SXSW Student Articles - Brands & Marketing

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BRANDS &

MARKETING

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ABSTRACT

#FoodPorn or Bust: The Socialization of Food Alana Bierbaum Graduate: M.S. Marketing alana.bierbaum@du.edu Instagram & Twitter: @alanabierbaum Link to Flipbaord Magazine Link to Session Food Connectedness

Millennials’ relationship with food is more advanced than any other generation in history. The panel, hosted by Pinterest, and comprised of food industry professionals in varying capacities and expertise especially in the relationship between millennial culture and food explored that relationship. As a self-described foodie, I was quite fascinated with this topic going in and further understanding how I became part of a generation that is so obsessed with food presentation, plating, exotic flavors, and ambience.

SESSION

Pinterest is known for being the social platform that allows for discovery and curation, different than seeing images and scrolling past. Enhancing the almost discovery search engine capabilities and interaction that this platform has in regards to quality content and the user, a lens feature was launched. This feature allows for users to snap a photo through their Pinterest app of something that they like and then provide similar images on their Pinterest page and ideas of products and where to purchase them. It is a way of providing offline discovery promoted by online images.

Relating that and other digital platforms to food, millennials have access to endless scores of content, creative recipes, where to find the best key lime pie, innovative food trucks, and anything the heart desires. Pinterest itself is the second largest food website, with recipes, photo inspiration, and restaurant suggestions. Tastemade videos help to create curiosity around food, how it’s made, the creativity that goes into preparing it, and translate that curiosity into the offline world. The digital age has provided a global and mobile opportunity for the creation of native and high quality food content. The important thing to remember for content creators is to create varied content for different platforms, being thoughtful about customers and how they engage with it. The idea is to create insatiable content.

Food is the new format of social currency among millennials.

Research has been conducted on this food participation and all that accompanies it including the lists being made of new restaurants to try and Pinterest board curation among others.

The research led to interviewing food industry players of note including Anthony Bourdain and having candid conversations about food trends like jackfruit cropping up everywhere and food cities like Brooklyn that dictate the way we consume.

Why do millennials interact with food and food culture differently than our parents and grandparents’ generations? It can boil down to access as well as control. Food obsession amongst millennials in online and offline interaction is greater than any other documented generation in history. Food has the ability to act as a cultural connector, and it is easier than ever to create, share, and find content. Within that ease also becomes the opportunity to provide really satisfying food moments and associations. Video series such as Tastemade and Chef’s Table establish multi-episode docu-series content with regional and global tastemakers that tell stories around the food and the creators. Viewership is easier than ever as is technology, distribution, and ease in content creation are driving food curiosity into further prominence. We as a generation don't have houses but spend more on food culture more than any other generation. Food is used as a format of anti-technology, as a way of engaging and connecting with something real. Tech helps facilitate that but food is about connectivity and an evaluation and reflection of ideals. Controlling food and food engagement in daily life is a way to control something due to millennial depression and stress, it is a form of creative control.

Food trends have been happening throughout history with the sensory aspect of food drawing people in, something in which technology is able to help expand upon. Content must look great on any device so that anywhere it is watched, attention will be grabbed and sustained. The idea is to create great stories and satisfying moment for the viewers with relatable content. Content should be either inspirational or aspirational, providing insight into ideas and experiences that people are interested in or not yet interested in. New angles and ideas in relation to food demand attention. Another element to the current state of food culture is the sort of zen feeling that is created through video consumption and the flow that is created with Pinterest searching and pinning. Organization can be soothing and food is commonly used, and sometimes abused, in a therapeutic sense.

CONCLUSION

This talk explained in depth how food impacts culture and vice versa. Food interest and experimentation is not a new concept throughout history, but with the world being as interconnected as it now is through technology, the content present is able to create a sense of community around food that reaches past neighborhoods and borders.

ABSTRACT

#FoodPorn or Bust: The Socialization of Food Alana Dreimann Graduate: MS Marketing alanaemail@me.com Twitter: @adreimann Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session If You Didn’t Take a Pic, Did You Really Eat It?

Society today is more connected digitally than ever before, however we are utilizing food as a way to connect offline. We have a cultural obsession with food and our online habits impact our real world choices with food. In this session panelist discuss the millennial foodie obsession and how online habits affect offline experiences. Hosted by Pinterest, this panel was moderated by Vikram Bhaskaran (Strategic Partnerships at Pinterest and world’s 5th pinner), and included Eve Turow Paul (a journalist and advisor who studies the wants and needs of young people around the world), Oren Katzeff (Head of Programming at Tastemade), and Peter Kim (Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD), the world's first large-scale food museum with exhibits you can eat).

SESSION

This session was themed around offline discovery in the real world. Tastemade is a great example of a business that is leveraging today’s global, mobile, and digital opportunities to create native content around food. Tastemade is thoughtful about all the platforms it can be on, like Pinterest.

By curating great content, being thoughtful about where to put it, and keeping their audience in mind, Tastemade had 2 billion views last year. Today, content has to be thumb stopping.

Eve Turow Paul became fascinated in how millennials would spend money to eat out rather than on laundry or rent and started researching the food culture in society. Today, millennials spend more money on food than hey do on shopping, which has never been the case before. Millennials are spending more on food than any other generation and millennials probably won't even own their own homes. This is unique because it has never happened before in US history.

Eve believes food is being used as a form of anti-technology.

Looking at pictures of food still makes you hungry. Sharing photos of food on social media is a part of self-branding more than ever.

Everyone eats and food speaks a language. Tastemade enjoys curating content that merges with that food language.

Our phones are now digital studios where we can do anything; the worst app on our smart phones might actually be the phone. Access to content has never been easier.

Food is a vehicle of amazing storytelling, especially at Tastemade. Technology is helping people connect. With so

much content online, Tastemade aims to have a thumb stopping experience that will catch someone's attention early and still sustain his or her attention throughout the videos.

Tastemade seeks to make each video a good story with a satisfying moment, that moment might be cracking an egg or applying frosting. Tastemade wants their content to be relatable. They strive to make their content inspirational rather than aspirational. They want their viewers to feel like they can cook even if you're not a great cook. Tastemade also wants to create interesting stories about ways to use the stuff you know in ways you would have never thought to use it. For example, you know about matcha but you never would have thought to use it in guacamole, these new angles help keep audiences stimulated.

Pinterest helps you organize and get into a Zen state that is soothing just like watching some Tastemade videos.

The food museum wants to create an experience that does demand it to be something that requires your presence. Meaning you need to physically be there because you couldn't experience the same thing online. They created Smell Synths where you press a button and it releases a smell and then you can add ingredients (chemicals) to make different smells.

Maybe you mix pancakes and can then add bananas or blueberries just by using your sense of smell. In the museum you also can watch someone cook on a wok and then eat it to learn about the difference of how great or different food tastes if it's made in a wok.

CONCLUSION

People are reconnecting with the source of their food. Now, people are going back to growing food themselves, eating locally, and building relationships with local storeowners and farmers. Food facilitates our relationships, we will remember sitting around a table interacting with people over a meal. Tastemade wants to create a community where food is the center of the conversation. Overall, technology can enhance or hinder out connection with others. Food will always be a great way to get people back into the real world and foster connections in person.

ABSTRACT

We all love food, but the millennials seem to be taking it to a new level. Many of the things they do online are centered around food. This obsession has many possible origins, but it is no question that food videos are one of the best parts of the internet.

SESSION

#FoodPorn or Bust: The Socialization of Food Annie Langston Undergraduate: Marketing Major Anlangston19@gmail.com

LinkedIn Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Millennials and Food: A Match Made in Heaven

This session featured representatives from Pinterest and Tastemade. Pinterest is a name that you should be familiar with, but unless you are sitting in class all day scrolling on Facebook, you may not be familiar with Tastemade. Tastemade produces short how-to videos about food. These videos are scattered around all over Facebook and other social media platforms, and they are quite addicting. Besides being aesthetically pleasing, the food they make is simple and it makes millennials want to cook. I am obsessed with Tastemade. I have always had an appreciation for good food, but it has increased while being in college. Finding real food, away from what the dorm serves, acts as an escape from the college lifestyle. Discovering that new restaurant with that one dish you crave every day is a reminder that there is a life away from college. It sounds odd, but food is somewhat therapeutic; Tastemade videos are a way to zone out from lectures, even if it’s only for sixty seconds.

Making food videos is not a revolutionary idea, so why is the obsession happening now? Eve Paul is a journalist that studies young people, and she had some ideas. She explained that food is a way to connect to the world, it’s a language that everyone can understand. This connection to the world has become stronger through the rise of digital media. Phones are now everyone’s personal studio. They make it easier to create and share content, especially satisfying food moments. Food is already a universal pleasure, it’s just easier to access that content now. Furthermore, technology has made it so much easier to take and share photos; behold the food Instagram. Most snap stories, Facebook posts, and Instagram photos are of what people are eating, and I am certainly one of the people who contributes to this obsession. I love sharing what food I am eating, particularly when it’s out of the ordinary or unique. When I order something that makes my jaw drop, my phone is coming out. I remember the restaurants I eat by the food I get there; if I can’t remember what I ate, I probably will not go to that place again.

The millennial food culture is both on and offline. An individual’s food budget is much larger than any other part of their financial life. This is like the period in the 70s where there was a similar food movement, but now it’s a larger mass. The old version of hipsters would find the hole in the wall restaurants, like the millennials today, and they created the trend of chop suey. That same discovery and fascination is present in most of the millennials today. Furthermore, this food obsession could be a way to push back against technology; food is real, it’s a tangible pleasure. Food is also something that can be controlled; the millennials like to be in control of their lives and food is a part of that. Millennials plan their day around what food they are going to eat. Personally, I don’t care how hectic my life is, if I know what I am eating for dinner and when, I am content. Food presents a chance to reconnect with friends, and it’s something to look forward to.

The key to this food obsession is the content that has been created around it. Tastemade and Pinterest have created content that looks great no matter the platform on which it is being presented. Tastemade aims for a “thumb stopping experience” for each one of their videos; something that makes a user stop and watch. The trick is sustaining a millennial’s attention, seeing as their attention span is growing smaller by the minute. Additionally, Tastemade wants to create a zen space for their users. I think that is why they have been able to retain a large audience. Yes, their videos show salivating worthy food but with the addition of soothing music and color contrasts, it’s like entering a different world.

Creating food content is rather simple, but this trend will not die soon, so the creators must make the future of food videos great. Tastemade doesn’t just want their users to watch the videos online, they want those cravings to be transferred to real life. People should be inspired enough to go out, buy the ingredients and make the recipe for themselves; the trick is how. I think Tastemade will become a baking ingredient service as well as content creators. There are plenty of companies that send groceries to your door, but they don’t usually include baking ingredients; this may be a market Tastemade could go into. Another goal is for their users to be engaged with the food community around them. For example, they would like to inspire them to go to farmers’ markets, and show an interest in where their food comes from. Tastemade wants their users to be equally engaged in their online and offline life. They are hoping that food will be the key to engaging millennials in their offline lives. Since that is what Tastemade wants to do, they should include motivational features in their videos. Instead of ending on the final product, they should have a title scene saying “Now Go Do It” or something cheesy along those lines.

CONCLUSION

Technology takes a big chunk of millennials’ lives, but for right now, technology cannot eat our food for us. The millennial food culture is continuing to grow and produce most of the content on social media. This food trend should be utilized by every marketing department in every company, this is a way to socialize with consumers about a common interest. Millennials care about food, therefore marketers should care about food. Food captures attention and sparks intrigue. Intrigue is money.

ABSTRACT

#FoodPorn or Bust: The Socialization of Food Krista Lumley Graduate: One Year MBA Kristaelumley@gmail.com

LinkedIn: Krista Lumley Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Use Technology to get off Technology

The panel consisted of four people; Eve Turow Paul from ETP Insights LLC and is the author of a book about Millennials and food, Oren Katzeff from Tastemade and is the head of programming, Peter Kim from The Museum of Food and Drink is the director and founder of this museum (the first of its kind), and Vikram Bhaskaran is from Pinterest who served as the panel discussion leader. They discussed how the digital world is affecting our food culture, specifically for Millennials. They talked about what this new food porn obsession means and how they are using the obsession in their businesses and/or research.

SESSION

Tastemade makes short videos of food being prepared. Oren described these short videos as “satisfying moments”.

People are obsessed with these short, fulfilling moments of looking at food that are now being called food porn. From day one, Tastemade’s strategy has had four parts, be thoughtful about who the audience is, be thoughtful how you shoot it, be thoughtful about what platforms you put the content on, and the content needs to excellent. Good content is not good enough. The content needs to be excellent because so much that exists already is that is excellent, therefore, the bar is set very high. Oren stated that the food obsession is so large now because of technology.

There is a digital studio right in your pocket that makes sharing this content so accessible.

He talked about the “thumb stopping” moment that needs to happen for their videos to be successful. Tastemade has approximately 3 seconds to get someone to stop thumb scrolling and look at the content. Three elements Tastemade looks at to get the thumb stopping moment are; make the content relatable, make it inspiration or aspirational, and present “stuff you don’t know about the stuff you know”, or in other words, present content in a new way or give a new ingredient for a known recipe you haven’t heard of yet.

People want some background information, but they want new information to add to it.

Eve had a much different perspective. She is not so much interested in the trends going on in the food world but she is interested in the why. Why are people so interested in food?

She saw food being used as currency between Millennials.

Conversations being had now are about finding the best food spots, taking pictures of the food, and spreading the news to all their friends. Millennials spend more money on food than shopping, but why?

Millennials can share any content they want through technology, why are they choosing to share food content as an obsession? In addition, they are not just using technology to share their content, they are sharing their food experiences on and off line. She argues food is being used as a format of anti-technology. It is about pushing back against technology to engage in something real. Millennials are using technology to show others they are getting out into the real world and having a real experience by making their own food or going to a restaurant and experiencing great food. Yes, they share the content on technology, but the point is to get people off technology to do it themselves.

Eve also found there are rising rates of anxiety and depression among young people. Food is something people feel they can control in what they believe is an uncontrollable world.

Millennials feel they can’t control if they get a job, but they can control what they eat. Lastly, she found Millennials are branding themselves by what they eat. They want to reflect to other people something about themselves and express themselves through something as easy to control as food.

Peter’s museum is not just any ordinary museum. It expands on food in a way you need to be present to understand and capture. For example, one exhibit takes people on a voyage through the digestive system and another is going into a hall and seeing hundreds of vegetables of different cultural foods from other countries. He believes people are using food as a marker of coolness and it is not a new trend at all, technology is just making it easier. This idea goes along with Eve’s of having the ability to brand and express oneself through food. He also talked about how trying new foods became a marker of coolness way back in the early 1900s. Finding unusual spots to eat became the cool thing to do. He gave an example of a Chinese dish that was discovered in China Town in the early 1900s and everyone wanted to find it because it was the cool thing to discover the unknown, delicious food for yourself. With the technology available now, it would’ve happened a lot faster and been a lot bigger of a movement with platforms like Instagram. But, food obsession has always existed.

I believe all panelists were correct in different ways. Eve’s perspective was the most intriguing to me. She looked past just paying attention to the current food trends and looked into why these trends are present. I do believe technology aids in the food obsession culture Millennials have, but I also believe it exists without technology. Being a Millennial myself I understand the feeling of not being in control of many aspects of my life but having the feeling of control over food. It is one aspect of life that is fun and easy to be knowledgeable on. It is also easy to relate to other people about because everyone eats food. The videos on Tastemade of food are very satisfying. As Oren was saying, reaching that satisfying moment in a video keeps people coming back to watch them. The content is done excellently, also. There is never a video that has poor quality or seemed like a waste of time to watch.

CONCLUSION

I like the idea of using technology to get off of technology. A trend with many Millennials is they want to be connected, but not appear they are too connected, because then it becomes uncool. Finding that balance for a company to be on technology a little, short snip bits like shorts videos, but also always being relevant will be the winners in this space. The idea that the digital content should be short and satisfying is imperative. By making great content the Millennials will believe it is great and they will go out and go to that restaurant or make that recipe. Be great on technology and you will see sales!

ABSTRACT Don Osmond (OzComm Marketing), Donny Osmond (Donny Osmond Concerts), Shonte Taylor (Shonte Jovan Taylor LLC), and Jeff Marcoux (Internet Marketing Association) comprised a panel to lead a discussion on storytelling, and why it is still one of the most effective marketing strategies out there even through all of this technological innovation

15,000-Year-Old Marketing Strategy: Why it Works Noah Kleinfeld One Year MBA - Finance Noahzinu@aol.com LinkedIn: NoahKleinfeld Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Marketing: Don’t Forget Where We Came From

SESSION Due to mass media and technology taking the reigns as the driving factors behind marketing in this day and age, the marketing tool that is storytelling nearly went extinct. Yet to this day storytelling remains one of the most effective methodologies for building and maintaining relationships, encouraging people to act in a certain way, and even to incite action. This is the very core of what marketing in any era hopes to achieve.

One of the biggest keys to effective marketing is the ability to evoke emotion amongst consumers. Without evoking an emotional response, it his hard to incite action. People will be far more likely to by a product you are advertising if your marketing tactic can generate some kind of emotional response.

By formulating the evocation of emotion into marketing strategies, the ability to create a recurring and memorable marketing campaign is far more likely. There is a neurological connection being made in the human brain when a given advertisement evokes emotion. For instance, people like the Geico commercials because the Gecko spokesman is cute and funny and makes them laugh. Therefore, there is neurological connection being made in the brain that may or not be conscious, but the likelihood of you signing up for Geico car insurance has become inherently higher whether you know it or not.

The use of storytelling is what truly helps to keep people engaged. A good story, more than anything else, can have a lasting impression on a person and potentially even alter their personality or dictate future behavior.

Ultimately, story telling leads to emotion, that emotion leads to storing the experience in your memory bank, and memory

is key when consumers are deciding which products to buy.

One of the interesting topics of discussion from this session was the idea of transmedia storytelling. Transmedia storytelling refers to companies marketing themselves across different platforms (aka internet, TV, newspaper etc.), yet delivering a different message on each platform and never utilizing the same message across platforms. The idea is when all of the various platforms come together, the full story will in turn come together. This tactic is thought to keep consumers actively engaged and an effective method to imprint the company brand in the mind of consumers.

While technology is certainly beneficial to marketing when utilized properly, marketing tactics should not be completely reliant upon it. In this day in age, so many companies rely on sheer data to determine what the most effective marketing strategies are, yet they overlook the simplistic but monumental value of storytelling which can often times hurt them in the long run. While being able to spread information on social media like wildfire is extremely efficient, having that person-to-person connection is vital for success as well. At the end of the day, people are not buying the products themselves by that question that product is answering. Therefore those who can tell the best story are often the one’s who come out ahead.

CONCLUSION

I greatly appreciated this session as each of the speakers were quite knowledgeable in their craft. I also liked the fact that amid all of the technology and innovation talk I have been hearing across SXSW, we finally see a panel who brings us back down to earth and reminds us not to forget the importance of our roots and what has always worked so well.

Technological innovation is a fantastic thing, but keeping it in perspective is also important going forward.

ABSTRACT

Humans are naturally intrigued by stories and the people who tell them. We are chemically programmed to enjoy and remember stories. No matter the new, fancy technologies that are coming into our lives, a good campfire story will always have a great impact on people’s lives. This is what marketers need to remember, heading into this pinnacle time in the United States.

SESSION 15,000-Year Old Marketing Strategy: Why it works Annie Langston Undergraduate: Marketing Major Anlangston19@gmail. com LinkedIn Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session The Power of A Good Story

This session had a very interesting combination of panelists. There was the CMO lead for worldwide enterprise marketing at Microsoft, a neuroscientist, a marketer named Don Osmond and his father, the entertainer, Donny Osmond. This was not a group I would have thought to put together, but it was this uniqueness that made me more intrigued. I even made a bet with myself to see how long it would take for Donny Osmond to make a personal plug; it wasn’t long...

Marketing is a “15000” year old pastime that has been using the power of storytelling to sell to consumers since the industry’s conception. The bottom line of marketing is to make revenue. People can get lost in how insightful different marketing campaigns can be, but it’s all for a profit. That being said, people can get lost in a good story even if it’s in an advertisement.

As mentioned, humans are chemically programmed to crave stories. Shonte Taylor, the neuroscientist on the panel, explained how the right side of the human brain is constantly looking for stimulus, and listening to stories is a natural release of oxytocin and dopamine. The release of these chemicals is a sign of an emotional response to a story, which makes a new memory. Marketers must provide the proper framework for a story to fit their audience, they must know their audience to speak to them effectively.

Donny Osmond chimed in about songwriting. He mentioned how they are not just songs, they are memories that have had impacts on his fans. Osmond made a very good point about how he once did a rock version of his song “Puppy Love” live in concert and one fan was not pleased. She came up to him after the show and asked him why he changed the song, Donny obviously responded with a cocky, “I can do whatever I want.” To which she said, “You had no right to mess with my memories.” That woman made a lasting impact on Osmond, and for good reason. People associate music, movies, and books with certain times of their lives; these things are like memory time capsules.

The brain registers any changes to those time capsules as

pain and distrust. Entertainers are marketers, they are selling a certain brand image, and if you connect with that brand and it suddenly changes, it’s like the entire world has collapsed. Humans are meant to connect with each other, marketing is a way to connect consumers to brands but they need a reason to be with that brand in the first place. The consumers must be as emotionally invested in that brand as they would be with a song, and it’s that brand’s responsibility to keep that message continuing.

The question was raised of how to keep storytelling involved in the marketing process with all the new technology and social media. The panel discussed how technology is about wanting the next best thing and brands must keep up with the trends their audiences are engaging with. Now, it’s not what the brand wants, it’s what their audiences want.

Companies cannot hide in the shadows anymore; all their decisions are public or can be made public. No one can hide in the age of the internet. Everyone is engrossed with their social media. These platforms have an emotional connection with each consumer because it is personal to them and they have control over the content. Social media is a tool of engagement that needs to be exploited by any brand to reach their consumers, but they must pay attention to what specific platforms their audiences use. Companies cannot just push out advertisements anymore; consumers want tailored, personal content without feeling the pressure of making a purchase. Telling stories through this personal content is how brands will grab and hold on to their attentions. Live streaming is a popular form of communication that celebrities use to interact with their fans. It makes the fans feel like they are one in a million. The panel made the good point that you can do an endless amount of work behind the computer, but personal contact with fans and consumers will be what sets you apart. Respond to their tweets, make a personalized post on their wall, or have a trivia contest and the winner gets a phone call from you. Now more than ever, that personal connection is needed, since people are continuing to disengage with the world around them. Brands and entertainers can wake the consumers up and turn their attention away from their phones, with experiences. People buy into an experience, and brands have to be able to give them that.

One of the most interesting points the panel made was that customer service will be the biggest differentiator between brands in the future. Every touchpoint a consumer has with a brand impacts their perception. I think the biggest challenge for companies in the future will be customer retention. Humans are naturally creatures of habit, but the new generations are not familiar with any current brands, and they will grow the start-up part of the industry. The younger consumers are prone to change, and strive for innovation. I do not believe that every well-established company will be able to keep up.

CONCLUSION

Never underestimate the power of a good story. If a marketer can tell a good story, his job is done. Storytelling should not be lost in this digital world. If anything, our stories should be enhanced by the power of this technology. Technology should not replace everything; it should utilize what we already know to create a world that we have only imagined.

ABSTRACT

People are irrational human beings, most of their purchases are emotional purchases. This is the reason why the 15,000year-old marketing strategy of storytelling is still an incredibly effective way of reaching consumers. Stories call on emotions, emotions are easily remembered and people buy based on emotions.

15,000-year-old marketing strategy, why it still works

To create a successful story telling marketing campaign, however, we need a consistent multi-platform strategy. While the marketing message has to be consistent and messages cannot contradict, it does not have to be the exact same message. Sending different messages on multiple platforms like parts to a puzzle can be an effective way of keeping the audience engaged and telling a capturing story.

Matthias Malojer

SESSION

M.S. Marketing Matthias.malojer@gmail .com @matthiasmalojer Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session The Power of Stories

Although 15,000-years-old, story telling will never go away as people simply want to be entertained. Stories entertain, they engage followers and fans and stories create something that no ad can, it creates longevity, it helps the brand be remembered.

In marketing, stories can help provide a framework that guides all other marketing efforts. The success of any story, however, depends on your “why�. As an organization, you need to understand your purpose, why do you exist. For example, your why might be to bring people closer to nature and provide them with the gear to conquer even the most difficult challenges.

The unique thing about stories is that they create emotions in followers, they take customers for a ride and these emotions and experiences are easily remembered and most importantly, customers buy based on emotions.

One especially powerful storytelling tool is transmedia story telling. Transmedia story telling uses a multi-platform approach to share the organization’s story. However, while multiple platforms are used to deliver the story, the messages vary from medium to medium like different pieces to a puzzle. This keeps fans engaged, they have an incentive to follow the organization now on multiple platforms and it allows for a more capturing story. The more parts of the brain you engage like emotions, memory and facts, the more memorable the story will be. It is key, however, to still send a

consistent and compelling story and to avoid any contradictions.

When telling a story across multiple platforms, organizations can make the mistake of getting hung up on only digital media. While this might be the perfect platform for a lot of organizations, it is key to understand where your customers are, how they engage with the brand and what a comfortable story telling medium is for both, the brand and the followers.

At the end of the day, there is no silver bullet to choosing the right medium.

Lastly, when telling a story, it needs to align with the actual experience the organization is offering and, most of all, it needs to be authentic.

In my opinion, storytelling can be a truly effective tool, but it is not the silver bullet in creating a successful marketing campaign. I believe that storytelling, along with the experience the brand sells as well as the brand’s purpose, all play into the customer journey.

While touch points are important, the story and the experience throughout the customer journey is what builds brand loyalty, engages followers and grows business. Furthermore, in this context I believe transmedia storytelling is a fundamental tool in shaping the customer experience.

Engaging followers through different outlets and giving customers the option to enter into a more intimate relationship with the brand by following the organization on different platforms and thereby learning more about the brand creates a customer journey that tells the brand’s story, communicates the experience and demonstrates to followers the brand’s purpose, creating a successful marketing campaign.

CONCLUSION

A brand that is amazing at all of this is Patagonia and REI. Whenever I receive a Patagonia email, I open it because I know just looking at the ad will make me feel good. It makes me want to go outside, escape the city and just fish all day long. The brand is amazing at telling its story of sustainability, love for the outdoors as well as communicating this Patagonia experience. This is also the only way how the organization can justify selling rain coats for $400, because it knows, to consumers this is more than a raincoat, it is part of a story, it’s an experience.

ABSTRACT

Donny Osmond and others speak about how the marketing strategy of storytelling hasn’t changed in 15,000 years. Even when technology is the driving force of marketing, brands can continue to use storytelling to build relationships with consumers. If brands want to continue driving sales and maintain competitive advantage in their industry, they must continue to tell compelling stories to their consumers.

15,000-Year-Old Marketing Strategy: Why It Works Darby Pappas Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing pappasdarby@gmail.com LinkedIn: @darbypappas Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Tell Stories with Your Brand

SESSION

Nothing has changed in 15,000 years. The most compelling form of marketing is through storytelling, according to Donny Osmond. As we market to our specific niche targets, we must continue to think of ways to make a marketing campaign memorable. It’s important from a branding perspective to tell stories that make your brand memorable.

You must market the experience through storytelling if you want consumers to remember your brand in a continuously competitive world. The primary objective of marketing is to drive sales for the business. But why are stories important?

Because they build an emotional connection with the brand to provide repetition which can continue telling your company’s story for years to come. The goal is to empower people to tell your story, but the story needs to be memorable to begin with.

It’s important for a brand to find their story, but they need to start with why. In order to find the why, you must share the benefit to your consumer and provide ways in which it will improve their life and craft that into a story. You have to ask yourself, “why does my company exist?” and “what does my product enable someone to do?”. The idea of storytelling is to control the perception of what people think of your brand.

You must engage the limbic (emotional) side of the brain to promote your brand. Also, you must tap into the memory with visual portrayals of your brand. The whole idea is to take consumers on your journey and set them up on how you want them to perceive your brand. You have to discover what is the overarching narrative that you want to tell your consumers. For example, Game of Thrones does a great job at storytelling and making their TV show/brand come to life.

They created Game of Thrones food trucks that served Game of Thrones themed food. This form of storytelling invited the users into the story with them and made the TV show come to life. If you want to build trust, you have to tell stories.

With technology being the main idea of all things, brands

must learn how to incorporate technology into storytelling. With technology, you can use data to see what your audience is engaging with on social media and use it to your advantage. It’s important to not move away from your story even when using technology.

Brands need to understand that they can find a personal connection using social media platforms. Brands can make a simple moment matter that gets amplified by the social media community, such as good customer service. If you turn a regular fan into a raving fan, they can tell your brand’s story for you. The problem today is finding whether we can connect as effectively through technology, and that’s up to the brand to decide. As long as a company uses social media, they can effectively use technology to their advantage to tell a story. Brands need to understand that people aren’t just buying products, they’re also buying the “why” behind the brand. It’s important that brands know the “why” because consumers are buying products based on the why.

I thought this session was slightly informative but I thought Donny Osmond’s thoughts were really disorganized and rarely lacked a point. Any time the panelists would ask a question about using storytelling to market your brand, Donny Osmond would provide anecdotes about his previous life being a superstar and how glamorous his career was, but would rarely tie the point back to marketing. I think choosing Donny Osmond to be the lead speaker wasn’t the best choice because he didn’t have much experience with business marketing, and his only experience he has is marketing himself. His points were all over the place, but it was interesting to learn about how storytelling is important when you want people to remember your brand. I was speculative of this session until the panelists brought up advice on how to storytell in the age of technology, and that made this session more relatable because technology is our primary form of communication. I wasn’t aware that storytelling connects with the right-brain and that’s important because people are more likely to remember your brand if it connects with the right-brain instead of the left. If the session didn’t have a neuroscientist attend to confirm the validity of Osmond’s statements, I would have been concerned. Luckily, everything that Donny Osmond spoke about was confirmed by a neuroscientist so the audience didn’t receive any incorrect information. The biggest takeaway I got from this session was that brands can use technology to story tell and that they have much more access to data metrics which makes it easier for brands to analyze brand satisfaction.

CONCLUSION

Storytelling is an ancient concept that has carried on for 15,000 years. With the use of technology, it makes it easier for brands to know if customers are satisfied with brand’s storytelling techniques and further advances the concept of storytelling. Just because technology is growing rapidly, doesn’t mean that storytelling is going away. Brands can use technology to market storytelling to the masses. Technology has only helped storytelling, but brands need to make sure that they don’t stray away from storytelling and finding the “why” of their brand. As digital increases, brands can continue to use technology to tell their stories.

ABSTRACT

Storytelling. Something humans have been doing for thousands of years, and what some would call, the first form of marketing. Today, storytelling looks much different than it did 15,000 years ago, however when utilizing the technologies available to us today, it could become more successful than ever.

SESSION

15,000-year-old Marketing Strategy: Why It Works Danielle Spezia Graduate: MS Marketing – Innovation and Entrepreneurship daniellespezia@gmail.co m

Link to Flipboard Link to Session In With the Old: Story Marketing

Selling your product is more than offering deals, or bargaining with the consumer. In many cases today, selling the product has less to do with the actual product, and more about the story around the brand to get you there, and the experience through the process. Properly constructed narratives aid in recall by putting the product in a different framework. This stimulates the right side of the brain, creating an emotional memory for the consumer, instead of relying on pure information storage capabilities. By creating an emotional connection between the brand and the consumer, storytelling not only builds trust, but also aids in the longevity of the brand. Transmedia storytelling is another technique, that allows marketers to convey their story to the consumer in different forms across multiple platforms. Doing this, invites the consumer to take the content they want, and allows them to create their own journey, assuring an authentic experience for the customer. For example, companies who utilize both traditional and non-traditional forms of media marketing, need should have a cohesive yet different message across all platforms. This is not the situation where you share a photo on Instagram, then click to also the same post to Facebook and Twitter.

Side note: in the beginning I was a little confused as to why Donnie Osmond was sitting on the panel, especially since his son was the moderator. In the end, though, he surprised me.

The way he conveys his personality to fans through multiple forms of social media, as well as the emotional connections he makes with fans during shows, is a cohesive, maintained story. And if anything can attest to the aid in longevity a technique can be, just think about his 50 year career, so far, in the music industry‌pretty crazy.

Trying to sell an unemotional product, with this technique can be difficult, but to really make this work companies/brands need to look at why they started? Why does this product exist, and what is the connection between the why,

that’s going to make the customer come to buy, and then come back again. Keeping your message consistent and authentic, is the key to generating an impactful story. Creating the narrative, that taps into the target…again be true to the reason you were formed in the first placed.

CONCLUSION

Storytelling is all about driving emotional impact through authentic storytelling. Connect humanity with the product, utilizing marketing to create experiences, and communicating human-to-human. It’s imperative for companies and brands to be authentic when communicating their story to consumers, should they want to create a true connection and a lasting company – customer relationship.

ABSTRACT

15,000-year-old Marketing Strategy: Why It Works Nicholas Kieler Graduate MBA Nicholas.kieler@gmail.com

www.linkedin.com/in/nic holas-kieler/ Link to Flipboard Magazine Stories not Statistics

While connecting to customers through feeling rather than logic is an often-repeated truism of marketing, it was interesting to hear this from a neuroscientific perspective. A story connects people together, and it helps them to empathize with an experience in a very powerful way. This powerful connection is the release of oxytocin in the brain, a neurochemical which is associated with a sense of community and connection with other people. This is a powerful marketing tool because it allows you to connect a person to the experience you want to feel, however that might motivate them. This is useful for more than just selling a product with positive emotions, it goes much deeper than that. If you want a customer to feel fear to get your security product, sadness in empathy for your humanitarian cause, or anger at losing out on great savings the way to do it is by telling a story.

SESSION

This session consisted of several marketing professionals, a neuroscientist, and Donny Osmond of music industry fame.

While there were several insightful aspects of the panel, a lot of the effect was ruined by the number of people who were there solely to see Donny Osmond and take their own pictures of him. Donny’s insight was very useful given his long history of experience and practice in using storytelling in his shows to better connect with his audience, though most of the insights had to be picked out of the stories he related to the audience. The Neuroscientist also had a lot of very useful information as to the science behind storytelling, but often she would get overshadowed by the other speakers. One of the speakers, Donny Osmonds son seemed to be there to poke fun at his father and to continue to bring the panel back to his father’s celebrity and life. Overall the impression of this panel was that there was a lot of truth to what was being said and a lot of very useful information, but the lack of focus and professionalism of the panel made it difficult to separate the insights from the spectacle.

To best understand the power of storytelling, it is most important to understand why and how it works. Our brains produce neurochemicals constantly in order to regulate our motivation and to activate different reward pathways within our brains depending on what we are doing. Dopamine is a common neurochemical which is responsible for motivating our most basic impulses such as eating and sleeping

. Another example of a common neurochemical is Serotonin, which is produced to help us stave off depression and preserve our appetites. Storytelling relies almost exclusively on Oxytocin, the so called ‘social’ neurochemical. Oxytocin is produced when we feel like we are part of a community or that we are enjoying the company of close personal friends.

Oxytocin exists to motivate us to seek out community which is evolutionarily important for keeping us safe and providing us with the resources a community provides. When we tell a story, we activate the feeling of community and belonging, directly stimulating empathy and connection with a message. This is why Oxytocin activation is such a powerful way of spreading a message, it triggers the empathy response and makes people feel like they are a part of a movement.

While the neuroscientist was great with explaining how storytelling works, Donny provided the best example of how to do it effectively. Near the beginning of the presentation Donny told the story of a song that he was well known for. For a long time he refused to play it because he wanted to play other kinds of music and felt that he had developed his style to have moved past that song. Despite refusing to play it at shows his longtime fans remembered it fondly and would always request it at venues he was playing despite his constant rejections. Finally, at one of his concerts the crowd was chanting for him to play the song over and over and out of retaliation he played a hard rock version of the song out of spite for the audience. After that show an older woman came up to him and explained how Donny had ‘no right’ to do that to something that was so important to her childhood. This event had such an impact on Donny that he stopped thinking of his music as belonging to him and began to play songs that he didn’t necessarily like because it was important to his fans. Donny went on to explain that this is how he introduces that song at every show. He could tell the audience that he was about to play a song about young love, but telling the story about the song helped the audience feel like they were a part of something special.

This technique is an extremely powerful one. Often in sales what is first talked about is the benefits and the aspects of the product which are expected to appeal to the customer. The talk about saving money and time, having a better life, or how impressive the technology falls on deaf ears because people aren’t emotionally connecting to it. You have to approach the shared experience that people have and the empathy that comes from a situation that you are trying to fix. If someone is trying to sell a bicycle they might talk about the gears, the frame, the chain, and the handles, but unless someone is extremely technical this probably won’t have a big impact on their decision. What psychological research shows is much more effective is to talk about the life experiences you get for having a bike. Talking about the trails you’ve been on, the people you’ve met, and the good times you’ve had with your bike helps people to connect so much more with you, and helps them to feel like they are joining a community: the community of bike riders.

CONCLUSION

The implications for Entrepreneurship for storytelling are straight forwards and easy to see.

Whether you are marketing your product to consumers, your business model to investors, or your revenue strategy with your financial partners, purpose and meaning beats figures almost every time. It is possible to be a market competitor without a strong brand, the.

market follower strategy is an example of that, but to be a powerful force in an industry requires a good story. It’s important to take a step back and ask what the experience your product or service brings to people, and how powerful the difference it makes in people’s lives is. Don’t talk about the service, don’t talk about the product or the company, talk about the experience. Telling a story means finding a way to get people to empathize with what you’re trying to do for people, and to join a movement rather than just being a customer

ABSTRACT

20 Years of Data: The Heartbeat of the Internet Colby Bjornsen Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing colbybjornsen@gmail.com

LinkedIn:@colbybjornse n Personal Website Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session How Digital Marketing is Taking Over-With the Help of Big Data

About.com is an American Internet-based network of content that publishes articles and videos on a variety of subjects.

They give expert advice and answers online to help viewers answer questions, solve problems and find inspiration on the topics they care about. Millions of people use their sites every day and therefore they hold a vast amount of data. Jon Roberts, About.com’s SVP of Data Science and Audience Development, discussed how they collect, monitor, and make predictions about users using over twenty years’ worth of data.

SESSION

Imagine having two decades worth of search query data under your belt. What data trends would you find? Would you be able to predict future trends and events? How could you apply this data to your business? This is exactly what Jon Roberts and his team at About.com set out to do.

Establishing their website just one year before Google’s launch, About.com sits on a hefty amount of data. To start this enormous task they began by putting all of their user data into a single plot, separating different types of content into categories (Travel, health, food, religion, careers, etc.).

By categorizing their content they were able to begin to understand their audience over time. They could see which channels were the largest and driving the most content at different points in the year. However, it didn’t tell them how the topics were related.

To examine how closely different topics were related, the About team made a constellation of About-clusters. Topics like health were clustered together where food was more spread out as food relates to so many different aspects of life. Through this they noticed that the same patterns were happening over and over again. Although life and technology has changed drastically over the past 20 years, fundamentally things have stayed the same. People ask similar questions at the same time throughout the years. For example, health interest has been stable for sixteen years.

July 4th brings little interest in health issues in America as no one seems to be paying attention to their health on the national holiday whereas January 1st brings a huge spike as many start their new year’s resolutions. People have stopped asking friends and family for solutions to health problems and instead go straight to the internet.

Imagine if your company could predict day-by-day what the health interest, or any interest, of the country would be. The competitive advantage would be substantial. Rather than waiting for a big event to happen, you could predict it. Of course, not every company has access to such a large array of people. About.com’s audience includes people from all over the world with different economic backgrounds, genders, religions and ages. Regardless, I’ve seen the impact data can and should have on every business no matter how much or how little of data you hold. People will often tell you a different answer when you survey them but when you monitor their behavior online you can see what truly interests and concerns them. Data does not lie.

When it comes to data, do not focus on individual people rather focus on the broad aggregates to make predictions because individuals are too unpredictable. About.com combined their search data with demographics to see what interests’ millennials at different parts of their life based on age and gender. Younger millennials (18-24) fixate on addictions, acne, STDs, stress, car insurance, beginner’s investing, stocks while older millennials (24-35) are curious about breastfeeding, pregnancy, miscarriages, financial services, crowdfunding, and bonds. In terms of gender- the most predictive insights into a man’s age tend to be self-directed (running, lifting, body building) while the most predictive insights into a woman’s age tend to reflect the age of the people she cares for (caring for spouse to caring for kids to caring for parents).

