing Providers

Converge Consulting Converge Consulting is the digital agency for education. We develop sound strategy and translate it into campaigns that deliver ROI in a crowded marketplace. Visit our website convergeconsulting.org for more information. convergeconsulting.org

Digital Pulp Digital Pulp is a digital marketing agency that loves higher learning. We build deep relationships with people by keeping it simple. Our strategy is shaped by a profound understanding of your difference and nature, and our creative marries content, structure, beauty and brand. Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s create together. www.digitalpulp.com

Dartlet www.dartlet.com Dartlet is a leading perception management and reputation strategy firm based in the Pacific Northwest. We specialize in the science of organizational personality, creating transformative, research-driven communication strategies in higher education. Known for our highly innovative research methods and large group consensus-building, Dartlet delivers unmatched marketing strategy and intelligent creative.

Education Marketing Group www.emgonline.com Premier, full-service marketing agency. Strategic brand counsel. Nationally recognized branding & media experts. 200+ HE clients. We create "Brands with Great Stories to Tell", masterfully integrate inbound/outbound strategies, and successfully implement ROI-driven brand campaigns.

Digital Deployment Digital Deployment builds award-winning websites for higher education. Clients include the University of California, California State University, and many others across the country. Digital Deployment uses Drupal CMS with a special UI to make your website incredibly easy to update. Features full integration with Mogo, Hobsons, Salesforce, and others. https://www. digitaldeployment.com/

Eduvantis Eduvantis helps higher education institutions grow enrollments and improve marketing effectiveness by better aligning their program delivery, brand positioning, funnel management and customer engagement with well-defined target markets. In addition to working across higher education, we have deep experience working with business schools and other professional schools. Eduvantis Digital provides search engine marketing (SEO and PPC) and social media strategy. Our mission is to help your school gain a competitive advantage.

www.eduvantis.com NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017 | MARKETING NEWS

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Directory of Higher Education Marketing Providers

Epicosity

ESM Digital

Emma's powerful digital marketing platform makes it easy for teams of all sizes to create beautifully designed email campaigns that drive results. With award-winning thought leadership, friendly expert services and thoughtful product design, Emma helps marketers worldwide do their very best work. Learn more at

Epicosity is an ideas company specializing in higher education marketing by blending creative services with a strong digital footprint. A global agency, we work with clients in 23 states and five countries. We help you tell your story through branding, digital strategy, public relations, web development, video production and more.

We Succeed When You Succeed. Just like you measure your success by the successes of your students and graduates, ESM Digital thrives when our partner schools do. We specialize in higher education and use integrated digital marketing to help colleges and universities across the U.S. attract high-achieving students to their applicant pool who are more likely to commit, enroll, succeed, and graduate.

myemma.com.

http://epicosity.com/

www.ESMDigital.com

Ethode

ExpertFile

Emma

Ethode is a full life cycle web & mobile software development agency headquartered in North East Ohio. We're proud that higher education is our largest vertical and our friendly staff have a wide array of products and solutions to meet your needs, budgets and timelines. https://www.ethode.com/ 68

Fathom

ExpertFile is the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first content marketing software that helps schools publish, promote and distribute their experts online through a searchable web network to drive connections with students, donors, journalists and conference organizers. Clients include University of Texas, UNC Chapel Hill, Wheaton College and Wake Forest University.