CONCLUSION

Before big data, marketers had a difficult time showing the results of advertising. Sales people were valued over marketers as the sales department could attach real numbers to the revenue they were generating. But, the buyer journey has radically shifted through the internet because people can research a product or service thoroughly before ever entering a store or talking to a salesperson. The marketing department has taken over the sales team as being closest to the customer though the vast amount of data they hold. By monitoring behavior online through websites, ads, and email, marketers can see where customers are in their buyer journey. The ability to process and store big data has shifted businesses from a sales first approach to a marketer first approach.

Digital marketing is taking over. CMO’s are becoming the new CEO’s because they can understand and solve customer problems more quickly and effectively than other executives. According to Russell Glass and Sean Callahan of LinkedIn, “The companies that create a culture that has intense focus on the customer through data, that values analyzing data, that is open to the truths data analysis reveals, and that has the guts to act on those conclusions will be the companies that prevail.” Every day users are telling your business what they care about and how those things are related through their search data. Grasp that data and your business will not fail.

Besides the importance of big data, I learned a variety of information that can be applied to almost any businesses out there. When it comes to content, one great article is better than ten different slight variations. Instead of writing new articles every time a slight change occurs in the space, work on updating good content to keep it fresh and up-to-date. While the world has changed, the questions we ask haven’t. Further, stop slowing users down. As

the world has become increasingly digital, consumers expect answers right in the moment they’re searching for them. Focus on page speed, a clean and simple design and recommend/ help solve whatever the consumer’s need is right now. As a business, recognize that you can’t solve everyone’s problem. Don’t expand into unknown territory; focus on what you know best and provide help to users who are searching in your arena of expertise.

ABSTRACT

Data collected over the past 20 years of the internet can help us to better understand and target consumers. Empowered by the wealth of data, companies will be able to improve their contextual advertising, which is especially important for effectively targeting women, as they are a different persona every time they use the internet. At the same time, internet data could prove to be a valuable market research and market testing tool.

20 years of data, the heartbeat of the internet Matthias Malojer M.S. Marketing Matthias.malojer@gmail .com @matthiasmalojer Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session The Internet to forecast tomorrow

SESSION

A new emerging technology 20 years ago, a staple of our modern lives today. The internet exploded in the 21st century. Linked to an increase in the use of the internet, data creation as well as data use skyrocketed to volumes never thought possible. This created data has a continuous structure year after year, showing the same trends repeatedly. This is the heartbeat of the internet.

As seen in the picture, data creation overall exploded in the past 16 years. Different colors represent different categories and the pulsating behavior of each category represents the internet user’s interest in a certain category over time.

Looking deeper into the information above, data can reveal fascinating insights that allows data scientists to forecast future behavior based on insights gained from internet data.

Some fascinating insights include: The quantity and the timing of people searching for topics related to the flu allows data scientists to forecast the magnitude of the flu season early on.

Internet data could have easily predicted the 2008 financial crisis. During this time house foreclosure internet searches increased strongly, while house buying searches disappeared.

After the crisis hit, searches for low-budget food recipes grew strongly. Three to four years after, financial indicators mentioned that the overall economy is recovering and people are moving out of the financial crisis. The searches for low-budget recipes, however, remained high until 2015.

While the government told society the economy is recovering, people did not believe it until 2015. As a result, the financial crisis of 2008 was reflected in the cooking habits of Americans.

After November 9th, 2016, health searches on the web dropped by 40%. Instead, one million searches by young millennial women of “How to impeach a president” appeared, forecasting the largest protest in US history, the women’s march.

The opportunity internet data offers is huge. The problem right now, however, is that most services only consider a small bit of personal data to target users with personalized ads.

Looking at the larger data environment would offer considerable opportunities to improve the targeting for people.

Contextual advertising is fundamental to advertising success and can create substantial value for consumers. However, without considering macro influences, ads and services miss out on huge opportunities to better target their audience and improve the relevancy of their ads.

One example that illustrates the importance of context is targeting mothers online. Every time a mother goes online, she is in a different role. In the morning, she might be googling for health tips for her husband, buy baby products at noon and in the afternoon, google about online university programs. Each time, she is a different persona, wife, caring mother, aspiring student and only ads that are relevant to the current persona are effective. As a result, contextual advertising to women must be one of advertisers’ top priorities. To achieve this, advertisers must consider the context of the entire internet to improve their effectiveness.

The challenge with contextual advertising is to ask the right questions at the right time.

Achieving this can lead to considerable improvements in an organization’s advertising strategy.

CONCLUSION

As mentioned before, internet data can forecast certain events and measure the extend of a phenomenon such as the flu. Using internet data could be a valuable market research and market testing tool. The research and testing surrounding new products costs companies millions of dollars. Instead, replacing focus groups and research specialists with data scientists that, based on the internet’s behavior and users’ search queries, forecast the product’s success. This might not work with products that have not existed before, but for redesigned products or to test the importance of a newly implemented feature, internet data could be a valuable research tool.

ABSTRACT

20 Years of Data: The Heartbeat of the Internet Darby Pappas Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing pappasdarby@gmail.com LinkedIn: @darbypappas Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Predicting America’s Downfall with 20 Years of Data

Jon Roberts speaks on About.com’s weaknesses and ways that they leveraged their weaknesses through data interpretation. About.com has been able to predict significant worldly events through their year-to-year data.

About.com uses data from the past 20 years and uses the data to drive traffic to their website. The changing fall colors was a topic that drove people to the site once a month per year. They were able to interpret data from observing trends year-to-year instead of looking at it month-to-month.

SESSION

Jon Roberts, data scientist at About.com spoke about About.com’s data problem and ways they were able to drive traffic to their site from solutions. About is one year older than Google, with 1,000 writers, 200 full-time employees, and one data problem: there was too much data on the website for people to navigate. Once About.com realized the problem, they decided to their solution was to treat it like a science problem. First, they needed to categorize all the content. Second, they needed to get all of their data into a single plot in order to interpret the data. Third, they used the categorized content to understand their audience over time. They essentially wanted to know who is reading it, why they are reading it, and what their interests are.

About.com’s biggest finding was that their website traffic correlates to the weather and working hours. The work week was the heartbeat of the internet, which means that they had the most traffic on Monday through Friday. Through their findings, they learned that they continued to see the same patterns over and over again. For example, Americans appeared to be more interested in Gymnastics during the Olympics than Football during the Superbowl. They also concluded that there is a wealth of possibility from data and the evolution of the mobile web started to change their data.

Every year, the interest in the flu evolved predictably. In August, flu searches increased by 15% compared to July. In September, flu searches increased 75%, and in October, flu searches increased by 240%. They also observed that questions about the flu evolve throughout the quarter. In Q3, preventative questions started becoming popular, such as “Can I get a flu shot with an egg allergy?”. In Q4, people appeared to start getting the flu, such as “How long does the flu last?”. In Q1, questions about recovery started becoming popular, such as “When can I kiss someone with the flu?”. This data has shown that health interest has been

stable for 16 years, except for an increase in interest of celiacs disease. About.com was able to conclude that big events drive changes in health interests.

With all of the data, About.com concluded that they don’t need to use February 2017 data to predict March 2017 data, but instead can use 20 years of Marches to predict each day of March 2017. Every day, About.com is able to know if the country is behaving as expected.

When the data isn’t predictable, it means that something happened. For example, in 2007, About.com’s writers’ saw the world changing and predicted the 2008 financial crisis.

Searches for foreclosures, derivatives, recession, and credit default swap started increasing.

The financial crisis started showing up across all categories throughout the website. In October 2008, interest in “budget recipes” doubled. All financial indicators showed consistent recovery from late 2009 onwards, but budget recipe interest didn’t start to decline until late 2015. The country didn’t economically recover until late 2015, and About.com could predict that from popular page visits and searches. Jon Roberts’ solution was to make a stable prediction from the data, and then you can start to see the world change. Another example he provided was on November 9, 2016. Health interest dropped for one hour on that day and it didn’t return to normal for three days. This same pattern shows up after the SuperBowl and after national holidays. I think it’s incredible what About.com is able to predict through interpreting year-to-year data. Roberts explained that the company’s methodology can be done to interpret data of all kinds on different websites.

First, you build a baseline profile of interest in every topic for the whole audience.

About.com sees 1 in 5 of all Americans on the website every month so their data is a stable, representative, and unbiased view of the entire country. You can do this with your own data, but you may need to understand your own biases. Next, for any subset of the audience, compare the interest of the subset to the baseline of the whole for any demographic imaginable. With this method, you can predict future events for years to come.

Jon Roberts mentioned that About.com went from 3.5 million articles to 350,000 articles in 24 months. This is because they had too much content on the site and users were afraid of all the content. They did this because one great article was better than 10 slight variations of the article. Updating new content beats writing a new article, so now About.com’s articles are updated about every six months. Roberts also mentioned that we need answer the immediate questions of users and not divert the question with other content. This is why About.com increased pagespeed, emphasized clean simple design, and recommended what users need at that very moment. I think About.com could have predicted incredible outcomes with their data and this session reiterated to me the importance of data in our lives.

CONCLUSION

About.com was able to use their data problem and transform it into a data solution. They are able to make realistic predictions about the future and use it to leverage their brand and improve the user experience by giving them applicable search results. About.com wants users to find information about the flu when it’s trending most, so they are able to update content during those popular flu months and answer users’ direct questions about the flu.

About.com uses data to improve users’ lives and knowledge and that is extremely important in the ever-increasing world of technology.

ABSTRACT

100 Million People You Don’t Know, But Should Kendra Arenkill Undergraduate: Marketing kendraa2@earthlink.net LinkedIn Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session The American People Reexamined

The results of this last election came as a shock to many.

While America is known for being a multicultural melting pot, full of different ideals and values, it is more homogenous than imagined. Yet there is a divide between the large cities and the smaller cities in the US, something that Lisa PecotHebert, a journalism professor from USC, and David Measer, a strategic planner from RPA, noticed in their own research.

Together, they took it upon themselves to talk to the 100 million Americans that need to be understood, the ones that have been misrepresented by the media. Understanding the different groups of people that exist in America is important because their values and consumer behaviors are vastly different. We all need to step outside of our bubbles and comfort zones to finally understand our American audience.

SESSION

It is clear that there is a divide amongst the American people. This last election was very divisive and made these differences stand out. Many people fall into the trap of sticking within their bubble from talking with people that have similar values and views to living in areas that create a certain lifestyle. I for one felt fooled after the election and was confused by the type of people in our country. This was because I, too, surrounded myself in a bubble of people that were very similar to me. The media has given many different perspectives regarding the makeup of our country but our country has been divided for a long time - in fact much before the election. It simply took the results of the election for the media and many other to realize they had been ignoring a significant amount of Americans. There was once a time when the United States formed a narrative of diversity, or so it seemed: after the terrorist attack of September 11th.

The patriotic narrative that was told described our diversity as the element that made the country strong, and it was something we were proud of. And while our country may not seem to celebrate diversity the same way today, it is in fact still present but seen differently throughout America. Lisa and David wanted to get out of their bubble and discover for themselves what was causing such devisiveness. To do this, they first looked at data; half of our population lives within 9 states, and in just a fraction of the counties around the US. There are a lot of people that are overlooked when the narrative of these few, large population centers are only considered. The top 21 cities in the US comprise 42% of the entire US population (cities such as NYC, Chicago, LA, and

Denver), while 44% of the US population lives in small cities (such as Columbus, Cedar Rapids, Toledo, etc.). These smaller cities are often misrepresented and misunderstood and were the primary target of the research Lisa and David carried out. This group they named the Alt Middle.

The Alt Middle is the middle part of America. They are the population that is making changes in our country, yet we ignore the middle with our advertising, as well as how we approach different topics in society. According to data, these people tend to watch TV shows such as “Tornado Alley”, “Big Time RV” and “Building off the Grid”. They value faith, tradition, respecting ancestors, stable personal relationship and traditional gender roles and their attitudinal statements reflect the same. This Alt Middle, on paper, seems very different from Americans who live in the top 21 cities who watch TV shows such as “The Tonight Show”, and “Game of Thrones” and value status, power, ambition and wealth. Much of this aligns with people’s stereotypes and preconceived notions of “the other” group of Americans. It’s easy to make assumptions about people in the other bubbles, but that doesn’t make others happy and it isn’t usually accurate. We can’t always understand people when looking strictly at data.

This last election proved just that. For that reason, Lisa and David traveled to four small cities for ethnographic research to actually talk to the Alt Middle to get a sense of them as people rather than data statistics.

After traveling to cities in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri and Kansas, Lisa and David discovered 4 key takeaways. First, they found that the Alt Middle thrives on human connection. Everyone that they met was very welcoming and nice, there was a strong sense of community, and everyone wanted to get to know each other. Second, they found that the Alt Middle is ambitious by definition. This group is driven by internal happiness, and for that reason, they are more humble and grounded yet very hardworking (the Midwest work ethic so-to-speak). This ambition can be seen in the way they approach their careers as well as their relationships. The Alt Middle is also very rooted in heritage. They are tied to their communities and churches, and remember their ancestors that came to America. To them, diversity is seen as the refugees that come through the local church organizations whom they help greatly. Finally, the Alt Middle views themselves as an epicenter, rather than a flyover city/state. These small cities are very content with the businesses they have and are up to speed with current technology. They do not wish they lived in a larger city and are perfectly content.

After considering the key learnings from Lisa and David’s ethnographic research, it’s becomes more obvious that both groups have a lot of similarities. And many of the ideas of the Alt Middle are becoming very popular with people in the “top 21”. Such ideas as beehives and owning chickens in the backyards, using mason jars as drinking glasses, and farmers markets.

Farm to table restaurants, the “workman denim” style and barn-themed weddings are pop culture trends that can be traced back to the Alt Middle. While the two bubbles may seem vastly different, they are in fact very connected.

CONCLUSION

This information is very important to marketers. Often times, marketers (in all industries) turn to data for the insight that determines their customer audience. While this can be helpful,

getting primary data and actually talking a specific audience can lead to a more accurate and targeted approach. Americans are more similar than we think and we share a lot of values at the core. True understanding comes from interaction and experience. It’s important that reporters are actively seeking out people that are outside of their bubbles when writing articles, and marketers must do the same. Success will follow in terms of interaction, customer perception, and sales.

ABSTRACT

How can we better appreciate, understand, and sell to one hundred million mainstream Americans we don’t really know?

This is the question David Measer of RPA and Lisa PecotHerbert of the University of Southern California attempted to answer during their hour-long session. To explore outside their bubble, Herbert and Measer took a road trip across the Midwest to meet, interview and interact with Midwesterns.

100 Million People You Don’t Know, But Should Colby Bjornsen Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing colbybjornsen@gmail.com

LinkedIn:@colbybjornsen Personal Website Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Meet the Altmiddle

SESSION

Do you ever feel like you’re trapped in a bubble, missing out on unique cultures? I know at the University of Denver there’s a certain reputation and stereotype associated with the students. At a majority Caucasian university, I sometimes feel trapped in a bubble. But how significant are these social and economic bubbles? How divided is America? After the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, a campaign was released to build a stronger America. It showed how people from many different backgrounds, genders, religions, and cultures have come together to become a part of this great melting pot called America. We may come from different backgrounds but we are all one of the same, identifying as Americans. After 9/11, there was a shift from “what makes Americans the same” to celebrating “how our differences make us unique.” When the 2017 election rolled around, no one was prepared for what happened next. The media made the election appear that Hillary had already won, not many people thought Trump would come out on top. The larger cities blamed the more rural areas for the election, jumping to stereotypical conclusions that they were uneducated.

Half of the United States population lives in just nine states.

But what about the rest of the population? For their study, Herbert and Measer cut out the most populated U.S. cities as well as the least populated, leaving only the middle percent (#Altmiddle). After looking at demographics and occupation statistics of the Altmiddle, (the name they designated to the people living in medium sized cities across the U.S.) they developed some data based theories on the people living in these areas. For one, the Altmiddle, tends to be hard working, ethical, and often employed by farm jobs.

Rather than traveling outside the country, they prefer to stay in the U.S. as well as purchase American made products.

They have strong faith and value religion, traditional gender roles, respecting your ancestors and stable personal relationships. However, data doesn’t always represent people’s true

attitudes and beliefs. This data just reinforced stereotypes. Other parts of the country blame the Altmiddle for the Trump presidential win. However, the polls aren’t always right. Herbert and Measer wanted to understand where these people were coming from and get to know them by talking and meeting them in person rather than jumping to conclusions based on data. Thus, their adventure to North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas began. They depicted the stories of their travels and the people they met through four videos, each portraying a different lesson they learned.

Video one: The Altmiddle depends on each other. They value one-on-one interactions and make connections easily. Unlike in big cities like New York, you’re not alone. Everyone talks to everyone, greeting each other in public, holding doors and stopping for small talk.

People seemed friendlier and were willing to invite Herbert and Measer (complete strangers) into their homes. In general, they believed social media was not a place for real connection. It can take away from real relationships. It’s more important to interact with people in real life.

Video two: People expressed their version of “the American dream.” Many focused on being successful at whatever you find joy in and being surrounded by friends and family.

Measer found the Altmiddle a lot more comfortable with their life than those in California who tend to be more materialistic. In summary, their ambition is more rooted in personal and relationship fulfillment. They’re ambitious but in their own way and success is more about providing for your family.

Video three and four: The Altmiddle is proud of where they came from. With a mix of immigrants, refuges, Native Americans and American-born people living in a small space, heritage matters. They honor their past by being the best person then can be in the present. They pride themselves on having a strong Midwestern work ethic and service is engraved in them.

CONCLUSION

Herbert and Measer concluded that we can’t be quick to jump to conclusions and develop stereotypes about people we’ve never met. They found the Altmiddle to be genuine, hardworking, educated and community/family oriented. A lot of the people they talked to were anti-trump or voted for him because they thought he would make things better for the farmers and factory workers. After visiting the Midwest, Herbert and Measer found these states to be less of flyover states and more as trend setters. Other places are introducing the farm-to-table mentality. Backyard gardening and community gardens are becoming popular as are raising your own chickens for eggs. People everywhere are adopting the idea of getting married in a barn. We have a lot more in common with these people than ever realized. By stepping outside of our bubbles and meeting people firsthand we can truly understand others. Before marketing to stereotypes make sure you get to know your audience. Data can’t tell us everything but interacting with them personally can.

ABSTRACT

America isn’t as multicultural as we all think. If you disregard the biggest cities and look at the demographics of the smaller, less melting pot cities you find that America is actually more homogeneous than it seems.

100 Million People You Don’t Know, But Should Taylor Figge Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing btfigge@gmail.com LinkedIn Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session #altmiddle

This is exactly what David Measer and Lisa Pecot-Herbert did in their research study of the Middle part of America. They focused on just the B and C size cities to figure out who they are and how they think. They called their research study #altmiddle because of the literal meaning for focusing on the middle part of America and for the middle ground between the alt-right and the alt-left. Measer and Herbert found that the alt-middle who live in America’s small-medium sized cities is very different than the people who populate America’s largest and most well-known cities. This session works to answer important questions such as how divided is America? Are we making bad choices with advertising and journalism? How many people are in a bubble and don’t look outside or realize they are in a bubble?

SESSION

Where did the drive for this research study come from?

Measer and Herbert noticed a divide in consumption patters of different groups of people in America. The divide was so significant that it forced Measer and Herbert to look to bubbles as an explanation. Your filter bubble is destroying democracy. People exist in different bubbles and do different things and often their paths never cross. Bubble exist because of the narratives that form about certain groups of people. Bubbles have the power to inspire and unite us, but they also have the power to segregate us.

The prevailing American narrative came post-911 and says that we are a country of ethnic diversity. Through this narrative, America was no longer seen as a melting pot.

Instead, America became a place where differences are what make us proud and unique as a country. Trump’s election was interesting, because it didn’t align with the narrative Americans have been telling themselves for years. This misalignment got Measer and Herbert questions the current American narrative. They wanted to look at the narrative as marketers to see what was going. So they embarked on a physical ethnographic study trip of the Midwest, focusing on cities in the middle of each state to meet some of the 100 million other people we know exist, but don’t hear from that often.

When starting their research, Measer and Herbert found that half of the United States population lives in just 9 cities. The majority of these cities lie either on the East or West coast and so that is where the narrative “coastal elite” came from. 42% of the US population live in these cities. Measer and Herbert decided to ignore the biggest cities (took out the top 21 cities) in the US and rerun the numbers. Nielsen B and C cities make up 44% of the US population. Roughly the same amount of people live in the biggest cities as live in the small-medium sized cities so Measer and Herbert wanted to find the differences and compare them.

So what did they find? The alt-middle is more homogeneous and works with their hands while the people in the Top 21 cities have white collar jobs. The alt-middle enjoys watching TV shows that focus on internal issues while the Top 21 likes to watch TV shows about external issues, sometimes referred to as smart programming. Attitude statements of the alt-middle include: “I’d rather travel in the US than to a foreign country”, “Religion should be the pillar of society”, “My number one goal when shopping is to save as much as possible”, and “Buying American products is important to me”. Conversely, attitude statements of the top 21 included: “I like to learn about foreign cultures”, “I am very interested in the fine arts”, and “I feel really good about seeing celebrities in the media that share my ethnic background”. They found values of the alt-middle to include: faith, tradition, traditional gender roles, respecting ancestors, stable personas, and relationships.

They found values of the Top 21 to include: power, care about status, own self interest, highly ambitious, and wealth. The people in the alt-middle were all very nice and willing to engage with Measer and Herbert to help them with their study. The people of the altmiddle are also more open to refugees than the Top 21 because they honor their ancestors who were once refugees in this country.

The people in the alt-middle are held to a higher social standard because they live in smaller cities where everyone knows each other. They take more time to interact with one another; if you see someone enveloped by their phone in an alt-middle city you immediately know they are from somewhere else. They thrive on human connection. One man in the study said, “social media can be a gateway drug, but it doesn’t replace real connection. I have to evaluate every bit of technology and figure out: what has it taken away?” I found this man’s insights to be very interesting and relevant to the SXSW crowd that this study was being presented to. Most people in the crowd are creaters or earlyadopters of new technology, so I think this man’s powerful opinion triggered some people to rethink the true benefits of new technology if it replaces human contact.

CONCLUSION

So what does this all mean? America has never been more divided. When you live in a bubble, you make a lot of assumptions about the other bubble but they might not be right.

We need to burst the bubbles. The people in the alt-middle is actually responsible for many of the trends in the Top 21, such as mason jars, Pinterest and DIY (do it yourself), farm to table restaurants, backyard gardening, barn weddings, and workman jean fashion. It is not just the alt-middle that desires to form communities. The people in the Top 21 show a lot of pride in their zipcode and rep it. The Top 21 is taking inspiration from the alt-middle, not the other way around. All of these examples are the people of the US looking inside rather

than outside. The Top 21 are starting to look for the things that people already have. This research study showed that these bubbles do have some similarities and that the alt-middle are the true trendsetters leading some of the most important culture shift. We cannot ignore them anymore.

ABSTRACT

This was one of the best sessions that I went to during my time in Austin, and it happened to be the first. Yu-Kai Chou, original creator of the Gamification Octalysis Framework delivered a solo session that was not only extremely engaging but practical and applicable as well. In his presentation, Chou broke down all 8 core drives involved in his framework as well as the right kind of situation in which to use each to your advantage.

Actionable Gamification for the Win Lane Bretschneider BSBA Marketing, Minor: French lanebret85@gmail.com

Link to Session Leveraging Behavioral Psychology for Business

SESSION

The first core drive he spoke about is Meaning, which involves users of a program contributing information to a central platform that is then available and generally helpful for the entire user base. It is basically crowd-sourcing of information that gets used by contributors and noncontributors alike. There are two good examples that Chou gave of places where meaning is being used extremely effectively right now. The first is Wikipedia, where anyone can create or edit pages on just about any subject imaginable. Wikipedia provides a platform for information sharing, and then it’s the users who input everything. Without people willing to share their knowledge on a vast variety of subjects, wikipedia would be nothing more than an empty site. While this might seem like a strange model to rely on people who technically get nothing in return for their contributions, the meaning comes into play here because the people that submit information to Wikipedia are compensated with the feeling that they are contributing to something larger than themselves and helping out an entire population of people with their knowledge. The same goes for Waze, a company that uses crowdsourced information to help commuters take the fastest possible route to wherever they’re going. They source information about locations of users and the speeds at which they’re traveling to determine where traffic is heavy and how long it will take to get from point to point in order to deliver the fastest possible route to a destination. There are also auxiliary functions of the platform that allow users to alert others when there is a crash, police activity, road construction or damage, or even where the best gas prices are. In this way, Waze creates a community around their service, and users are intrinsically encouraged to contribute for the good of everyone else.

The second core drive Chou discussed was Accomplishment.

This deals with some kind of competition, either with yourself

or with others, that encourages you to try to win and therefore keep “playing.” The best example of the way that accomplishment is used for business is eBay. EBay sets up a bidding system for the products that people sell, and, as a result, those that win their bids generally end up overpaying for the things they buy but feeling really great about themselves for being the one who submitted the highest bid. Even though they were simply the only one willing to overpay by such an egregious amount, it feels like a victory for the consumer who won anyway. Many other companies incorporate accomplishment by implementing points systems or badges for their users that show progressions. Even if they don’t actually mean anything or translate into something tangible, winning something on a profile and knowing that there is more to be won makes users feel good about themselves in the short term for their “accomplishment” and encourages them to keep trying to win more.

Empowerment is the third core drive, and this involves the implementation of complex rules or systems that users must learn in order to be successful. This is most commonly seen in card games like Magic, Pokemon, or Yu-Gi-Oh, where the way the game is played is far from simple and the investment necessary in order to understand the ecosystem in its entirety is quite high. To put it in context, Chou pointed out that the total information that people need to remember in order to play these games far exceeds that contained in the periodic table, which is a little scary to think about in my opinion.

The fourth core drive is ownership. Incorporating ownership into the purchase decision essentially creates an emotional attachment tied to possession, and people buy more or more often because they think something is theirs. The Safeway monopoly prize competition that runs every year is a great way to think about ownership, as customers take home their own Monopoly board and play the game with tickets that they earn by shopping at the grocery store. The more that they shop there, the more tickets they earn and the more likely they are to win a prize. Another example I would relate this to is the idea of McDonald’s happy meal toys. The toys are a big part of the reason that kids want to go to McDonald’s because they provide the satisfaction of collecting and owning something for themselves.

Social influence is the fifth core drive, and this involves groups of people coming together in some way. In video games, it can be multiple players collaborating to beat a difficult level that they might not be able to beat as a solo player. It’s also seen a lot in startup funding when businesses turn to crowdfunding resources like Indiegogo or Kickstarter. In these examples, people work together to achieve a common goal, but the influence does not necessarily have to be a collaboration effort. Chou also referenced a company called OPower that gave a breakdown of energy consumption for not only your household but every household in the neighborhood. Users were able to see how they compared to the average and the most efficient, and people who used it ended up conserving a ton of energy due to the high competition factor. OPower leveraged the human competitive nature in order to help people save on energy.

The sixth core drive is scarcity, which is reflected when people want something simply because they are not allowed or able to have it. The principles of this core drive are well illustrated by the way that the popular social media platform, Facebook, was launched. It

started as a directory for Harvard students, and at the time it was a platform exclusively used

by Harvard students. No one else in the country had access to it. When Zuckerberg began to expand out to other universities, he limited the availability to other Ivy League universities.

He set the standard that Facebook was going to be exclusive. At this point, many people had heard of Facebook, and the excitement around it was growing. Slowly, other universities across the country started to get access to the platform, but those who had the most excitement around it were the ones who didn’t have it yet. Every university wanted to be the next place that Facebook would be unveiled mostly due to the exclusivity of it all.

Unpredictability is the penultimate core drive in the octalysis framework, and this aspect thrives off of people’s curiosity. Chase bank ran a promotion for a while that illustrates this beautifully called “Chase picks up the tab.” Essentially, whenever a customer used their Chase card, there was a small chance that Chase would pay for that purchase. Despite the fact that there was only a very small percentage of people who were granted this prize, the total number of purchases on Chase cards skyrocketed, and people spent far more overall than they had previously. In this case, it’s not so much about winning the prize that drives people to participate, but it’s knowing that there’s a chance you could win and wanting to use your card to see if you do.

Rounding out the octalysis framework is avoidance, which is a core drive that feeds off of a lack mentality. In the popular game, Farmville, users maintain their crops by checking in regularly and tending to them to ensure that they’re thriving. However, if you leave them alone for too long, your crops will start to shrivel up and die. This motivates users to keep coming back again and again on a frequent basis, as the user feels responsible if their crops die after all the hard work they put into maintaining them before. In this way, users want to avoid letting their farms die, regardless of the fact that they’re only digital.

CONCLUSION There is a difference in the basis for these core drives, and they are divided half and half.

One half can be considered to fall under white hat core drives, while the other half can be considered black hat. White hat essentially empowers people and makes them feel good about themselves in order to motivate them, and black hat is all about getting results quickly and effectively, even if that means people feel down on themselves to get there. That’s not to say that white hat is always good and black hat is always bad, as black hat core drives can be used as aversive techniques for completing difficult tasks like eating healthier.

ABSTRACT

“American Gods” opens with a man in prison. A realistic setting to begin a story. This is nearly the last realistic component the show utilizes in its heart stopping pilot. A show based on a bestseller by acclaimed author Neil Gaiman, it explores f how cultures are shaped by the gods they worship and what happens when those gods are replaced. In true Starz fashion the result is incredibly bloody.

American Gods: The White Buffalo Matthew J. Frost MBA in Marketing Matthewjfrost3@gmail.com

Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session How do you spend to own Word of Mouth?

With such a great story, and a truly amazing cast led by HBO favorite Ian McShane, why did Starz spend a bunch of money to place a giant stuffed white buffalo in the rain? One purpose, to capture and build word of mouth. It didn’t work.

SESSION

The story of American Gods is the type of tale that nerds like myself flock to. I mean come on, Norse gods and leprechauns on an American road trip? Forget about it. I was hooked from the minute I saw the cover. Since then the book has been one of my favorite recommendations for people looking for something new to read. Now before you turn the page and save your self the musings of a book loving fan boy, let me assure this is not the case.

American Gods, which left SXSW without any significant festival buzz, is an outstanding case study on how not to position your content and how to waste money. Word of mouth is a fickle and slippery asset to leverage. I spent thirteen months of my life trying to do it in southern Afghanistan and still didn’t quite succeed. Starz spent three rainy days in Austin and thousands of dollars to fail spectacularly.

Well beloved by Uber-nerds such as myself, American Gods has a die hard built in audience. However, it is not the type of show that is quickly understandable and relatable to nonfans. Given this reality, Starz and the show’s media team were faced with how to present the show at SXSW and garner the elusive “buzz” so many movies and shows desire. Their approach is easy to make fun of and probably made sense to those close to the project.

The media team for American Gods created a tech oasis across from the convention center with a 15 foot tall, steam spewing , white buffalo sculpture. It was eye catching, but ultimately did little to drive interest in the shows premiers.

Weather was the death nail of the campaign and a disastrous bit of luck for the network.

The weather the first few days in Austin was overcast and alternately rainy. Cool stature of not, no ones going to spend a few hours in your outdoor oasis and experience your show if they’re getting rained on.

The Buffalo was a popular photo destination for a day or so, but without context the show didn’t garner any of the buzz that it was hoping for. The premiere of the show, which I was luckily enough to attend, was packed. However, of the 20 or so people I talked to in line to see it, all of them had read the book and were fan’s of Gaiman’s writing. We, as fans, understood the significance of the white buffalo to the story of American God’s . Starz wasted, in my incredibly biased opinion, an opportunity to build awareness and tie interest to what is a truly great show.

American Gods follows the misadventures of a recently released prisoner from an undisclosed southwestern state named Shadow Moon. Released early due to his wife’s death, Shadow travels home to be at her funeral and encounters a fellow traveler named “Mr. Wednesday”. For those of you unfamiliar with the source material, this is an obvious hint that Shadow had just met Odin. One of the central Gods in the Norse pantheon that inspired Gaiman’s, Mr. Wednesday is played with relish by actor Ian McShane. The rest of the show, and by extension the series, focuses on the travels of Shadow and Wednesday as they meet and interact with various characters from a host of mythologies.

The show was incredibly well done and as a fan I was incredibly impressed. As a marketing student, I was struck by the wasted opportunity to build awareness and buzz. I understand, it’s easy to throw stones. A quick check of historical weather patterns in the hill country of Texas, however, would have quickly shown that placing a large investment that you want people to congregate around outside was a bad idea. Despite this gaff, I and my 20 line friends were hopeful for the show.

American Gods stands a good chance at occupying a place in popular culture that will soon be vacated by Game of Thrones. The cast is amazing and the story is engaging. Had Starz not haphazardly placed most of their festival advertising budget in the rain, they may have actually gained some buzz.

CONCLUSION

Word of mouth has become increasingly important for Brands to gain and leverage as part of their marketing mix. What this example shows is that it can’t really be bought, at least not in this case. Any campaign that seeks to gain word of mouth as a key component needs to start small and be incredibly focused. It’s not enough to simply spend money, brands need to tie word of mouth to their content and engage key influencers in the real world.

Ironically, American Goods did gain a fair bit of buzz post SXSW. The concept of black man leaving prison and discovering that he suddenly might have godlike powers seems to ring true in the current political climate. The best part? This buzz was nearly free.

ABSTRACT

The Automated Assistant Revolution

Automated assistants have been around for quite sometime and are only improving as our technology grows. It has completely revolutionized the way customers can interact with any company or brand. Chatbots have come up recently where instead of being on the phone you can simply type out whatever issue, comment, or need that you have. Although Chatbots are used by the majority of the companies, over 70% of the bots don’t operate the way that they should. With our current technology, there is no reason that there should be issues for customers using the Chatbots. Ido Iungleson, Mobbie Nazir, Asher Rapkin and Seth Harris talk about the ways that the chatbots will be improved overtime and should be working currently. While it has been around for some time, it really is the future of customer service.

SESSION

Asher Rapkin was my personal favorite from this panel.

Hearing about his experience with Facebook was really impressive and really stuck out in my mind. He works for the Anton Jenssen Global Business Marketing Team leading the Product Marketing Communications Platforms for Facebook.

Graduate The team has worked mostly with go-to-market strategies for many aspects of the Facebook platform, one example being Anton_Jenssen@hotmail.com Messanger. Prior to working at Facebook. Asher Rapkin worked for a division of Apple called iAd as the Global Head of Channel Marketing. Asher has several other impressive Link to Flipboard positions prior to Apple and Facebook that I found really Magazine interesting as well. In addition to committing most of his career working with Digital Marketing, he is an active member Link to Session of the Producer’s Guild of America’s New Media Council and is on the board of the iab’s Native Advertising and Social Automated Assistant Committee. Rapkin works a lot with other people to change the way brands can use technology, like Chat Bots, to help Revolution them better their business. Rapkin was a very impressive speaker and changed the way I think about the progression of Chat Bots.

Typically, most instances with Chat Bots have made my customer service experience worse than when I speak to a human on the phone. I often find myself attempting to say the right commands or clicking the right numbers in order to get to a live operator more quickly. Some companies even use the the fact that they don't use Chat Bots as a reason for their company to stand out. After this session I feel I have been

able to see the future of the Chat bot more than I did. I have dealt with Chatbots both over the phone and in the “chat with us” on a company’s website. I usually have a better experience when I use a chat and am able to type out my comments or concerns than when I say it over the phone. I do have an accent, so here in America often times the Bots have a difficult time understanding me; using the “chat with us” option helps eliminate that problem for me.

I have read a lot about robots and how they will soon be able to detect our emotions.

Honestly, I didn’t think about how this would help the Chat Bot. After this session, I see how the speakers talked about how important it is for the Chat Bots to determine our emotions and be able to match it accordingly in their responses. Soon, with the change in AI technology, Chat Bots are going to be the best way for us to interact with customer service for any type of brand or company.

Another part of the Chat Bot that I thought was interesting is the option to make an order simply by “texting” the Chat Bot from your computer. There have been instances where people show screenshots of the flaws with these types of Chat Bots not performing the way that they would have hoped. After this session I am confident that they are going to improve the way the Chat Bot functions on both platforms revolutionizing the way we shop and get help through customer service.

CONCLUSION

While many people might find Chat Bots to be an annoyance in customer service, or any type of communication with companies, it’s important for people to look at the potential that they can bring to companies and for consumers as well. I see the importance of using the Chat Bot after this session and I think it’s important for the rest of the consumers to see the way it is going to evolve over the years and become better as technology improves.

ABSTRACT

Tapping into the automated assistant revolution takes skill and know how—it is not something to be approached frivolously. Chatbots have the ability to disrupt entire industries, and as outlined in this session, particularly the way that consumers shop. Automation should be based on providing value through utility, and when done well, the concept of chatbots should not even require extensive understanding from the consumer.

The Automated Assistant Revolution

SESSION

Currently, 70% of chatbots are not delivering what users ideally would want out of such a service. This is mostly due to the newness of chatbots as a whole, which is also currently the industry’s biggest challenge. Chatbots are essentially the creation of a new kind of customer service with the Logan Leake enhancement of customer satisfaction as a result. They should be able to answer the questions of “what are your needs? and how can we help you achieve them?” It is Undergraduate: BSBA important to master this concept before jumping in for the Marketing sake of being “in”. Everyone is incredibly eager to be a part of this chatbot revolution that they are entering the space logan.leake@aol.com just to be there without actually thinking of why they are there and if they actually should be there at all. Again, Instagram:@LoganMatoaka chatbots are all about utility, not solely entertainment. Think about your objective and how you want to measure it, first and foremost. This will help guide companies in creating a Link to Flipboard successful chatbot.

Magazine

Link to Session It’s a Revolution: Deceivingly Human Chatbots

Another consideration when creating a chatbot is the idea of “empathy through service.” Bots can be programmed intelligently and should communicate with the same abilities human have but better. Going off of that, bots should absolutely have personality and one that is representative of the associated brand. In fact, creativity of communication is not limited to one language—consider using GIFs or memes—so long as what is being communicated is representative of your brand persona. If a company can build an engaging automated platform they then have the power to strengthen their brand all the more, particularly if that platform create the shortest distance from bot to user. This is the ultimate goal. If a company is not able to make bot performance faster than what their website could provide manually manipulated, then this is not a space to waste company resources in. Chatbots are not cheap investments— it takes a diligent amount of effort to make a truly effective and engaging chatbot.

The biggest barrier in this industry as of today is simply discovery. This is such new technology that most consumers are not even aware of its existence. Even brands that already have bots are not promoting them enough. If your company utilizes a chatbot, say so on your website, communicate the fact that you have this resource! While at this point in time it is rather difficult to measure effectiveness, it is worth taking note of how many bidirectional conversations are happening to at least begin measuring effectiveness.

The panelists made it a point to emphasize just how important it is to distinguish the sentiment of the consumer when engaging with a chatbot from start to finish. Taking note of this also allows for great measurability of effectiveness. Does the user appear to be happy at the beginning of the conversation but completely frustrated by the end of it? This is a good indication that your bot is likely not providing the utility and value it has been sought to. Another element that ties into consumer satisfaction are accurate response signals.

Transparency is a must when creating a successful bot. An automated assistant should possess the ability to communicate to the user approximately just how long it will take to get back to them with the answer they are seeking to find.

Right now chatbots are in their infancy with their capabilities being endless. Automated assistants will be anywhere and everywhere in the years to come. Expect them in your autonomous vehicles, your homes (beyond Amazon’s Alexa), restaurants, etc. The physical act of shopping could even become obsolete with the help of chatbots. For example, if you are in the market for a new television, an automated assistant would be able to recommend the perfect TV for your space based on a number of elements, such as size, without you having to take all of the measurements yourself. Once given a list of recommendations you then would be directed to Best Buy’s website, for example, to purchase your new television.

Easy! However, this sort of assistance does pose the ethical question of whether or not bots can be biased to a particular brand, either based on your search history or another influencing factor. Of course with any advancement of new technology, questions of ethics come into play, and generally, legislation then follows.

CONCLUSION

There is still so much for brands to be learning about bots and from bots. Since this is such a new space brands should expect to continue learning all they can and to grow with it as to not be left behind. As this space continues to mature marketing is essential, though first having as close to a perfected platform as possible from the very beginning, is key to success. While automated assistants are curated from a place of utility and usability it is important to remember that they can and should be fun and engaging. As language processing advances, chatbots will become more intelligent and deceivingly human (re: the perfect human). The future is being discovered now—are you ready?

ABSTRACT

Beyond #Foodporn: Changing the Food Media Diet Kendra Arenkill Undergraduate: Marketing kendraa2@earthlink.net LinkedIn Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session The Future of Food Media

Food writing primarily focuses on consumption - whether it is a recipe or a listing of the best restaurants to eat at. Such writing revolves around the final outcome of the meal on the plate. Food writing has even moved away from typically media outlets and onto social outlets such as Instagram where consumers simply scroll through endless images of food. It’s becoming ever more difficult for journalists to grab the attention of readers regarding food topics that extend coverage beyond the hedonistic. Social and political food matters are also important and are being covered by journalists, but how can they gain reader awareness? In this session, four panelists gathered to discuss the future of food media in the 21st century. The panel included Corby Kummer from The Atlantic, Kate Cox from The New Food Economy, Chase Purdy from Quartz, and Helena Bottemiller Evich from Politico.

SESSION

The four panelists began the discussion after stating a thesis to be used as guidance. That thesis was: “for decades there has been two really different kinds of food media, that only look at food in terms of consumption: the first is food pornstyle that includes photography, dining and entertainment writing, and the second is industry journals that look at food as a business.” All panelists agreed that most of the food content that is created today includes recipes and diet related articles, which is what consumers tend to click on the most. As journalists, though, they are looking for new ways in which their readers can “engage with their plate”. To do this, these reporters need to find a way to re-phrase to consumers how relevant other food industry news is. Such news includes that of big food companies, industry trends, and social justice of food. It is important to note that these panelists insisted that they be considered food writers and not food reporters. The distinction lies in the accessibility of the information that is being written about. Writing about food as a business is a type of writing that is not accessible to many food bloggers or writers - everyday people. It should also be acknowledged that the title of food critic, known for evaluating food and restaurants, is nearly dead. This is not because consumers are not interested, but instead because fewer media outlets are able to pay the dining and travel expenses of these food critics.

From personal experience, I have noticed that there is fewer

content written by food critics. A friend of mine has created a food blog on Instagram, and in a sense, it is these food bloggers that are now taking over the title of food critic. These bloggers take it upon themselves to try many new foods and restaurants and then post about their experience. Because they often consider themselves “foodies”, they incur the expense. When their following grows large enough, though, this expense of eating out is then passed onto restaurants as they often invite the food bloggers to attend their restaurant or food event free of charge. There is little need anymore for a food critic.

The big question the panelists then discussed was how to get consumers interested other important food topics. What they discovered and noted was food as an object is not that interesting. To make it interesting, the stories written about food have to involve people.

For example, a great article was written by The Tampa Bay Times where they exposed fake claims of locally sourced food from restaurants. This article showed a great deal of investigative reporting and involved consumers in the article. Another great article that exemplifies this was titled “Bigger Chickens Bring a Tough New Problem: ‘Woody Breast’” and was published by the Wall Street Journal. This article was important for food reporters because it broke down the silos between industry and production of poultry in the United States and stated the impact that it can have on consumers. Such articles have an impact on consumers, which therefore increases their interest in reading them. Another great example of this was the article “The Vegetable Technology Gap” written by Politico. This article was about a “non-sexy” issue regarding the history and innovation of vegetables. It garnered a large viewership, though, because it touched on supermarket packaged salad. This turned the story into something that is relatable and tangible, in a sense, to consumers. These stories touch consumer’s lives, and are topics that consumers have opinions on, which stems engagement.

CONCLUSION

This session was very valuable to marketers who work in public relations. Reporters want their articles to be read by the public, so when pitching food journalists about a story, it is important to state why the story would be applicable to consumers. It is clear that food related articles that involve consumers are more successful. The pitch should be simple and succinct.

Food reporters and marketers who are responsible for creating content regarding food related issues should be weary about the titles they use on their articles. While the title is important in grabbing the reader’s attention, don’t just use a big title to drive clicks. If the content isn’t there or it doesn’t match the title of the article, readership will quickly drop off.

Readers are becoming increasingly aware of the titles written as click-bait. Instead, create a title that reflects the content of the article. When writing the content of the article, be sure to engage the food system and food producers as well as consumers. Food should not be reported any differently than journalism on other subjects, such as education, government, or the economy. Be sure to report food related content similarly.

ABSTRACT

Brain, Behavior, Story: MindChanging Narratives Kendra Arenkill Undergraduate: Marketing kendraa2@earthlink.net LinkedIn Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session The Influence of Brain Behavior on Storytelling

Christopher Graves, the Chairman of Ogilvy Public Relations and now the President/found of the Ogilvy Center for Behavioral Science, has been studying brain behavior and how it impacts marketing communications for the past 8 years. He has been on the hunt to understand what types of communication changes people’s minds and how consumers ultimately make their decisions. Often times in marketing, campaigns that appear to be great are produced but do not garner the results that had been hoped for. Chris has discovered that the secret lies in the narrative; there is an actual science to effective storytelling. This session explores Chris’s research in neuroscience and behavioral science to unearth what makes for a successful and impactful narrative.

SESSION

Over a span of 8 years, Christopher Grave’s conducted 5,000 different pieces of primary research. Through his research he discovered that everything we thought we knew about how to change someone’s mind, shape opinions and craft a good story were wrong. The solutions Chris has found for good narrative has to do with three key accidents that happened in the last 150 years. The first accident that happened to a man named Gage in 1848. Gage’s job was to build railroads, so he usually had a sharp metal tool in hand. One day, an explosion happened in the ground that caused Gage’s metal tool to go through his eye and brain. Shockingly, Gage was still able to speak, but his personality changed dramatically and he was no longer able to make sound decisions. This is because the steel rod had gone through the part of Gage’s brain that deals with emotion. As it turns out, 90-95% of our decisions are made with our emotions. As Descartes once said, “we’re not thinking machines, we’re feeling machines that think”. Many times consumers don’t know why they’re making the decision that they are, but they do so because of an emotion they felt. At great example of this was a focus group study that was done in which consumers who were in a room were asked to pick one of two posters of their choosing when they left the room.

1 group of consumers were told to explain their decision, while the other group did not. The group that was asked to explain their choice chose a silly/dumb poster while the group that did not have to explain took a flower print poster. What this shows is that when consumers are faced with explaining their decisions, they often collapse and do not know how to explain their choices.

The second historical accident which Chris saw as important happened to Professor Charles Lord in 1979 who wrote “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence” after he conducted an experiment gauging people’s confirmation biases. From this study, people felt threatened when shown factual evidence that contradicts their strongly held beliefs. Their brains tell them “this information can’t be correct” and the brain actually experiences physical pain when wrong. Therefore, when telling a narrative, it’s important to not argue with facts and statistics - don’t discuss differences between fact and myth. While this may seem logical, it actually makes the narrative worse because people are receiving new information which makes them feel pain or feel threatened. Repetition on the other hand, even if it is repetition of a myth, is familiar and therefore popularizes the message. Also, mages of charts or graphs is persuasive to consumers. Affirmation is a tactic that works in narrative but is rarely used. When telling a story, it’s important to us narrative transportation; the more immersed someone is in a story, the more they’re likely to change their mind. The effects of fiction vs. nonfiction have the same effect on people, and the characters within the novels can affect how people think and feel. This efficacy for a character can change a person’s actions, reflecting the character whether for good or for bad.

The third and final historical accident which provides insight on storytelling happened in 1992 with Giacomo Rizzolatti. Giacomo wanted to map the brain and neuron firings (the part of the brain that makes you think and feel). He studied the neurons of monkeys in a study in which he mapped the neurons that fired when the monkey ate food. What was discovered was mirror neurons: when the monkey watched the human eat food, the monkey’s neurons started firing even though it wasn’t eating. This indicates empathy in the brain. To be successful in storytelling, it’s important to tell the story in such a way that the story-receiver begins to mirror the storyteller’s brain, thinking of what the storyteller will say next. Good storytellers understand and emotionally move others.

CONCLUSION

Marketers can learn a great deal from this talk, because at the heart (no matter if you work with data or in communications), storytelling is at the heart of what we do. Based on the three “historical accidents” discussed above, it’s important that marketers use emotion, avoid fact versus myth arguments, engage in narrative transportation, and engage in neural mirroring.

Marketers need to be aware that they are not writing in abstract ways (such phrases as “value-added”, “shareholder value”, “out-of-the-box”) and instead use concrete language because it is more credible and believable to consumers.

Marketers also need to be cautious of the way they discuss their own brand. Brands get in trouble when they practice cognitive dissonance and fools themselves about who they really are. For example, a company is in trouble when they believe they act like Patagonia but are, in reality, a energy company. Matching customer brand perception with company brand perception is crucial for understanding the appropriate narrative. When creating this company narrative, marketers should take advantage of the OCEAN personal-skew filter. This tool will analyze how consumers feel about your brand. Overall, narrative is important because it is from there that we derive meaning.

ABSTRACT

Speaker Christopher Graves, founder of Ogilvy Center for behavior science, gave one of the best talks of the week. His entertaining and animated session dived into the art of narrative. Graves’ work focuses on connecting neuroscience, behavior science and narrative theory to create more effective storytelling. I now have a new view of effective persuasion to change the minds of consumers.

Brain, Behavior, Story: MindChanging Narratives Colby Bjornsen Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing colbybjornsen@gmail.com

LinkedIn:@colbybjornse n Personal Website Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session The Power of Narrative

SESSION

Graves began his presentation by information the audience that everything we thought we knew about how humans make decisions, how to change someone’s mind and most of what we know about how to craft a story—is wrong. By explaining three accidents that occurred over the past 150 years, Graves developed his only theories on effective storytelling and persuasion. Key takeaway number one: we’re not thinking machines, we’re feeling machines. Without our emotions, we are unable to reason. In fact, ninety-five percent of our decisions are controlled by emotions. Well rational facts may help you back up your decision, at the end of the day the decisions are based on emotion. For this reason, Graves recommends avoiding focus groups because humans can’t truly explain why they decided to do (or choose) something.

Key takeaway number two: arguing by using facts does not make your case any better. People aren’t going to change their beliefs just because you start throwing numbers at them. They will get more annoyed/frustrated and start to think you’re making facts up.

Key takeaway number three: repeating a myth (or something untrue) can make it seem familiar and even believable to consumers. When we hear things over-and-over again we start to think it’s true. Further, people tend to be blinded by science. If graphs and formulas are displayed on advertisements it increases ad persuasiveness and belief in a product. A prime example is in hair commercials seen on TV where they show the “science behind the shampoo” and display modules reacting with each other. These brands are simply trying to persuade the audience to believe the product works by showing the “science” and “research” behind it. However, no one should follow in these steps to create an unfactual and deceiving campaign.

Key takeaway number four: we consistently underestimate the power of narratives. Using stories can sometimes be more effective than fact-based campaigns; the more immersed in a story consumers are, the more likely they are to change their beliefs to match those within the story. By allowing consumers (readers and viewers) to be transported through someone else’s perspective, the story becomes more relatable and therefore attitudes and emotions are evoked. Further, showing the story of an individual is more powerful than showing an audience large numbers. For example, in a campaign to raise money for starving children in Africa, what do you think is more impactful: A chart displaying the thousands of children who are suffering or a single picture of a mother finding her dead child? Clearly the image.

Our emotions immediately take over when we can identify with the individual or family involved. Numbers will never be more powerful than a story.

Key takeaway number five: consumers are more likely to believe concrete things. While reading or listening to someone speak, our brain always takes things literally before figuratively. Things that can be easily pictured and formed into concrete things often become more believable. For example, in Trump’s immigration reform he talked about building a wall. The public saw it to be more credible, something that he was actually going to do, because we could picture it in our minds.

CONCLUSION Graves started and ended his session by asking the audience to tell a story to the person sitting next to them in just 60 seconds. His hope was that by the end of the hour-long session we’d have the knowledge to tell a more effective story. By appealing to our listener’s emotions, using concrete terms, and not relying on facts to change their opinions, an excellent narrative can be formed.

ABSTRACT

Brain, Behavior, Story: MindChanging Narratives Eleanor Hancock Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing Minor: French eleanorwhancock@gmail.c om LinkedIn Instagram: ellie_hancock95 Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to session Science Will Revive The Art of Narrative

The communications landscape is littered with failed attempts to change minds and behavior. Brands frequently overlook the science behind effective narrative, producing many award-winning campaigns that do nothing. This session’s speaker, Christopher Graves, was recently honored with a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency for his work in connecting neuroscience, behavioral science and narrative theory for more effective storytelling. In this session, Graves uses insights from his current position as global chairman of Ogilvy PR and leverages the curiosity of his former career (award-winning news executive for two decades) to open our eyes to a new view of changing minds and effective persuasion.

SESSION

Methods of crafting a persuasive story was wrong for a long period of time. They neglected to use science from our world and translate it for the business world to use for storytelling.

Our skewed perspective of effective storytelling can be attributed to 3 large accidents across 150 years.

Accident #1; In 1848, Phineas Gage was working on the most disruptive technology at the time. It was the railroad. On September 13th, a steel bar shot through the left side of his eye and brain. Thereafter, he could no longer make any sound decisions. Fast forward to the early 2000’s, neuroscientist Antonio Damacio studied his skull in addition to living patients with brain lesions to understand how humans make decisions on a neurological level. He observed that, within decision making, our left and right brain do not work separately but in symphony. There are two parts of the brain that need to work in tandem. The amygdala is the source of fight or flight reaction while the prefrontal cortex takes in raw signals and figures out what to do with them. What Darmacio discovered is that we are not just thinking machines, we are feeling machines that think. Without our emotions we are unable to reason. Although emotion dominates in decision making, we still need the rational facts.

Accident #2: In 1979, professor Charles Lord conducted a experiment to understand to what degree fresh evidence can change people’s mind. If you believe something and someone shows you evidence to the contrary, how will it change your mind?

Each participant self-selected whether or not the death penalty deters capital crimes. Once they selected a stance, Lord provided research to each individual that proved the other stance was right. What Lord found is that these individuals stood by their original stance despite being shown contrary evidence. If you give a person ironclad evidence they will deny its truth because people react defensively. This is scientifically known as confirmation bias. Graves conducted his own research to understand where communication goes wrong in efforts to change someone’s opinion. First, he found that facts are polarizing and people do not give into them. Second, repeating the myth inadvertently popularizes it. This is scientifically known as a availability heuristics. As humans, when we are exposed to repeated messages over time, we become convinced they are true. Novelty poses a threat but familiarity does not. Third, affirmation works but we rarely use it. Before you try to change someone’s mind you have to disentangle self-worth and identity in the issue because what we believe is a part of our identity and could be a stake. Fourth, we consistently underestimate the power of narrative to change minds.

There is a science to affective narrative and when crafted carefully, it is extremely powerful.

Trivial elements such as graphs can induce persuasion but the behavioral science called narrative transportation has the greatest impact. Melanie Green and Raymond Mar have studied narrative transportation for most of their professional career. Here are some of their findings to develop our thinking of persuasive narrative. They discovered that fiction readers develop more empathy by constantly taking the perspective of different characters.

Empathy for character works both ways. To put it simply, if you read about or watch something unintelligent it can make you unintelligent. The more people are immersed in the story, the more their attitudes will align. These attitudes and beliefs don’t have to be explicitly stated but should provide an implicit theme. Nonfiction or fiction, both genres have the same efficacy to persuade. In comparison to other forms of persuasion, narrative fiction tends to be more effective because it takes a non-intrusive or non-authoritative approach. It allows you to be transported without consciously confronting adversarial facts.

Accident #3 In the 1980s and 1990s, neurophysiologists Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team discovered mirror neurons. They used macaque monkeys in their study and found that some neurons responded when the monkey observed a person picking up a piece of food, and also when the monkey itself picked up the food. What this uncovered is that we experience what we watch. This branched a whole field of science. Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist out of Princeton, studied mirror neurons in the context of narrative. He found the scientific term called neuro coupling. It explains that if someone is telling a good story, the listener’s brain mirrors the story and in some cases the listener would accurately anticipate where the teller was going with the story and mirror it in advance. Imagine if we could do this intentionally. Imagine if your narrative was based on understanding mirror neurons. Some may dispute it as unethical but, in fact, every great writer has already achieved this level of neurological engagement with their readers. In science this is called the concreteness effect. Studies on this effect discuss the influence of concrete language versus abstract language. If you write in a very descriptive concrete fashion, it has different impacts on the brain than abstractions.

Think about this in the context of our life. Think about how companies talk? They talk with business vocabulary including buzzwords like synergy, value added, innovation, and

paradigm. If we use sensory evocation to bring these words to life, our brain finds it difficult to digest. The problem is that our brain takes these words literally before understanding them metaphorically. This evidence reveals a surprising correlation between concreteness and imaginability/believability. Concrete language is proven to be more believable because if you can picture it in your head it is more credible. When we think back to business language, we find that companies are straining credibility with abstractions.

Social norms are another tool of persuasion that is typically underestimated when trying to change someone's mind. Solomon Asch, a pioneer in social psychology, is well known for his conformity experiments. His findings uncover how peer pressure can change opinion. To use peer pressure for a good cause requires knowledge of who else believes in that cause because people do not want to feel out of sync with a group. Those that challenge social norms of a group they believed in experience a unique pain connected to alienation. On a neurological level, areas associated with puzzlement and physical pain light up. These individuals are known as convert communicators. Convert communicators are perceived as credible sources because they are arguing against their own previously held attitudes and behaviors. Consider a democratic politician who was formally registered as a republican and now argues against republican policies. Although this could be perceived as hypocritical, these communicators are effective because they are sincere and have experienced pain in breaking social norms. To persuade behavior requires belonging and credible influencers such as convert communicators. You can’t lecture people into good behavior or it will backfire. Experts spewing evidence is not the answer to persuasion because your expert is another’s idiot. As mentioned earlier, evidence just polarizes us. You have to change minds with empathy and disentanglement. If you take identity out of play, there is no identity threat. Removing causal attribution makes people more willing to change their behavior.

Don’t make reasoning free people choose between knowing what's known and being who they are. If you do that, they will retreat to who they are.

To apply these concepts to leveraging narrative, let’s consider The Identifiable Victim Effect.

Scientists Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic discovered this effect referring to the tendency of individuals to offer greater aid when a specific, identifiable person (victim) is observed under hardship, as compared to a large, vaguely defined group with the same need. Stories without numbers have greatest effect and inserting rational suppresses sympathy and empathy. When you look at the one you will. If you look at the best you won't. For example, when you pile on the number of refugees who have died, it will not have the same impact as a story about one child refugee in hardship.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, our methods of crafting persuasive stories have incorrectly relied on a world of experts. If you strip down the message and fill it with numbers, it won't feel empathetic.

The road to persuasion is through narrative transportation. Emotion trumps all rational.

Brands lack persuasion because they lack knowledge about the human brain and its application in creating convincing brand narratives. Brands get in trouble when they engineer with cognitive dissonance. Get into the mind of your customer and use mirror neurons to craft an experience and engage your customers on a deeper level. Do not be authoritative, be empathetic. Finally, use concrete language over abstract language so your brand story is clearly understood and, more importantly, convincing.

ABSTRACT

Brain, Behavior, Story: MindChanging Narratives Taylor Figge Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing btfigge@gmail.com https://www.linkedin.co m/in/taylorfigge/ Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Changing Minds Flipped Upside Down

President and Founder of Ogilvy Center for Behavioral Science, Christopher Graves, stands front and center of the stages as he, and he alone, tells the audience how to change minds and behavior of people through three simple steps.

Graves shares with the audience what effective storytelling is and how they can use it in their personal and professional lives. The art of persuasion is not an easy task to accomplish.

But with Graves’s insights on connecting neuroscience, behavioral science, and narrative theory the audience is left some new tools in their repertoire of how to effectively change minds.

SESSION

Over the course of his career, Graves has collected about 5,000 sources of primary research data. And what has he found our from all of this data? Everything we thought we knew about how humans make decisions, shape opinions, tell stories, and change people’s minds is all wrong. Three accidents over the course of 150 years caused Graves to reach this realization.

In September 18, 1848, a railroad worker accidently put too much gun powder in a railroad hole and when it exploded it sent his tool straight through his head and brain. The railroad worker did not die and was still able to talk with the tool in his head. When he came back to work eight weeks later his coworkers noticed a change in his personality. He has gone from nice to mean and could no longer make sounds decisions. It turns out that the tool had gone through his Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex which is responsible for the processing of risk and fear.

What this incident shows researchers and marketers is that we are not thinking machines, we are feeling machines. All human decisions are powered by our emotions and instincts.

There is a battle between the rational brain and the emotional brain and the emotional brain will always win. But we do still need our rational brain to back up our decisions.

Graves gave great advice to the audience when he told us to never ever run a focus group again. When you ask someone in a focus group to explain their decision they will collapse and make a poor, irrational decision, because it is easier.

Asking humans why they made a decision, which is usually a main goal of focus groups doesn’t work out so well.

Fast forward to 1979, a researcher wanted to measure to what degree he could change people’s minds when presented with new information. He had participants self-select to whether or not the death penalty works. First, he gave each group research that proved their opinions and then he flipped it an gave them new information that proved their opinion was wrong. The result he found was the when the participants of the study were presented with the new information it did not change their minds. They all kept their original points of view.

The more evidence you pile onto people just makes them mad. They assume it is false evidence because they don’t want what they think to be wrong. Arguing the facts doesn’t work. The more facts that are brought to the table the more polarization there is in the argument. Affirmation works, but we rarely use it. Before you try to change someone’s mind you have to untangle their identity from the issues first. People’s stance on an issue becomes a defining characteristic of their personality, so when you simply say they are wrong without trying to understand their side first you have already lost any hope of changing their mind. We constantly underestimate the power of the narrative. There is a science to effective narrative as a tool to change minds when it is effectively crafted.

Marketers should use narrative transportation to change the minds of consumers and get them to align their opinions with a brand. Narrative transportation is non-adversarial and allows the viewer to be transported through someone else’s point of view and situation and causes the viewer to put themselves in someone else’s shoes.

Now it is 1992 and Giacomo Rizzolanti is trying to map the human brain in terms of neurons firing, how we form patterns, and mirror neurons. This is the earliest biochemical roots of empathy. Humans experience by watching. Everything we do can be mirrored by other humans. Narratives should be based intentionally on mirror neurons so that everyone is on the same page. There are two ways of communicating: the concrete way and the abstract way. Concrete communication is easier and faster for the brain to understand and unpack.

The more concretely you speak, the more people agree with you. Graves backed this assertion up by having us look at the most recent election. Trump clearly was more concrete while Clinton was more abstract with their policies and as a result Trump came out on top despite poll data and analytics.

CONCLUSION

Graves convinced the overflowing auditorium that they should use stories over numbers any day in order to change someone’s mind. Narrative transportation is a slow burn but when done right it is very effective. There have been a number of successful companies that have used this theory to their advantage in advertising campaigns. Marketers can learn from Graves’ findings at the Ogilvy Center for Behavioral Science and use his tips to better market and communicate with target audiences. The key takeaways from this session were that people are driven by emotion, use narrative transportation instead of facts, and companies should speak in concrete terms.

ABSTRACT

Christopher Graves is a communications expert. He has spent time working in the media industry and he studies behavioral science extensively. During this session, he approached marketing and the power of influence from many unique perspectives. He offered insights as to how we are affected by marketing campaigns at a very subliminal level.

Brain, Behavior, Story: MindChanging Narratives Marshall Miller Undergraduate: BS Computer Science MarshallDavidMiller@ gmail.com @_marshallmiller Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session How our Brain Makes Decisions

SESSION

Christopher Graves defined and explained three “accidents” in human history which have led to significant discoveries about the human brain.

The first “accident” occurred in 1848 when a railroad worker, Phineas Gage was caught in an explosion. An iron rod penetrated his skull. It went straight through his eye and out the back of his head. Gage didn’t die. On the contrary, he was completely conscious and lucid all the way to the hospital, cracking jokes about the horrific situation. Phineas had a unique recovery.

Although he eventually was emitted from the hospital, Gage left a fundamentally and psychologically different person. His personality had changed. Now he was nasty and foul mouthed. He was also incredibly indecisive, and took several hours to draw conclusions and make judgements.

It wasn’t until the 1990s, when neurologists Dr. Damasio and Dr. Hanna Damasio, examined Gages frontal lobe and made a powerful discovery about the human brain. They determined that together, the amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex are responsible for making crucial decisions. The Damasios figured out that the brain creates an emotional stamp for every situation a human encounters. This stamp helps us recognize events so in the future, we can make better actions and decisions. This is where the idea of gut feelings come from.

“We are not thinking machines. We are feeling machines.”

- Rene Descarte Research by the Damasio’s regarding how we make decisions led to further innovations in the field. Most notably, the two systems of thinking which were explained by Daniel Kahnmen in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow.

Kahneman identifies decisions that are made quickly, automatically, or intuitively as System 1. System 2 is a slower, analytic process where more thinking and reasoning is involved.

Another “accident” described by Graves occurred when professor of Psychology, Charles Lord discovered what’s known as “confirmation bias”, or “motivated reasoning”. The core principle of confirmation bias is that once an individual has an opinion about a topic, their brain will filter out any opposing arguments and will only utilize information that confirms their opinion to make an argument.

What I thought was interesting was how another Psychology professor, Drew Westen, conducted a similar study where he showed individuals videos of their preferred political candidate ”flip flopping” on an issue. Westen then showed the individual a video of an opposing political candidate flip flopping. The Individual being observed tended to agree with their favored candidate. They supported the decision and rationalized for flip flopping.

In regards to the opposing candidate, they still spoke negatively about them and their decisions. During this study, Wested was examining parts of the individuals brain to see the various activity. He noted that no increased activation occurred when supporting the preferred candidate. This confirmation bias happened naturally.

The third ‘accident’ happened in 1992 when Giacomo Rizzolatti was studying the mapping of neurons in the brain. He was able to isolate the part of the brain where neurons would fire when humans pick up food. Rizzolatti worked furiously to develop a device which would indicate when neurons fired, emitting a sound like a Geiger counter. He hooked it up to the brain of a monkey.

At one point, one of Rizzolatti’s lab partners picked up some of the monkeys food and ate it. The monkey watched and the Geiger counter started firing. This meant that the neurons in the monkey’s brain were firing as if it was eating! Thus, mirror neurons were discovered.

Because the monkey thought it was eating, it was empathizing with Rizzolatti’s lab partner, indicating that empathy has biochemical roots.

Story tellers and marketers are firing this natural occurrence of empathy to try and engage us and captivate us. A story teller is successful if the story triggers an emotional response.

This is called a ”capturing moment”. By capturing a moment in our lives, marketing campaigns can create a biochemical response so strong that it drives us to make purchases or make decisions.

CONCLUSION

I walked away from this session with some valuable information. For one, I learned how to be a better writer. I now notice when companies or brands use engaging words rather than boring words like “Synergistic”, “Innovation”, and “Paradigm”. Words like these are boring and ineffective because they do not invoke an emotional response. You simply can’t tell someone to draw ”Innovation”. There is no visualization or imagination in the word. I also am much more aware of outside influences on my decision making process. While commercials are fun to watch, I try to make it a habit to see where the real motivation is coming from.

ABSTRACT

Brandcast + Startup Lounge Nicholas Kieler Graduate MBA Nicholas.kieler@gmail.c om www.linkedin.com/in/nic holas-kieler/ Link to Flipboard Magazine Tools of the Trade

Constant innovation is a consequence of the 21st century.

Anyone who hopes to be successful has to keep staying at the forefront of every new development and advancement in the field they are most interested in. There are always new tools, new software, and new innovations making holding onto doing things in a way that’s comfortable a major advantage to a firms competitors. Two companies: The Case Foundation and Brandcast are offering new products which help to change the way that new businesses develop. It is not the individual companies or their products which are particularly of interest, but the direction that they show the startup industry taking that is the most important takeaway.

SESSION

A combination of fallen through panels and a general curiosity of the different lounges in the startup section led me to seek out the different companies which were hosting these casual meeting spot. The first lounge that I attended was hosted by The Case Foundation and was about diversity in the startup field and encouraging young entrepreneurs to get out there and to make their ideas a reality. There were a lot of participatory activities and the idea seemed to be to see the many different faces of entrepreneurs as well as to participate in sharing your own story and intentions about your future. Overall The Case Foundation seems a bit hokey with their message of diversity and ‘getting involved’ but it is clear that they have good intentions and are trying to be innovative in their mission to try to include as many different types of people in the world of entrepreneurship as they can.

What really interested me about the case foundation and the reason why I am writing about it was because of a piece of software that they were in the process of developing. This software was part of a website which turned a massive amount of startup finding data into a visual format. The result of this visualization of data is a map of every investor and every company they invested in as well as the amount of money that was invested in each startup. While it is true that there are plenty of websites like angellist.com which help people to search for investors for their companies this seemed much more intuitive and easy to navigate. The potential for this product to help in the fundraising process is enormous. Not only can you track the most active investors by seeing the number of startups attached to them, but you can easily browse their portfolio to see the types of ventures

they have historically invested in in the past. This is also another great way to see if there are already startups trying to do the same thing that you are. By finding an investor who is in the habit of investing in a certain type of business it becomes easy to check many similar businesses very quickly. For instance if you were interested in a lawn and garden enterprise it would be easy to find an investor who tends towards similar businesses and see if they have already invested in something similar to your concept.

The next lounge I visited in short succession from this one is the Brandcast lounge.

Brandcast has a feel which is wholly separate from The Case Foundation. Immediately when walking into this lounge there were a handful of art installations scattered about the room as well as several people hanging out on their computers. While The Case Foundation seemed to be running on a theme of being wholesome Brandcast was running on the theme of being artsy, trendy, and forwards thinking. Mostly the purpose of this lounge was to get a hands-on experience of their new product and to talk with the CEO and developers who had created the product.

The best way to describe Brandcast is a website design tool that combines complete control of a website and extremely simple intuitive user interface. The number of effects which were possible were very impressive, and despite everything that I could possibly think of to throw at the developer I was talking to he was able to do everything I asked. You can change opacity with hover, float any object over any other object, change the arrangement of prebuilt articles, and much more within the timespan of half a minute. I was very impressed that you could put a lot of random objects with random rotations in random places and make them all buttons that lead to different parts of the website. I found it very impressive that all the developer needed to do was change to edit mode, click and drag an object to where he wanted it, and right click it to change its properties. I feel that with my previous experience in website design what was so exciting was that this opened web development to people who would not normally be able to design a website because of the difficulty that entails. The leader in this market Squarespace only allows you to work within a template and make minor changes and those changes can be very difficult, this by contrast gives you complete control and an interface which is even easier. If Brandcast is successful with what they are trying to do, they will end up being a major disruptor to the market

CONCLUSION

Innovation and advantage can come from anywhere at any time, and to be successful as an entrepreneur you must be open to getting learning experiences from a lot of unconventional places. While it is very useful to attend panels and to do research on the latest reported trends more than this is required to be successful. Knowledge and experience comes in many forms and to gain the benefit of it one must be tuned in to everything that is going on around them. Your successes and failures are useful, the successes and failures of others are useful, and the next big thing has to start off being small first. It is not necessarily the company or product that is the next big thing, but what that product or company is getting at and what it is trying to do. The future might not be The Case Foundation or Brandcast, but the future is almost certainly easier access to funding information and more intuitive website design.

These tools presented in themselves are impressive, but it takes more than a good product to be successful. The investor map from The Case Foundation was a small portion of their operation and was buried under a lot of sentimentality and inclusiveness which may end up causing them to not be taken seriously. The design tool from Brandcast was incredibly powerful and intuitive, but they are trying to take on giants in the industry and compete with products many customers are already familiar with and trained in. As an entrepreneur, it is not your place to invest in the future of these companies, but to see what they can bring to the table and the importance of what they are trying to do. The message here is that easy access to investment information is useful, access to intuitive web design is useful, and to find a way to give yourself that advantage no matter where you get it from.

ABSTRACT

Can Agencies Lead Again?

Meet Up Kendra Arenkill Undergraduate: Marketing kendraa2@earthlink.net LinkedIn Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Solving the Disparity Between Agencies and Clients

This meetup was a group led discussion, bringing together advertisers who work at an agency with those who work inhouse for a client. The discussion was led by Jennifer Gove and Yuliya Crevier who both work at the advertising agency Prescott Kelly who discussed the change in the agency-client relationship, because in 2017 it is much different than it used to be. Anyone was able to speak up and share their own experiences, opinions and thoughts on the topic in the hopes of achieving a better understanding of what each side can do to better their relationships. Because often, the better the client-agency relationship, the better the resulting work is. Clients discussed why they turn in-house and what agencies can do to be known for their expertise again. The event was very crowded which goes to show that the topic of this meetup is very much a relevant advertising problem.

SESSION

In the world of advertising, businesses came to agencies because of the creativity they offered - at least this is how it used to be. Now, however, clients are creating in-house agencies because they want control over their brands. And clients are growing their in-house departments to include everything from strategy to production. It’s argued that inhouse client teams benefit because they know their business inside and out. Knowing more about their business (including internal processes, employees, structure, politics) can produce accurate work, but in argument, the end result tends to be more internally focused and less focused on the consumer as the end result. Agencies say the work of inhouse production is not as memorable and is generic as a result. An agency, on the other hand, can offer a more objective perspective because they don’t know the brand inside and out the way the client does - yet this also comes as a fault in the eyes of clients.

Forrester Research has asked advertising agencies over the years: “do you feel like your client-agency relationship is improving?” Usually the number of agencies that respond “yes” to this is increasing every year, until recently the number dropped to about 50% of agencies responding “yes”. From a client perspective, they typically terminate their advertising agency either when the agency doesn’t have the right talent or enough depth of talent, agencies can’t retain client knowledge or because employee retention is low (30% is the average retention rate). It’s also important

that advertising agencies consider the their size as a company; small agencies usually do not have the trust of large clients, medium agencies have a hard time trying to act like both a large and small agency, and large agencies have a hard time changing their method and structure.

From the agency perspective, they believe they are unique in terms of what they can offer.

Agencies can provide big ideas for long-term thinking. Advertising is vast, spanning from digital to public relations to virtual reality, there is a lot of ground that has to be covered.

Agencies have had the experience of working with many different platforms across different client work. This can be seen in the fact that the need to train employees has tripled within agencies. Small agencies even have the advantage that they are able to narrow into a niche, that in turn, makes clients want their business even more. Agencies are also at an advantage because they have a broader range of employee expertise as well - diversity in backgrounds, personal characteristics and career expertise. This helps to bring objective ideas and opinions to clients. While strategy is a key component to agency teams, it’s important that all employees are knowledgeable and capable of developing and carrying out strategy. It shouldn't be a role but an element of every employee. Consulting firms are starting to step in and take client business so it’s important that when training employees, all are well versed on strategy.

One client suggested others try the idea in which their in-house agency is run: don’t give job titles out to employees. That way, when the employees come to work each day they’ll talk about the problems that need to be solved and then work from there to solve them using each of their skills. Agencies especially can adopt such a method of retrofitting each project.

Another client suggested that agencies focus on growing their current client relationships instead of pouring all of their time and resources into seeking new business. No matter the solution, it’s important to discuss how results will be measured. Clients and agencies, when working together, need to discuss who will take responsibility for the results, this is especially important for campaigns that fail, as agencies usually take the heat and risk losing the client.

Communicating this information is important. The failed Pepsi commercial that aired the first week of April is a testament to this entire meetup that I went to. Pepsi produced a campaign they thought was aligned well with their business, meanwhile, the were looking at it through “Pepsi-colored lenses” and didn’t see the bigger picture that an agency could’ve provided. I hope that agencies will again find the trust of clients because great relationships can lead to incredible work.

CONCLUSION

Overall, there are lessons to be learned both for advertisers as well as those that work on the client side of marketing. Advertising agencies need to be cognizant of hiring more diversity and aiming for retention when hiring. Retention is very important because it can help build strong agency-client relationships. Agencies also need to improve the way in which they train their employees to ensure that all are exposed to strategy and all are knowledgeable about a wealth of subjects within advertising. Agencies should also test new structure, such as keeping employees on client work for longer periods of time, changing the size of their agency or experimenting with not using job titles. Finally, communication is key with the client - as an advertiser, be sure you know what your client expects of you, how you can help

accommodate them, and then work to build that relationship. This will make it hard for them to walk away from your business.

Those that work as marketers on the client-side also have areas to improve. It is equally important that the client has strong communication with their agency as well to ensure they receive the service they’re looking for. Clients also need to work with agencies to share with them important business information that will help them gain better understanding of the company they’re working with.

ABSTRACT

Change or Die: The risks of trying something new Nicholas Kieler Graduate MBA Nicholas.kieler@gmail.com

www.linkedin.com/in/nic holas-kieler/ Link to Flipboard Magazine How to Please Customers with New Products

To create something profitable it is important to differentiate what you offer from your competitors. Customers are always looking for the next big thing, but it can be hard to meet their expectations of having a truly memorable experience of a new product. Customers have high expectations of anything that is labeled as new and innovative and often they want to return to the feeling of being impressed rather than to be satisfied with something being unique. It’s easier to find something that is already showing signs of popularity and find a way to monetize it than it is to find something that is both unique and appealing. When putting a new spin on a beloved product, it is important to be similar enough not to lose what customers liked about the product but not too similar to not interest customers in trying the new version.

SESSION

This session was part of the gaming expo which was starting to come in at the final days of SXSW. The panelists were various game designers responsible for very widely known and successful games like Command and Conquer and Assassins Creed. They talked about some of the issues that they faced both in being pioneers in the industry and in trying to keep their long running franchises fresh and interesting. While their talked revolved around releasing new products as it related to video game titles I found there was a lot that could be generalized to releasing new and innovative products overall.

The first really useful piece of information was that customers are not looking just for something new and creative, they want the feeling of experiencing something really good that is new and innovative. When people hear of something new they remember an experience of trying something which had a huge impact like their first MP3 player or their first video game console. Not every innovation forms a billion-dollar industry, but every customer who is promised something innovative expects to hold that next big innovation. Before you bring your product to the market, you have to make sure that it’s more than new, and even more than good.

Customers don’t expect to be satisfied with innovation, they expect to be impressed with it.

Another good piece of advice given by the panelists was to look for new things just as often as coming up with new things. Good ideas don’t always come from developers and

often the best ideas start as projects from individuals within the community. DOTA is one of the best selling games available on steam right now, but it started as a player created mod for Warcraft. In the same vein, Black Mesa started as an independent project to recode Half Life into a new. engine, and has since become one of the bestselling game remakes of all time. Finding a new and innovative product can cost thousands of dollars in research and development when people are already using your product in new and unforeseen ways. This is why it is so important to pay attention to the community that forms around your product or service to find out how their needs develop and change While some companies offer a very consistent and very stable product, most companies want to find new niches and new markets to appeal to. When branching out into a new product offering it is important to keep a balance between what your existing customers love about the product and what a new group of customers might be interested in. It can be very difficult to know what the marketplace will be into, and many things which seem to make perfect sense in theory can completely backfire once released. Crystal Pepsi had all of the flavor of normal Pepsi, and studies showed that people were interested in healthy alternatives to their products. Without the heavy use of dyes, Crystal Pepsi was healthier than its heavy dyed alternative. Despite no change in the makeup of the product other than the color people swore that it tasted differently and the product failed significantly. In the end, the product was too different for customers to be comfortable with it and disinterested the customer base.

By contrast when lays released their ‘Fresh Stacks’ product they were trying to compete directly with ‘Pringles’ by offering stackable chips in a container that kept them from being damaged or crushed. The product had a big initial release with the hope of trying to maximize market penetration and sway customers over to their new product. Unfortunately for lays their product was almost exactly the same as Pringles, and Pringles familiarity to the customers was enough to keep them loyal. Because lays didn’t wow customers who were willing to give them a try they didn’t give a significant enough reason to make the product switch

CONCLUSION

Not every company needs to be innovative, some companies are very successful selling a consistent product. However, the most reliable way to grow is to innovate and to create new product to appeal to new types of consumers. It is important to be responsive to customer needs and looking at what customers are doing with your products is a great source of innovation which has evidence that it will already be successful. When offering customers a new product it must be similar enough not to confuse your existing customer base, but different enough to appeal to the new market you are trying to target.

ABSTRACT

Communicating in an Era of SelfValidating Facts Nicholas Kieler Graduate MBA Nicholas.kieler@gmail.com

www.linkedin.com/in/nic holas-kieler/ Link to Flipboard Magazine Identity Trumps Logic: Appealing to Values Instead of Ideals

Our country and our culture is more divided than ever.

Republicans hate democrats, liberals hate conservatives, the poor hate the rich, and nobody is willing to hear out the other side. Meanwhile real issues threaten all of us and solutions must be found before things get to a point where they are beyond fixing. At a time where communication couldn’t be more important is has become nearly impossible to facilitate, and we are just starting to see some of the negative repercussions of the rising animosity between citizens. The reason that things have become as they are is the reinforcement of ideology as identity and an increasing valuation of holding strong to ones beliefs. Identity motivates our every action and idea, and causes us to seek out echo-chambers which help us to protect our identities from the values of others that might threaten them. The key to bridging this gap is to find the values of others and to speak to them. Every identity has values, and often the most biased and uninformed opinions are not accounting for the sacrifice in values they represent.