Fathom is a full-service digital marketing agency for transformation minded higher-education marketers. With experience in connecting institutional strategy and strategic marketing solutions, Fathom helps modern marketers to navigate change and calibrate admissions and marketing departments. Fathom is headquartered in Cleveland with offices in Columbus and Chicago.

https://expertfile.com

www.fathomdelivers.com

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Directory of Higher Education Marketing Providers

FindAUniversity – FindAMasters & FindAPhD How diverse is your student body? We can help you attract high quality international graduate students with effective & measurable online marketing campaigns. FindAMasters. com & FindAPhD.com are two of the largest graduate program directories in the world – drop by our booth for some Cadbury chocolate and a quick demo! http://www. findauniversity.com/

Frontline Education Frontline Education is an integrated insights partner serving more than 12,000 educational organizations and millions of educators in their efforts to develop the next generation of learners. Bringing the best education technologies together in one integrated solution, Frontline supports the front line of education in efficiently and effectively managing everything from recruiting, hiring and absence management to professional learning, evaluation and special education.

www.frontlineeducation.com

Funnelback If you’re analyzing web traffic, you know that over 30% of your visitors navigate using site search. Funnelback for Higher Education makes search a revenue-positive marketing asset. This flexible, pre-assembled search experience includes sophisticated marketing analytics and accessibility tools out of the box. Funnelback. Search like you’ve never seen it. www.funnelback.com

Gatesman Noble Noble is part of Gatesman, one of the fastest-growing, mid-size, privately owned, fully integrated agencies in the U.S. with offices in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Springfield, Mo. We have expanded our size and scope, particularly in the areas of digital, social media and PR for our Higher Education clients. http://www. gatesmanagency.com/

GGP www.ggp.com GGP creates unique experiences for our customer’s retail journey. With over 120 properties across the country, our properties are filled with opportunities to enhance and promote your brand. From large format advertising, to onsite consumer events to local sponsorships, we help create custom, targeted campaigns at any of our shopping destinations.

GMASS Looking for more students? The Graduate Management Admission Search Service (GMASS®) allows you to find and connect with over 500,000 aspiring graduate management education candidates – who have the specific qualifications you’re looking for and are interested in hearing directly from you. With GMASS you can search in over 2,000 unique combinations to create targeted campaigns to meet your marketing and recruiting needs. GMASS www.gmac.com/gmass NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017 | MARKETING NEWS

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Directory of Higher Education Marketing Providers

Hanover Research Founded in 2003, Hanover is a global research and analytics firm that delivers market intelligence through a unique, fixedfee model to hundreds of higher education institutions worldwide. Hanover’s team of experts helps higher education leaders make informed decisions, identify and seize opportunities, and heighten their effectiveness.

http://www. hanoverresearch.com/

InMotionNow inMotionNow solves project request, project management, content review, and reporting challenges for marketing and creative teams with its creative production management solution called inMotion. With inMotion, teams can automate administrative tasks that typically distract content creators from getting their content to market faster. http://www.inmotionnow. com/ 70

High School Counselor Marketing High School Counselor EMail Lists The most comprehensive and thorough email lists available with unlimited yearly usage. Proprietary lists built and maintained by our own staff. You control the data! High School Counselor E-Directories: E-mailed quarterly directly to over 56,000 + High School Counselor’s with full page color ads available

http://www. highschoolcounselor marketing.com/

Inside Higher Ed Inside Higher Ed is the online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education. Inside Higher Ed draws 1.5 million readers each month, making it the ideal platform to reach a large and diverse audience of influential higher education professionals. Visit insidehighered.com today. https://www. insidehighered.com/

HigherEdJobs HigherEdJobs® is the leading source for jobs and career information in academia. Each month, 1.5 million visitors come to our site, a majority of whom hold an advanced degree and have worked in higher education for 5+ years. Recruiting with HigherEdJobs ensures your school attracts and hires the very best. https://www. higheredjobs.com/

JetSpring www.jetspring.com JetSpring uses AI powered messaging and data analytics solutions to bridge the gap between institutions and students. Using brand-specific chatbot technology, supported by collegeeducated chat agents, our solutions improve institutional health by growing enrollment, boosting engagement, and increasing student matriculation.

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Directory of Higher Education Marketing Providers

Keypath Education We take the time to get to know your institution, your goals, and your current and prospective students. Our approach leverages front-end research and best-in-class tools and technology for creating an integrated marketing plan backed by data. http://keypathedu.com/

Knowble Media www.knowble.io Knowble Media was established in 2010 as a digital communications partner for higher education and educational non-profits. We focus on creating digital experiences designed to strengthen brand position, achieve communication goals, and exceed expectations.

Libris by Photoshelter Libris by PhotoShelter is the simplest and fastest cloud-based digital media library built for photos and video. We’ve helped over 100 colleges and universities source, organize, and distribute their visual assets quickly and easily. We also own and operate our network, so every asset managed is safe and secure. Learn how Libris can help your school at

libris.photoshelter.com

MagnetStreet Localist Lipman Hearne

www.localist.com

Lipman Hearne delivers branding, strategy, and communications that win minds. With 50 years of marketing experience, we’ve helped over 400 higher education institutions increase awareness and national rankings, enroll hundreds of thousands of additional students, and raise over $28 billion. We’re full service – providing strategy, planning, design, development, and implementation. www.lipmanhearne.com

Localist is an event technology company that turns the calendar on your website into a marketing machine. Through our software, Localist helps organizations easily publish, manage and promote events, saving time and money while boosting event ROI. To date, Localist has powered more than 5 million events across the world.

Postcards are good. Magnetic Postcards are better! When you add a magnet, you will increase the ROI on your mailing. We will help you design a magnet that will jump from your design. Visit us at booth #5 to learn more. https://www. magnetstreet.com/ NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017 | MARKETING NEWS

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Directory of Higher Education Marketing Providers

MBuy

Mindpower Inc

MBuy drives enrollment & engagement by connecting higher education institutions with students and families throughout their decisionmaking lifecycle across digital and traditional channels. By leveraging the entire media spectrum under one roof, the media planning & buying process is simplified and customized based on your institution’s needs. Our real-time cross-channel optimization and reporting capabilities keep you ahead of the competition, and give you the campaign visibly you need.

We love to think. About politics. World peace. And the awesome power of a great education to change, well, everything. Think of us as marketers on a mission: to help you unleash the truest truths of your organization in ways that transform lives. For almost 25 years, our mighty band of brandbuilders has helped bring great ideas kicking and screaming to life. Our big ideas, memorable marketing campaigns, and strategic storytelling are designed to #GetInTheirHeads – and get you the results you need.

www.mbuy.com

http://mindpowerinc.com/

https://www. mogointeractive.com/

mStoner

New City

mStoner, Inc. is a digitalfirst agency committed to tailored solutions that deliver real results. We craft powerful, tailored, human-centric experiences to illuminate your brand and allow you to tell the story only you can tell. We position your team for improved productivity, sustainable growth, internal alignment, and proofpositive success.

NewCity is an interactive design agency specializing in websites and digital campaigns. After more than 20 years creating digital experiences for nonprofits and higher education, we know a thing or two about what works. But we also use research to understand each client’s challenges and develop creative, strategic solutions.

Mongoose Revolutionize the way your campus communicates with Mongoose, higher education's preferred messaging platform. Elegantly designed and exceptionally intuitive, Mongoose is a gamechanging texting solution for your entire institution.

https:// mongooseresearch. com 72

Visit our website:

mStoner.com

Mogo Interactive Mogo Interactive, a Learfield Company, is an industry leader in online marketing and media solutions for 200+ companies across the U.S. and Canada. As a leader in innovative digital marketing, we design and deploy customized campaigns to help universities capture the power of the digital world and realize exceptional results

www.insidenewcity.com

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Directory of Higher Education Marketing Providers

NRCCUA

Niche https://www.niche.com Niche is the largest website for researching colleges. Every month millions of students use our rankings, reviews, and data to choose the right schools for them. Colleges can upgrade to a Premium Profile to make their school stand out and drive more applications, campus visits, and inquiries.