SESSION

The panel ‘Communicating in an era of self-validating facts’ was one of the best presented panels of my entire SXSW experience. The slides were very well done and very succinctly presented, and I was very impressed with it being almost exactly an hour without feeling rushed or dragged out. The presenter was a single panelist presenting this information on her own and her delivery sounded as if it had been very well rehearsed and timed. While I am unsure of the presenters background she talked enough about psychological principals that I felt she must have some form of a psychology background. Overall the impression the presentation left with me was that the presenter cared deeply about the topic, performed extensive research on it, and spent time making sure that it was presented accurately and in a way that made it easy to understand. I felt what she explained was very intuitive and extremely credible.

The general assumption that people get when having a discussion with others is that they are forming their opinion based on facts and rationality. The reality of the matter is that most people form their opinion based on strong feelings and a sense of identity. Identity is more about the culture that surrounds someone and the people that they interact with daily. One example of a very popular identity is being

catholic. The process by which someone ends up catholic is not because they decided one day to consider all the different religions and decided that Catholicism was what made the most sense to them. It is more likely that a catholic comes from a catholic family or a catholic community and that the reason they are catholic is the constant reinforcement of this identity in the actions they performand the people whom they interact with. All identities are tied to values: mothers value being caring, investment bankers value money, professors value open mindedness, and athletes value physical fitness. When people are asked how they feel about an issue, they check their values based on their identities and they respond the way they expect someone with their identity would.

This concept helps to explain why today’s culture is so argumentative and so unwilling to change their viewpoints. Personal identity is something which is an important part of our psychological makeup and it necessitates being taken very seriously. When our identity is challenged in any way it seems like a personal attack to our values and invariably results in a very negative reaction. At its base level, one of the most offensive things to say to someone is that they aren’t right about their identity. To say that a mother isn’t a mother or an athlete isn’t an athlete is to say that someone isn’t upholding the values that they hold as most important. This is why when issues are talked about that relate to these identities the reaction is so visceral.

One of the most often cited arguments which divides people is the topic of global warming.

While liberals are on the side that global warming is a huge threat to humanity and people have to change to save our planet, conservatives have the viewpoint that the science is inconclusive and that regulation hurts businesses and their employees. Both sides will point to facts and figures that they believe supports their opinions, but both are arguing from their beliefs to the facts and not the other way around. The thought process is that they belong to their group, and their group values things which relate to global warming, which means that they value those things and have to take the side their group has historically supported. For a liberal, to change their mind about global warming means not to care about the environment and not to have the values they do. In the same vein, for a conservative to admit global warming means they don’t care about blue collar workers and an efficient economy. Neither side can psychologically handle betraying their ideals, and so the argument will always be two people talking and no people listening.

The only way to try to change someone’s mind is to find what their values are and try to appeal to them directly. There is usually some part of the value philosophy associated with an identity that can be tied to an issue to allow for a discussion to take place. In the global warming example many liberals will hold the viewpoint that no amount of coal should be allowable in an energy plan because of their effect on the environment, but liberals also value scientific progress and innovation highly. One way a conservative might try to appeal to a liberals values would be to talk about advancements in clean coal or suggest investment in decontamination practices. Alternatively, conservatives often hold the viewpoint that green energy is not very economically feasible, but also hold the value of long term sustainability. A liberal might reach a conservative by explaining that coal only exists in a limited supply and it is running out, and so something more sustainable must be found.

CONCLUSION

People come from many different backgrounds, and it is important to understand how to change the method you use to sell people on an idea depending on where they are coming from. Some people will be naturally predisposed to your viewpoint, and it will be very easy to get them on board with what you are trying to do. By the same token though there are also people who will be naturally against your idea from the start, and it is important to be able to understand why they feel the way they do and what about your idea appeals to their specific set of values. The blunt force approach to marketing and pitching has never worked and will never work. Only by trying to relate to those people whose values are the hardest to understand can something be refined to the point where some aspect appeals to everyone’s values.

ABSTRACT

Contemporary Curation: How Imagery Shapes a Brand Daniel Zuber Under Graduate: Major: Marketing Minor: Business Information Analytics Dan.S.Zuber@gmail.com Social Handles: D_Zubs Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Imagery is Key to Shaping a Brand

Imagery is something that is essential to building a powerful brand. As referenced to in another South by Southwest session, Draw to Win: Innovation with your Visual Mind, that 90% of data on the internet is visual. Now this is referring to data specifically, but we as humans’ process and remember images better than words and numbers. Imagery is something that enhances a brand in many ways such as authenticity, awareness, association and more. Imagery can also be powerful tool to have conversations with consumers as well. This can take multiple forms such as user generated content or conversations around an image that has been shared by a brand. Imagery is something that is powerful, so brands need to be careful about what their own imagery means to their consumers. Companies need to make sure their imagery aligns with who they are as a brand.

SESSION

It is no secret that imagery has become an important part to brand building. Visual images are starting to become key indicators for brand recognition and brand identity. To open the panel, the moderator asked for the experts’ perspective on imagery and how it can enhance a brand. The representative from IBM began to talk about the authenticity around brand imagery. “The more authentic your imagery is, the more people will relate to it” is one quote that seemed to be the future of imagery strategies. Companies in the past have been complacent about their practices and use stock images when trying to create imagery around their brand.

This is a habit most brands need to change to be successful in the future.

As the market place becomes cluttered with various options for the same product, brand recognition is becoming more of a requirement. Authenticity is what consumers are beginning to look for within brands when it comes to purchasing their product. Per the panel, authentic brand imagery is one of the largest factors that contributes to the authenticity of brands. This is because brands should know what their consumers think of them and can convey that through the correct imagery. Generations are becoming more aware of their purchasing habits and can tell when a brand is fraudulent and not using authentic brand imagery.

Platforms like Instagram are becoming increasingly popular when it comes to social media platforms. This is a platform that is strictly built off images.

This means that if a brand were to be active on this platform, it would be a necessity to have authentic brand imagery.

One of the panelists commented on authentic imagery saying “It was created by people like you and I.” Whether the panelist was talking about the meaning behind the imagery or user generated content I am unsure, but this allowed me to draw a connection to brands that are currently executing well with their imagery strategy. GoPro is a brand that instantly came to mind. On their social media accounts, they are constantly posting the video or photo of the day from a GoPro user. These are not images GoPro told users to take. They are genuine images from a GoPro user’s adventure and GoPro wanted to display the moment of imagery they captured. This guarantees that GoPro is using authentic imagery to build their brand because they are not the ones who are taking the pictures.

Like the topic of user generated content, the representative from SheSpeak’s talked about how brands need to be active listeners with those who are talking about your brand and posting about it. She explained how these are the thought leaders of your brand and generally have a concept of what consumers think your brand represents in regards to imagery. This is key for marketers to know when looking to implement imagery into their brand. Aligning brand imagery with consumer thoughts will create for a powerful brand that consumers believe in. It also allows for a company it shift the perspective of consumers when it comes to what they think of the brand imagery. The brand can slowly start to implement some changes to the imagery that will hopefully start to change the perspective of their current consumers. It is necessary for brands to have conversations with their users about where brand they think the imagery lies .

When companies collaborate with their customers about their brand imagery, it helps brands create a better story with their imagery. The best brands are those who can tell a compelling story and do it through imagery. By telling a story through imagery, it allows consumers to feel a part of the story. Brands have different meanings to everyone. Brand imagery can allow consumers to create their own story of a brand that will create a powerful meaning to them.

CONCLUSION Brand imagery has become essential to forming a successful brand. Authenticity of brand imagery is becoming important to consumers when they are buying into a brand. Stock images are becoming easier to pick out and consumers are feeling lied to when they realize the image is not authentic. Collaboration with loyal consumers can provide authentic and power brand imagery to help connect more with consumers. This will then lead to a brand story that is formed between the company and the consumers making for a more powerful brand.

ABSTRACT

Courageous Creativity: Dreaming & Doing Madeline Trippe Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing/French madelinerose.trippe23@ gmail.com LI: @madelinerosetrippe FB: @madeline.trippe IN: @mynameis_maddy Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session “Inspiring Creativity”

The entrepreneurial spirit in myself loves business and the strategy behind it, yet I’ve always been a very creative artsy brain as well. For my career I wanted to find the perfect balance between the two and I discovered that within art direction. As an art director, my team is always turns to me first to come up with the brilliant campaign idea. But, sometimes the perfect idea doesn’t come to my head and I struggle to wonder if I’m creative enough and if I’m not, how can I lead my team?

At the session, Courageous Creativity, Executive Creative Director and Co-Founder of Refinery29, Piera Gelardi leveled the playing field and expressed her same concerns that she has to address in her position at Refinery29 and her secret to overcome the struggle. In your not familiar with Refinery29, it’s a digital media company dedicated to producing content to help people discover and refine their personal style through inclusivity. Refinery29 is known for its bright colors and prints, vibrant graphics and revealing the real woman.

Piera is on a mission to aid women in feeding their creativity.

To help her inspire creativity within herself, Piera sticks to three tricks; be the most you, create the conditions for creativity, friction creates sparks.

SESSION

As Piera Gelardi walked into the session, she was wearing a silver 80’s pantsuit, had bright red lips and micro bangs. This woman was creative. Before diving into courageous creativity, Piera expressed how important her team was and that in any setting, marketing or not, collaboration is the key to creating great content. Whenever Piera begins a meeting, she starts with a 4321 Shake (which she had the room do) to make her team laugh and level the playing the field so they feel secure, because good ideas flourish with trust.

In order to create amazing content, you must stay true to yourself and be the most you. We all have thoughts of doubt when it comes to creativity. You finish a piece and pick it apart because its not quite perfect. Then we judge ourselves for the fact that its not perfect or that your vision isn’t coming to life. Remember that you are. Each person leads a different life, lives a different experience from that day. Each person has different ideas and brings something to the table.

Remember your esthetic, what has inspired you? At one point in time, we discover our brand and the content we

produce has a particular style, that’s your signature. Stay true to yourself and the big idea will come.

The Refinery29 offices are bold in color, have art splashed across the walls and each room has a different theme. Creating the conditions for creativity is essential to producing great work. How can you be inspired if your in an uninspiring space that doesn’t feed your creativity. Put pieces of art on the wall that you adore, paint the room in different colors.

Surround yourself with creative people. Think big, think impossible, be ridiculous and laugh about it because once you hone in on those thoughts they lead to brilliance. Piera believes that the more you laugh, it unlocks a higher intelligence within yourself.

Refinery29 is a bold company, that believes in taking a stance on social movements. These social movements are powerful but can reveal a lot of emotions. Use that pain and turn it into purpose. Create controversial content because it creates a conversation. That friction creates sparks, controversial content provokes thought and inspires change.

Refiniery29 is one to look at when it comes to creativity. The have taken the beauty of art and stayed on top of technology to create incredible installations and digital marketing. For the companies 10 year anniversary. Piera had a huge dream to create 29 rooms in one single space. While she was originally torn down for thinking too big, she went forward with her dream and had a party with 29 different rooms. Each room was its own work of art with a purpose to inspire creativity and provoke thought about an artist, business or cause.

Refinery29 is taking content to the next level, their content is fun, eclectic and visual interesting that captures peoples attention. I’ll be curious to follow Refinery29 and Piera Gelardi as they pioneer the digital media space.

CONCLUSION

Ever since this session, I can’t stop using the term courageous creativity and using that to help drive my work. Piera gave me a lot to think about in terms of provoking my creativity.

I’m just finishing college and beginning my career, I have a lot to learn and a lot of growing to do. I have a lot of laughing to do in order to unlock my creative brilliance.

ABSTRACT

Courageous Creativity: Dreaming and Doing

Piera Gelardi, Co-Founder of Refinery 21, began the session with an active moving excise that made us shake out arms and legs in all different directions. Gelardi then goes on to tell us that by doing this, it levels the playing field. What does she mean by this? It starts the day off by creating trust with those around us by acting funny. It also allows us to get out of our minds and into our bodies by being physically active. Courageous creativity is about being vulnerable but confident when throwing ideas out there. Gelardi explains that along with shaking it out, there are three key tenants to courageous creativity: be the most you, create the conditions for creativity, and friction creates sparks. These three things are key to being a think with courageous creativity.

Daniel Zuber

SESSION

Under Graduate: Major: Marketing Minor: Business Information Analytics Dan.S.Zuber@gmail.com Social Handles: D_Zubs Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Courageous Creativity Can be for Everyone

Piera Gelardi tells the audience at her session that courageous creativity is something everyone can have. One does not need to be naturally creative or be one chalk full of ideas all the time. Creating the right atmosphere to be courageously creative is the hard part. Once this setting has been created, the ideas will start to flow and the come of quality not quantity. The three key tenants to be courageously creative is be the most you, create the conditions for creativity, and friction creates sparks. From these three simple situational conditions, people can then begin to think creatively.

Be the most you refers to empowering yourself and embrace your individuality. Gelardi related this to women empowerment, but I personally think all genders can benefit from these key tenants. Gelardi speaks to how it is sometimes hard to come out of your comfort zone and embrace who you are and your individuality. How does one embrace their individuality? Staying true to your values, trusting your intuition, and remembering that you are never done growing are key stepping stones to embracing your individuality.

As a future marketer, being the most me has helped me produce some of the best idea for marketing moves. Not only is this something about an individual person, but this is also applicable in a group like setting. Having a marketing team that can conduct brainstorming sessions where everyone can be themselves will allow for outrageous and courageous creativity. Having been in multiple marketing groups and teams,.

I have noticed a difference in team dynamic when people feel comfortable to share their ideas and when people are reserved. I would say this exact reason is why companies are starting to put a bigger emphasis on company culture moving forward Company culture is also a business aspect that can help create the conditions for creativity.

Gelardi explained how not everyone has the best creativity in the same environment.

Sometimes it is when you are sitting in your favorite place, in your office, or in the swimming pool. She urged the audience to think back to when they had a great idea and think about what setting we were in and how we felt. She also explained the process of how brilliant and courageous ideas come about. It begins with ridiculousness, leads to laughter, and ends with brilliance. These are aspect of people having a positive mind and signs of feeling.

This is not the first time I have heard of bringing ridiculousness into the marketing space to inspire great marketing ideas. In the book marketing outrageously by Jon Spoelstra, he explains how his success as a sports marketer has come from marketing outrageously. If the idea does not sound outrageous enough, it may be okay but it will not be great. Being noticed and recognized is key when working to make your brand standout from the others.

Outrageous and ridiculous marketing does that. I have remembered brands that I have interacted with before simply because of a ridiculously activation they have executed.

Surrounding yourself in the conditions for creativity includes having people around that you have chemistry with, but they also must have different perspectives than you. This brings us to the final tenant of having friction create sparks. Being able to bounce ideas off people who see things differently are how great ideas are formed. Gelardi explains how this helps not only to produce imaginative results, but helps to reframe the problem. Sometimes marketers are looking at the problem they are trying to resolve in the wrong way.

This concept is what has made marketing teams I have participated on be so successful.

Sometimes the team is created up of people with different majors and interests that add for a unique spin on the concepts we come up with. Having diversity within a marketing team is key to have the most successful marketing initiatives.

CONCLUSION

After walking out of this session, I found myself thinking that I too could be creative even though it is not something that comes naturally to me. Having creativity is not something that happens over night for most people. It is a process that is not one size fits all for everyone. Creativity comes to people in different ways and marketers need to recognize that. Being the most you, creating the conditions for creativity, and having friction to create sparks are three tenants that are the corner stones of courageous creativity. It is up to the individual to fill in the space between them with what helps them be creative.

ABSTRACT

Cozy with Cookies: Our Brain & Behavioral Targeting Logan Leake Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing logan.leake@aol.com Instagram:@LoganMatoaka Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session The Fine Line between Cookies and Creepiness

True privacy is becoming harder and harder to attain—the progression of technology is ensuring that. Even when we are physically alone, so long as we have our mobile devices with us, we are never truly alone. With every ‘like’, purchase, web search, and social media post, brands get a glimpse into our lives, all thanks to cookies. Through behavioral targeting brands are able to suggest incredibly specific products in hopes of playing on our psyche and gaining our business. But when is it that these artfully tailored advertisements begin to cross the line from helpful to intrusive?

SESSION

There is an undeniable scientific art to cookies. While cookies simply track who we are through a myriad of ways, it is the post-process of determining which signals, that are coming through certain algorithms, that brand managers distinguish to make sense of. These cookie-based algorithms have the ability to distinguish from what is true now to what will be true in the future. Yes, thanks to cookies, our devices help brand managers predict our future, which in truth, can be quite the terrifying concept. In fact, there was a Cornell study that created an algorithm that could determine if new mothers would develop postpartum depression with 80% accuracy before said mothers even developed it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly there is a direct impact of behavioral targeting on our psychology. Consumers respond differently to targeted advertisements than an advertisement that is not considered such on the basis of its delivery. For example, consumers do not typically question why they are seeing the ads they are seeing when in print form or on the television, but when it comes to online content the question of “why am I seeing this?” is at the forefront. More than likely, if consumers understand why they are being shown a certain advertisement (based on past behaviors) then all is well.

Additionally, due to a psychological disposition that people want to see themselves in a better light allows brand managers to utilize cookies to help do just that by playing on people’s insecurities with the hopes that they will want to self-improve with their brand’s product. In fact, display ads have the ability to change how people view themselves, which in turn, causes them to then act/purchase/consume differently.

However, I have yet to address the question of when this all become creepy. While consumers normally enjoy the relevance around advertisements that cookies are able to supply they also equally do not want to feel as if they are being spied on. Crossing this fine line is up to marketers, and on the consumer’s end, it really all boils down to value.

Advertisement personalization gets better results when there is definite value being communicated. As to not make your target audience uncomfortable, however, marketers need to determine between which X and Y factors are just “cozy” enough without being too personal.

There is a real disconnect between the volume of data being collected through cookies for algorithms and the fact that consumers do appreciate a well-targeted recommendation. If consumers were to be told exactly what and how that targeted content is being curated, they likely would respond with strong distaste, and yet there is a proven appreciation for tailored content. There is virtually no consent from consumers to marketers obtaining this information beyond the consumer’s ability to either enable or disable their devices’ cookies.

This creates a looming question of ethics in this space as we are so far from communicating transparency on how this information is being obtained and how we are using it.

I personally believe that there is a need for more robust rules around the use of cookies.

With so many class action lawsuits currently in play around this concept, there needs to be some sort of definite legislation that protects both businesses and consumers. There needs to be more than the simple check box of “I consent”—we should be communicating transparently how privacy is being maintained and how cookies are being utilized.

Unfortunately, we are far from this point.

So far, cookies are pretty much solely being used for advertising purposes. But like the Cornell study mentioned earlier, cookies have the ability to be used in a variety of other good and useful capacities alongside programmed algorithms. Remember, cookies collect information and algorithms process that data. However, until we come up with legislation on how to use this information ethically, there is the risk of algorithms being created with the ability to make profoundly unfair decisions. Jennifer Golbeck, a panelist associated with the University of Maryland, brought up an example of an algorithm being able to determine if DUI offenders would be more likely to get another DUI based on whether they attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting versus if they were to spend time in jail. While this may have surface level appeal, something like this is not going to be necessarily accurate or even determinant, as the human mind is much more complex than a few algorithms.

CONCLUSION

While cookies have the ability to provide a sort of “cozy” atmosphere for consumers, marketers need to be aware of that fine line between cozy and creepy. Moving forward, there needs to be consent, control and transparency within this space if we want to be able to continue utilizing and benefiting from all the good that cookies can provide.

ABSTRACT

Cookies are impacting our privacy and essentially decide what ads we receive based on our internet history. 50% of attendees in the session block cookies on their devices and the other 50% enable cookies on their devices. This session analyzed the impact of cookies and examined the importance of cookies in behavioral targeting. Cookies can track your behavior, predict your behavior, and even affect your purchase decisions. This session explored how cookies may or may not be impeding on our privacy and ways in which cookies may help or hurt us in the long-term.

Cozy with Cookies: Our Brain SESSION & Behavioral Cookies leave behind crumbs of your website behavior and Targeting can be sold to third-parties to provide ads that fit your Darby Pappas Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing pappasdarby@gmail.com LinkedIn: @darbypappas Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Are Cookies Creepy or Cool?

personal preferences. The session provided the example of how Target was able to figure out a teenager was pregnant before her father knew. This example shows how Target uses cookies to attract pregnant women to buy baby products by sending promotional materials in the mail based on their internet and purchase history. Brands use cookies to make advertising more targeted and specific, which can be seen as either helpful or creepy depending on the person being targeted. The science behind cookies is that they must know your age, certain demographics about the user, and internet history and provide ads related to those demographics and search preferences. Machine learning models are able to find data on certain people and provide ads that might relate to them. Target is able to pull data from your purchase history, social media, your friend’s social media, and language in your own social media and then it comes up with an algorithm that pulls information about the user and provides ads that target the specific person. I think the concept of cookies can be extremely creepy when they go beyond your internet history and start pulling your social media and social media of your friends as well. Panelist Jennifer Golbeck mentioned that the basic information it pulls are your age, gender, race, sexual orientation, behavioral (drugs, smoking, drinking), risk of disease, intelligence level, personality traits, Facebook likes, etc. If you like Jim Beam on Facebook, it’s likely that you are a drinker. With that information, it connects your Facebook likes to your intelligence level. The four strongest Facebook page indicators of intelligence are science, thunderstorms, Colbert Report, and curly fries. I thought these four factors were interesting in making assumptions about intelligence

level, but Golbeck studies social media digital analytics for a living, therefore she can’t be wrong. The algorithm is similar to the principles of the CDC (Center for Disease Control & Prevention) in the sense that likes, rumors, and viral videos on social media spread like viral diseases. This algorithm helps predict the future and can even manipulate your future behaviors.

A Georgia Tech study was done where they were able to predict women who would develop postpartum depression based on their tweets 75% of the time. I think this study is incredible and can be used for good instead of just for behavioral targeting. Another study was done to predict how likely Alcoholics Anonymous attendees will stay sober for 90 days based on their tweets before the meetings, and the results were accurate 85% of the time.

The panelists also discussed the impact of behavioral targeting on psychology, and it was interesting that behavioral targeting is specific to each individual person and has the capability to change how consumers see themselves. An example they provided was when the lead panelist, Archana Iyer, received an anti-aging face lotion ad. This ad was able to influence the way she saw herself. Before she saw the ad, she wouldn’t have considered using anti-aging cream. But after the saw the ad, she realized that maybe she was aging and needed the cream. This company used reverse psychology by telling Iyer what she needed and not what she wanted. Negative ads such as debt relief and credit repair can make people notice their debt and give them the opportunity to self-improve, so these targeted ads can either be seen in a positive or negative light depending on the person. Behavioral targeting is taking place on social media newsfeeds and Google search results, not just from website ads anymore.

The lead panelist presented the question, “is personalization the death of discovery?” and I think this question is extremely valuable when deciding whether cookies are good or bad for you. You have to decide whether you like that cookies are telling you what you want or whether it’s preventing you from discovering anything on your own. Lastly, the panelist asked “when does cozy become creepy?”, and this is another important question when determining whether you want cookies enabled or not. She mentioned that consumers want relevance but they don’t want privacy breaches, so I think businesses need to find a balance between encroaching on your privacy while simultaneously providing targeted ads. Iyer also mentioned that brands need to figure out what signals are too personal, such as an ad that has your name in it. Brands also need to walk the line between being relevant and annoying, which means that brands need to provide ads for products that people are actually able to afford and ads that wouldn’t offend or annoy anyone.

CONCLUSION

The enabling of cookies has left a debate of whether they are helping or hurting you. Some agree that cookies provide relevant ads, while others say that they are encroaching on your privacy. Behavioral ads are influencing your brain and the way in which you make purchase decisions. Technology is now able to pull algorithms where they know what products you want before you even know you want them. This can be beneficial to digital marketing because it reduces waste and costs less when ads are targeted to the right person.

Deciding whether to enable or disable cookies is up to the user, but overall, personalization provides better search results.

ABSTRACT

Connecting with the modern consumer is proving to be a new challenge for brands. As music continues to play an integral part in people’s lives, it’s becoming more of a distractor, that can give the listener the ability to disengage from the world for a moment in time. With this knowledge, marketers are viewing this as an opportunity to incorporate music and sound into their tactics to try and stand out to the consumer. How, then, can brands collaborate effectively with the music industry to drive meaningful impact in culture?

Creating Cultural Impact with Music Collaborations

SESSION

Since the dawn of the “interruption era” there have been fewer significant changes within the business space. Brands are constantly searching for new approaches to gain the attention of the consumer or ways that they can be the new disruptor in a space already filled with ingenuity. Despite this, there actually has been quite the significant amount of Logan Leake change within the music industry in regards to content. The way artists create music has changed, the way individuals Undergraduate: BSBA consume music has changed and the way that we share Marketing music is ever-changing. The music content market is saturated—there’s an abundance of choices and consumers are overwhelmed. When it comes to music creators logan.leake@aol.com collaborating with brands in hopes of enticing a cultural impact, it’s important for them to find the right brands who Instagram:@LoganMatoaka have meaningful roles to play and have a compelling story to tell.

Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session

Stop- Collaborate & Impact.

Reasons that music creators may choose one brand over another to be a part in their campaign includes the integral thread within a brand’s story that should resonate with that artist. This is the deeper meaning that has the ability to drive cultural impact. Lil Yachty and Carly Rae Jepson’s collaboration with Target was used as an example of a partnership that did not seem to have any deeper meaning than the paychecks exchanged. Therefore, the panelists found little to no impact in this advertisement. The one standout in this string of advertisements though was the incorporation of a virtual reality headset on Lil Yachty. While this was not the focus of the commercial it does resonate with the fact that artists are using tech in new and interesting innovative ways to form collaborations, whether that’s on stage or online. Speaking to this concept, however, is the Bob Dylan and IBM Watson collaboration. This commercial aired in 2015 but wasn’t really all that effective. There seemed to be a disconnect as to why Bob

Dylan was even the chosen spokesperson. Are Bob Dylan fans the target market for IBM Watson? Doubtable.

It’s commonly known that innovation is often born from a need for survival. The panel pointed this out while referencing BBC World. They have recently began working in the virtual reality space in anticipation for what’s to come and are making the effort to include technologies new to their business in their daily output. Planet Earth II’s snap story release on Snapchat courtesy of BBC is a great example of this. By utilizing Snapchat, they are reaching a whole new market they would not normally be simply through televised news.

They have adjusted accordingly in the redefined mobile television space by moving from horizontal capture to accommodate vertical viewing. Through this collaboration with Snapchat, BBC has been able to engage consumers in an immersive storytelling experience with the help of new technology that allows for the capture of sound (within nature) and placing that alongside music, creating this like-no-other experience. From this collaboration they have been dubbed the “HBO of Mobile,” which is huge.

There’s an incredible opportunity within this space to create meaningful cultural impact whether that be through music or even sports. The panel briefly mentioned one of the Brazilian soccer players for Real Madrid who utilizes his cultural platform in advocating that kids stay in school. Using his stance as a famous and incredibly influential athlete to promote a positive message has done incredibly well. If brands can find, and collaborate with, significant members of society to insight change in the form of a deeper social meaning, they have hit the jackpot. As another session I went to mentioned, “good is the new cool” and brands who are converting to that business model and doing the best and will continue to do so.

CONCLUSION

With traditional revenues changing and the artist/brand relationship strengthening the time is now to jump into this space. Tips of advice that the panel left with those who asked questions were simple. “Understand your passions and how you want to identify your brand.” This resounding notion of understanding your brand inside and out is imperative to capitalizing on whatever passions your brand has. Next, “Know your story, know your brand, know your fan base and what your collective story is together.” Another iteration into the importance of knowing everything about your brand. If you don’t know yourself, how can you expect to grow? Same goes for brands.

ABSTRACT

Draw to Win: Innovate With Your Visual Mind Lane Bretschneider BSBA Marketing, Minor: French lanebret85@gmail.com

Link to Session Simple Drawings Make a Huge Impact

Dan Roam of Digital Roam Inc. did a lot with just a half hour session. From his Ten Commandments of drawing to the impacts drawings can have on information sharing to some of the most famous people ever to take full advantage of visual information, Roam physically showed the audience why drawing is important. It also doesn’t matter if you can’t draw. Even as a master of drawing himself, Roam made it clear that his drawings were nothing worthy of accolades, but they still make big impressions.

SESSION

Roam began the session by sharing his Ten Commandments for visual thinking. I’ll list them out because I think they’re worth mentioning.

1. Draw like your life depends on it 2. Whoever draws the best picture wins 3. Draw a circle and give it a name 4. Lead their eyes and their brains will follow 5. Start with “who” and then show “why” 6. To lead people, show them the destination 7. To sell to someone, share your pen 8. To innovate something, draw it upside down 9. To teach, let them connect the dots 10. When in doubt, draw it out Some of my favorites from this list are numbers two, four, eight, and nine. As much as number two sounds like an art competition, it’s not. What it’s really trying to say is that the person who can either explain the best or help someone else understand most clearly is generally the winner. Maybe I just relate well to number four because I’m a visual learner, but I agree that what people are paying attention to is almost always what they are looking at. The best way to get someone to understand you is to lead their eyes. I don’t think number eight is very literal either, but the resounding message is that innovation comes most easily when you turn a concept on its head and try to see it from an angle that no one has ever thought of it from before. Finally, with number nine, I’ve always thought that being able to share your knowledge with others is quite important, and this seems to outline a best practice for it. For someone who has never been introduced to a concept before, they need a base or framework with which to think of it, but it’s imperative that they connect the dots themselves for the most effective learning.

After sharing his Ten Commandments, Roam went into a little more about why drawing is important. One of his main points was that people have had more than enough practice using visual information to learn. While we’ve been reading and writing for centuries, we’ve had over 30,000 years of practice and improvement using visuals. As a result, visual learning is one of the most innate practices we have. He also talked about statistics on modern information, and they’re pretty impactful. According to Roam, 90% of all data in the world was created within the last two years, and 90% of all online data is visual. This is powerful because it means that the overwhelming trend for the way that humans want to be able to process and share information now is through images. Studies have also shown that drawing out an object, idea, or concept is one of the most consistently reliable ways to remember it. Half of our brains are dedicated to processing visuals, so it’s no wonder so many people are visual learners.

Finally, Roam closed the session by going through a list of some of the most famous people who really understood what drawing was all about. He mentioned inventors like Da Vinci, Graham Bell, and Edison. He also mentioned actress Hedy Lamarr, who was also an inventor herself. She sketched out all of her inventions, one of which was meant to ensure that radiocontrolled torpedoes used in World War II couldn’t be interfered with. Although the military didn’t adopt the technology until the 1960’s during the Cuban missile crisis, her invention is one of the important elements of communication technology today, including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

When I think of visuals, I think of more than just drawings and pictures. I think of charts and graphs and infographics, all of which are widely used (if not overused) in business already.

The concept of producing information in visual form is nothing new. I think the issue is that visual information is not always used correctly or in the most efficient way. Visual data displays have become so commonplace that they don’t have the effect that they used to. In order to make them a little more effective, I think it requires a little more creativity. Roam spent the whole session reiterating how people need to start using drawing to their advantage, and I think he’s right. Introducing more pictures and images, whether hand drawn or digitally created, would go a long way toward effective sharing of ideas. Memes and gifs, for example, are underutilized in business, but I think that both are surprising and relevant enough to make the kind of desired impact, and businesspeople can use these to tell an information story that others can relate to.

CONCLUSION

Hopefully, businesspeople will begin to catch on soon to the importance of good visuals and how to best use them to their advantage. It makes for a much more efficient knowledge transfer, meaning fewer misunderstandings and everyone getting on the same page more quickly and easily. My advice is to throw in a wacky gif and start telling a story next time you have a presentation to give. It will help you much more than a simple flow chart will.

ABSTRACT

This session Engage More Fans Using Retail Marketing Strategies, consisted or Panelists, Megan Dandois, from Experian Marketing Services, Brad Pitzele from Game Stop, Michelle Devore, the Director of Marketing at Neiman Marcus Group, and Sean Horton, the President, founder and creator of Decibel Festival.

Engage More Fans Using Retail Marketing Strategies Kirk Scully Undergraduate: BA Marketing/ EDP Kirkpscully@gmail.com

Instagram: @scullymon Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Boosting Fan Engagement

The session covered laying the foundation for engaging more customers, the importance of Data, Testing, and bringing everything together in the end to accomplish higher engagement.

SESSION

Retailers usually tend to have quite large audiences, and big budgets. With these large audiences, and a budget to make things happen, it is important how a retailer, or entity goes about engaging with their audience in order to ensure that those numbers don’t decrease, and the engagement only gets better.

First of all, it is important to lay the foundation. It has been found, that Email’s, usually deliver the highest ROI for marketers. ROI, simply means return on investment. For the money that you are putting in, what are you getting back from that upfront investment. Although it may be speculated that the more emails you send, leads to less email engagement, this has actually found to not be true. The quantity of emails which you send, doesn’t effect the amount of emails opened, or the audiences engagement with those messages. Email on average has 40 times the acquisition rate of social media. Therefore, when deciding where to use your budget, Email has time in and time out proved itself as a necessary means of communication with customers, and a seamlessly efficient way to acquire new ones.

Your Fans, or customers, are who you are going to need to make you or your business successful. In creating these new leads, it is important that you don’t just reel them in. This is where the importance of the Promotional Calender comes in.

There are 4 simple steps involved in the promotional Calender: Convert, Grow, Appreciate, and Retain.

First of all, you start out with Welcoming a new customer. If you have someone inside your store, or on your website, that is an opportunity to Convert them into either a customer, or

some part of your audience. If they had the interest to interact with you in the first place, then prove that you are worthy of keeping that relationship going. Converting can be easy.

Figure out a way, to add them to your email list. If you are a retailer, if they purchase a good, have them enter their email to create an account at checkout. Once you have converted them, it is crucial that you don’t sleep on them however. Therefore this takes us to the next step: Grow.

It is important to Grow your relationship with your customer so that they don’t feel like they just gave you their email for nothing. An easy way to grow this relationship, is to send a follow up email with your customer after they leave the store. If they purchased an item from your store, send them a follow up email with information on the brands which they have already expressed interest in. This is a simple way to also setup your next opportunity for closing a deal with this customer on their next purchase!

The third step in the Promotional Calender is Appreciation. This is probably one of the most important steps in the process, which will set you up for the last step, to Retain.

Appreciation, can be simple as well. Start an email campaign rewarding those customers who have subscribed. Make them feel like you know them, and that you appreciate them. If you can, get your customers birthday when you first convert them so that you can send them an appreciation email on their birthday, giving them some sort of value whether that be a discount, a gift card, a free item, or whatever. Lastly, an easy way to appreciate your customer, is to send out an anniversary of their initial subscription. Once you have your customer, appreciating their existence is a great way to Retain their subscription. If you do all of these things well, the retaining your customer should not be an issue.

Collecting data, can be absolutely crucial in retail, or whatever it is you are in. It doesn’t have to be that black and white either. If you ask your customers for their, Email address, Name, Postal Code, Birthday, or more it can tell you useful information, and come in handy down the road. What this Data can tell you is, your customers Time of Day Preference, Device preference (iPhone, Android, Desktop), and even their Location at the moment. How you treat some one based on how you acquired their email address can be a good tool.

Notice which methods of acquiring subscribers were the most succesful, and use that information in how you spend your money in the future. Once you have this data, how do you use it? With a customers Zip Code, you can send them location details. With Device preference, you can promote your mobile app, or promote your website to them depending on which device they use.

Testing, is another very useful tool. It can be quite simple. Make a hypothesis, design a test, Randomly assign test groups, and then run that test. Once you receive your results, evaluate these results and implement your findings into your future actions.

CONCLUSION

Boosting your customer, or fan engagement, will only lead to increased sales or revenue down the road. It is important that at every opportunity you get, to try and convert people into customers, or subscribers. Once you have these new leads, act on them. Grow these relationships, and appreciate them. Make them Feel like they are important to you, which

when it comes down to, they really are. All of these steps will eventually lead to retaining your subscribers, which should be the end goal.

Collect Data, and test your data. Data can provide you very valuable information. 56% of emails are opened on mobile devices. Knowing that, make sure your website, or anything you include in an email is mobile activated. Knowing what time of day users are operating their devises, can boost your engagement depending on time of day which you send your emails. There are simple steps and things you can do, which can boost customer engagement, leading to an increase in Revenue at the end of the day.

ABSTRACT

Facebook and Instagram: A Tale of Two Feeds Kendra Arenkill Undergraduate: Marketing kendraa2@earthlink.net LinkedIn Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session The Time to Differentiate on Social Feeds is Now

These days, marketers face seemingly endless option when it comes to posting, creating, advertising and promoting about their products and services. Even when looking only at social networks, there are a multitude of platforms that marketers need to know how to utilize to stay relevant to consumers.

Facebook was one of the first social platforms and one of the most successful, even to this day. During this session, Vicki Molina-Estolano and Jaideep Mukerji from Facebook IQ describe their findings on how to use Facebook for as a business, versus using Instagram. Both sites, while similar, have a lot of differences in the way users interact and engage as well as the way different age groups use the platforms. They also discussed popular trends on each platform and the best ways to get messages across.

SESSION

In total, American’s spend about 20% of their time on both Facebook and Instagram alone - that’s a lot of time spent looking at a screen on social media! Vicki and Jaideep conducted a four part study to look at what was happening when users were spending time on both of these platforms. In the first part of the study, they analyzed intern Facebook and Instagram data. They then used IPSOS for interviews and surveys among people aged 18-64. From there, they measured unconscious associations with the Facebook and Instagram feed through IAT. And finally, they studied what content was popular during seven different major events. They found a lot of interesting results when looking at the complete study as a whole.

What Vicki and Jaideep found was that both social feeds have a lot of things in common. Both platforms are used to connect with others, they are both used during similar times of the day, and they are used for sharing content (people post content on each feed at similar times as well). People also use both sites to curate (on both feeds, people follow similar companies, events, and people), and to fulfill their emotional needs through feelings. Humans have eight key emotional needs fun, connection, belonging, relaxation, control, recognition, power and discovery - and both of these social feeds are used to fill that void.

While much is similar, even in the content that is posted, the feeds capture different levels of consumer attention. The people that interact with the platforms are also different.

Facebook is a platform that close friends and family tend to interact on, while Instagram is more of a public sphere of people and businesses where consumers engage in what they’re passionate about. Facebook empowers people while Instagram invites people to explore.

During major events, Facebook users turn to the platform to share their reactions while Instagram users turn to the platform to see “behind the scenes” coverage. The term discovery is also treated differently on each platform: people use Facebook to discover exposure to new ideas, often for laughter and humor, while people use Instagram to discover things that inspire them, using discovery for surprise and delight. Consumers associate the words funny, in-control, and appreciation when using Facebook, and their mindset tends to be happy and calm. Instagram users associate the platform with the words adventurous, real and creative and associate their mindset to be one of amazement and amusement. These differences in mindsets while using the app is important for the way businesses advertisements are received by consumers.

For understanding what forms of advertising are effective on Facebook, Facebook IQ used their multidisciplinary team approach; they took data from their consumer insights, advertising effectiveness, and creative insights teams which used methodologies such as creative ratings and neuroscience (emotional/physiological). For upper funnel metrics (including advertising recall and brand awareness), Instagram performed slightly better than Facebook. When it came to lower funnel metrics (including message association and preference/favorability), Facebook performed slightly better than Instagram. At the sale stage, the final stage of the consumer selling funnel, both platforms performed about the same. This is an important takeaway, because while they both performed similarly for advertising, each did slightly better at different stages of the sales funnel. Therefore, marketers should advertise on both platforms. To put this research to the test, the exact same ad was tested on performance on both Instagram and Facebook. On Instagram, the ad was more noticeable (+7%) and had more emotional reward. On Facebook, the ad had more information reward and a better call to action (+36%). Sensors can be used on people’s skin to pick up on their emotional intensity when viewing ads on both platforms. When measuring this, Instagram’s people start and continue to have a more emotional reaction, and the ads hold consumer attention longer here.

All of this seems very relevant in the way in which I use my social networking sites and feeds. I am much more likely to read the text of an ad, or watch a full ad video on Instagram than I am on Facebook. Instagram ads, in my opinion, do a better job of fitting in to look like any other post from my feed versus the ads on Facebook which stand out as an ad (so I then scroll by it). I’m curious to see how businesses adapt to the new similar features on both apps - stories. These features are too new for any research to be done on the effects of advertising here.