Ologie Ologie is a branding and marketing agency. We’re a team of strategic thinkers, creative problem solvers, and storytellers. Together, we’ve helped over 130 colleges and universities across the country define their purposes and tell their stories in powerful ways. We create brand experiences through all forms of media: print, digital, environmental, photographic, and video.

ologie.com

National Research Center for College & University Admissions (NRCCUA) NRCCUA® is a membership organization that links colleges and universities to the nation’s largest college and career planning program for students seeking postsecondary guidance. Members receive exclusive access to Encoura™ Data Lab — an educational data science, analytics, enrollment services, digital marketing and research platform. Website:

OHO Interactive OHO Interactive is a Boston-based agency with years of experience delivering award-winning strategy, design, and web development solutions in higher education. We work with our clients to “fix big website messes” through a contentfirst approach, active prospect tracking, and research-driven UX.

www.encoura.org

https://www.oho.com/

OmniUpdate

Paskill, Stapleton & Lord

OmniUpdate is the leading provider of content management solutions designed to streamline content administration and solve the digital marketing and communication challenges of higher education. With the largest user community among higher ed CMS providers, OmniUpdate delivers an award-winning CMS that meets the unique needs of colleges and universities.

https://omniupdate. com/

PS&L is an enrollmentmarketing agency focused on the longterm enrollment health of our client institutions. Traditional undergraduates, adult degree completers or graduate students; our work helps you intercept prospects throughout the selection process. Services offered: Advertising, Brand Identity, Consulting, Market Research, Publication Design, Staff Development, Video & Web Services.

http://psandl.com/ NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017 | MARKETING NEWS

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Directory of Higher Education Marketing Providers

Primacy Positive Promotions http://www. positivepromotions.com

An industry-leader and creative marketing specialist for over 70 years, Positive Promotions’ experience enables us to help you develop and implement strategic solutions for your recruitment, recognition and branding program needs.

QCA QCA is the promotional product industry’s only independent, nonprofit, accreditation organization dedicated to helping provide safe and compliant products. QCA’s sole purpose is to certify responsible sourcing processes involved in product quality, product safety, supply chain security, social accountability, and environmental stewardship.

QCA – Quality and Safety. Delivered. www.qcalliance.org 74

Primacy is an award-winning, independent digital agency that delivers powerful experiences connecting brands, people and moments. Primacy combines in-depth education expertise with cross-industry experience, unparalleled client service, and solutionoriented innovative technology. Primacy drives meaningful impact and measurable results around admissions, advancement and academic reputation outcomes. Services include strategy, design/UX, marketing, media planning/ buying, technology, video and mobile.

www.theprimacy.com

SimpsonScarborough http://www. simpsonscarborough. com/ In higher ed, creative ideas need to be inspirational and motivational — but also grounded in research and vetted by stakeholders. Our integrated approach to market research, strategy, and creative services brings together your people, vision, and values with our recognized knowledge and partnership to build

brands that inspire and endure.

PPAI www.promotional productswork.org Promotional products are an essential branding media that advance marketing campaigns. Promotional products break through the constant hum of advertising and give brands access to personal advertising space they can’t buy.

Smart College Group Smart College Group provides custom, responsive higher education marketing services. We specialize in search services, content creation, IP targeting, and social media. Use our combined 40+ years of experience to track, communicate, and attract the best students for your college or university. Nothing we do is one size fits all. www.smartcollegegroup.com

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Directory of Higher Education Marketing Providers

Sprout Social Sprout Social offers social media engagement, advocacy and analytics solutions for leading agencies and brands.

https:// sproutsocial. com/

Story + Structure Story+Structure is a human-centered innovation design firm. By creating meaningful engagement between people and organizations, we help organizations become experience driven.

StudentBridge

http://www. storyandstructure. com/

StudentBridge Inc. is the leading provider of student engagement and conversion solutions for colleges and universities worldwide. We help schools tell their unique story and more effectively engage prospective students through our proprietary video communication, virtual campus tour, and advanced analytics platforms. Our solutions help colleges and universities identify website visitors, engage prospects, and convert prospective students into actual students, delivering measurable and immediate ROI for admission and marketing officers. http://studentbridge.com/

TERMINALFOUR

TextAim

http://www. terminalfour.com/

www.textaim.com

StudyPortals B.V. Location: Boston, MA Contact: Steven Mulligan, Regional Director of North America Phone: 857-302-2395 Fax: +31 403 046 226 Email: insights@studyportals.com Web: https://www.studyportals.com/

StudyPortals is the international study choice platform, enabling students to find and compare their study options across borders. With over 114,000 published courses from over 2,450 participating universities and over 19 million users in 2016, StudyPortals is a leading information source for study seekers. Founded in 2009, StudyPortals covers universities in Europe, the Americas, Oceania, and Asia. For universities, StudyPortals is a results-based channel for international student recruitment.

TERMINALFOUR is a digital marketing & web content management platform for higher education. We enable Universities & Colleges to drive student recruitment, retention, alumni fundraising & research promotion by maximizing the effectiveness of their digital & content strategies.

TextAim is a cloudbased communications company that allows back and forth conversations with students by text. Since students prefer to use text instead of phones and email, TextAim allows schools to communicate to hundreds or thousands of students through a system as easy to use as email. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017 | MARKETING NEWS

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Directory of Higher Education Marketing Providers

The Thorburn Group, a Stamats Company Our work is driven by a singular, simple thought we call the centering idea crafted to tell the world where your brand stands and where it is headed. Our work is insight-driven and creatively focused, neither pure emotion nor pure data. Because we believe relying too fully on one to the exclusion of the other wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do the job.

http:// thethorburngroup.com

University Business University Business is the leading provider of business and management solutions for higher education administrators at two- and four-year colleges and universities nationwide. University Business also produces the annual UBTech Conference, where higher educationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leaders combine visionary thinking with practical solutions.

https://www. universitybusiness. com/

Up & Up Up&Up is a higher ed marketing agency that's committed to helping institutions exceed their goals through brand strategy, storytelling, and marketing. We believe connecting the right student to the right school not only provides a perfect college experience, it makes them fans for life.

www.upandup.agency

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Directory of Higher Education Marketing Providers

VisionPoint Marketing

Wevo

VisionPoint Marketing is an integrated marketing agency built to serve institutions of higher education. Through our focus on branding; website design and development; and digital and traditional marketing, we help our clients overcome their strategic, creative and technical challenges.

WEVO enables digital marketers to test and improve website conversion before going live. It is a platform that leverages artificial intelligence and crowdsourcing technology to predict relative conversion, identify why consumers aren’t converting and inform a better website. WEVO's award winning platform has been used by leading Fortune 500 firms and has delivered more than 2x increases in conversion.

visionpointmarketing. com

www. wevoconversion.com

University of Florida The University of Florida’s mission is to prepare students to lead and influence the next generation for economic and societal benefit. One of the nation’s largest universities, UF has become the first Florida school to break into the top 10 best public universities in the 2018 U.S. News & World Report rankings.

www.ufl.edu

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DIGITAL MARKETING

How to Build a Career in Digital Marketing Take these steps to define yourself as a force in the fastest-moving field of marketing BY JASON ERICKSON

s the digital landscape continues to evolve with all of the tools, platforms and possibilities it encompasses, the skills required to thrive and achieve the dynamism essential to an impactful and long-standing marketing career have shifted. These changes have been particularly evident in roles at the director level within the user experience and digital marketing spheres, where there is potential for expansive career growth and the ability to make an impact on the industry. Position Yourself for a Rapidly Evolving Digital Space Master in-demand skills and tools. Google Adwords, user interface, mobile design, responsive design and full-stack design skills are at the top of the list for employers looking for talent. Create various digital assets. Hone your skills and strategic approaches to create websites that are able to unite