CONCLUSION

For marketers, it’s important that they distinguish what their goals are to determine which of the two platforms to post on. Though, if possible, marketers should post advertisements on both platforms for optimal results. Marketers who wish to advertise on these platforms need to consider the culture of each platform and then design their ads to fit with the type of person who is using each platform. Better tailored advertising messages will resonate better

with your audience. Marketers should also be sure to use a complementary approach when it comes to their organic presence. Fitting in with the other content being posted on these feeds is crucial to getting consumers to even pay attention to the ad. Finally, marketers need to focus on strong creative that conveys the brand’s personality. The creative should be wellrounded that can focus on different brand elements and be used on both platforms. Strong images and brand cues tell consumers what you as a brand want them to do. Overall, have fun using both platforms, because they are more similar than they are different and are there to express creativity!

ABSTRACT

Facebook and Instagram: A Tale of Two Feeds Colby Bjornsen Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing colbybjornsen@gmail.com

LinkedIn:@colbybjornse n Personal Website Link to Flipboard Magazine

Link to Session How to Advertise on Instagram VS Facebook

In this session, Facebook IQ (Facebook’s data analysis team) clarified the differences between Facebook and Instagram in terms of how people use the feeds and the needs each fulfills. Though these differences marketers can gain insights into which platforms to share their messaging and creatives on in order get the most bang for their buck. Speakers Vicki Molina-Estolano of Facebook and Jaideep Mukerji of Facebook IQ dived into what Facebook and Instagram mean to those that use them.

Facebook acquired Instagram for one billion dollars in 2012.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook once said, “we believe Facebook and Instagram are different experiences that complement each other.” The two platforms are connected in many way (including ownership) even though they operate as separate social media sites. To streamline the ad process, Facebook has made it easy to create Instagram ads through Facebook’s ad manager. Marketers are faced with the challenge of running ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram or both. While Facebook is still the largest social media platform, Instagram is quickly catching up.

SESSION

Estolano, Mukerji and their team launched a four-part study to investigate the differences of the two platforms. First, they analyzed internal Facebook and Instagram data. Next, they conducted interviews and surveys among people aged 1864. Further, they measured unconscious associations with the feeds through the implicit-association test (IAT). And lastly, they studied popular content during seven major global events. Through this study, they determined that Facebook and Instagram have a lot of similarities but people come to each with a different mindset.

On both platforms people use the feeds to connect with others, share and curate content and to address their emotional needs. Both platforms are used as similar times throughout the day. But who users interact with on the platforms varies significantly. While on Facebook, users are more likely to interact with close friends and family whereas on Instagram users engage with people and businesses promoting and displaying things they’re passionate about.

Instagram generates more “digital relationships” where users have frequently never met the people they follow or interact with. The emotional needs filled by each platform also

differs. While Facebook is more likely to empower people, Instagram invites users to explore and be inspired.

Through the interviews, surveys and implicit-association testing, the researchers investigated the words, activities and expectations most commonly associated with both platforms. They learned that most people associate Facebook with humor and Instagram with adventure. People tend to relate Facebook with personal connections (sharing life events, accomplishments and opinions with friends and family) and Instagram with exploration (seeing how others live and explore the world). The expectations of users on the platforms also varied. Facebook is more commonly used to get reactions from others where Instagram is used for a personal glimpse behind the scenes.

So, what do these nuances mean for advertisers? By understanding and recognizing how people interact with ads on each platform, marketers can generate more effective advertising tactics. One study posted the same ads on both Instagram and Facebook to see which platform performed better. Instagram ads produced higher emotional reactions and held people’s attention for longer while Facebook provided more brand information and greater calls to action. After examining eye tracking it was concluded that users spend more time on Instagram looking at the image than on the text itself. At the end of the day, each platform generates an almost equal amount of sales. Learning how to tailor your ads to each is the key to marketing success.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, although the feeds on both Instagram and Facebook have a lot in common, people have different mindsets while interacting on them and this affects how they react to ads. When creating ads consider the culture of each platform to help design more effective ads that tailor your message to your audience. However, it’s important to remember that Facebook and Instagram are more similar than they are different. Both are feed-first platforms where people go to connect. It can be expensive to have different strategies on both. So, instead of creating separate strategies for each platform consider playing with the imagery and text of your ad because they will communicate differently on each platform.

Examine ad effectiveness by analyzing impression and sales results to see if one platform performs better for your brand.

All things considered, I believe brands should be running ad campaigns on both platforms.

Since Instagram ad creation is a part of the Facebook ad editor you can manage ads across both platforms in one central place. However, the type of ads and the demographics you’re trying to reach differ on each platform (see above). Some other things to consider: the types of campaigns you can run, which objectives you can track, your audience targeting options, prices of advertisements, and where your ads will be displayed. But, that’s a whole different discussion.

ABSTRACT

Facebook and Instagram: A Tale of Two Feeds Darby Pappas Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing pappasdarby@gmail.com LinkedIn: @darbypappas Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Facebook and Instagram: Similar Feeds, Different Mindsets

Vicki Molina-Estolano of Facebook Marketing Science and Jaideep Mukerji of Instagram Marketing Science discuss the similarities and differences between Facebook and Instagram. Ads are received differently across different platforms, and marketers can use the similarities (and differences) to improve their campaign. This session discusses how marketers can address both cultures differently and learn how to make their marketing strategies cost-effective.

SESSION

20% of Americans time on mobile is spent on Facebook and Instagram. The two feeds have a lot in common, but people have different mindsets of each, which affects how users react to ads. A four-part study was conducted by Facebook and Instagram. The study analyzed internal Facebook and Instagram data, conducted interviews and surveys of users aged 18-64, measured unconscious associations with the feeds through implicit-association test (IAT), and they studied popular content during 7 major events. They learned that Facebook and Instagram have a lot in common with lots of overlap. This study found how people use the feeds: to connect, visit, share, curate, and feel. They found the most common reason people use these platforms is to connect with others who share similar interests, people visit both Instagram and Facebook at similar times of the day, people post content on each feed at similar rates, people on both feeds follow and unfollow at same rates, and people use it for emotional fulfillment. But, similar content captures different levels of attention. Facebook is used to follow close friends and family, where Instagram is used to follow athletes and celebrities. This study also found how the feeds fulfill emotional needs by measuring 8 key emotional needs (fun, belonging, control, power, connection, relaxation, recognition, discovery). The study concluded that Facebook empowers people and makes them feel connected and recognized, and that Instagram invites people to explore and makes them feel discovery, fun, and exploration. The definition of discovery varies on each platform. People associate Facebook more strongly with happiness and calm, and Instagram more strongly with amazement and amusement. On Facebook, people most associated connecting with friends and family, sharing opinions, sharing life events, and sharing accomplishment. On Instagram, people most associated seeing how others live, sharing life events, connecting with people they admire, and exploring

the world. I can agree with this because the accounts I follow on Instagram are inspirational and provide adventure on my feed, whereas I go on Facebook to see what my friends are doing. During major events, people go to Facebook for reactions and Instagram for behindthe-scenes. Lastly, the speakers explain how these findings play out for advertisers. These findings can be taken with a multidisciplinary approach, using consumer insights, ad effectiveness, and create insights. They needed to look beyond ad effectiveness and find research from different teams. What I found most intriguing was that they used neuroscience to understand how people felt and their reactions while browsing both platforms while being exposed to ads on both platform. With all of this data, they took a marketing approach to analyze how effective the advertising was on each platform. They concluded that Instagram performed better than Facebook on upper funnel metrics because Instagram had better ad recall and brand awareness, where Facebook performed better than Instagram on lower funnel metrics because Facebook had better message association, favorability, and sales. This showed that both Facebook and Instagram can provide great value together along the funnel.

With all of that overwhelming data I was given during the session, I was waiting for the final takeaway of the research. Finally, they wrapped up the research with the importance of the study. Marketers need to always remember the context of each platform. Instagram is more about visual inspiration and exploration, where Facebook is more about getting real-time information. Marketers should also understand the emotional intensity of each platform.

Instagram creates a spike of emotional intensity at the beginning more than Facebook.

Marketers need to understand that ads on Instagram hold longer due to the visual nature of Instagram. I think these were all valuable pieces of information from the research because each platform offers a different culture in the end. I’ve heard an overwhelming amount that the context of your content matters, and that you must understand how users interpret content differently based on the medium. First, marketers need to consider the culture of each platform, because although they may be similar, they are still different. Next, marketers should use a complementary approach for their organic presence, because a holistic strategy ensures connection to your brand. This was advice that I wasn’t given in previous sessions and I can see how important it is for brands to make sure that their strategies connect throughout each platform. Third, marketers should remember that Facebook and Instagram are more similar than different. Fourth, marketers should focus on a strong creative that conveys brand personality. A single creative can be successful but it needs to be well-rounded where people will find different elements of interest based on the platform.

If I could sum up this session in one sentence, I would say that a well-rounded ad is one that finds balance between image & text and Facebook & Instagram. It’s crucial for ads to incorporate both text and image and even connect the ads across platforms.

CONCLUSION

Facebook and Instagram are similar and different in terms of how ads are received across both platforms. While both are incredibly similar in terms of usage, they vary in terms of fulfilling emotional needs. Marketers can create campaigns that fulfill the varying emotional needs of both platforms while keeping it cost-effective. Overall, Facebook and Instagram are both platforms where people go to connect with others, but it’s important to advertise with the right message in mind for each platform.

ABSTRACT

Facebook and Instagram: A Tale of Two Feeds Hunter Saillen Undergraduate: ISM Music Business Hunter@After.Live @AfterLiveMedia Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session No, Facebook and Instagram Are Not The Same Thing

Facebook and Instagram are the behemoth social media's we interact with on an everyday basis. In fact, a staggering 20% of mobile phone usage is spent on one of these two platforms. Their reach spans ages, cultures, genders and locations. Each platform meets a distinct need in the eyes of the user. The aim of this session was to dive into the relationship between Facebook and Instagram and explain how people use each feed and the expectations they have when on each platform. Businesses can then leverage this information to best cater to the needs of each community and deliver a message that resonates with the target demographic. This session was presented by Victoria MolinaEstolano, a consumer insights analyst at Instagram and Jaideep Mukerji, the leader of advertising research at Facebook.

SESSION

It is important to note that Instagram is owned by Facebook and that there is a great deal of crossover in the structure of each platform. The primary difference between the two is that Instagram is a visual medium whereas Facebook is an informational medium. Despite this, there are many similarities between the two. First, users come to connect with others who share their interests. There are thousands of communities on each platform where users can come and interact based on common interests. The power of this opportunity is profound, allowing people from disparate locations to connect in ways not otherwise possible. When marketing, you know that ads should be targeted based on communities of shared interest. Second, people come to these platforms to meet emotional needs, to feel something.

When creating campaigns, it is important to appeal to the emotions of your target demographic in a way that will make them connect with your product or brand. Third, both platforms are visited at similar times of the day. If you can discover what time your target audience is most active you will have a better chance of reaching them with your content with the appropriate timing. Fourth, people post content on each feed, curate their profiles, follow, and unfollow at similar rates.

I find the difference in the way users interact with each social media to be far more interesting and important when developing a marketing strategy. So how is it that people are using each feed? On Facebook people are more likely to interact with family and friends whereas on Instagram people

are more likely to interact with a public sphere of people and businesses. When marketing, this helps you define who holds a sphere of influence over users and how they can be leveraged to “do your bidding� mwahahaha. On Facebook discovery is about being exposed to new ideas whereas on Instagram discovery is about inspiration. As people are scrolling through their Facebook newsfeed, they want to see content provokes thought.

When creating content, make sure that it is more informational and idea based. As people scroll through Instagram, they want to see content that inspires them to take action. When creating content, make sure that it is visually stimulating and well made so that you can inspire your viewers.

The emotional needs of each user base differ between platforms. Facebook empowers people while Instagram invites them to explore. Facebook is most associated with humor, being in control, appreciation, happiness and calm. Instagram is most associated with adventure, creativity, amusement and amazement. Take advantage of the emotions people are looking for when you are creating content for each platform and try to align the emotions of your message with the dominant emotions of the platform. What is it that people expect when they go to each platform? People turn to Facebook for reactions and opinions. People turn to Instagram for a glimpse behind the scenes. What this means is fairly obvious. Share your opinions and reactions on Facebook and give people a chance to look behind the scenes of your company or brand when on Instagram.

When creating ads for either of these platforms, make sure that your advertisement has both a clear focal point and a call to action. By providing each of these you give your target audience a concept to hone in on and a way to take action on that concept. Doing this successfully can drive meaningful traffic to you anticipated target. It is also important to note that people spend more time looking at an ads image than its text. For this reason ads on Instagram hold attention longer and have a higher emotionally intense response within the first five seconds. Whatever medium you choose to use, make sure your ad conveys as much information as possible through the image. Instagram is a better platform for upper funnel metrics, generating high brand awareness. Facebook is better for lower funnel metrics, leading to a greater proportion of sales. Think about your sales funnel when creating an ad for each platform.

CONCLUSION

All of this information can be condensed down into a few simple key takeaways. First, consider the culture of the platform you are using. Ensure that your content reinforces the culture of that platform and that you are engaging authentically with that culture. Second, use a complementary approach to your organic brand presence. Have a holistic strategy that responds to interests on the platform and corresponds with your brand. Third, remember that Facebook and Instagram are ultimately more similar than different. Fourth, focus on strong creative message that conveys your brand personality. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel each time you post. One creative can work well across both platforms.

ABSTRACT

Facebook and Instagram: A Tale of Two Feeds Hamilton Tyler Undergraduate: BSBA Finance/Economics hamilton.tyler@du.edu LinkedIn: @hamiltontylerjr Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Subtleties of Social Media

Facebook and Instagram appear to be similar social media platforms on the surface, but there are big differences in the way people use and interact with the platforms. Vicki MolinaEstolano and JaiDeep Mukerji of Facebook IQ, investigated the relationship between Facebook and Instagram. People perceive Facebook and Instagram differently and factors such as age differences cause perception that is even more distanced. Each feed has a lot in common, but people have a different mindset on Facebook than on Instagram, affecting how they will react to ads. Facebook dove deep into internal data to see how advertisers should be using the platforms differently.

SESSION

Facebook launched a 4 part study to find the key to social media advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Facebook analyzed internal Facebook and Instagram data, conducted interviews and surveys among people aged 18-64, measured unconscious associations, and studied content during 7 major events. They found some interesting results on the similarities and differences of the platforms. Both platforms are used to connect with others who share common interests.

Similarly, both platforms are used for emotional fulfillment at similar times of day. People tend to have a high rate of interaction on both platforms as well.

Facebook found that their platform is generally used for interacting with a close circle of family and friends, while Instagram users are 30% more likely to interact with public figures and businesses. Why do Instagram users seem to be more explorative than Facebook users? The study took measures of how much each platform satisfies eight key emotional needs; fun, belonging, control, power, connection, relaxation, recognition, and discovery. Facebook and Instagram were found to both satisfy user’s emotional needs, but in different ways. For example, discovery on Facebook means something different than discovery on Instagram.

Facebook discovery is about exposure to new ideas while Instagram discovery is about inspiring the user. Users on Facebook desire humor, empowerment, and feelings of happiness. Users on Instagram want a sense of adventure, diversity, and insight into how other people live. Emotional needs fulfilled with each platform falls back on the expectations of the user when people go to each platform.

Facebook is a more reactive site in comparison to Instagram’s intimate glimpse behind the scenes.

The nuances between Facebook and Instagram play out differently for advertisements.

Context expectations cause users to react differently to ads on a cognitive level. The exact same ad featured on both platforms should theoretically produce identical ratings.

However, the Instagram ad received 7% higher noticeability and an 8% higher emotional reward. The Facebook ad received a 25% higher informational reward and a 36% larger call to action. The identical ad experiment proves that advertisers can maximize efficiency by considering the differing culture and expectations of each platform. By taking a unique approach to advertising on Facebook and Instagram, metrics such as ad recall and brand awareness can be increased, resulting in brand favorability and sales. Implicit user expectations of Facebook and Instagram can align with brand values to create a brand personality. The implicit expectation of adventure on Instagram means that a targeted Patagonia ad would fare reasonably well. Platform expectations will not always be the same.

As platforms go through updates and user bases grow and shift, the role of advertisers will too. Platform trends and expectations change over time, so it will be interesting to track the changes in consumer metrics over the coming years.

CONCLUSION

Facebook and Instagram share more similarities than differences. By understanding the subtle differences between the two platforms, advertisers can increase the effectiveness of their ads. People use the platforms for similar but different purposes, which brings challenges to advertisers. They appear similar on the surface, but the underlying cognitive mechanisms and expectations prove key differences. The popularity of social media creates great opportunities for businesses to advertise. Businesses can use the nuances of Facebook and Instagram to increase ad recall, brand awareness, and message association.

Facebook and Instagram are unique tools that advertisers can use to increase marketing efficiency and cater to the culture of each community.

ABSTRACT

Good is The New Cool: Market Like You Give a Damn Annie Langston Undergraduate: Marketing Major Anlangston19@gmail. com https://www.linkedin.c om/in/annielangston/ Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Marketing 2.0

The age-old marketing techniques have been reimagined by the millennial generation. Millennials have created a more wholesome, relevant formula for effective marketing. They have created a new set of values and are articulating that through their marketing strategies. Bobby Jones and Afdhel Aziz are the authors of Good is The New Cool : Market Like You Give A Damn, which paints the picture of the current cultural shifts and how those are affecting the marketing industry.

SESSION

I went into this session with low hopes, seeing as every person I listened to that week have told me the same thing about marketing; be transparent. To my surprise, that was only a sliver of their presentation. Bobby and Afdhel created an entirely different marketing model that is way more relevant to the current market. For only a thirty minute session, this was one of my favorites.

They began by talking about what was going on in the world today, like brands that are doing well, the rise of the nonprofits, and celebrity activists. Companies like Toms and Zappos have incorporated community and worldwide efforts in their business models since their inception. This concept sparked a flame of inspiration for up-and-coming brands.

Because of this, if there is a new company that doesn’t give back in some sort of way, they will not last long in the market. This includes the rise of non-profits.

Non-profits have gained a new “cool” status amongst consumers, especially the millennial generation. That generation is taking the future of the world very seriously. Lastly, celebrities like Beyoncé and Lady Gaga are public political and social activists. Their actions have validated the efforts that have been made by people for generations; they provide hope for struggling communities. The influences from brands and celebrities have made doing good the new cool, just like how the authors put it. People are more inspired to do more good for their communities and create businesses to propel those efforts. The millennials have created new expectations for brands, 95% of millennials will switch brands for one that supports a good cause. Every time you spend your money, you’re casting your vote for what kind of world you want. That may be a bit dramatic, but this generation has imprinted this in their daily lifestyles.

These trends are changing the way marketers reach

consumers, so the old strategies are getting a face lift. The rise of technology has been a great conquest for social networking but has also increased advertising outlets. The majority of the global population are using ad blocking on their devices, and it’s statistically shown that marketing is the least valuable profession in the eyes of consumers. Everyone is trying to avoid advertisements, so it’s crucial that brands market their company in a different light. One of the steps in the new cool model that Bobby and Afdhel presented was: don’t advertise, solve problems. Brands should use their resources to solve everyday problems, and that is all the marketing you need. If someone hears about a brand doing something good, it spreads like wildfire; that is what people care about. Social activism is a strong driver in brand strength and social responsibility builds wealth. If your only motivation as a brand is to make money, there is money in doing good. But don’t get too comfortable, if money is your driver, people will figure that out quickly. In addition, brands cannot just speak empty words, they must back up their promise with proof. Actions speak louder than words and with the constant watch of social media, every action is being monitored. People are good at sniffing out the liars. Another step in the new cool way of marketing is to think of people as citizens not consumers. This is not a transactional relationship, it’s multi-dimensional. People want to see their passions displayed in a brand so they can form an emotional connection with them. The millennial consumer is more concerned with being a hard-working citizen that will better the planet than keeping up with the newest fashions. Their values as citizens have changed, and a brand needs to adapt to these changing values. Furthermore, there is strength in numbers. Brands should find allies that share a common purpose. The more allies a brand has the more impact they can make in the market. Therefore, more people can be included in the brand’s mission, which will make them more invested in the overall goal. Lastly, Bobby and Afdhel added a fifth “p” of marketing, purpose. Brands need a purpose; they cannot exist for no reason.

CONCLUSION

Everything seems to be changing right now, and marketing is one of those changing things. These new ideas about marketing will pave the way for new generations, giving them the ability to work for what they care about. What was presented in this session is what should be taught in schools now. I believe the biggest problem with universities is the stone age curriculum. Professors should be teaching what is relevant now, and keeping the students up to date with the current state of the world. Universities are already a bubble, the curriculum shouldn’t encourage the old ways of doing business. I learned more relevant information during this conference than I have this entire year. I understand there is value in traditional thinking, but if those ways are not relevant in the current market, they are worthless. Furthermore, students are so absorbed in the college bubble they have no idea about what is going on in the world, including new business practices. I want to learn what will help me in this current market, not what helped my professor in a different time. When I was listening to this session, I just kept thinking that this is what I should be learning. Purpose marketing is changing every aspect of advertising and digital marketing. Everything that was presented is applicable in a digital world because it’s been created by a digital world, traditional marketing strategies were not.

ABSTRACT

Good is the New Cool: Market Like You Give a Damn

Positioning your brand around a greater cause is almost imperative today to be successful with the millennial generation, in terms of both gaining them as a customer and even as an employee. 64% of millennials won’t even accept a job if the company doesn’t give back to the greater community in some way. Some of the most popular faces in entertainment today like Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and LeBron James, are considered the architects of the new “cool” and are undeniably the ultimate influencers. Using their talents and creativity as a platform for awareness and distribution to impact the greater good is potentially one of the coolest things they could do and their fan base is all over it looking for ways to get involved.

SESSION

This convergence of commerce, conscience and culture is quickly becoming what is now considered the norm in Logan Leake business practices and is likely here to stay. New expectations from millennials and Gen-Z of the brands in Undergraduate: BSBA their lives are spurring this demand with the help of technological disruption and the “crisis of meaningfulness.”

Marketing This crisis is centered around marketing and the question “do we want our legacy on this planet to really just be about logan.leake@aol.com helping people buy more stuff.” These generational influences are taking majority part in this movement and for Instagram:@LoganMatoaka good reason.

Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Stand for Something, Market with Passion.

In order to master this shift in business model requires a necessary mind-shift. Most businesses start with the reasonable purpose of making money but that is simply not enough anymore. Having a deeper purpose and knowing it inside and out is critical. Following that same token, determining allies on this purposeful endeavor and finding common purposes is another key component. Additionally, repositioning the concept of the consumer is also highly necessary—brands should think citizens, not consumers. This places a greater significance on the idea of conscious capitalism with a stakeholder perspective as the consumer is now seen as a greater part of the world—a citizen with a potentially impactful purpose—and not just a transactional relationship. Consumers are this attainable market while citizens have passions and original thought. If these consumer-turned-citizens don’t feel that they a connection to a brand they won’t be coming back. As important as marketing is in the overall scheme of things, the crisis of meaningfulness actually places marketing and advertising in

the category of the four least valuable professions. Knowing this, when advertising to millennials and generation Z, it’s important to solve problems rather than push a product or an image. Brands should be solving problems on both levels of everyday matters all the way to the epic.

Marketers refer to the four P’s of marketing as product, price, place and promotion, but according to this session there’s now a fifth ‘P’ just as essential. You guessed it, it’s purpose.

In fact, this is the most crucial thing an organization / brand can do. Think of purpose as the new digital. It should be just as integrated into our business models as our devices are into our everyday lives.

Brands without a higher purpose or ones that don’t ultimately serve a deeper need run the risk of being ignored by the consumer (i.e. citizen). Tying social activism into a business model is an incredible driver of brand strength and as a result has the ability to build wealth through this adoption. As briefly mentioned in the abstract, some of the most successful performers in entertainment today have incorporated some deeper purpose into their brand persona.

“Music has a way of shining a light on what’s going on now in a way that no speech, no book, and no historian can do.”

–Jaha Johnson It is music and culture that will be the baseline for change. Regardless of whether or not musicians or pop stars initially started out with a deeper social purpose or strong stance on bringing recognition to an issue or injustice, they are doing so now. At least, the bigger and more successful celebrities are. They have realized that utilizing their platform to spread awareness is both well-received and respected. The path to hell is paved with good intentions meaning being in this position of power and respect is more than just spouting empty rhetoric—action must follow and action always speaks louder than words.

CONCLUSION This change within the business space, built off the basis of something bigger than ourselves, is a monumental step in the right direction. The future of marketing goes much deeper than what we know as cause-marketing and will allow younger generations to combine what they’re passionate about into their professions.

ABSTRACT

The CMO for Rockfish and co-founder of The Brandery, Dave Knox, discussed his book Predicting the Turn. This book highlights the changed business climate and relationship that has been and continues to develop and evolve between startups and large corporations. In business school, I know that startups are abundant and have the ability to really infiltrate and shake up the market, so I was interested to see the corporate perspective surrounding that.

High Stakes Business Between Startups & Blue Chips Alana Bierbaum Graduate: M.S. Marketing alana.bierbaum@du.edu Instagram & Twitter: @alanabierbaum Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session The Ever-Evolving Market Space

SESSION

There is an obvious shift between digital marketing and digital business models and how they are now converging. Digital started as a merging channel, and a new way of advertising, but also a way to remove the competitive advantage of others with higher marketing share. The digital component of business has started to become the business model due to its significant and dominant place within our market now as the world has become online-centric in retail and as a business delivery space. Competition is now coming from anywhere and a variety of different places rather from just another giant corporate name.

The speed of change is always accelerating and innovating upon itself. Innovation and startups are dominos that disrupt the current business market present at the time of their inception. One example presented of this in a historical sense is when tractors were invented, they overtook the role of horses within the field, and when cars were invented, they further overtook the role of horses and could drive better than tractors. Market share became disrupted each time, and in our current point of history, Uber has taken market share from taxis and innovated the market of mobility.

Market intelligence is the idea of involvement in innovation and future projection, something that is becoming a requisite for companies to stay relevant. A key for companies in this ever-evolving climate, is to develop a sense of how and when the future will unfold within the market space and share that information with the primary stakeholders within the corporation. Future analysis does not always work out, but it is a proactive measure that can lead to greater success than being wholly reaction to market changes. what we see on the screen. While the visual component is mostly steady longshots of the mundanity of everyday life, grooming birds, driving a car, sitting on an airplane, the music interweaves itself in a much more dramatic way when it is used.

Most acquisitions taking place at this point in the game are driven by innovation. Large companies are investing and investing heavily in change in where their industry is headed. For an example, Under Armour has invested in fitness pals as an effective way to be consistent with the brand image while further developing it. When companies try to ignore change, they fade because of their refusal to adapt to where the market is heading and what consumers are gravitating towards. It is also a smart business plan because adapting to a new business model increases consumption. From the perspective of the startups, acquisitions are the general desired result of business. They need a partner that moves quickly and cares about the company first, and the size of the check is secondary (if the startup was initiated from a place of innovation and passion). With startups, time is the most essential commodity because funding is very limited. Big companies are starting to realize innovation-driven acquisition may be a way forward, as eggs need to be placed in various baskets in order for continued success in today’s market. Disrupting the disruptor is actually beneficial for both parties, acquired innovation for large companies and effectively impacting the market while being acquired for the startups. Evolution is the name of the game with constant innovation.

CONCLUSION

If large companies are not acquiring the startups themselves, they are often copying them. The consumer perspective is an interesting one at present because a lot of people are wanting to shop smaller-scale and are shunning big businesses. Startups get a boost from those customers and when large companies acquire them, the customers leave and find something else. The whole market is not like this, of course, because a lot of customers are equally keen on convenience, and if that convenience and innovative product, service, or technology is now offered by a huge corporation, they will still invest in it and the image of the large corporation may be boosted in their eyes.

ABSTRACT

The speaker, Dave Knox is the managing director of WPP venture, a blue-chip company (large) and a co-founder of the Brandery, a small startup. So it was very exciting to learn from his experience in how his experience differ from these companies. And how he has helped both blue chip companies and startups find common ground and build relationships that have been mutual beneficial for both parties.

High Stakes business between startups and blue chips Thomas Grant Undergraduate: Finance/Legal Studies Email Address Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session How to build relationships with small startups

SESSION

In the business world, it is vital for blue chip companies; companies that are nationally recognize and have a large a relative large profit growth to build relationship with smaller startups in order to not fall behind their competitors. In recent years, we have seen a shift between digital marketing vs. digital business models. By building relationship with small startups, Blue Chip companies saw it as a competitive advantage and a way to go to a market in a different way.

Dave Knox illustrated this through his own interpretation; the flop, the turn, the river, which was inspired by poker. He explained that the “turn” is where the toughest decision is made, do I need to get out now, go all in, etc.

Dave Knox further described how tech companies’ innovators spend more money on R&D while large companies spend more on marketing, which they already have. Therefore, these larger “blue chip” companies are becoming less and less innovated, as we have seen in recent years with companies such as Apple, Inc. Blue Chip companies are also having trouble requiring top talents, people with PhDs and top technical talent are looking to join startups rather than a “Blue Chip company” because they want to be part of the next big thing or idea.

Dave Knox continued this session talking about how startups could potentially have a domino effect on other companies.

According to Dave Know, startups has the chance to knock down big companies as they are growing larger and increasing in numbers. The total available market is not thinking about market share as many Blue Chips do today, but rather think about what a market can become and not what it already is – this is the mindset of startups. Dave Know said that “saying you’re aiming for x of a y billion industry is unambitious.

Change the y not the x.”

Dave Knox also discussed four different activity areas for modern companies; 1: Innovation driven acquisition: Not just adding competitor to your portfolio but thinking about where innovation is heading and how things are changing across the board. Under Armour planning for future; bought the three largest providers of day-to-day tracking.

Ultimately provides platform for relationships which will come back around to sales 2: Invest in change, where things will be down the road. Long term outlook not just 6 months but 3, 7, 10 years.

3: Partnership: “Startups are like water; they take the easiest path down hill. Don’t care if you have the biggest check book if it takes 6 months and 9 months of legal, want a partner that works quickly and cares.

4: Disrupt the Disruptor. FedEx didn’t care about same day shipping. UPS did. Bought a company, didn’t know if consumers would want same day delivery, but they invested for the future, were ready in case they did, and eventually they needed to have same day delivery – which they were.

He explained that Amazon is now synonymous with same-day delivery. They took the idea from other companies, but went the extra mile. And they are now the leading retail store in the world.

CONCLUSION From a business student’s point of view, it was very helpful to hear from Dave Knox’s experience with how large companies and small startups can build relationships to mutual benefit each other.

ABSTRACT

High Stakes Business Between Start Ups & Blue Chips Krista Lumley Graduate: One Year MBA Kristaelumley@gmail.com

LinkedIn: Krista Lumley Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Partner Up!

Dave Knox is the Managing Director of WPP Ventures and co-founder of The Brandery. He also worked at Rockfish Innovation Group and the giant corporation P&G. This means Dave has experience in very diverse type of companies. This also makes Dave involved in two opposite type of companies at the same time, one Blue Chip company and one start up company. Therefore, Dave has insights on both and how the two types of companies can form mutually beneficial relationships. He gives advice for both types about how to thrive in the digital economy.

SESSION

Dave started his talk examining how to use digital in a now almost entirely digital marketing world. It used to be all about market share and getting the most shelf space. Now it is about things like shipping costs because there is unlimited shelf space when so much inventory is being sold digitally and not in a physical store.

He starts to bring in how start ups are effecting the market place. Competition now exists between everyone, not just between the big companies. The digital space makes it possible for the smaller companies/start ups to get involved and be real competitors.

A current problem for a lot of the biggest companies is that they are spending too much money on the advertising for go to market. This is an older, traditional way of thinking. The tech companies and innovators are taking on a different strategy by not wasting their money on the expensive advertising. Tech companies and innovators are getting the word out about their companies in cheaper, digital ways.

Another way to look at how start ups are doing so well is to look at the way dominos operate. A smaller domino can easily knock down one that is much bigger than itself. It does not depend on the size of the domino; it depends on the speed of domino knocking down the other domino. A smaller domino can also knock down a bigger domino if it is going fast enough. With start ups, the speed of change has been accelerating. By this, Dave meant start ups (small dominos) are popping up faster and coming in faster, consequently, knocking down the big companies (big dominoes) faster.

Dave also talked about how companies should not think as much about market share, but think broader. Companies need to think about what the market could be and not what it is. He gave an example to explain this using the horse.

Horses used to be the main vehicle of transportation. There used to be about 25 million horses for transportation and now there are 250 million cars and 4.5 million tractors.

Businesses were trying to take the market for horses at 25 million, but the market turned into this much bigger market of cars and tractors that are in the same transportation market but serve different purposes. As one can see, it's a broader view. It's not just about taking market share away from horses, it’s about looking at the market broader by looking at what the market could be.

Dave stated, "Saying that you're aiming for x percent of a xyz company is unambitious, great companies change the y not the x.” This goes along with when he said, “Businesses are succeeding that have market intelligence. This means having the ability to see the future of your industry before it happens.”

Dave went through four activity areas. First, innovation driven acquisition is imperative.

Second, businesses need to invest in change (not where the business will be in 6 months but where it will be in the next 3-5 years). Even CAT, a heavy machinery company, is going into the tech space. A lot of people did not originally understand why CAT would do this.

Dave’s answer is simple; if you don't innovate you will fail. Third, partnerships are key. He stated, "Starts ups are like water. They will take the easiest path down the hill." Gaining a partner that moves quickly and actually wants to work with you and believes in you is key.

Time is a start ups most valuable element. Fourth, disrupt the disrupter.

Being a part of a start up and a Blue Chip company would be extremely beneficial to understanding both sides. The strategies are dramatically different for both, but clearly, both types can learn a lot from one another.

Dave’s four activity areas are well advised. His quote about start ups being like water caught my attention. It is much easier for a start up to fail than an established big company. But, start ups are also often excellent innovators and that was also one of imperative elements Dave noted to have in a business now.

Big businesses and start ups working together would cause for a lot of tension because they often have different mindsets. How Dave is able to stay sane by keeping the two mindsets apart for each company is very impressive. Incorporating what each one could learn from each other is what makes Dave the success he is today.

CONCLUSION

Overall, he talks about a framework for big companies to get where things are going. He also talks about how start ups can benefit from big companies by partnering with them. It's not the same old business it used to be and these two types of businesses need to work together to be successful.

Dave is right that companies now are going digital and shelf space is not the biggest fight anymore. Having free shipping or having enough stock to supply online orders are the type of demands people expect from businesses now. When someone goes into a store and that store is out of something he or she wants it is expected he or she can easily order it online.

The digital space is seen as a must now, not a perk.

Businesses need to innovate that are seen as traditional companies, like the CAT example Dave gave. If your company is not looking into the digital space, your company will fail.

Even if it doesn’t seem to be a common sense move for your type of company, it will fail without innovation.

ABSTRACT

High Stakes Business Between Startups and Blue Chips Jack Tinkham Under Graduate Marketing/Psychology jacktinkham@gmail.com Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session David And Golliath

As the Managing Director of WPP Ventures and co-founder of The Brandery, Dave Knox wears two hats—one of Blue Chip companies and another of startups. He is often a translator when these two business worlds intersect. Dave helps Blue Chips and startups find common ground, innovate and create mutually beneficial business relationships in his book Predicting The Turn: The High Stakes Game of Business Between Startups and Blue Chips.

This book will be the must-have business tool for Blue Chip marketers looking to form a strong partnership with startups in this new digital economy. In his session, Dave will discuss his book and share valuable insights

SESSION

Dave Knox, Managing Director of WPP Ventures and cofounder of The Brandery, has worked closely with both startups and blue chips over the past few decades. During his time in the industry Knox has noticed wide-scale change in the dynamic between start-ups and blue-chips that has been driven by innovation.

As Knox recounts, in the days before digital business became a commonplace start-ups and blue-chips would work together to improve blue-chip market share. Though since the inception of digital business practices more intense competition has risen between the the two groups.

In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, blue-chips were unable to see the potential of digital business. Blue-chips saw the internet as a means to scale up marketing strategy and increase market share while startups saw the internet as a means of market penetration. This disparity in thought led to the creation of e-commerce giants like Amazon, who have found ways to reduce inventory costs, optimize shipping logistics, and dominate the market.

Second blue-chips should be increasingly gathering market intelligence to predict trends in industry. Knox notes that recent shift in consumer behavior, like wide-spread adoption of subscription revenue models in 2015, was actually noticed

by VC firms in 2010, who poured billions into companies like Dollar Shave Club and Spotify.

Third blue-chips must continually invest in change. In order to stay relevant blue-chips must identify where their industry is going in the long run. While it is impossible to say where any industry may go, at any given time there are a handful of startups with the potential to disrupt any given industry. To stay ahead of the curve blue-chips should invest in a diverse array of possible disruptors. In Knox’s words blue-chips should not look at the risk/reward ratio of a single acquisition or investment, rather they should invest in multiple startups, most of which will probably fail, in search of the one that “scores a thousand runs.”

Finally blue-chips should also make themselves widely available to partnerships with startups and recognize what startups value the most, time. As Knox put it, startups are like water travelling down a mountain, they take the path of least resistance. Due to their limited funding, startups are continually time-pressed to materialize their idea. To save time and money on both sides, Blue-chips should seek out partnerships in which they are relatively certain they can facilitate that success of a startup.

CONCLUSION

The future of the technology industry is likely to be heavily influenced by the dynamic between small companies and giant tech conglomerates. In the technology industry, startup’s often have innovative algorithms and platforms, but lack the data to optimize both, while Giant’s have data, but suffer from the echo-chamber effect and the consequences of administrative inertia. This disparity will likely cause a barbell effect within the tech industry, where-in a gap exists between algorithms and the data needed to fuel them.

Due to this disparity, the necessity to learn how to work with Giants, and start-up’s, will be a key characteristic of tomorrow’s giant. Having contributed to a white paper on the subject, I do not think that Giant’s can acquire at the rate of innovation. By that I mean that no matter how many companies a Giant, like Microsoft of Google, purchases, there will almost always be a new start-up with a more valuable algorithm than that of the prior purchase.

I see Tomorrow’s successful giant putting down the company plastic and picking up an open ended partnership system that facilitates collaboration between giant’s and start-ups. While purchasing a start-up can be quite profitable or a massive failure, the purchase may change the dynamic that spurred innovation within the start-up in the first place. To avoid loss, and to protect the secret ingredients of the start-up’s innovation process, giant’s should cut acquisition budget and seek to work with a larger number of start-ups on a value-share basis.

ABSTRACT

How Brands Do Well By Doing Good Nick Kruse Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing NickKruse333@gmail.com

Facebook /nick.kruse.77 LinkedIn : /in/nicholaskruse/ Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Great is Good

Many corporate entities have recently been exhibiting more of an interest in the advancing social, environmental, and economic issues. The most impactful and prominent of these corporations doing well as a business while simultaneously doing good are B Corps and Public Benefit Corporations. B Corp entities are evaluated across a rigorous set of standards by nonprofit B labs investigating their standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. Public Benefit Corporations evolved out of the popularization of B Corps, but have expanded legal obligations for accountability, transparency, and purpose. B Corps and Public Benefit Corporations often do not decide to apply for these standings over night, most often the policies and actions of these companies are already in line with the standards expected of them. Not all companies doing great by doing good have B Corp or Public Benefit Corporation standing but their actions, values, and mission closely align or are working towards those expectations. In this panel senior members of Kickstarter, Airbnb, Upworthy, and Good Inc discuss this trend in business and its specific evolution in their own companies.

SESSION

The panelists represent varying backgrounds and positions in their companies, but share the common goal of creating positive social and environmental impact through the successful operation of their businesses. Ms. Michal Rosenn has a background in law and has been General Counsel at Kickstarter since 2012. She was instrumental in the companies transition to a Public benefit Corporation. Ms. Jennifer Lindenauer is currently the Vice President of Marketing at Upworthy. She has previously held senior positions in communication and marketing in various corporations. Mr. Ben Goldhirsh is the co-founder and chairman of GOOD Inc, as well as the chairman of his own foundation, and a co-founder and chairman of City Year Los Angeles. Ms. Kim Rubey is the Global Head of Social Impact for Airbnb, and focuses heavily on creating positive impact on resources and communities across the globe. She is also a strong proponent of Airbnb’s ability to assist in the response of disasters.

The structure of corporations traditionally did not take into consideration the negative social and environmental impacts of their operations, and often times these actions directly drove company profit growth. Before regulation of these

Before legal regulation of negative externalities in developed countries, corporate boards were arguably acting in accordance with their obligation to maximize shareholder wealth and the companies growth. Ethical standards in the age of Rockefellers and Carnegies regarding negative externalities were not quite what they have become today, there are still droves of modern examples of companies increasing their profits through imposition of negative externalities on underdeveloped countries and their peoples. Modern legislation has red tape around these practices, however it is often circumvented or quietly cut.

Rather than being obligated to maximize growth and shareholder equity, the board of a B Corp is also obligated to act in accordance with the public good. The specifications of the companies mandate, allow the board to make decisions which consider both shareholder equity and the public good. Public Benefit Corporations have enhanced ability to weight the social and environmental impacts of their actions greater than that of shareholder equity. In traditional corporations surpluses are fed back into the shareholder equity, whereas with these types of corporations they are able to use surpluses to do public good in regards to their mandate, mission, and values.

The actions and impacts of these corporations are not only beneficial for overall public good, but recently are proving to be effective means of building a successful company.

Many modern consumers are very conscious of the implications of their purchase decisions and seek out companies whose values and actions align with their own value systems.

Political implications and stances of companies, often reflective of those social and economic implications, also drive considerable support by consumers. The most commonly discussed theme in this panel was the implications of companies taking a stand on political, social, and environmental issues as is evident from many of the Super Bowl 51 ads and surrounding campaigns.

Ms. Rubey of Airbnb discussed the recent stance her company took on refugees and the discrimination against Airbnb users of color. She stated that their initial defensiveness to the discrimination issue caused a stumble. They were reluctant to remove profile pictures because of their importance in the trust between users. Waiting even a day in situations such as this one can have severe implications. They recognized that they stumbled and failed to seize the momentum of the situation to reflect their values. The incident solidified the speed and conviction of their future decision making.

Ms. Lindenauer of Upworthy reflected on her companies stance to not create direct political posts throughout the majority of the 2016 US election. Although Upworthy did begin publishing content related to the policies and stances of President Trump, she says they regret not using their platform to discuss the values they believe in and were founded on.

She stated that they wish they had gone further in reflecting their values and beliefs through their content during the election cycle.

CONCLUSION

The general consensus among these four representatives and their brands is that 100 adamantly devoted and engaged customers is better than 100,000 who kind of like your brand. Similar to obtaining quality customers, ethical engagement is a great way to draw in

quality employees in this highly competitive space. The underlying motivation of this movement is a shift from commercially driven products to value driven ones. The value consumers associate with their purchases goes far beyond cash.

ABSTRACT

How Brands Do Well by Being Good Nicholas Kieler Graduate MBA Nicholas.kieler@gmail.com

www.linkedin.com/in/nic holas-kieler/ Link to Flipboard Magazine The Ups and Downs of Movement Branding

Tying your brand to a movement can be an extremely powerful tool for attracting customers as well as keeping them loyal. Many companies find that they can add value to the customer experience by linking their product to a movement and allowing the customer the option of acting responsibly. Fair trade coffee, locally sources vegetables, local manufacturing, and commitment to fair labor are all examples of popular movements which large brands like Starbucks and Chipotle have adopted with huge success.

While this has shown to be a very effective tool in the marketplace it is not without it’s dangers and shortcomings.

Tying yourself to an unpopular movement can be one of the fastest ways to lose customers. Often companies are blinded to the opportunities that they could be capitalizing on by not listening to what their employees and the marketplace have been very vocal about. One of the most powerful ways to be successful in the marketplace is to recognize movement opportunities, avoid movement risks, and to learn how to build movements effectively.

SESSION

This session was very reminiscent of an earlier panel I attended at the spectrum lounge about the importance of social responsibility. While that panel focused more on the power of being good and how to tell people about it this panel was more focused on how to find potential movements to associate with and how dangerous it could be to end up on the unpopular side of an issue. While the spectrum panel was more focused on the positive benefits, this panel focused more on the cautionary tales and potential pitfalls of a movement. This panel was also being run by managers and marketing managers rather than corporate responsibility managers. My overall impression was that this panel was more professional and more nuanced, painting a more complex picture of using ethics as a part of marketing.

One of the most important aspects of generating a movement is by listening to the thoughts and opinions of your customers and employees. Many very successful initiatives come from employees who already want to do good in the community and the company they work for.

Managers who care about lowering the cost of their electricity might encourage a green program, employees who see a lot going to waste might start recycling even if the company does not specifically ask them to. It is important to

have a baseline of employee freedom to act on their own good intentions. This is why it is important to foster a culture where employees feel safe to act, and where their supervisors take notice of the results of their efforts. Some movements are started by customers, and it’s important to pay attention to what your customers are doing and why. The health boom of the early 2000’s caused a demand for healthy alternative options, causing many fast food companies and restaurants to start offering health substitutes to their customers. In this case, the customers started a movement of wanting to be healthy, and these companies responded but supporting their customers movement.

While in the case of the fast food industry this created a profitable niche in some cases deciding to back a moral issue can be really damaging to a company’s reputation. Chic-Fil-A backed same sex marriage, Hobby Lobby refused to offer birth control, both suffered a loss of customers who refused to eat at their companies. What is worse is being seen to openly violate a popular movement or to have actions which go against your markets popular ethics. When Volkswagen hid their failed emissions tests from the public, the resulting backlash resulted in a huge loss in stock price and many customers refusing to buy a Volkswagen. With peer to peer communication and a rise in the popularity of ethical purchasing it’s hard to imagine that companies who support bad causes or deceive their customers will be able to survive in the future marketplace.

If you find yourself on the wrong end of a movement you have to consider your position in the marketplace to best respond to the impact to your brand. One thing which is very important is to ask if the people who are upset are the people who are your customers.

Vegans are very upset with the position the meat packing industry takes on animal abuse, but vegans aren’t the customers of the meat packing industry so they don’t care about that demographic. Sometimes standing against a strong movement in the general marketplace can be an extremely successful way to appeal directly to a niche customer base. It is important to remember that you must appeal to your customers, not to everyone, and appealing to a niche market strongly in defiance of general sentiment can be seen as being brave for sticking to your principals. Casinos have a generally negative opinion from most people, but they often use this negative reputation to their advantage, appealing to their customers desire to do bad things. Because of this audacity in the marketplace, those niche customers to which their position appeals will appreciate the support of their rarely supported ideals.

It is important to listen to the struggles that your customers and employees face every day and empathize with what they are trying to do. Customers who are eating at restaurants want to be eating healthy, customers who go to casinos want a place where they are free to be themselves, it is important to find ways to support this outside of their supply chain.

They have to invest in communities around them and show their customers they are responsible and a force for good. If you support a movement, but only so much as it is something you are directly profiting from, then you will be seen as a hanger on rather than as a genuine supporter which can be much worse than not supporting a movement at all. If chipotle only invested in their own farms, then their customers would think they were only interested in maximizing their efficiency. By investing in improving agriculture overall, Chipotle shows that they have a genuine care for the environment.

CONCLUSION

A movement can be a powerful tool, or a disastrous mistake. Sometimes the strategy can be joining a good movement to show you understand your customers values. Sometimes it’s defying a popular movement because your niche customers have niche values.

Movements can come from anywhere, and it’s important to always be paying attention to what your customers and employees are trying to do.

ABSTRACT

How Kona Brewing Successfully Bottled Hawaii Matthew J. Frost

MBA in Marketing Matthewjfrost3@gmail.com

Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Authenticity at the heart of Brand Growth

Beer. It’s been part of human history since Mesopotamia and some historians have argued that was a driving force behind the advent of agriculture. With a product that sells itself, everyone has gotten into the beer brewing business in the last 10 years, with a large portion of this growth occurring in the craft sector. Growing form 1,500 in 2008 to 5,000 today, Kona brewing of Hawaii has 4,999 competitors. Amongst such a crowded market, how does a brewery stand out?

Kona brewing and their partners at Duncan Channon were faced with this problem. Their ultimate and unique answer was that instead of selling their beer, they’d sell their island.

SESSION

Kona brewing is a quickly growing a popular beer brand based in Kailua-Kona Hawaii. A brand deeply tied to the community in which they come from. Island life and Island time are part of their business model, as is a deep respect for nature and the native peoples of the Islands. With this as a backdrop the company sought a new direction to advertise during a period of marketed growth. With thousands of competitors how did they as a Brand stand out?

Contracting Mr. David Bell of L.A. based advertising agency Duncan Channon, the brand sought to bottle Hawaii. What this meant for the brand was that, instead of trying to fight competitors on ingredient quality or taste, the company focused on their true differentiator. The islands of Hawaii are a rich and gorgeous place. The islands still hold wonder and mystery for much of mainland America. Kona built a campaign around reminding the mainland how awesome the islands are, and in fact never talked about their beer in any of their adds.This campaign, which would come to be known as “Dear Mainland…”, was hugely successful for them and ultimately became a collaborative process between the brewery, it’s agency, and their lead actor and now creative director Mr. David Hekili Bell.

A native of Hawaii, Mr. Bell previously worked at the Honolulu Airport, with his only acting credit being a brief appearance in the reboot of Hawaii 5-0. His presence in the project solved a huge problem for Kona, hiring actual Hawaiian's to be in these commercials was incredibly hard.

Many locals didn’t have acting experience and the alternative, hiring actors from L.A., would rob the campaign of authenticity if needed to be successful. In Mr. Bell the

company found an able actor and an authentic voice for their campaigns.

The basics of a Kona commercial are incredibly simple, Mr. Bell and a colleague are framed on a beach and deliver a message to the crazy, puritanical mainland America. On of their first, about how the existence of only one happy hour is ridiculous and that instead America should make one hour sad hour and the other 23 happy, was incredibly successful for the company. It set a tone for the campaign which has now become a mainstay for Kona and has seeped into all aspects of their business. Even when designing their new website, the concept of island time and sensibility were built into the site, with visitors being urged not to view the site but to go hang out with friends instead.

The ultimate success of the Kona campaign was incredible. The company saw an initial sales lift of 37%, the third largest for any brewery in the last 12 years. With this success in mind the company doubled down on Dear Mainland and invested in a new campaign titled “One life, don’t blow it”. In this phase Mr. Bell was actively leading the creation of content and again the company saw a huge return on their investment. Kona received a 15% sales increase tied to the new campaign and is now within the top 10 of craft brewers. Their strategy of bottling Hawaii was incredibly successful, due to their ability to sell themselves versus their product.

CONCLUSION

Kona brewing is an outstanding case study on how brands can leverage authenticity to build brand awareness and advocacy. Well known on the islands, their tongue in cheek letters to America painted their beer as the gateway to a more relaxing life. Dear Mainland worked so well because Kona, despite the advice of “big city” producers actively searched for and hired local Hawaiians. With “white washing” a huge factor in the popular culture lexicon, their forward thinking and dedication to their vision is something to be admired.

Consumers will increasingly demand authenticity from the brands that they use. Kona had embedded that authenticity into the DNA of it’s brewery and benefitted from it financially.

Both fellow beer brands and those outside of their industry should take note, a little brewery in Hawaii simply bottled themselves to great success.

ABSTRACT

Having a great product with a unique selling proposition is simply not enough anymore when there are hundreds of other similar great products on the market to compete with.

Living in Colorado for the past four years has taught me a thing or two about craft beer, like just how many craft breweries there are in this magnificent state (more than 140, to be exact). Kona Brewing found itself in this inundated market with the simple question of “How are we going to make it to the top?” Through provenance, is how.

How Kona Brewing Successfully Bottled Hawaii Logan Leake Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing

SESSION

Parker Channon, co-founder, partner and CMO of ad agency Duncan Channon, had a direct hand in ensuring Kona Brewing’s success within the craft beer industry by selling its product by selling its place of origin. Today, there are 5,000 breweries in the United States alone, meaning Kona Brewing has 4,999 competitors. To say the least, craft beer is big business, so finding their unique selling proposition was essential to their success. They began their process by asking themselves “What does Kona Brewing have that the thousands of others do not?” The answer? All that is Hawaii.

One of the most important factors that Duncan Channon did correctly after this realization was portraying the true, authentic Hawaii. They were incredibly adamant on Instagram:@LoganMatoaka representing Hawaii with cultural authenticity and considered this to be an “absolute necessity.” Having lived in Hawaii for a time myself, I recognize the immense value in depicting Link to Flipboard these chain of islands beyond grass skirts and surfboards, but Magazine it’s the other majority of the population that needs convincing. In fact, Channon was advised by their Los Angeles producer to not bother with going to Hawaii to cast Link to Session for their commercials and that a “tan Asian guy” from LA is “Happy Hour is 23 Hours all they needed. Thankfully Duncan Channon had the sense to (discreetly) laugh at this suggestion and off to Hawaii they Too Short.” went to do it their way and the right way. “If you want to get something done right, it’s going to take time, and it will be worth it,” Channon articulated.

logan.leake@aol.com

Channon, also having spent time off and on in Hawaii growing up, realized this importance from the very start. He wanted to share with the rest of America the local culture he grew to be so fond of so he thought to position Kona Brewing’s product as a “lifestyle beer” as opposed to the overly common craft beer sell. With this came the creation of the basis of their advertising campaigns: “Dear Mainland.”

Their marketing campaigns focused on what made Hawaii so perfectly unique in comparison to the rest of the United States and reminded us all to breathe—a much needed reminder to connect with what matters. Out of this came Kona Brewing’s slogan of “One life right? Don’t blow it.” Commercials always ended on this note—a light-hearted Hawaii version of “you only live once” coupled with the incredible desire to stop everything you’re doing to crack open a cold Kona beer and just breathe. After these ad campaigns aired, Kona Brewing saw a 37% sales lift as measured by market research company IRI, which was the third highest lift recorded by IRI in twelve years. Today, Kona Brewing is now in the top ten of all craft beers.

With all their success came their understanding of the website paradox. While they of course want online traffic they realized this direction was inconsistent with their original idea of getting people off of their devices and away from screens. To stay true to their marketing campaign, they created a beautiful website but came up with a quirky alternative encouraging people to not go to it: “Mahalo for not visiting konabrewing.com” and “Instead of visiting us online, why not enjoy a Kona brew in the real world?” Ingenious.

Positioning their product around place, and actually being able to, was absolutely the right thing for them to do, but now that they have mastered that concept, will other brands be able to follow suit without becoming redundant? This reminds me of the concept of Vemödalen—the frustration of [photographing] something amazing when thousands of identical [photos] already exist. Kona Brewing, already having been able to capitalize on this marketing perspective, makes me wonder if others will be able to do so as well. Perhaps, though, only if done correctly, as Channon was so adamant of. During the session, however, a Wally Olins quote was presented addressing the charm of provenance. “In an era, in which transitional companies are making everything, everywhere, we, as consumers, still love to think that the things we treasure come from somewhere—a particular place. We like to think that provenance is a guarantor of quality; that it confirms our preconceptions about German technology, or Spanish passion, […] or perhaps more especially food from local ingredients—and often it does.”

CONCLUSION There are four things that Duncan Channon did right: casted local, asked local, walked the talk, and kept it simple. Or as they like to say, “some simple stuff we maybe kinda got right about Hawaii.”

ABSTRACT

When there are hundreds of emoji-making apps on the App store and more coming out practically everyday, it might be silly to think there is something new left. Marketing through messaging apps just might be that new thing. If companies can leverage the power of emojis and sticker packs to attract people to their brand, they have a whole new way of attracting and retaining customers.

iMessage: The Next Marketing Goldmine Elena Changalidi Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing & International Business Elena.Changalidi@du. edu LinkedIn: /in/elenachangalidi Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Emoji Land

SESSION

This session had a great panel of execs from Dunkin Donuts, Nike, Marriott and Snaps discussing the future of marketing through iMessaging and other messaging apps. We are entering an era of so much abundance that sometimes it’s hard to keep track of it all. While there are countless products out on the market, there are also countless ways to market those products. This is where we are also entering a new wave – marketing through messaging. Currently, messaging apps are more popular than social media and over 40% of people say that they check their messaging apps before other ones. What does that mean? That iMessaging (along with Facebook, direct messages, etc.) really is the next gold mine. Already, there are so many different keyboards that users can adapt to their messaging apps, so many emojis to use and with the latest iOS update, so many sticker packs.

Each of the panelists took turns talking about just how their companies are utilizing this new trend in their marketing efforts. Nick Dunham from Dunkin Donuts talked about the fact that they strive to relate to their consumers by making sticker packs that are relevant to specific occasions and that would promote the brand. You’re going out for coffee with your girlfriends or getting donuts for the office? Great! Use one of the Dunkin stickers to communicate and engage with your friends and coworkers in a more personable way. Nick emphasized the fact that content really is key and creating sticker packs that are actually fun to use is vital. Not only does it engage the user more, it is easier to communicate that way. Ultimately, their goal is to give a voice to people through emojis and stickers.

Amanda Moore from Marriott talked about the fact that their brand really tries to resonate with millennials. One of the ways they do that is through messaging campaigns because that is where the majority of millennials spend their time. She

also touched on the fact that you have to make sure that whatever emoji or sticker pack that you create is fun. Chatbots also came up in Amanda’s conversation. She mentioned that with the rise of Chatbots, it allows the brand to give the consumer the choice to engage with them. Currently, Chatbots are not the most popular among consumers because they are lacking in the human aspect that so many people still cherish. With the advancement of technology, this is going to become something that companies have to leverage to their advantage and create experiences that are comparable to talking to a real human being.

Kelly McCarthy from Nike started off by saying that Nike is a lucky brand. It doesn’t need much introduction and certainly has a large enough customer base. Having said that, it still has untapped potential in marketing through messaging. One of her main points was that while there are a lot of people in America that are starting to prioritize messaging, Asia is the leading market on messaging apps. What this means is that there is still a lot of room to grow and for innovation to happen in our market. She also talked about the fact that context is key. Companies want to create emojis and sticker packs that are going to enhance the conversation and offer something that is currently missing.

What all three speakers had in common were two things: make it fun and make sure it fits.

There is nothing worse than rifling through a hundred different emojis or stickers just to find the right one. As I mentioned earlier, there are so many different ones already that it’s hard to differentiate yourself and that perhaps is going to be the biggest hurdle for companies.

Another hurdle that was mentioned by Kelly was the fact that it is getting extremely difficult to get people to download additional apps and keywords. The solution? Make something that is easily installable straight into the messaging app and does not take a lot of ‘heavy lifting’ on the consumer’s side.

CONCLUSION

Messaging has become the most common way that people communicate with each other and is a field that is ripe for marketing. In a world where every consumer wants a unique experience with a brand, connecting with the masses has become almost obsolete.

Consumers want to feel special and want to be able to express themselves easily through emojis and stickers. Nick mentioned that what brands need to be looking at now is the dark social – one-on-one connections with people through places like messaging apps. A brand can really differentiate themselves if they can offer something to the consumer that is not only easy to use, but is also fun and allows them to communicate more effectively with their peers.

ABSTRACT

iMessage launched in conjuncture with iOS 5, and has been enabling Apple devices to communicate via text message like instant messages with Wi-Fi or data. Most folks haven’t given much thought to iMessage since, except for the occasional judgment based on the color of a friend or collogues response. This panel discussed the potential of iMessage to become a marketing powerhouse.

iMessage: The Next Marketing Gold Mine Nick Kruse Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing NickKruse333@gmail.com

Facebook /nick.kruse.77 LinkedIn : /in/nicholaskruse/ Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Designed for Designers

SESSION This panel was presented by Snaps, a platform which powers iMessage, Chatbots, and Emoji Keyboards. Ms. Vivian Rosenthal, the founder of Snaps moderated and participated in the discussions. The panel consisted of Mr. Nick Dunham of Dunkin’ Brands, Ms. Kelly McCarthy of Nike, and Ms. Amanda Moore of Marriot. The panelists, excluding Ms. Rosenthal, all represent brands who make current use of these tools or plan to in the near future. iMessage commands more monthly users than social media.

Furthermore 40% of messaging app users in the US check their messages immediately after waking up. Despite the popularity of this channel in the States, China has a 98% rate of opening through messaging channels.

In addition to providing chatbots to interact with customers, native content distribution, chatbots, conversational user interface, and creation of branding keyboards are the solutions for a brand to capitalize on messaging channels.

Branding keyboards are very popular as a peer to peer sharing device. They consist of emoji packs as well as sticker packs. iOS 10 began offering sticker packs similar to those used by Facebook Messenger. The proliferation and popularity of emoji branded keyboards undoubtedly contributed to this decision by Apple.

New brands don’t tend to build apps, as they will likely end up in the graveyard. Context and relevance are important to successful implementation. Content must also serve utility or entertainment. For established brands the cost of user acquisition through branded keyboards is significantly less than other options.

Ms. Moore discussed Marriott's use of these devices. Upon observation, customers were 62% more likely to engage with

a brand who is on messaging platforms. Marriott engaged Snaps to implement an emoji campaign. They simply created curly haired emoji's, courtesy of Marriot, and the emoji pack became one of the most searched emoji packages. The popularity of the pack garnered more than a million impressions for Marriot.

In consideration of this and other emoji campaigns, they are becoming obsolete in the wake of the more popular sticker campaigns. For all intents and purposes the two are essential the same, stickers just being larger and sometimes animated. In a similar but slightly more elaborate way, stickers can convey paragraphs of text in a brief image.

Dunkin’ Brands has had notable success with campaigns through Snaps. Their brand and market space is very ritual driven. Mobile is core to rituals as most mobile users will testify.

The Dunkin’s app is considered to be a robust and also social app.

People genuinely and regularly use the app and Dunkins’ was able to use this engagement to build a chatbot in a native app ecosystem. Creating a chatbot in a native app ecosystem is not common. The user base and their interaction with the app allowed for its’ successful implementation. Dunkins’ successfully created content for users of its’ app specifically for Valentines Day. The campaign was initiated to give people a voice through branded visual communication which was culturally relevant and fun for audiences to use. This is representative of their focus on the customer journey. Messaging was happening in the Dunkins’ app anyway, so these types of campaigns are means of taking advantage of earned conversation.

Mr. Dunham elaborated on another successful campaign and how it not only drove engagement, but also sales. On National Coffee Day they implemented an emoji campaign with the ability to gift drinks or gift card cash through their apps’ messenger functionality.

Emoji's were cute and relevant and many users engaged in the new gift ability. This approach for marketing their brand on National Coffee Day, was much more effective than their old campaigns. Running a TV ad in the week before the holiday was much less effective than the aforementioned campaign.

Ms. McCarthy said that Nike was waiting for more accurate and effective language processing before Nike commits fully to the breadth of marketing actions undertaken by Snaps. When building this type of platform as a brand, it is important to do one thing really well first. Relevant specialization is key in the successful implementation of these programs.

The variety of Nikes’ offering requires machine learning to more effectively understand context to successfully interact with customers. In order to naturally talk with the customer about any and all of the products Nike offers, the programs must advance. For a company like Dunkins’ with relatively narrow offerings, the current programs are able to more effectively communicate with users.

CONCLUSION

In addition to the growth of the popularity of stickers, video and video chatbots hold significant opportunity for effective messenger marketing. It was clear from the panel that this technology is in relative infancy, perhaps the toddler years, but presents a fantastic opportunity to engage audiences.

ABSTRACT

Marketers are always looking for the “next big thing”, and while businesses have been focusing on leveraging their presence on social media, mobile messaging has managed to stealthily become the actual next ecosystem that businesses should be paying close attention to. In fact, in terms of audience, mobile messaging is much larger than social media. With 98% open rates in the U.S., mobile messaging is hard to ignore.

iMessage: The Next Marketing Gold Mine

SESSION

Link to Flipboard Magazine

There are three solutions for brands in the messaging space: branded keyboards and iMessage sticker packages, native distribution, and chat bots. The panel specifically recommended creating sticker packages over branded keyboards, however, as the latter is becoming more obsolete as sticker packages are becoming more popular. What is a sticker package you ask? It is brand curated content inspired

by Emoji's that smartphone users can download and incorporate into daily messaging. Nick Dunham, head of Media Planning and Buying, Digital, Social Strategy and Multi-Cultural Media for Dunkin’ Donuts U.S., sat on this panel and spoke to the success of Dunkin’ Donuts’ sticker pack which is available on the iPhone’s app store for free.

“The ability to express one’s desire for a donut or a coffee to a friend without using any words at all is a largely appealing concept to consumers.” These sticker packages give the consumer a voice through visual communication.

Mobile messaging is considered dark social, which in a nutshell, is shared content through private channels. While the social media market becomes more and more flooded, enters the (more or less) mysterious but ever so attainable marketing concept of direct messaging. Mobile apps are already such a big part of today’s businesses, as most things are positioned for mobile, it is no wonder messaging has not Logan Leake caught on sooner than it has. Unfortunately, however, marketing through mobile messaging is a double-edged sword—while it is currently under utilized this is what makes Undergraduate: BSBA it so appealing. It is an unsaturated market which ultimately Marketing is driving its current success. However, if done correctly, brands can avoid ruining their chances of success in this logan.leake@aol.com space. Messaging is incredibly personal and it’s difficult to make a brand appear as a person—the brands that do the Instagram:@LoganMatoaka best are the ones that “look and feel like your friends.”

Link to Session Stickers, Chatbots, Oh My!

Within social media, video content is king, however, messaging is considered to be much more interactive than video. Content within a messaging platform is obviously completely different than on a social platform with branded stickers absolutely being considered as content. One essential element does remain true across both platforms though and that is the importance of knowing your brand and the relevance around it. Not every business can and will have success in the messaging space so before investing tremendous resources it is so incredibly important to recognize whether or not your brand has a seat at the table, particularly in regards to sticker packages. The overall biggest hurdle in the sticker space, is getting users to download it, however, once they have it (and love it) they use it.

Tips on how to get consumers to use your sticker packages? Focus and find your niche—do one thing very well first. Next, production and distribution should be concurrent—brands are over-producing content and under distributing it.

A resounding theme to marketing is the ability to provide either utility or entertainment.

With stickers, entertainment is typically at the forefront. When it comes to Chatbots, however, utility often times is the main focus. Chatbots, a form of intelligent messaging, have also become the next big platform in the marketing space. They have the capability to be high-performing and readily available customer service representatives, sales people, and so much more. Commerce is a conversation and chatbots should be able to capitalize on this concept. For example, Dunkin’ Donuts digitized their menu and will soon have a chatbot taking orders via messaging before customers even arrive to the store. Artificial intelligence and visual processing are incredibly important within the chatbot space. AI and visual processing are constantly improving, and according to the panel, just 24 to 36 months down the line these two elements will see incredible improvement.

CONCLUSION

While there is much incentive for marketers to enter this space of direct mobile messaging, particularly since 62% of millennials are more likely to engage with brands through messaging, there is a high level of pressure for brands to be successful and then some on the first try. Good, better, and best simply is not good enough anymore, particularly in the messaging space. Brand self-awareness is pertinent to coming out on top. Quite a few wellknown music artists have their own sticker packages, in fact, allowing their fans to interact with their brand on a daily basis. Even while fans are not listening to their music, or customers are not chowing down on their favorite Dunkin’ Donut, these brands are experiencing a constant presence in their followers’ lives, and that is priceless.

ABSTRACT

Messaging marketing allows marketers to move into a very intimate space, forming new valuable relationships with consumers. To create value through messaging, marketing applications need to provide either utility or entertainment value to users. While the opportunities that this creates are tremendous, the audience that can be reached through messaging marketing will be limited and might not be relevant to all organizations.

iMessage: The next marketing goldmine Matthias Malojer M.S. Marketing Matthias.malojer@gmail .com @matthiasmalojer Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session “Comcast would like to chat with you�

SESSION

Personal messaging has always been a very personal, very intimate realm were consumers were not open or happy about advertisers intruding into this private space. Facebook messenger tried some direct messaging between brands and customers with limited success. Now, however, brands are increasingly moving into the almost untouched direct messaging space through new innovative ways.

The appeal of the messaging space is threefold. First, as mentioned before, the space is almost untouched with little to no marketing present at the moment. Also, messaging applications have more users worldwide than social media and finally, messages sent in messaging apps have a 98% open rate. As a result, the marketing opportunity from messaging apps is tremendous.

To take advantage of this opportunity without making users feel intruded upon or offended, firms have developed three ways to capitalize on messaging platforms: branded keyboards and stickers, chatbots and native ads.

Branded keyboards are a fun way to connect with a brand, but are troublesome to install. However, native ads, such as keyboards have proven significantly more successful than non-native advertisements. Stickers on the other hand are more expressive, easier to install and still have the native ads advantage. Overall, as of right now, stickers are more popular for these reasons than branded keyboards.

Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular and some Western companies have already successfully implemented them in their marketing strategy. The problem with chatbots is that they are still too early in their development to create a large, successful marketing campaign based on them. Asia, on the other hand, is about 24-36 months ahead in chatbot R&D.

As a result, in countries such as China and Japan, chatbots are being increasingly implemented as part of a messaging marketing strategy.

Lastly, using native ads in messaging is a delicate balance. Unsmart deployment of ads might offend customers and create negative sentiment instead of driving valuable traffic. An organization that managed to create a great native advertising campaign on a messaging platform was Dunkin Donuts. Dunkin implemented for a limited time a feature on Facebook messenger that lets users send gifts such as coffees and donuts to their friends which can be redeemed at their local Dunkin Donuts. This is a great example of a native advertisement that builds the brand and drives business while being an easy on the go branding opportunity.

For businesses, entering the messaging realm is just another social media strategy. While the ways to reach customers effectively might be different, for marketers this space is nothing new.

In my opinion, the messaging realm offers huge marketing opportunities. However, for ads to be successful they have to offer one of two things to users: Utility or Entertainment value.

If a company’s messaging marketing strategy offers neither, it is most probably a waste of resources and it is destined to fail.

One great example of an organization that realized the marketing opportunity if they can provide utility in the messaging space was Dove. So far, no emoji exists with curly hair. As a result, Dove created a branded keyboard that offered all sorts of curled hair emojis as part of a campaign that demonstrates the beauty of curled hair. The keyboards were a huge branding success for Dove as they provided utility to its users and, most importantly, the message the ad communicated aligned with the organization’s own values, making the ad credible and authentic.

The messaging strategy of a brand has to clearly align with its own values and its own character to create an authentic experience for the user. Only like this the new marketing tool will turn into a valuable new branding opportunity for organizations.

While the messaging realm is still very much untouched and offers great opportunities, the returns from messaging apps is so intangible and as a result, will be hard to measure. It will be interesting to see how organizations that engage in messaging marketing will define success.

CONCLUSION

Messaging ads are a meaningful way of building more intimate relationships with consumers and allow for better targeted ads in the process. The problem I see with messaging marketing is that, similar to Snapchat, it is limited to a small share of society. As a result, unless your target audience are trailing milennials and younger, this marketing strategy might not be an effective tool to reach your organization’s target audience.

ABSTRACT

iMessage: The Next Marketing Gold Mine Darby Pappas Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing pappasdarby@gmail.com LinkedIn: @darbypappas Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Marketing Strategies Need to Include iMessage Strategy

Messaging apps are more popular than social media, which is why companies needs to integrate new marketing strategies for messaging. Messaging and social have different purposes, therefore messaging strategies need to focus less on content and more on design, such as keyboards and stickers. We are entering an era where people aren’t even communicating with words, but rather communicating through stickers. Branded keyboards, stickers, and Chatbots are all successful ways to implement a messaging strategy for your brand.

SESSION

We are entering the next wave of social media and this wave includes messaging. The audience for messaging is larger than social media, with iMessage seeing 200,000 messages sent per second. Open rates for messaging is 98% in the United States, while 40% of Americans check messaging apps before any other app on their phone. These statistics should be enough proof that messaging apps are the pot of gold in a marketing strategy. The three solutions for brands in messaging are branded keyboards & iMessage apps, native distribution in messaging, and Chatbots & conversational UI. With branded keyboards, you can leave your branded content in the hands of your biggest advocates, the consumers. Dove launched a Love Your Curls Emoji Campaign where they left their brand in the hands of the consumers to use their branded keyboard. Another strategy is the iMessage stickers on iOS 10, where there is a sticker section for brands to publish branded content such as keyboard emojis. Another strategy is for interactive experiences, where brands give the user a chance to play games within messaging apps. Native distribution gives users the chance to learn more about their favorite brands in a messaging app. With native distribution, users don’t have to leave a messaging app to learn more about brands.

Chatbots & conversational UI is also important in a messaging strategy because virtual assistants are able to perform tasks that weren’t able to be performed years ago.

Chatbots can give information on a given topic and can even provide personalized recommendations for the user based on their brand choices. Facebook Messenger is a great example of allowing companies to incorporate chatbots into their brand and eliminates human error. For example, KLM, an international airline, is able to provide flight information using a Facebook Chatbot and is only enabled by a user plug-in, and doesn’t require downloading an entirely

different app. The seamless integration of branded features within messaging apps are what appears to be changing the world and technology.

Nick Dunham of Dunkin Donuts discusses how Dunkin’s messaging strategy differs from its social strategy. He explains that content is king with social, while with messaging apps, the less content the better. Dunkin is driven to video on social, whereas messaging apps allow Dunkin Donuts to be more fun and interactive. For Valentine's Day and National Coffee Day, Dunkin had different strategies for messaging and social but provided the same overarching goal that Dunkin wanted to drive interaction on these days. The tools are different but the goals are always the same. Kelly Mccarthy of Nike mentions that brands that do best in social are the ones that make it look and feel like your friend posted it. I think this is valuable advice for social and messaging strategies because users aren’t looking for anything robotic, and are rather looking for companies to relate on a personal level. Kelly also mentions that messaging data is hard to track compared to social since it is relatively new, therefore companies need to continue experimenting what is right and what isn’t right.

WhatsApp and Instagram are the most powerful tools in tracking data, whereas iMessage is difficult because the data is owned by Apple. Since messaging is a fairly new trend, it can be difficult to measure data. Luckily, the metrics on keyboards and stickers can be tracked.

Engagement perspective and bot interaction was said to be enough KPI to measure data.

Another metric that can be used is when people drive to the store (such as Dunkin Donuts) and open up a coupon on their phone. Lastly, the awareness of the bot and interacting with the bot on an intimate level is also measurable data.

The use of stickers is a trending topic in a messaging strategy, because stickers must be relevant and aesthetically appealing. The advice given for designing sticker packs was to take the stickers to the next level and making them culturally relevant and fun. I think if the stickers aren’t culturally relevant and fun, then no one will use them and they will just sit on messaging keyboards. Dunkin Donuts did their National Coffee Day messaging campaign perfectly: they designed stickers that applied to the holiday and where people would use them and share with friends and it drove sales into the store. It can be difficult for a user to download and adapt to an entirely new app, which is why the app needs to offer utility or entertainment. The best advice of developing a messaging strategy was to not build an entirely new app for your product, but instead figure out ways to integrate your brand into already established platforms.

CONCLUSION

Messaging is becoming as important of a strategy as social media. Since more Americans use messaging than social media, companies have a chance to leverage their brand through keyboards, stickers, and chatbots in messaging apps. There is no need to build a new app from scratch because the chance of a user adapting to the new app is extremely slim.

Rather, it’s crucial for companies to use already existing messaging apps and give users the chance to communicate through brandname keyboards and stickers. Messaging strategies are becoming an important part of a company’s marketing strategy, therefore it’s important to maintain the same overall goals but to change the execution between messaging and social strategies.

ABSTRACT

iMessage: The Next Marketing Gold Mine Madeline Trippe Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing/French madelinerose.trippe23@ gmail.com LI: @madelinerosetrippe FB: @madeline.trippe IN: @mynameis_maddy Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session “EyeMessage”

South by Southwest presents students with an opportunity to attend sessions of their choosing and hear from some incredibly successful people who are eager to spread their knowledge. At this particular session, the panel was comprised of the founder of Snaps, Vivian Rosenthal as well as marketing experts from Dunkin Donuts, Nike and Marriott.

When thinking of social spaces, we often jump to social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

While these social platforms are influencing and changing our social habits we forget another medium that is on the rise as well, imessage. Since the inception of the front camera on mobile phones and rise of social media, people have turned to be more visual processors and now prefer to consume data and media visually. The up and coming generations of y and particularly z are connecting with brands in different ways than previous generations have seen. Generations y and z value transparency with brands, they need a personal connection in order to be sucked in.

The real question is, how will we market and connect to customers in a day and age where customers don’t trust brands? We will have to hone in and adapt quickly, join the sacred spaces and become more humanized through marketing.

SESSION

Every time I attended a session, I always went in with an open mind to whatever I might hear. I was usually blown away to hear common concepts taken in a different direction that I’d never thought about or acknowledged. While my parents grew up with the inventions of computers, colored television, mobile phones. My generation, millennials, have seen the transformation of cell phones from blocks to mini commuters, 3D television, iWatches, augmented and virtual reality games, autonomous cars and I’ve only been alive for 20 years. Technology is evolving at a rapid pace. I’ve seen milestones over the past 20 years but with so much technology being invented and becoming available, I can’t imagine where we’ll be in five years, let alone ten.

As we look to the future of marketing, its all about the imessage. When I originally read the description for this session I was slightly confused, how could messaging be used to market to consumers. iMessage is Apple’s messaging system, specifically when your texting another apple phone user and the message is blue. iMessage is

is instant, you can see the other person replying in real time and now has multiple features to draw, include pictures, and more. iMessage will become the term for all messaging applications, including Facebook Message, WhatsApp, and Viber. All of these applications are based around the same idea of instant messaging.

If you remember, in 2011 Apple revolutionized the usage of emoji’s. Emoji’s are representative symbols for emotions, places, plants, animals, etc. Emoji’s have become incredibly popular and are used in messaging constantly. People love using emoji’s because 1) its so much quicker to tap a symbol to represent how your feeling or what your doing then to write it out and 2) they’re fun and feed right into people’s visual desires. People even have whole emoji conversations. There are groupings of emoji’s that represent a word or phrase. Following the emoji craze came the release of stickers. For me, stickers were still somewhat of a foreign concept. Stickers are available to download from android & ios app and then put into your phone’s keyboard. I was originally thrown off by a marketing director from Dunkin Donuts at this session but Dunkin Donuts has been incredibly successful in utilizing stickers to market to their consumers. Stickers are still on the rise but are predicted to overtake emoji’s in the future. Expect to see all brands having stickers available to download. From a marketing perspective, stickers put a brand right into the consumer’s hands, at the forefront of their every day lives. It is crucial for brands who choose to utilize stickers that they be fun and relevant, this is an opportunity to create a humanized personality for brands. Which builds an emotional connection between the brand and the consumer. This is key when marketing to generations y and z. Dunkin Donuts and many other brands are already pioneering stickers, those companies who aren’t involved in stickers are falling behind. Its key to keep up and be a pioneer in this fast paced and everevolving market.

Think ahead, in just five short years, what does communication look like? How does communication happen? This successful panel of people believe that with technology in the future we should expect extinction of the written language because stickers and emojis are shortcuts for written text. Social platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest are beginning to blow Twitter out of the water because they are such visual platforms.

Facebook is struggling to keep up and has come out with its own version of Instagram stories to cope. Communication will become so simplified. Instead of texting mom the words milk, eggs, and butter, stickers in the representative symbols will be sent instead.

Already, the fact that Americans still text words is shocking to Asian and South American countries. While some Americans have learned and taken advantage of Siri for messaging, most of us have yet to hop on the bandwagon. In places like China and Brazil, people are constantly talking into their phones and sending voice messages. Simple Siri on iPhone has lead way to Chatbots. When most people hear chatbot, they either think of a talking robot or they think of Amazon Echo or Google Home. Amazon Echo and Google Home are large versions of Siri that has the same capabilities. From asking one of these home chatbots you can change the music, find out the weather or ask any question your heart desires. However, the future of chatbots is much more complicated. While at the IBM house, IBM had its chatbot out. Through having a three-minute written conversation on a tablet with a chatbot inside the app, the chatbot was able to discover my personality type based upon my

answers from our conversation. Siri, Alexa, Echo are such basic chatbots. Instead, think of chatbots more as humanizing applications. These chatbots are being created with the power to think the same ways as humans. In the future, imagine, emails being written for you by a chatbot that reigns over your email, it still sounds just like you but you didn’t have to do any of the work. Fridges will have tablets on the front of them and a chatbot will know what items your running low on or out of and will automatically write it on a list for you, even order it from the grocery store and have it delivered to your front door. Technology is becoming more and more easy and accessible and will be so seamlessly integrated into our lives.

Through the combination of chatbots and imessaging, brands are taking a new approach to connecting with young consumers. As a way to be more personal and integrated, brands are coming out with messaging apps. H&M is testing a chatbot messaging system where consumers can easily buy clothing straight from talking to a chatbot. Imagine your phone buzzing to an alert from H&M with a picture of a new released dress that’s complimentary to your style based upon compiled data collection from your historical interactions with H&M, then a message that asks if you want to purchase. All you’ll have to do is say yes and it will arrive at your door, without having to go through the purchase process. Messaging back and forth, interacting is how trust is earned with millennials. This also creates a personalized and easy shopping experience for the consumer and millennials are all about the collaboration and co-creation when it comes to choosing brands.