other business assets, such as social media channels, to create impactful environments across technologies and platforms. This is a key priority for organizations in becoming competitive. Put the user and platform first when developing digital content and technological assets. Elements such as screen size, mobile responsiveness and the effects they can have on customer experience and communities are essential. Regional focus is a factor. As cities, their supporting economies, key industries and communities evolve at different paces with separate considerations and priorities, it is important to consider their impact on technology. The Future of Digital Marketing and UX Careers Going forward, integrated video and livestream technologies, along with increased automation capabilities and the design elements they bring with them will continue to lead the evolving digital field. To ensure you maintain an advantage, it’s

career advancement

important to keep several tips in mind. Be a digital asset, and maintain yourself. With marketing becoming increasingly specialized, it is essential that you decide the direction you want to go, hone your specific skill set and continue to focus on refining and innovating in that area. Don’t be a “master of none.” Focus on innovation and staying ahead of the latest and greatest. Certifications are losing value due to the speed of the market and digital industry. You should spend your time remaining abreast of trends, nuances and opportunities within your specific skill area to remain competitive. Do project work on the side to boost your portfolio. With most hiring decisions now based directly on portfolios, your work samples hold as much—if not more—weight than your résumé. Keep this in mind as you grow in your skills and knowledge. Stay professional and never stop innovating. Maintain high professional standards and be mindful of the delicate balance of the “quirkiness” of talent by the market. Let your creativity and innovative spirit flow, but don’t forget to keep your eye on the strategic focus, dynamic opportunity and innovative capability of the digital landscape. m JASON ERICKSON is director of Sparks Group’s creative division.

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ON THE RECORD

Managing Marketers: Tips From the Top of the Organization Between setting staff size, balancing dueling skill sets and interdepartmental rivalries, marketing managers have their work cut out for them. Here’s how Sharat Sharan, co-founder, president and CEO of global webinar solutions provider ON24, does it. BY ZACH BROOKE | STAFF WRITER

 zbrooke@ama.org

What advice do you have for determining the size of a marketing department?

All organizational functions should be shaped by the goals of the business, and a marketing team is no different. Start with your objectives, then determine the talent level, experience and headcount it will take to achieve them. If rapid growth is the top priority, it’s important to have a strong, strategic

leader of demand generation with a healthy team behind him or her to execute campaigns, pump out content, analyze all the results and double-down on the tactics that are driving pipeline. A business that’s in a slower growth stage or more mature phase can slow down their demand generation efforts and place more emphasis on brand building, creative campaigns and sustaining their reputation. The traditional view of marketing

career advancement

as a cost center is outdated. Marketing is part of a company’s holistic revenue strategy, so the level of their revenue responsibilities should determine the development of the organization.

How big is your marketing department, both in terms of numbers and relative to the rest of the company? How did you arrive at that size?

Over the past 15 years our marketing team has been dynamic, consisting of a couple people at the beginning to more than 20 at one point. The department has evolved as our company has evolved. We’ve added new roles and capabilities to support different business models, leverage emerging marketing technologies and accelerate our pipeline growth. The agility of a marketing organization is more important than its size. A winning team has a balance of strategic experience and startup scrappiness—a strong set of leaders who instill a data-driven methodology to guide the department and a junior layer responsible for day-today execution. For that reason, we’ve invested in adding SaaS marketing veterans who drive our overall strategy

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career advancement

ON THE RECORD

and ensure that macro-level decisions are maximizing our results. Then, we’ve brought on a diverse set of marketers who bring an equal balance of creativity, operations and technical sophistication to keep us moving forward.

Q A

How do you know if you have too few or too many marketers?

It’s less about the quantity of people and more about the quality of results. Look at every aspect of the marketing organization to gauge its overall health. If you are seeing an incremental increase in pipeline, is the cost per lead increasing? Or, are you growing like crazy, but also experiencing more churn? Use business indicators to assess the overall performance and pinpoint the weak spots. Then, determine how to improve it—whether it’s headcount, investing in a different marketing technology or changing strategic course.