CONCLUSION

Just think, those crazy concepts in iRobot might become real in the near future. We’re already on the way with autonomous cars, artificial intelligence robots, smart fridges and chatbots. Technology will shape the way we communicate, purchase products, and perform daily activities. The marketing industry itself is going to have to evolve quickly to keep up with the quick pace. We’re moving in a digital, high tech, extremely visual direction.

Marketers will have the challenge of forming a connection with consumers in innovatively creative ways to engage and appeal to these new generations.

ABSTRACT

imessage: The Next Marketing Gold Mine Daniel Zuber Under Graduate: Major: Marketing Minor: Business Information Analytics Dan.S.Zuber@gmail.com Social Handles: D_Zubs Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Personal Connection with Brands through iMessage

iMessage is looked at as a service that allows two iPhone uses to communicate personally through an instant messaging app. This is now a space where companies can start communicating to their customers in a personal way.

Messaging apps have a 98% open rate, have more monthly users than social media, and now 40% of users check their messaging apps as soon as they get up in the morning. So why have companies waited so long to use this platform to market to their consumers? People are protective about their “private” messaging apps and do not want to see advertisements in this space. Here in the states, messaging apps are beginning to become more popular. Users here have different habits that need to be addressed so marketing on these platforms is not quite a cookie cutter approach that would work across markets.

SESSION Before this session, I never thought of iMessage as a place where companies could capitalize on marketing efforts. This was a space that seemed off limits to brands because people have never seen branded content before in messaging apps.

The new features added from the recent iMessage updates are where companies can start to slide into your iMessages.

Most people may be aware of this, but iMessage now allows you use both Emojis and what some call stickers inside of their messaging app. Companies are now beginning to develop branded Emoji keyboards and branded sticker packs that allow users to use branded content in their messages. This is a dynamic way of increasing a company’s brand reach. In my opinion, if this is executed in the right way, it can increase a company’s brand equity immensely.

The key to this strategy is users need to opt in to the sticker pack or emoji keyboard. This aspect takes away the risk of pushing content out to users who do not want to interact with your brand.

As I sat and learned about this strategy, I felt like this was a strategy that would almost turn a company’s customers into brand ambassadors. These are the people who love your brand so much that they are willing to go into the app store and download a set of stickers or Emojis that only pertain to your brand. They will then begin to use these images in their everyday conversations, creating for more brand contact with others.

This is a smart strategy to start off an iMessage campaign because it has relatively low risk in the sense that your customers will not be forced into interacting with the brand it their messaging apps.

Along with Emoji keyboards and sticker packs, companies are beginning to use the new technology of chatbots within iMessage. This is a move within the iMessage space that is a little riskier than others. Chatbots are becoming more robust, but there is still a slight chance that a bot will not work well enough to satisfy a consumer’s need. This is a service customers opt into by texting a specific number and receive a coherent response answering their question Chatbots are something I think will change the customers service game and if integrated into the iMessage platform properly. The panel talked about how integrating a chatbot into iMessage is not about being a first mover, but more about how well your chatbot performs.

If I can ask Nike details specific shoe they carry and receive a customized response, then that is an amazing experience. It cuts out the hassle of me having to go to Nike’s website, click on the search box and going through the search results. This takes some time and effort for consumers to do and in the end, they may just find out that Nike does not carry the shoe anymore. If I can do that over text and not have to focus 100% on this scavenger hunt for shoes, that would make the process so much easier for consumers which may lead to more conversions. These chatbots can could be the secret sauce to offering premium customer service.

CONCLUSION iMessage is a platform that can be the next marketing goldmine if companies know how to properly interact with the consumers. The panelists made people know that this was separate from any social campaign. Times have changed to where people are letting brands into their life in a personal way and are connecting with them more. Being to interact with a brand as a friend through a popular messaging platform will only build a more emotional connection with your brand. This is a space where brands need to be careful with what they are sending their customers. The wrong message can have catastrophic consequences. This type of marketing is something that is still its early stages and still has a ton of room to develop.

ABSTRACT

IoT & the Shoppertainment Era

We live in an era where experience is more sought out than quality and prestige. Everyone wants to have a good time, and it doesn’t matter if you’re just going to the store or a big fancy concert. We also live in an era where tech is everywhere and is exponentially growing in its capabilities.

So why not combine the two? The Internet of Things has allowed people to sync up their lives with so many different gadgets and services, it’s no wonder that both the resort industry and cruise line industry wants a piece of the pie.

Ever wanted to walk up to a door and simply open it with a bracelet? Or go to Vegas and have a customized itinerary pop up on your hotel TV screen? Well, that just might be possible.

Elena Changalidi

SESSION

Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing & International Business Elena.Changalidi@du.edu

LinkedIn: /in/elenachangalidi Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session All about the Experience

If you’ve never been on a cruise or a trip to Las Vegas, then you know that it can be extremely fun, and extremely overwhelming. Brands are constantly competing with one another to get your attention and you are bombarded with options of what to do/eat/see/etc.. I haven’t been to either, but the panelist leading this discussion know a thing or two about both. For this session we had the pleasure of listening to Thomas Fanger, VP of Multimedia at MGM Resorts and Laura Davis Taylor, President of Princess Cruises talk about what it means to blend the Internet of Things with the experience that they hope every single one of their customers have.

One of the main points from the whole talk was that it’s all about the brand experience and staying within the brand ecosystem. If a company is going to introduce new technology into the mix it has to be something that blends with the existing image of the brand. There has to be a new, enhanced level of service that is complimented by the tech but not dominated by it. Thomas started the talk off by expanding on the idea that MGM Resorts is really in the “holy shit” business. They want to make sure that each guest has an experience that is not only going to be memorable, but also something that is going to connect with why they’re there. He talks about the fact that it is important to make sure that the advertisement that guests see is targeted towards their particular purpose to be in an MGM Resort.

Are they on vacation with their family or looking to gamble away their life’s savings?

Regardless of what type of vacation you’re on, when you’re in Vegas you want to feel like a VIP, just like everyone else. Through technologies that are tailored to the specific guest, that is a possibility. Tech should add value to the customer and be something that is seamlessly integrated into their experience. Thomas also says that a brand has to be cutting edge, not bleeding edge. That means that there always has to be a certain degree of adoption, you can’t just go all in on a big project like integrating new tech into every single room of a hotel without actually having data to back up its usefulness. MGM Resorts has already been implementing adaptation techniques into some of their hotels that they are trying out new technologies.

Laura chimed in with her on take on this and the idea that customers should see advertising as a gift and not be in a transaction state of mind all the time. To her and the Princess Cruise brand, there is nothing more precious than vacation time. Laura talked about the new Medallion cruise line that is essentially a ‘smart’ ship. When a guest registers for the cruise, they get a medallion in the mail that is about the size of a quarter. What this medallion does is allows the customer to not only customize their trip to the max, but also get into their room, order food and drinks and track their own trip if they wish to. There is no obligation for the guests to opt in on this service, but if they do, they get a much more personalized and enhanced experience.

While it is great to think about the ways that companies can take the next step and utilize technology to enhance the customer experience, what happens with all that data that is being collected? This is something that both panelists agree is a major issue and one that must be transparently addressed within a business. While initially this might be a hurdle for getting some customers on board (no pun intended), ,the data is very useful to both the consumer and the business. The consumer benefits from the fact that now their experience can be tailored to their needs and wants. The business benefits from the fact that they can use this data to attract customers to use their services again and know what target market they should be focusing on.

CONCLUSION

Technology brings about so many new possibilities that we didn’t even think we needed before. It is no surprise that industries like cruise lines and resorts are trying to utilize tech to their advantage. In the era of the Internet of Things, it is so easy to go online and find just what you are looking for without even having to put in a lot of information. So many services utilize our personal data and preferences to create unique experiences, so why not with resorts and cruises? Both MGM Resorts and Princess Cruises are doing just that. They are both experimenting with ways to allow tech to enhance their guests’ experience and ensure for a seamless integration into their brands. If you’ve ever been on a cruise and not wanted to get up from your chair to order another drink, well… Check out the Medallion cruise ship line.

ABSTRACT

The world of entertainment has been curated by creative musicians who produce their vision through unique design. Musicians rely on design to connect with their audiences by making a world that they can be a part of. With the rise of technology and social media, the art of design is changing and music is becoming devalued. Music is everywhere, but it takes a true artist to create something unforgettable.

Let’s Dance: Music, Design, and Creativity Annie Langston Undergraduate: Marketing Major Anlangston19@gmail. com https://www.linkedin.c om/in/annielangston/ Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Art Will Always Have Value

SESSION

I have always been interested in how a musician brings his vision to life, whether that be through album covers or music videos. The internet has changed how creative visions are distributed, like micro-content. Social media is now filled with videos that are less than a minute long, which continue to engage with an audience. This technology has created an endless world of creativity and possibilities, but artists are still packaged in a certain way. For example, as a consumer, you can look at an album cover and know what kind of band it is; you know what a punk band looks like versus an electronic duo. Anyone could look at Daft Punk and know that they are electronic producers. The old music industry has driven certain marketing techniques for genres and with every tool we have now, I hope an artist can break the cycle. I believe that the challenge for musicians today is separating the marketing from the artwork. Now musicians have the data to see what works but that shouldn’t hinder the creative process, data shouldn’t put design in a box. An artist’s visions shouldn’t be altered to satisfy a marketing team, the team should alter their strategy for the art, because in the end, art is what you are delivering.

The internet has created a new way for musicians to tell their stories, but has been thought to devalue music. In the past, people would have to wait months for a record release, and they would line up at the record shop to get theirs. It was special to own a record, to be physically connected with an artist. The idea of owning an album is lost on the new generations because music is readily available all the time. I believe that my generation is the last of the nostalgic, we have brought back the record and understand the value in physically owning music. I have never been a big fan of streaming music because I think the amount of content on those services can bury true artists. Furthermore, streaming has taught the younger generations that music isn’t worth any money, that creative art is free. Musicians don’t create

art for money, but we associate money with value, and if consumers don’t put money into music, they won’t see a value in their work. Music isn’t special anymore, it’s a commodity that consumers take advantage of. Even if a musician creates a true original piece of art with an incredible track, it is expected and mundane. This attitude has made it increasingly difficult for a musician to break out of the pool of content.

Making music has become more of a job than a way of self expression. Being an artist used to be a way to escape the world, but now they have to be immersed in it at all times or they could fall behind. Now, musicians have to manage their brand, book shows, create merchandise, promote, and maintain a strong social media presence. All of this other work a musician has to do distracts them from creating the art they want to share with the world, which is a burden that technology should have never put on them. Some artists have teams that can take some of these jobs on, but most artists are trying to do it all themselves.

Working in music used to be a specialty function; that specialty is lost in today’s industry. A musician has to be able to do it all. Social media is a blessing and a curse, it has created a stronger bond between artists and fans but an artist cannot walk away from it. Social media is a constant watch on an artist and their life so they can never make a wrong move and their fans can control where their career goes. For those artists who do not like using social media, making a successful career will be more difficult.

The music industry is in a transitional period, so the future of artists is somewhat unclear. The panel explained that mastering video content is the next hurdle in music, and every other industry. Music videos will be the focus of artists in the next few years and I cannot wait to be a part of their creative vision. Furthermore, producing interactive film for consumers will be a way that an artist can differentiate themselves. This connection has been started through live video and will be advanced through virtual reality. Musicians will utilize the immersive qualities of VR to create a new, intimate fan experience that will expand their creative abilities. Every industry is being turned over by technology and everyone has to adjust. Music will always be craved by consumers, but how it’s delivered and valued is still up in the air..

CONCLUSION

Technology is making the challenge of producing creative work easy for the average person. I think that is an incredible gift for the community but it makes musicians work seem part of the shuffle. I have a great respect for musicians who are brave enough to share their stories with an audience, and I value their talent.

ABSTRACT

Letting Go and the New Way to Tell Visual Stories Halle Farago Undergraduate: BA Studio Art and Italian, Marketing Minor halle.farago@gmail.com

Linkedin Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session National Geographic’s Equation Behind Instagram Success

The most followed media brand on Instagram is National Geographic. A brand built on beautiful photography, and inspirational and informative stories can clearly utilize the platform to share the amazing experiences of their photographers. The even more interesting aspect of their Instagram account is that Patrick Witty (Deputy Director of Photography, and Digital at National Geographic) and Rajiv Mody (Vice President of Social Media at National Geographic) have given the photographers full control of the Instagram account to post as they’d like. What does it say about their brand to release full control and creativity?

The panelists along with one of their top photographers, Aaron Huey explain the amazing collaboration that happens when the control is left to the photographers.

SESSION

The images taken by National Geographic photographers stand alone in their glory and with the extraordinary stories behind them, but Instagram has allowed the company to push forth even more images, along with the brands beliefs, and expose viewers to different cultures and issues on this earth. The photography isn’t the only aspect that has led National Geographic to become the most followed brand, but it’s also the authenticity that comes from the photographer's first hand experiences, allowing followers to jump into the moment with them. Patrick Witty explained how absurd it is that they give the password of the account to 105 photographers, but the idea of handing over the control is what makes it so magical, authentic and diverse.

Even though Witty would usually look over the photographs before sending them out into the world in any other platform, for Instagram, the photographers don’t have to check-in with Witty first, they post as they please. Witty doesn’t love all of the photos that are posted, but it makes the feed unfiltered and honest. The photographers are also encouraged to write a caption about how they're feeling on their journey and what their experience has been like.

Releasing full control can be scary but Witty says there are some guidelines the photographers do have to follow to ensure too many pictures aren't posed at the same time.

Thanks to the new feature of Instagram stories, photographers have been utilizing this medium to share direct experiences on their missions. These videos are not produced and unpolished and lend to a much more

experimental aspect. The only issue that comes with this technology is that these photographers aren't always located where great cell phone service or wifi exists. It makes it a little more difficult to be authentic and to post in the moment without connectivity.

Once photographers like Aaron Huey do have service, they post to continue the sharing process and give viewers personal connections to his journeys. He appreciates using Instagram because the focus isn’t on the final product. The focus is on capturing what is around him. Instagram gives National Geographic photographers on opportunity to show why they do what they do, show viewers the amazing people they meet and express what life is like living in these places. Often Huey talks about his hopes and dreams in his comments to express the contemplative state that consumes him on these photographic missions. In the past, they've also utilized Instagram for flash sales to make money after natural disasters. Aside from fundraising opportunities and the using Instagram as an extension of the brand’s beliefs, there’s no other place to put the material and content somewhere other than Instagram. At the end of the day it’s about telling those stories.

CONCLUSION

National Geographic’s unique release of control gives the account even more purpose and allows content to flow. Their magazines go through an editing and production process, but Instagram is where their authenticity really shines. The pictures captured by National Geographic photographers are very raw and natural, but the platform of Instagram plays further on that ability to be raw and unedited. As a business venture, National Geographic has taken the right approach, because at the end of the day, Instagram goers want to see those eye-catching photos that bring them on the photographers’ journeys. The panelists expressed that Instagram really is the only platform where they can market the skills of their photographers but also their brand as authentic storytellers.

ABSTRACT

Letting Go & The New Way to Tell Visual Stories Madeline Trippe Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing/French madelinerose.trippe23@ gmail.com LI: @madelinerosetrippe FB: @madeline.trippe IN: @mynameis_maddy Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session “Visual Storytelling on Social”

National Geographic has been known for years for its ability to capture beautiful imagery of our world and expose successes and pitfalls of our global society. National Geographic has taken advantage of visual content social media platforms, particularly Instagram and Snapchat to reach a wider and younger audience who doesn’t buy their magazines or visit their website. On Instagram, NatGeo is the only brand to be in the top ten followed on Instagram, the rest are either celebrities or Instafamous people. During the session Letting Go and the New Ways to Tell Visual Stories, Patrick Witty, the Deputy Director of Digital Photography, Rajiv Moody, VP of Social Media and Aaron Huey, a photographer, all from National Geographic discussed how we can harness visual content platforms to educate and bring new light to telling visual stories.

SESSION

National Geographic creates beautiful content and has managed to pioneer through social media. National Geographic’s Instagram profile is splashed with imagery of animals, landscapes and people. NatGeo has a team of 105 photographers who ALL contribute to NatGeo’s Instagram.

Patrick Witty is the one in charge of all of the photographers and the content that they post. When NatGeo first decided to try out Instagram, Patrick wanted to experiment, he wanted the great content that was seen in the magazine to transfer to social. He wanted to build a community on Instagram and give their brand an identity. Instead of having all 105 photographers (whom post for Instagram and Snapchat as well as the magazine and website) send him their planned posts, he decided to trust his photographers and give them creative freedom to post whatever their hearts desired.

It was incredible to hear from Aaron Huey, one of the photographers, and how he would all of a sudden receive an assignment from NatGeo and be on a plane within a few days. For one of his assignments, he was to do a story of the life of Sherpa's, who take climbers up Mount Everest. He lived with the Sherpa's for three months on assignment, each day capturing something new. Aaron spent three months immersed in a new culture, capturing their daily lives, their hikes, even the tragedies that befall Sherpa’s each time they take a new group up Everest. From Patrick’s point of view, it only made sense that his photographers post on their

on Instagram and have the audience hear their voice, see their vision. Patrick asked his photographers post as themselves through first person captions, sharing their stories, being authentic and unfiltered to really connect with their audience. Patrick encouraged his photographers to interact with the people on social. After posting on the Instagram account, many photographers will switch to their personal accounts and answer questions and comments, interacting with their community, building NatGeo’s brand identity.

Patrick is a huge fan of Snapchat and Instagram. Snapchat is unlike any other platform, it’s a personal messaging system to share real time pictures and videos with people in their circle.

Snapchat was the first platform to give birth to the idea of stories, having one continuous set of short stories that build into a daily life story. The problem with Snapchat is that it’s a personal messaging platform however Snapchat does have Discoveries for brands. NatGeo utilizes Discoveries to share video content, but it’s not real time like Snapchat stories are, Discoveries have to be manipulated and prepared for posting, its not just a series of short live videos. Patrick was overly thrilled when Instagram released their own version of stories and albums.

Stories were the first out of the gate for Instagram. Just like Snapchat, people can now upload videos that are only visible for 24hours and you can view anyone’s story that your following. This lead NatGeo to have an outlet to share the behind the scenes of how dirty the photographers have to get, in order to get the perfect shot. NatGeo has taken advantage of Instagram Stories in the best way to bring light to unknown disturbances as well as show the beauty of the world through a different lens. One of the examples used, a photographer was on assignment in Kenya capturing beautiful elephants. However, while we saw adorable baby elephants playing in mud, the photographer went with Elephant Rangers on a poaching chase. Where he took his Instagram audience to see a gruesome elephant death that was so disturbing but shed light on the horrible poaching problem in Africa. This whole story was captured through Instagram Stories, from the photographers point of view, shot on his iPhone. In February, Instagram started albums, where you can upload multiple images to one post. This is another way to take an audience on a journey through photos Instead of posting 10 photos in a row from a day spent in the Artic, one post with 10 pictures that start the viewer on a personal journey, a personal discovery.

CONCLUSION

National Geographic’s Instagram now hold more visual content than all of its published magazines combined. While NatGeo has beautiful content taken by professional photographers, the emphasis was on creating a captivating story to tell and the different ways to do so. Tell your personal story, tell your brands story, open up to your audience and show true authenticity to get people invested in your content. Each day is different, filled with a new adventure. Don’t shy away from the camera,, show your face, let people in to your life and show them your personal journey. NatGeo has done an incredible job with Instagram and is definitely one to look to for brand inspiration. Facebook just released its own version of stories as well. As we move more into the digital and visual world, not many brands have hopped on the stories bandwagon. It’ll be fun to watch and see how other brands start to utilize stories and share their brands stories. As a marketer, I’m going to listen to Patrick’s advice and love stories as much as he does, as it seems to be working for National Geographic.

ABSTRACT

Leveraging Social Media to Build Your Brand Nicholas Kieler Graduate MBA Nicholas.kieler@gmail.com

www.linkedin.com/in/nic holas-kieler/ Link to Flipboard Magazine How to Win When You’re Playing a Platform

Everyone touts the importance of social media marketing, but few talk about the many pitfalls that can arise when trying to use social media properly. There are many different platforms which are used for marketing: Facebook, twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, etc. and all of them have different users with different personalities and their platforms have completely different set ups. Trying to design a one size fits all media marketing campaign will never be effective. To be a successful digital marketer, you have to pay close attention to the subtle nuances of each platform and cater to the needs of each carefully.

SESSION

This session was put on by an online pseudo celebrity. While I was very skeptical of her credentials the points that she made were backed up by solid reasoning and were extremely intuitive without being obvious. Her story about how she managed to build up a successful YouTube channel was not at all convincing: her number of followers were low and she seemed to have gotten an unfair boost from another very well-known YouTuber. As someone who really enjoys fresh content of a personal nature I am a frequent visitor to YouTube and I had never heard of this speaker until attending her conference. While I did like many of the points that she made, I could not in good faith treat her like she was an authority on the subject. Instead I spent much of the session recording what I felt to be the most useful and the most intuitive aspects of the presentation.

The first platform which I felt I learned a lot about was Facebook. When producing content for Facebook it is important to upload your videos directly to Facebook rather than linking a video to Facebook which is hosted on another server. Because Facebook makes more revenue from showing its content vs content hosted on another website it has a lot of incentive to bury links to other websites and hide them from users while promoting their own content. Another very useful tip on using Facebook to promote content is that most people who are watching videos on Facebook are doing so on a silent device. Most Facebook users are idly scrolling on their phones in public places or sneaking access at school or work, meaning that they are watching videos on mute. It is important therefore to have captions on all of the videos that you upload to Facebook, otherwise most of the audience won’t know what you’re saying.

Another platform that was discussed during this panel was Instagram. Like Facebook I don’t have a lot of history with Instagram, which is why I learned so much from this part of the discussion. One of the most clever aspects of the entire panel was about posting any images that you submit on Instagram Vertically instead of horizontally. When a picture is vertical it takes up more space on that screen, meaning that people who are looking at the image have their eyes on it for longer. As someone with a psychology background you would be surprised how powerful it can be for someone to look at something for an extra 34 seconds of processing. Another important aspect of using Instagram as a platform is using the ‘story’ aspects of the website. The ability to set together a group of images can tell about a very powerful experience which people who are viewing the content can connect with. Rather than posting random one off images of things like locations and brands Instagram offers the opportunity to post things in a sequence which can show the passage of time. You can show a customer overcoming a challenge, having their problems solved, or having a good time at one of your locations. These small stories are far more entertaining and involving for the consumer. Not only does an effective use of story help bring people to your website, it also helps them to connect better with your message.

The last piece that I thought was very interesting in this panel was the explanation of the importance and proper usage of Twitter. The presenter went a long way to emphasize the importance of this particular platform, stating that if you were only going to have one platform for social media marketing that Twitter was the most important one. While it is important to try to get your content into the hands of your existing and potential customers, Twitter is more than any other platform the direct face of your company. Not only is it very important for your company to have a Twitter page to directly interact with customers, it’s also very important for people who are running companies to have a twitter so that people can get a better idea of the person who is leading the company. When using Twitter, what is most important to remember is that you must stay personal. One of the worst mistakes is to use Twitter as just another place to put content, to post your weekly deals or to advertise new products. Twitter is so useful for giving your company a very personal feel, and should be used to contact customers directly to get their feedback as well as to help alleviate customer issues. The best way to use Twitter is to foster a personal connection between the person or company who is tweeting and their many followers.

CONCLUSION

One of the most critical aspects of the current era is how much technology has impacted everything that we do and is continuing to change how we do things every day. Decades ago, marketing was about television, radio, billboards, and newspaper advertisements.

While these technologies are still relevant, the advent of social media marketing has added an entirely new genre of marketing platform. The work of designing a marketing campaign has effectively doubled with these new technological developments, and today’s marketing professionals are expected to develop different strategies for ‘traditional’ and ‘online’ marketing methods. This means that in order to stay relevant and effective, a marketer has to know how to best capitalize on these new online marketing methods. Just like the traditional methods, each online platform is like a completely new medium and reaches a completely different demographic. Just as people who watch television are not all the same as people who read newspapers, people who spend most of their time on Facebook are not the same people as those who spend most of their time on Twitter.

To succeed in marketing, you have to know not only how people on these different platforms think and why these platforms appeal to each consumer, but also to understand how the coding and layout of each of these platforms affects how the content is consumed.

Is your content its own standalone piece or is it just another part of a long feed of information? How easy is it for the people on this platform to find your video and watch it again? Exactly how much space can you expect to have in relation to everything else being displayed? All of these questions have a huge impact on the type and the scope of the content which should be delivered to each of these platforms.

ABSTRACT

Mainstream but Muted: How to Market Legal Cannabis Jeffrey Mutchnik BFA Emergent Digital Practices/Marketing Minor jmutchnik21@gmail.com

@jmutchnik Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Breaking the Stigma of Cannabis

The cannabis industry is growing at a rapid rate as more states vote to legalize cannabis use in their communities. With this growth comes the rise of cannabis related companies who are looking to market themselves to a mainstream audience. These companies are looking for ways to market themselves and overcome a certain negative perception that surrounds the cannabis industry. How can these cannabis companies challenge media outlets to let them build their brand, while some outlets are not letting them advertise on their platforms?

SESSION

Due to federal laws against cannabis, there is a stigma that surrounds the culture of cannabis and cannabis related businesses.

In states where marijuana is legalized for medical and recreational use, the potential for profit of these companies is inevitable. In 2016, Colorado alone generated over $1.1 billion in revenue from medical and recreational dispensaries. The cannabis industry is projected to earn $20 billion in revenue by 2020. Effective marketing is an essential factor to a successful business. With the status of cannabis laws and advertising restrictions, advertising agencies are finding themselves having to reject the cannabis industry from marketing their products.

How do you market a brand where the industry is heavily regulated? Cannabis brands are quickly learning the importance of educating and changing the stigma of cannabis. Some marketing platforms, such as Facebook Advertising, and Google AdWords, prevent cannabis related content on their feed due to the current status of marijuana laws in our country. The fundamental values of cannabis marketing focus on presenting the product as a “mainstream product consumed by mainstream people.� They want to treat this product as every other conventional popular product. Marketers of cannabis are relying heavily on traditional marketing tactics, such as print, and billboard.

With each state having different regulations on cannabis and cannabis related products, marketing teams must dedicate lots of time, energy, and resources to learn, and navigate laws that might vary in each 50 states. In cannabis marketing, it is almost impossible to run a national campaign because the regulations are so different depending on the state. Due to these regulations, cannabis businesses struggling to generate real profit. It can create a smaller budget for ad campaigns and it can be a challenge for these brands to get into mainstream events under a sponsorship.

A smaller budget means that marketers must be very strategic

about their branding, and meticulous about their ad campaigns to maximize their effectiveness.

How do you target audiences within these legalized states? For example, MARY Magazine focuses on introducing cannabis to their readers as a lifestyle brand. Art, music, fashion, and film are progressing the culture and bridging the gap between the mainstream audience and the cannabis curious, but cannabis does not have to the biggest focus of the marketing. Another example of a localized marketing campaign comes from Leafly, the world’s largest cannabis information database, with their free Leafly Comedy tour. Leafly partnered with various media outlets, as well as 20 different comedians, including T.J Miller, Michael Ian Black, Chris D’Elia, and Eric Andre, to host a 12 show free comedy tour in major US cities. Leafly thought this was a way to bring the cannabis culture into the mainstream, and create an environment that is about entertainment and enjoying life rather than strictly just cannabis. This example shows the impact of constant, rigorous communication with media outlets and connecting with firms to educate them about the industry. Cannabis brands need to bring content and stories that connect to people.

When most people think of cannabis, they tend to automatically picture the color green, the green cross, and the oversimplified marijuana leaf picture, or maybe the whole “rasta” theme. These are traditional, cliche approaches to aesthetic in cannabis related businesses. In order to break the stigma of the cannabis industry, it’s important to focus on design whether it’s for web, mobile or in print, and how the visual appeal of a campaign will drive emotion of the consumer. Implement elegant color schemes, and effective elements of typography. Avoid the overuse of these stereotypical themes. Be consistent with your designs to establish brand identity.

Social media is a fantastic way to build your following, but consumers want quality and sophisticated content. Large social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Google have largely been removing cannabis related content from their sites, causing issues for marketing teams who loose access to the immense targeting data within those two platforms. Cannabis companies are still allowed to create pages for their companies, but the content must be appropriate. Similar to the alcohol industry, the cannabis industry must be smart about the content that they promote. The content must be organic, and follow the regulations within the particular region. As we near closer to the end of federal prohibition of cannabis, marketers will look to utilize those outlets as much as possible.

Influencer marketing and social advocacy are a big way for companies to establish their brand. For example, Marley National brand, partnered with the Bob Marley family, established a program called Rise Up, which funds projects, in mainly Jamaica, and the U.S, that are dedicated towards, “social change, environmental sustainability, and lifting up communities that have been harmed by of social injustice of cannabis prohibition.”

CONCLUSION

Cannabis related businesses will obviously face some obstacles in regards to marketing, simply due to the fact that cannabis is still a federally illegal substance. That being said, these companies have to go back to the basics of marketing such as print and billboard, as well as continue to push media outlets to allow them to promote their brands and educate them about their business. In order to do so, marketing teams need to develop creative,

empowering, and sophisticated content. Run the company just like a Fortune 500 company would run theirs, and make the content appealing, interactive, and engaging so that people will be drawn to it and advertising platforms will eventually be more inclined to accept cannabis related products.

ABSTRACT

Mainstream but Muted: How to Market Legal Cannabis Madeline Trippe Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing/French madelinerose.trippe23@g mail.com

Let’s be honest, leaves are ugly, flowers are not beautiful, in regards to marijuana that is. How many times have you driven by a dispensary, dinky standalone building, barred windows, a bight green cross, and some cheesy logo and name with signage that is green or features pot leaves or is purely a stupid name with a connotation to cannabis. How ordinary, how boring, how typical and overplayed. What’s the differentiator between one scary looking dispensary and the next?

During the session, Mainstream but Muted: How to Market Legal Cannabis focused on these detrimental marketing problems that are influencing negative stigma around the industry. The panel featured Berrin Noorata, in charge of Marketing Communications and Social Impact for Marley Natural, Meg Owen, Senior Digital Marketing Manager for Leafly, Kayla Cook, the Director of Events and Sponsorship for Privateer Holdings and Adrian Farquharson, Chief Creative Officer for MARY Magazine. Together they discussed how marketers can create impactful marketing to shape the marijuana industry differently then its current route.

SESSION

As a new industry without federal legalization, there are obstacles in marketing cannabis. There’s the fact that since pot is only legalized by state, just as weed can’t cross borders, neither can marketing. Each state has its own rules and regulations for marketing cannabis of what you can and cannot do. With it being an emerging market, there’s not a Link to Flipboard lot of revenue being spend on marketing, budgets are small Magazine and marketers must jump through hoops to have a small budget make a big impact. We also have this connotation Link to Session that the marijuana industry is different so we must market it differently. You have to treat the marijuana industry just as “Pot Leaves Everywhere” you would any other industry when it comes to marketing and please avoid gimmicks or giveaways.

LI: @madelinerosetrippe FB: @madeline.trippe IN: @mynameis_maddy

Just as you would treat any other industry, create marketing that is impactful, that will leave a lasting message, create great content. Think about how marketing cannabis can be integrated, understated. Adrian, from MARY Magazine has their home base in New York. In order to target their NY audience, Arian focuses on lifestyle activation to appeal to New Yorkers. He used examples of photography pop-ups,

seasonal movie nights, taking peoples interests of music, fashion and film to bridge and change the narrative around cannabis, but be subtle, cannabis doesn’t have to be prominent at an event or venue, it just has to be present. Leafly decided to host a comedy tour in the US and internationally in order to bridge the gap between mainstream and cannabis. Being in a fun environment, cracking stoner humor helped normalize the cannabis industry and activate a broader audience. They wanted to get out an educate people about cannabis, connect communities and get a clear story across.

Marketing cannabis properly is going to help normalize the industry and cure the negative stigma. We have to help the public overcome the stereotypes around women and cannabis, race and cannabis. Berrin thinks we need to change our approach to esthetic around cannabis. People immediately turn to cliché marketing of pot leaves and green. Focus on quality, create something different and innovative. Have quality photography, design and copy, you’ll stand out from the sea of green.

Cannabis users are all about their community, especially in an age where even though weed is legal, the negative stigma is a turn off for stoners. Be strategic on which social platforms are used and how you market. Most social platforms won’t let you market actual marijuana product, instead take an educational standpoint. Focus on educating the public about cannabis and all its benefits and promote responsibility just as alcohol does. Marketing is already moving into an age where its all about connection and collaboration between brands and consumers. Narrow your target market and penetrate those communities.

Influencer marketing is huge within the fashion industry, influencer marketing is a perfect solution to reach those niche markets of cannabis consumers. Considering people can post whatever they’d like to their accounts, finding micro-influencers, even targeted localinfluencers can help promote your product. On a large scale with influencers, while they don’t need pictures or videos incorporating marijuana, using influencers that are known supporters of cannabis will do the trick.

CONCLUSION

Current cannabis marketing is thinking way too small. As an aspiring art director in Colorado, I’ve had a fair share of run-ins with companies who do marijuana marketing, in fact I just met a new contact the other day who focuses solely on cannabis marketing. All of these marketers have been sticking to the basics, a lot of them actually utilize those no’s of greens and crosses. Even those who have managed to create a beautiful welcoming dispensary, with an interesting name and logo, in the shades of navy and crème still have strides they could be making to increase sales and attain new customers. I think we’re only a couple of years off from having federally legalized medical marijuana, maybe even so for recreational. Once those boundaries come down between states, we’re going to cannabis marketing take off, let’s just hope other marketers have learned just as I have, to say no to pot leaves everywhere.

ABSTRACT

Make it Hard:

Benefits of Creative Problem Making

While problem making sounds counterproductive, it’s counterintuitive for a reason. Problem solving usually happens when a new and unfamiliar conflict arises. From there, one sets out to solve that problem to never have to be solved again, thus making “solutions to existing problems [often times] derivative”. It’s not enough to simply solve problems and create solutions if you want to make it ahead.

Problem solver are cogs in the wheel—they’re necessary. It is innovation that is harder and harder to come by. Innovation arises through creative problem making and this session attempted to demonstrate just that.

SESSION

The panelists wanted to physically demonstrate this concept of creative problem making by filming, editing and publishing an original music video all within an hour time frame with the help of the audience. Andrew Geller and Logan Leake Aaron Duffy led this endeavor with the virtual (pre-videoed) help of YouTube star and actor, Flula Borg. Geller, who Undergraduate: BSBA helped design and produce a number of the band OkayGo’s music videos, has extensive background in making obscenely Marketing hard music videos which made this hour an interesting one.

This whole idea of making something harder than it needs to logan.leake@aol.com be boils down to challenging the process and making “awesome” content. It’s not necessarily always about finding Instagram:@LoganMatoaka a solution, per say, but rather actively embracing the things in life that are hard and making new discoveries along the way.

Link to Flipboard

Magazine

Link to Session Make Problems to Solve

So the plan was this: 1. Record 12 sounds (4 sounds in increments of 3) 2. Feed them to an editor 3. Review the cut 4. Upload to Flula Borg’s YouTube Rather than this being designed to be hard for the audience members, the session focused on demonstrating the difficulty that the speakers are embracing in the creation of this music video in a matter of 45 minutes. However, some of the tasks the producers put the audience to were designed to be executed in a way that was either somewhat difficult or slightly uncomfortable. It would be too simple to press your own cheeks together and blow raspberries, therefore, have a complete stranger help you execute this! That’s pretty much how the rest of the hour went.

Now, how would one apply this concept of creative problem making to marketing? Well, to be fair, there are a number of instances that come to mind off hand, albeit they may not be creative in the sense that this session intended. Urban Outfitters is a prime example of “creative” problem making. All of the negative press Urban Outfitters receives around cultural appropriation and insensitivity is not by accident. A number of the products they design and sell are strategically offensive. This sort of tactic gives them exposure that they are not paying for (free marketing) and is just offensive enough to garner publicity without losing their customer base. While they may lose a few customers they know that even those they offend will continue to shop there so long as they communicate their wrong doing and submit an official apology. While this may not be exactly what the session leaders were getting at, there is definitely a degree of creativity behind making these problematic products intentionally.

Geller spoke on how he has designed a number of music videos for OkayGo, a band that is known for the creativity behind all of their music videos (most notably the treadmill one for “Here We Go Again”). I remember vividly when this video first came out. People could not stop watching it. If people didn’t know who OkayGo was they had at least seen or heard of the famous Here We Go Again video. This was an incredible marketing advantage for the band. It’s instances like this that play into the idea of rewards to be had when making things hard.

If you’re interested in seeing the comically complex music video we produced during this session, you can find it here.

CONCLUSION Thanks to apps most everything to make our lives simpler is within arms reach and a touch of a button away. While it’s convenient, there’s no challenge anymore. Though the solutions that creative problem making can produce sometimes fail miserably, or succeed with gusto, they are always original. Pushing oneself to do what is not easy will set oneself up for success.

ABSTRACT

People think they can’t easily create an ad. They get caught up in thinking they need fancy technology, recording studios, etc. Adobe, Facebook, and small businesses partnered together in this workshop to show us how to create easy, engaging ads just using our phones. This workshop provided tips, tricks, and the best apps for creating!

Mobile Studio: Creativity in Your Pocket Sara Mischa Kregstein Graduate: MBA with Digital Marketing Strategy Saramischa@hotmail.com

Twitter/Instagram: @Saramischa Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Phones: Your 5 Minute Ad-Maker

SESSION

We all know that better creative drives better results. This session wanted to democratize creativity with three key takeaways: creative empowerment, how to scale creativity, and how to make creativity actionable. With the help of Facebook advertising and all of these mobile tools, creating an alluring piece is actually very simple. It is also very easy to scale one piece of creative across several platforms. The best way to showcase your creative and engage others is to bring your product to life. The mobile phone has everything we need on it: A quality camera and editing and design apps.

During this session we learned how to shooting with boomerang, create a simple stop motion video with vidlab, and use adobe spark. The session used Ali Maffuci’s business Inspiralized as an example and live demo for how small businesses can use these tools to create quality advertising. Inspiralized is a spiralizer for food and a blog with recipes. As the brand Inspiralized embodies a clean and professional chef, Ali thought she needed a large, beautiful kitchen setting to shoot in. She learned that she could skip this large cost and instead use contact paper on a foam board to create the background she needed. She used marble contact paper to create the look of a fancy table-top.

She used another white board to help reflect natural light from her window. She demo’d how to hold the boards during a boomerang video to capture a stimulating video.

Next, Lewis Tutsel from Facebook showed us how to use Vidlab: A stop motion mobile app. The most important step in creating a stop-motion is the setup. You need to focus on white natural light. If you hold your finger down on your iPhone it will lock in the exposure so that it doesn’t change between shots.

Stop motion looks better if shot in a square. You should shoot to not edit. Make sure everything is set up and ready first so you can just string the images together. Once you take a set of pictures, slowly moving your items around, you can upload to vidlab and adjust the time length for each screen. It’s best to turn off transitions so it doesn’t take away from the moving objects. This creative is most effective when combined with some music or narrative.

Ben Matthews from Adobe taught us all about their new product: Adobe Spark. Adobe Spark seeks to help people who have limited time, budgets, and design skills to create. The app uses pre-created designs and color schemes to produce new social graphics. It’s also really helpful that you only have to design once on this program as it has a resizing option that makes it easy to repurpose one form of creative to fit another social media platform.

After the training session we were handed iPhones, rainboots, contact paper and boards, and told to make an ad for a company reselling used shoes in two minutes!

CONCLUSION

You don’t need big fancy sets or tools to look like a marketing professional. There are hundreds of quick tricks and tools you can use to make your product shine. Use Youtube and google to find out more. There’s also hundred of apps out there that will make your posts look beautiful and engaging.

ABSTRACT

The medical and recreational marijuana industries are booming across the country. It is inevitable that the end of the federal prohibition of marijuana will come to an end in the near future. Businesses are looking to jump into the market early, and establish themselves before the prohibition is actually lifted. In states where cannabis is legalized for medical or recreational use, cannabis companies are preparing for a market boom.