How would you recommend companies organize their marketing departments, both in terms of how a team is structured and where the department fits in with the rest of the company?

Silicon Valley’s culture is built on asking questions, and that entrepreneurial mentality is an important mindset for today’s marketers. Just like running a startup, a brilliant idea only goes so far. You must prove it’s a sustainable business. That’s the approach we try to foster—having the freedom to think up unique campaigns, but also having the data to back up the business reason for it. Luckily, marketing technology has reached a level of maturity where being data-driven isn’t rocket science. We’re at a point where data analytics are baked into every aspect of digital marketing and it’s integrated across the marketing organization. That’s the way we’ve designed our marketing platform— making it easy for data-driven marketers to translate customer engagement into actionable insights. It’s less about mastering data science and more about knowing what to measure and pulling the right reports to provide real insight to your customers and the business. To get there, require creatives to have objectives behind every campaign that ladder to bigger business goals. Understanding strategic business objectives is key. Then, you need data to show your progress against them.

There’s always debate over the salesmarketing relationship, and whether marketing should report to sales. In the era of the self-educated buyer, the marketing organization needs to partner with sales rather than be its subordinate. Marketing is the only team engaging with prospects and customers across the entire buying cycle, from awareness to loyalty, and brings that customer-centric view to the C-suite.

Where should data-literate marketers defer to the creatives, or what do they need to understand about the creatives’ thought process to ensure no one is alienated and both are producing the best possible work product?

Not everyone can be generalists and have firm foundations in multiple disciplines. But there is a need between colleagues to be able to speak the same language, especially for those who serve in the same department. With that in mind,

how can you ensure creative-minded marketers are also data-literate?

Being data-driven isn’t just about numbers and demographics, it’s about understanding customer behavior and psychology. Being able to delve inside the minds of customers and prospects provides a huge source of inspiration for creatives.

If you’re getting the right kind of data, it’s fuel for the creative fire. Neither side is superior; it should be a cooperative process.

There’s tension between some marketing and sales teams. What does marketing need to know about sales teams to help them meet their objectives?

Here’s a common scenario: A salesperson receives several bad leads from the marketing team, doubts the validity of all marketing-generated leads and gets frustrated by not having support. Tension between sales and marketing arises when there’s a lack of trust. To form a true partnership, it’s critical for marketers to realize that it’s the quality of leads that matter, not the quantity.

What should managers take into account for specific employees when setting goals for them?

Think about the overall business goals, then your team’s goals and then how an employee can uniquely contribute. It’s a waterfall effect that starts at the top, and then is personalized at the individual level. Knowing how your goals impact the entire company instills a higher level of responsibility, accountability and pride in your work.

Q A

How much goal-setting should be left to employees?

Goal-setting should be done in collaboration between a manager and the employee. It’s the manager’s job to ensure an employee’s KPIs align with the business objectives, but then employees should have the independence to develop their own goals within that framework. This approach creates a sense of ownership and sparks a sense of entrepreneurship inside them. m

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advertisers’index ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Quick source for contacting the suppliers in the November/December 2017 issue of Marketing News. 2017 Directory of Higher Education Marketing Providers . ...................................... p. 64-77 2017-2018 AMA Training Series ........................... p. 78 URL: h ttp://ama.marketing/ts 2018 AMA Winter Academic Conference ................... inside back cover ttp://ama.marketing/winter2018 URL: h

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#OfficeGoals A peek inside the marketersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; offices that make us drool

FAME, an experiential retail marketing agency, retained NELSON to design its office in a historic building in downtown Minneapolis. Housing roughly 25 employees, the space consists of a reception area, two conference rooms, an open-office work area and a bar and entertaining area. Each area was customized for its specific purpose. Intricate details mixed with existing elements, such as Terrazzo flooring, add character while complementing the buildingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s history. m

PHOTOS: FARM KID STUDIOS

Design: NELSON

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