Modern Cannabis: From Ditch Weed to Disruptors

Jeffrey Mutchnik BFA Emergent Digital Practices/Marketing Minor jmutchnik21@gmail.com

@jmutchnik Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Marijuana Millionaires: How Legal Cannabis Aims To Turn a Profit

SESSION

The cannabis industry is currently the fastest growing industry in the world. There has been a rise of more and more cannabis related companies, and products within the mainstream media are in favor of legal cannabis. While there is still a significant percentage of people who disagree with the use of this plant in any form, it is clear that a majority of the population agree that there are benefits that come from this industry. Currently, one out of every five adults in the U.S have access to legal cannabis This change in perception is can be partially attributed to the rise of medical information that is being released about the plant. Patients and families are opening up about their marijuana use to treat various ailments, and the positive impact that the drug has had on their lives. Medical cannabis is supported by over 60 prominent US and Worldwide health organizations, who believe there is a true medicinal benefit from the plant. Cannabis has become commonplace for replacing traditional medicine because the side effects are less harsh than some of the heavier drugs like steroids or opiates that are being prescribed by millions of doctors across the world on a daily basis. Opiate overdoses have decreased by over 25% in states with legal cannabis. Large pharmaceutical companies have been donating heavily to campaigns opposing cannabis legalization, but at the same time they are developing their own synthetic cannabis product. This shows that the cannabis industry is really disrupting Big Pharma, and not only making a large enough impact on their profits for them to take action against legalization, but also for them to realize the potential the plant has enough for them to create their own product. In some cases, cannabis can even be an even more effective treatment than some of these drugs. For example, cannabis has been used to treat epilepsy in a wide range of patients from children to the elderly, and there have been many success stories that indicate the treatment of

cannabis have drastically reduced the number of seizures that occur to almost a nonexistent amount. These families had exhausted all of their options as far as traditional medicine, and nothing worked as well as the cannabis extracts that were used to treat the epilepsy. The end of cannabis prohibition would allow families across the country to have access to these types of treatments, instead of having to work around the restrictions that are put in place in certain states.

Another reason why the end of the prohibition would benefit our community is the fact that it generates significant amounts of revenue for state and local governments. Experts have predicted that by the year 2020, the cannabis industry will be worth $20 billion in economic value. To put that in perspective, the NFL is currently worth $20 billion. This means that by 2020, the cannabis industry will also surpass the Big Tobacco industry. In Colorado alone, the cannabis industry raked in $1.1 billion in recreational and medical cannabis sales in 2016. Also, by 2020, the amount of cannabis industry jobs will outnumber the amount of manufacturing jobs in the US. That’s significant profit and opportunities being generated thanks to the legalization of cannabis in certain states. If the federal prohibition is lifted, this industry will only rapidly grow even more so, and possibly outperform the numbers that were predicted, and will result in increased profits for the federal government as well due to taxes levied onto the legal cannabis industry.

While the cannabis industry is still in it’s infancy, there are various companies who are looking to establish themselves in the market. For example, Leafly is the world’s largest cannabis website. They are visited over 500 million times each month, and were rated App of the Year in 2014. Their goal is “educate and empower individuals about cannabis.” They are aiming to provide information about cannabis to consumers and businesses, so they can become more knowledgeable about the industry. With consumer tools such as the strain explorer and database, dispensary finder, and a news and entertainment section, Leafly hopes to provide access to people who are curious about consuming cannabis. They also hope to aid cannabis businesses by providing a platform for them to create a brand identity, and provide information about strain offerings, prices, specials and discounts, as well as data insight and analysis tools.

CONCLUSION:

Within the next decade, federal cannabis prohibition will be completely lifted, and we will begin to see the cannabis industry grow to unimaginable heights, medically and recreationally. Whether or not you personally like the product, it is clear to see the benefits that could come with the growth of this industry. It would allow families to seek proper treatment for their loved ones without worrying about breaking the law, or moving to a state with legal cannabis. It would decrease the amount of opiate overdoses, and the amount of illegal activity associated with cannabis such as Mexican cartels, and various gangs across America. This biggest reason is the potential profit and job opportunities that would be generated across the country. It would create new, successful businesses that could pay their employees healthy wages, and communities will begin to see improvements made to their infrastructure, thanks to the tax dollars also being generated from cannabis sales. The end of prohibition would allow cannabis companies to optimize their marketing strategies to maintain a successful business within the cannabis industry.

ABSTRACT

Modern Cannabis: From Ditch Weed to Tech Disruptor Madeline Trippe

The market for cannabis is on track to reach $20 billion in legal cannabis revenue by the year 2020. Cannabis is a hot topic as more states are realizing the benefits and opportunity within this market. Under Privateer Holdings, Leafly is the world’s largest cannabis website, featuring a strain explorer, strain database, dispensary finder, as well as news and entertainment in regards to the cannabis industry.

Since cannabis is a new emerging market, since it’s being legalized, Leafly dedicated a full day of sessions that focused on all aspects of the cannabis industry. During the session, Modern Cannabis: From Ditch Weed to Tech Disruptor, Paul Campbell, the VP of Digital Innovation at Privateer Holdings jumped into a greater discussion on the marijuana industry as a whole and the ways to penetrate the market.

SESSION

Cannabis is currently the fastest growing market, but its facing a lot of obstacles. Currently legalization is determined by states and marijuana has not been federally legalized and each state has their own regulations. As more states are madelinerose.trippe23@g coming around to legalizing cannabis, the negative stigma behind cannabis is beginning to change. Since Colorado first mail.com legalized marijuana, there was finally opportunity for actual LI: @madelinerosetrippe research to be conducted and data to analyze to have a better understanding of marijuana’s benefits, risks, and FB: @madeline.trippe uncover its many uses. The most prominent benefit is IN: @mynameis_maddy actually marijuana’s health benefits. While marijuana as an industry follows very closely to alcohol and tobacco, alcohol and tobacco have very significant health risks associate with Link to Flipboard them. Marijuana has been proven to help stop seizures for Magazine epileptic patients, aid in opiate recovery, help with anxiety, PSD, and chronic pain. Over 60 prominent medical Link to Session organizations are supporting the medical benefits of marijuana and are working to discover more.

Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing/French

“An Untapped Market”

From an economic standing, Colorado is thriving in revenue from the industry, we now have more funding for industrial growth, school, and preserving our beautiful state. The NFL is worth $20 billion and the marijuana industry is predicted to reach the same by 2020 as well as enough cannabis-related employment opportunities that will outnumber manufacturing jobs. Considering that cannabis is only legal in some states, people are starting to realize the social injustice associated with marijuana and that people of color are 5x more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession. As

dispensaries are popping up, people are having an off-putting reaction to the stereotypical barred shops but some dispensaries are luxurious and offer a lot more to the eye once inside. This industry is curbing itself to be approachable.

The downside to such a new industry is that with all the rules and regulations, the fact that anything regarding marijuana, whether that be the product itself or marketing cannot cross state lines. Marketing marijuana itself is its own headache. It’s extremely difficult to market marijuana through advertising in a digital space since anything on the internet is accessible to anywhere in the world. Any digital platform that isn’t just for the state cannot promote marijuana due to the state-to-state regulations. Marketers are having to move backwards in time and revert to older marketing tactics in order to reach audiences. In the past, Leafly has used billboards as promotion, managed to move around regulations and have the first advertising campaign on Pandora. By finding other loops in the regulations, Leafly was the first cannabis company to advertise in the New York Times leaving 500 million impressions.

An unconventional way to market was through the use of a comedy tour that was both in the US as well as internationally. The purpose of the comedy tour was to bring awareness to the marijuana industry to change mindsets, educate the public on the medical benefits as well as the recreational ones.

The marijuana industry is poised for disruption. There are technological advancements that can be made through the use of cannabis . In the pharmaceutical industry we’ve seen a 25% dip in opioid overdoses in the states that are legal and that’s only one statistic. As people are turning to being more organic and finding healthier alternative medicines as opposed to chemicals. Within agriculture, hemp is being produced more frequently, clothing brands are turning towards using hemp products since they leave a much smaller carbon footprint to produce. If your innovate enough, there are plenty more uses for marijuana other than smoking it to become high.

CONCLUSION

As for marketers this is still an untapped market. Ugly, scary dispensaries are the most common to appear with green, leafy signage, a bright green cross and barred windows, there is much room for improvement. The key is to penetrate this industry first. Nine states have legalized recreational and medical marijuana usage. There are many discoveries left to be made. Think outside the box, be innovative, be a pioneer in this industry and you will be successful.

ABSTRACT

Helen Crossley, Head of Facebook Consumer Insights, takes a look at how mobile is changing consumer behavior. Key points in Crossley’s session include that mobile activity is year-round, mobile activity defeats desktop, mobile occupies the white space and the couch space, time flies faster on mobile, mobile shortcuts are on the rise, and the future is now. These key points provide proof that marketers need to address the mobile niche because there is much more opportunity because mobile is overtaking desktop.

Moving at a Mobile SESSION Minute Darby Pappas Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing pappasdarby@gmail.com LinkedIn: @darbypappas Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Facebook IQ: Understanding Consumer Behavior

Facebook IQ is a platform on Facebook that helps marketers succeed in a more open and connected world. Facebook IQ gives people insight, vertical insight, and advertising insight.

People insight includes analyzing how people consume media in terms of trending topics. Vertical insight includes what people are talking about and doing online. Advertising insight analyzes how people are consuming ads and finding ways to optimize ads. A key task of Facebook is to understand their audiences. For example, for new parents, feeding time is also Facebook time. New parents can be on Facebook as early as 4am. 56% of new parents have visited Facebook on their mobile device by 7am. This is a key insight that Facebook takes into consideration when analyzing consumer behavior. Facebook also has to understand conversion. They must look for topics to watch and see what’s trending. Facebook also has to understand their audience and the verticals of the audience. For example, in the beauty category, millennials ages 18-24 are into either the natural makeup look or the bold look such as purple hair. Women aged 25-34 appear to be loyal to products. This just shows the depth of research that Facebook performs when analyzing consumer behavior.

Crossley states that mobile is a big deal year-round. People in the US spend up to 4.5 hours per day on their smartphones. 67% of US adults say that their mobile phones help them have less inactive time and greater than 60% of them feel more productive when they usually have nothing to do. Facebook analyzed usage during the holiday season and found that the mobile portion of online transactions during Black Friday grew 55% in 2016 compared to Black Friday in 2015. During the holiday season, Facebook found the mobile portion of online transactions had a 10% increase in 2016 compared to 2015. Facebook also found that mobile conversions grew when people are likely on the go. Most people are on Facebook on their desktop from 8am-4pm,

while most are on mobile from 4pm-9pm. I think these insights are interesting and it shows that mobile transactions are becoming more prevalent as user experience improves over time.

Crossley mentioned that mobile is occupying the white space and the couch space. People aren’t just on mobile in-between activities. 30% of mobile sessions are less than 3 minutes, 32% of mobile session are between 3-20 minutes, and 37% of mobile sessions are over 20 minutes. This changes the way consumers think about shopping, since they are exposed to their phones at all times of the day for many different durations. There is this transition from going shopping to always shopping. This presents a huge opportunity for marketers because they have the opportunity to increase presence at all times throughout the day.

38% of retail shoppers wish they could do more shopping on their smartphone, which means that it’s important for a brand to understand if they want an automated shopping process or a customer service experience.

Crossley mentioned that times flies when we’re on mobile. The perception of time on mobile is 33% shorter and time seems to go by faster on mobile than on desktop.

Facebook looked at how quickly people scroll on their desktop (2.5s) vs mobile (1.7s) and found that marketers need to grab users attention much faster on mobile because they are moving much faster. The key point to realize is that time is different across devices. On average, participants browsed 5 fewer products when shopping on mobile. Mobile is also accelerating the shopping journey for retail and e-commerce. Consumers buy products 13% faster on mobile (6.7 days) than desktop (7.8 days). Mobile to mobile conversions are 1 full day shorter than desktop, which shows an incredible opportunity for markets to advertise on mobile. People also spend 75% less time when booking on mobile than desktop. This means that shopping is more efficient and faster on mobile. In the travel shopping journey, mobile shoppers visit 42% less touchpoints than desktop shoppers. I think this presents an opportunity to travel industry marketers to advertise on mobile, because it shows that consumers can be more impulsive on mobile.

All of this data shows that the future is now. Consumers expect a seamless online experience, and we need to give users that experience. Mobile was never considered a trend until recently, and marketers can use it to their advantage. This was one of my favorite sessions because Crossley provided insightful information about mobile consumer behavior with data to back it up. Facebook presents an incredible opportunity for advertising.

CONCLUSION

Mobile advertising is an entirely different segment from desktop and is becoming the most important aspect in digital advertising today. Users are spending more time on mobile than on desktop, and they buy products faster on mobile than desktop. This presents the perfect opportunity for marketers to create mobile-driven campaigns. Consumers are starting to do all of their daily tasks on mobile, and marketers should adjust to this new marketing opportunity. Helen Crossley perfectly emphasized the importance of advertising on mobile and it’s relevance to digital marketing.

ABSTRACT

Moving at a Mobile Minute Hamilton Tyler Undergraduate: BSBA Finance/Economics hamilton.tyler@du.edu LinkedIn: @hamiltontylerjr Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session The Future of Mobile

Facebook is the biggest social media platform in the world and therefore hosts a huge database of user information.

Facebook is utilized by nearly all ages and demographics across the world. Helen Crossley, of Facebook IQ, explained what businesses can learn from this generation of mobile users. Mobile devices have caused a shift in consumer behavior that businesses need to embrace in order to stay up to date with changing times. The future is now and it is not waiting for anyone to play catch up.

SESSION

Facebook IQ provides real insight into the real actions of millions of Facebook users. Facebook IQ helps marketers to understand trends across generations, geographies, devices, and time. By understanding consumer behavior, businesses can provide ads that are more relevant to the lives of users.

Users will find more value in the ads and are therefore more likely to make a purchase. The advertising insights of Facebook IQ means that users are more effectively targeted as well. Marketers can use information obtained through Facebook IQ to better their business and the lives of the consumers that they touch.

Trends are at the heart of consumer behavior. Most importantly of all, trends are now. They are occurring in the real time and drive innovation of the future. Facebook IQ found a trend that mobile merriment is year round. The mobile device makes the user feel more productive in comparison to the previous world of desktop computers.

Mobile provides accessibility that was never possible before.

The user can now fill short periods of time though out their day with use of a mobile device. Waiting in line to get a coffee is no longer a waiting game. Instead it is a time to be productive and check emails. Facebook IQ proves this with data because mobile conversions grow when people are likely on the go. Mobile conversions rise between 4pm to 10pm, in comparison to desk top usage which peaks at approximately 11am. Mobile trends are driving the future of technology innovation and pushing the need for devices that make daily activities easier while on the go.

Mobile is occupying the white space and couch space.

Mobile devices have caused a transition from the user going shopping, to always shopping. People no longer need to go to a mall to shop. Instead, the ability to shop is always in their pocket and a purchase can be made at any time of the

day. People trend to browse fewer products while on mobile in comparison to desktop. On average, Facebook IQ found that people browse 24 items on mobile and 29 items on a desktop computer. Time flies when we’re on mobile, which accelerates the shopping journey for retail and e-commerce. People search for products and like to get it done fast.

Consumers have more time available for exploring additional products on a desk top computers since he or she is not on the go.

CONCLUSION

Facebook IQ uses consumer information to change the way that businesses advertise. By understanding consumer behavior, businesses can provide the most value to their customers with remarkable relevancy. Trends are at the heart of consumer behavior and embrace change while driving innovation. They have the capability to make or break a business. Facebook IQ helps businesses to understand and anticipate trends. Mobile users don’t desire the same experience on the go as they do while sitting at a desktop computer.

Mobile is fast and frequent, which invokes a feeling of productivity from the user. It accelerates the shopping journey for retail and e commerce by filling the void of extra time in the user’s day. By understanding consumer behavior, businesses can capitalize on trends and embrace the changes that mobile brings to people’s lives.

ABSTRACT

Nancy Harhut, Chief Creative Officer of Wilde Agency, discussed the next generation of marketing based on strategically implementing people’s defaults decisions into your company’s marketing efforts. Harhut is passionate about the impact behavioral science can have on marketing.

SESSION

Next Generation Marketing with Neuroscience Colby Bjornsen Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing colbybjornsen@gmail.com

LinkedIn:@colbybjornsen Personal Website Link to Flipboard Magazine

Link to Session How Neuroscience Can Help Your Brand

Do people make their own decisions? According to new research by neuroscientists people do not “make” decisions they simply default to reflexive actions without ever thinking.

So, what does this mean for marketers? Perfectly good ads, emails and website can fail because people rarely make logical choices. Harhut dived into how brands can take advantage of people’s default decisions by implementing them into their marketing. The subconscious brain is more powerful than anyone realized, it controls 95% of consumer purchase decision-making. Neuroscience can help a company’s marketing by: getting people to notice and remember your brand and by getting people to do what you want and pay what you want.

Step 1: how neuroscience can help a company get people to notice and remember their brand. Humans are hardwired to notice things that are different (Von Restorff Effect). If something is new or different it forces people to focus and pay more attention to whatever is standing out. Marketers can use color to make things pop, use images that default our eyes to a specific spot or even use emoji’s in subject lines of emails to make the email stand out in an inbox. Further adding an element of surprise or a mystery will help attract customers. By using a surprise sale, you can change what a consumer is expecting to see. According to the motivating uncertainty effect, people are more likely to do a task if they don’t know what the reward is. Therefore, by telling a consumer they could save between twenty and forty percent off, they subconsciously become more interested in coming to your sale.

Nowadays everyone talks about storytelling, but many people don’t know the science behind it. If you hear something out loud or watch as something is performed more parts of your brain are being activated and the more likely you are to remember it. Therefore storytelling is a vital part of every brand. The Zeigarnik Effect states the people remember uncompleted tasks better than

completed tasks. In terms of storytelling this reflects when we haven’t finished a story. We feel this nagging feeling to complete it, we want/need to know how it finishes. By evoking emotions (like anxiety, awe, wonder and fear) in our storytelling people are also more likely to remember it.

Step 2: how neuroscience can help a company get people to do what they want them to do. It should be known that the brain will take any shortcut it can. If a person can imagine and predict an event happening they’re more likely to be interested in a product or service.

When a person cannot imagine a specific product or service in their life, the brain doesn’t want to work to picture their life with it. Show and tell people exactly how your product or service will impact their life and so they easily imagine their life with it. Consumers flock to the scarcity principle when brands release a urgency or exclusivity side to their product or service. People don’t like to miss out on opportunities (only 100 tickets left!) but they do enjoy being part of a private group (don’t tell everyone, only a select few are receiving this deal).

By effectively framing, or choosing the words that describe your product, service, or offer, you can alter its’ success. For example, a giveaway is more likely to draw consumer attention than a promotion. A small $5 fee is more acceptable to consumers than a $5 fee.

By framing things as positive or negative you can also increase effectiveness. If a popup window says, “Download the case study?” and your answers are either to click “YES, get the free case study now” or “NO, I’d rather not know how my marketing is performing,” a consumer is more likely to click yes. Rather than framing things in terms of price, try to frame things in terms or time and experience as they are finite commodities you can’t get back. People place more value on finite things (i.e. The best sleep of your life).

Allow customers to experience cognitive ease. People don’t want to stress over things that require too much energy. By keeping messages simple and using images over words, customers will be more happy and likely to pay attention. Using a single call to action is also beneficial. Removing the choice for consumers will tell consumers exactly what you want them to do.

Step 3: how neuroscience can help a company get people to pay what they want them to pay. Marketers should use the magnitude encoding process when deciding how to price items. Numerical stimuli (like prices) are encoded in the memory as magnitude representations and therefore people subconsciously judge the price of something based on its “size”. For this reason, by adding decimal places or dollar signs (more characters) to your prices, consumers will read as it as a larger number or price. Therefore, when showing savings add the dollar sign and two zeros so customers subconsciously view it as greater savings and vice versa. Another great tactic is to put the most expensive item on the left side of a page. People use anchoring while examining items. When reading left to right, a person will use the leftmost item as the anchor and look at the relative difference of the other items as they go across a page. By introducing the highest priced item first, people think they’re getting a good deal. Hedonic bundling can also be successful. Take the bundle of items a customer is receiving and make the most expensive/luxurious item a freebee.

This way consumers think they’re getting an amazing deal.

CONCLUSION

Ignoring neuroscience will cause even your best marketing efforts to fail. By combining all three of the steps above, marketers can control the subconscious mind of consumers and in a sense, make decisions for them. I learned how to control consumers. By underlining, bolding, and italicizing the three steps of how neuroscience can help your brand above, I controlled where the reader’s eyes went on my paper (whether they noticed it or not).

ABSTRACT

Opening Remarks: Hugh Forrest Hillary Conciatori Undergraduate: Strategic Communications / Marketing and International Studies hillaryconciatori@aol.com

Twitter/Instagram: @hillconch Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Waffles and Web Design

Hugh Forrest, the Chief Programming Officer of SXSW and head of interactive badges gives tips about where to go, what to do, and how to go about your SXSW trip. He discusses how this year is different than any other year due to multiple changes they have made. He thanks us for bringing the creativity and wants to welcome everyone to a year that is supposed to be the best yet. Forrest introduces the fact that Joe Biden and other influential speakers will be attending. He also discusses the errors that were made in the past years and what the team has done to remedy that throughout their planning over the past nine months, including the revamped badge system that will create an even better experience for the SXSW community. However, he puts heavy emphasis on their key message that has carried throughout the event the past 30 years, and that is that SXSW helps very creative people achieve their goals.

SXSW wants to enable this global, creative community to use the elements available to them to become more creative, diverse and stronger within different career paths.

SESSION

Forrest is honored that it has become a global event. The creativity of Austin makes this event even more special. The main focus of his talk is some of the 2017 improvements.

They spend 9 months putting the event together and after it is over, they spend 3 months tearing it apart and identifying what went well and what can be improved upon. A lot of improvements come from the feedback from people who attend. They have an new badge system this year that they believe is a huge improvement. The interactive badge allows people to go to film and music content this year, which is a huge change. This system gives attendees even more opportunities for learning and discovering and gives attendees even more opportunities to network, particularly with people outside one’s specific area of expertise. People seemed to be very impressed and excited within the session when discussing the new badge system, and I am surprised that they did not have this before.

I think it is interesting that in the past, attendees would buy either a music, film or media badge and that limited them to going to only those events. Forrest mentions that there will be some hiccups and to bare with them throughout this new process. They have also added 20 new tracks, including journalism, which is incredibly popular this year. He also mentions that the marketing and branding track has grown

impressively this year, which I am excited to hear because that is what my main focus is coming into this week. Other changes for 2017 consist of a new chatbot called Abby, and SXSW gaming is now its own event. The chatbot is in the GO mobile app, which he says has some flaws and is still learning, but is fun to play with. I am looking forward to using the chatbot because of everything I have read about artificial intelligence and chatbots throughout the quarter, and she is learning more the more she is used by all the attendees.

Abby will get smarter throughout her use, and pushing the limits and flaws in her programming will be fun to test out.

Hugh says artificial intelligence is an undercurrent in all 24 tracks this year, which is incredibly exciting. Half of the AI sessions are apparently optimistic about the future, and the other half question the negative aspects of AI and what is yet to come. Within my reading, I have noticed a similar trend in that many authors have a positive outlook on the future and many negative, such as that AI robots are becoming too powerful and could potentially take over or they cannot handle and regulate their emotions as humans do. They are also eventually going to take jobs from humans, such as HR and other departments that AI is working to be better at than the average human brain. Forrest says he wants to challenge attendees to find trends and themes to discover that are adventurous and out of our comfort zones. AI is something I have enjoyed learning about the past few months and in Global Product Innovation, yet it is definitely outside of my comfort zone. However, I look forward to learning more about it this week and internalizing that information. Forrest encourages attendees to go through the post event survey in order to give honest feedback so they can work on improvements for the next year.

CONCLUSION

This information touches marketing, business and tech in so many ways because Forrest is announcing all of the new events and underlying themes throughout SXSW this year. As I mentioned above, he discusses how AI is prevalent throughout the entire event, with a chatbot and other AI aspects during most of the events. He also discusses how marketing and branding have become big in the past couple years, and how attendees should use the knowledge they gain from different sessions and aspects of SXSW to be creative, whether that be in the marketing field, film or music. He markets SXSW in a way that it is relatable to everyone, because there is something for everyone, no matter what field they study.

However, he encourages people to diverge from their typical path and do what makes them uncomfortable and dare to explore different fields. His talk discusses how this event is an amazing business opportunity that everyone should take advantage of, whether that be to network with other fields, attempt to find a new job, or simply learn from those around us to improve upon our own careers.

ABSTRACT

Power Up, scale up, brand up: The age of you (Spectrum) Nicholas Kieler Graduate MBA Nicholas.kieler@gmail.com

www.linkedin.com/in/nic holas-kieler/ Link to Flipboard Magazine The Future of Enterprise is Good

A good reputation is a powerful tool for businesses both big and small. Too many companies nowadays miss the mark on good product design and social responsibility and pay the price heavily for it while their more globally and customer minded competitors flourish. We are entering the age of reputation, in which people will go out of their way to make or break a company based on their public perception. In the world which is more interconnected than ever being good has become majorly advantageous while sacrificing employees and customer expectations in the pursuit of the bottom line isn’t a strategy that is going to work in the future.

It’s not enough to just be good either, you must also let people know that you are good. If a firm fails to adequately inform people about the stance it is taking it risks looking insincere or insecure about its position. A weak stance can make a customer believe that a company is not supporting a cause because it is important, but rather because it is a good PR move which can lead to a worse reputation than doing nothing at all. Combining good practices with effective message spreading techniques creates a positive reputation, which is not just an asset for the company, but a requirement to compete in todays marketplace.

SESSION

This session took place at the spectrum lounge, a place off the convention center which was being sponsored by Charter. While this panel was not a part of the official SXSW roster a badge was required for access and the panel was made up of professionals in their field which lent a lot of credibility to the panel. The audience of the panel was smaller than average probably due to the lack of advertisement that this panel existed at all. The four speakers on stage all had backgrounds in corporate social responsibility and were joined by an audience of about 30 people. Another interesting aspect of this panel was that everyone including the moderator were all women which I felt was good because of the very different perspective that was brought into the session because of this.

The four presenters and the moderator touched on a variety of topics centered around social responsibility, customer based design, and how to best leverage a positive reputation. The experience for me was not one of a revelation of ideas, but more of a revelation of terms. The

things that were talked about on stage were ideas which were very important to me and which I had been struggling to explain to other people for years. Customer focused design is something which has fallen by the wayside in the wake of the information age. Product designers are now more concerned with what they can do than what their customers need, and this has started to lead to overpriced and unneeded products for affluent but uncaring consumers. These badly designed products are one very important source for negative reputations for companies, especially with the advent of aggregated online customer reviews. This is why now more than ever it is so important to keep in mind that the purpose of a product is not to create something fantastic, but to create something which serves the customers needs.

Another interesting point was on the importance of corporate social responsibility and how it affects companies of different sizes in different ways. A large company has to have a dedicated CSR department and has to make sure that this department is closely integrated with the social media and marketing department. One of the biggest problems with good CSR is that it is often the first department to be cut when there is a budget shortfall even though it is one of the most important functions to keep a large company running smoothly.

As a large company, it is not only important for the leadership to recognize the value of CSR but also for those people in CSR to convince the leaders of their companies of how important a part of the company they are. By contrast, often a small company generates good CSR just by being local. Many customers will go out of their way to shop and smaller individually owned storefronts rather than purchase items at global conglomerates just to keep their money within the community. People like it when their money goes to someone who is not a big time CEO managing a large firm and would rather see their money go towards a hard working neighbor. Still, even small companies have a duty to make sure they are acting ethically towards their community, their employees, and the environment, as a bad reputation can be a lot more devastating to a smaller business.

The last very interesting point from this panel was that it is not enough to just do good, you have to let people know that you are doing good. Nothing good comes out of a company keeping a good deed secret. No matter what cause a company chooses to support, it is important that the company comes out strongly on behalf of its movement to show its customers that it really does care about the issue. The more publicized a CSR movement is the more awareness it generates for the cause and the more genuine it seems to people who see a strongly taken stance. Taking a stance on an issue opens a company up to criticism from those who are on the opposition, and this lends to the credibility of the company. Making a company’s movements known to their customers exposes the company to the risk of losing people who no longer agree with them, and it’s this assumed risk that helps people to believe that your company is trying to accomplish something important.

The best way to spread a movement is ‘not to be viral, to be a virus’. While not directly related to being good or helping the community I also found this to be very useful information. The idea is that most people when developing content focus on making the content as entertaining as possible in the hopes that it will spread. While it is true that good content is more likely to be passed to others, the more important element is to spread the content as far as possible. What makes the biggest difference in the potential for something

to go viral is not how contagious it is, but in how many patient zero’s you can get your content to first. It is more important therefore to spend time on posting and sharing the content everywhere possible first, as this is the best method for forcing a fast dispersal of content.

CONCLUSION

I would say that the future of business is reputation, but the truth is that the now of business is reputation. With social media taking off and our world growing more global and interconnected, a business can’t survive any longer with a bad reputation. This is a conclusion that I have held strongly for years but now have much better words for: customer focused design and corporate social responsibility. If a company does good things, and is well known for doing good things, customers will pay more to support a movement than they will for a high-quality product. Rises in movements such as free trade, American made, and responsible lending are all powerful examples of the market moving in this direction.

Ignoring these critical signals of a shift in culture as either a new entrepreneur or an established firm spells unavoidable disaster down the line.

There are still examples of companies who operate successfully on platforms of deceit and wrongdoing, but I feel these companies days are limited. Wells Fargo recently got busted for signing their existing customers up for fake accounts and lowering their credit ratings because of it. Since their scandal in early October of 2016 Wells Fargo has lost millions in lawsuits and potentially even more in lost customers. When Chipotle had an outbreak of E Coli at one of their restaurants they had to close down their businesses and retrain their entire staff just to regain their reputation. It is pointless to ignore such clear writing on the wall: Be good or go home.

ABSTRACT

Retail Innovation: Reshaping Customer Experience Hamilton Tyler Undergraduate: BSBA Finance/Economics hamilton.tyler@du.edu LinkedIn: @hamiltontylerjr Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Technology and the Retail Experience

Artificial Intelligence and big data are the key to solving many of the problems faced by brick and mortar retailers today. The dawn of huge Internet retailers such as Amazon has caused difficulties in physical stores because they cannot compete with the prices offered online. There is a shift away from competing on price towards competing on quality. Brick and mortar stores will never be able to compete on pricing, but they instead can leverage other assets that online retailers don’t have. There will always be a need for physical stores since there are many products that people want to experience in real life, such as clothes. Technology is capable of changing the entire retail experience for the customer and bringing a new age to retail shopping.

SESSION

The overall goal of technology in the retail shopping experience is to let customers spend time doing what they like. Retailers want to make it as easy as possible for the consumer to make a purchase. For example, real time data collection can be used in retail stores for real time action implementation. This technology can be used to increase sales or promote certain products. Only a sliver of technology currently has the capability to achieve this goal, but the required infrastructure is not far away. In the future of retail shopping, customers won’t have to carry a wallet or coupons. Perhaps a finger print can be used to uniquely identify a customer and charge their account. The future of retail results in an entirely different operation than traditional stores.

The incredible pace of technology is touching every single business and industry. The future will be a very different world and a wonderful reality. Our grandkids might not need to learn how to drive a car. Retail shopping is compatible with the future but it is important for them to embrace the reality of smarter learning machines and artificial intelligence.

If retail embraces technological change, there are some great innovations that can occur. Building new technology requires an understanding of consumer behavior to build things people love. Big data is a way to understand and achieve this goal. With machine learning and artificial intelligence on the horizon, it is a great time for brands to refocus their efforts to be sustainable in the future.

Garima Agarwal of Kohl’s described the biggest problem faced in big data retail as being customer security concerns. Customers worry that their information might be seen by the wrong person when data is collected and stored. It’s a completely understandable concern in the digital age and brings up an issue that is being prioritized by businesses. Companies need to understand that it is their responsibility to protect a customer’s data because after all, it is their data, not the company’s. A proper infrastructure system is required to ensure the property security of data. It is especially true for transactional data since that’s what hackers want. Not all types of data need to be treated the same. If someone were to obtain the shopping preferences of a customer, it would have little to no impact on the customer compared to a leak of credit card information. Businesses can minimize security concerns by utilizing the latest and encryption methods. By staying up to date with rapidly advancing technology, businesses are providing the best experience possible for their customers.

CONCLUSION

The future of consumer data analysis lies in helping traditional companies transform into the future of tech retail. There is a generational progression that accompanies the future of technology. Younger people are more open, knowledgeable, and comfortable with technology. There is an almost limitless amount of information that can be learned about the consumer and used to enhance the entire retail experience. Businesses will see increased sales when the purchasing process is as easy as it can possibly be for the customer. Transparency in data collection provides peace of mind to the consumer because people will be open to the idea when they are told how they are protected. An advanced infrastructure is required to maintain the level of security needed to keep data safe.

Businesses put themselves at the forefront of the consumer experience by using technology to improve experiences and allow the customer to spend time doing what they like.

ABSTRACT

Digital advertising has heightened the importance of the first few seconds of advertisement viewing. Reflecting on your personal allocation of time to mobile video can be a frightening prospect, but is also indicative of the global shift towards the mobile language built around video.

SESSION Seconds Matter: Capturing Attention in Mobile Feed Nick Kruse Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing NickKruse333@gmail.com

Facebook /nick.kruse.77 LinkedIn : /in/nicholaskruse/ Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session 1.7 Second Elevator Pitch

This session was presented by Ms. Ann Mack of Facebook, who presented on a very similar topic in 2016. The main difference in her presentation this year was the emphasis on creating platform specific content.

Ms. Mack provided some valuable insights from Facebook, as well as an interesting case study. 48% of video watch time on Facebook stems from shares. This is largely because mobile tech is able to capture shares from real life connections. Video consumption accounts for 20% of all time on digital. Also, report time spent watching video on mobile surpasses that of desktop. Time spent watching video on Instagram increased by 150% in the past year.

Cisco reported that mobile video will increase 9 fold by 2020 and account for 78% of data.

A significant focus for Facebook analytics this year was investigating how people process screens overall and on different platforms.

Viewers felt more attentive and positive towards content on mobile screens. TV screen viewers were more distracted and exhibited a higher cognitive load.

A romantic comedy commercial was used to evaluate cross platform screen efficacy. They suspected that viewers would respond differently on mobile vs TV viewings, and they were right.

Biometrically, people responded more positively to emotional moments on mobile than TV. I suspect this may be due to framing, where people feel more connected to mobile because their friends and family channeled through their mobile device. Facebook analytics suggested that this is because the TV is further form the viewer than the mobile device. People perceive their phone as larger, as if we have blinders on, because were holding it inches from our face.

Advertisers cannot just take TV ad style and put it on mobile

medium. Ads have history of going with what they know and just forcing it into new mediums. Attempting to force those old round pegs in the shiny new square holes would be a death sentence in this new mobile and digitally driven space. The first TV ad was for Bulova Watches, and was essentially a radio ad with a static image. Dragging feet on change is sure fire way to fail.

3 years ago digital surpassed TV in terms of user time spent interacting with the platforms.

Don’t take TV effective strategies and slap on mobile. Digging deeper into the variants, consumer behavior is significantly different on either platform. Nearly half US adults say they check their phone at least thirty times a day. Millennials check them at least sixty two times a day. Facebook makes up 1/5 of all mobile minuets. Users are also consuming content quicker. 1.7 seconds is the average engagement for mobile feed, where as desktops are 2.5 seconds. Not only are people consuming faster, they are retaining it more quickly.

A quarter second of exposure on mobile is enough to create retention. Marketing has not bridged the gap between consumer behavior and its own behavior in the mobile feed. We need to bridge that gap more quickly and effectively. Only 24% of mobile ads were understandable without sound. Less than half had identifiable brand cues.

Small changes to optimize these can make a big impact. Three times more people were engaged when the brand or message was presented in first ten seconds. Forty seven percent of brand value occurred in the first three seconds and seventy four percent in the first ten seconds.

For mobile feed, build ads from the ground up. Do everything you can to capture attention quickly, rather than showing the branding moment at the end of the commercial. The hero in this space is placing assets at the start, and lead with strong creative.

Design these ads for muted viewing, but delight when the sound is on. Frame visual story in a vertical frame. Play more with targeting, sequencing, and new formats to find what's effective and integrate accordingly. Its not always possible to build for mobile first. If that’s the case take the existing assets and apply mobile principles.

Facebook insights entered into a partnership with Weiden and Kennedy to optimize a Finish Dish Soap ad, which had been created for TV, into an effective mobile version. They optimized it for the mobile feed mostly by shortening it. They also used a single vignette of a married couple that hadn’t existed in the TV ad. Additionally they reduced the size to fit mobile and shifted the frame to a vertical one. One of the most important alterations was bringing the brand mention in 25 seconds earlier.

CONCLUSION

Mobile video is drastically changing advertising. Platform specific ad development is quintessential to success in mobile and digital spaces. The advertising industry as a whole must embrace these new channels and not try to retain all of the tried and true methods.

ABSTRACT

We are all familiar with the saying “every second counts.”

This is resoundingly true with capturing attention in the mobile feed. In fact, according to Ann Mack, director of insights marketing at Facebook, it takes all of 0.25 seconds to recall content from a mobile feed. All with a swipe of a finger and a scroll of the screen, people are consuming more and more content faster than on any device ever before.

Seconds Matter: Capturing Attention on the Mobile Feed Logan Leake

SESSION

Any conversation that starts around David Bowie is bound to be a good conversation. Mack unapologetically began this session by capturing our attention with the fact that Bowie fans all over the world came together to grieve his passing via one particular video/GIF displaying all the faces of Bowie over the course of his career. Now more than ever we are expressing ourselves through sight, sound, and motion and are seeing a significant rise in video creation. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a video is worth at least ten-thousand.

Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing

Time watching video on mobile has now surpassed desktop/laptop—in fact, 20% of overall time on digital is spent watching videos and by the year 2021 a projected 78% logan.leake@aol.com of all mobile data will be video. Consumers are processing this content differently and are experiencing both Instagram:@LoganMatoaka physiological and neurological responses. As the consumer market is steadily turning towards mobile it is important to understand that the way in which content is being processed Link to Flipboard is much more positive and attentive. As opposed to Magazine processing something on the television, which is met with a response of distraction and a high genitive load.

Link to Session

Bowie and Mobile, 0 to 60 in 0.25

When comparing mobile versus television, one might ask, “but doesn’t size [of screen] matter?” and to that I can respond with a confident no. Think about it: “small” screens really aren’t that small due to the distance we hold them from our faces. The closeness with which mobile screens come to our faces makes them seem a lot larger as they are directly in our field of vision. TVs, on the other hand, are much further away making them be perceived as smaller than they are. Not to mention, the periphery distraction is constant. Let’s face it though, “every new technology is prisoner to its predecessor,” Mack so eloquently points out.

Consumers’ behavior within the mobile space is also inherently different than it is with TV. It is frequent, fast, and done with the sound off (and on).

In terms of frequency, nearly half of U.S. adults say they check their phone more than thirty times a day, with 62% of those respondents being of the millennial generation. In regards to speed, people consume mobile in 1.7 seconds (though the younger one is, is directly related to the speed with which one scrolls). Facebook, not surprisingly, makes up one out of five mobile minutes. This is huge. People are consuming mobile more and they are consuming it faster. In fact, retention of content is actually quicker on mobile at a quarter of a second. Content that is consumed quickly can easily be memorable, which is an incredibly important idea that all marketers need to digest and understand.

To be more specific, the marketing industry has yet to bridge the gap between mobile feed and advertising. Only a dismal 24% of advertisements were understandable without sound and less than half of those ads had identifiable brand cues. A whopping 47% of campaign value is driven in the first three seconds with 74% in the first ten seconds. Three times more people were actually engaged in said campaigns when the brand message was represented in the first ten seconds. But here’s the kicker: building for mobile feed from the very start is now the primary. In terms of creative considerations in the mobile feed, the goal is to capture attention quickly and design for sound off but to delight with sound on. Lead with strong creative from the first frame on and, most importantly, add text overlays (creatively) and captions. Not only is this an inclusive approach, it is a necessary approach with the majority of videos being consumed on mute. Finally, don’t forget that on mobile, people are watching in a vertical environment, so take into consideration how that changes your video.

With the transition to mobile feed, videos, too, need to adapt. It’s small changes like these that ultimately drive a big impact. Marketers need to abandon their preconceived notions of what video is and how it is being consumed as “It’s not the biggest and fastest that survive, it’s the ones that are the most adaptable to change.” –Darwin. Different kinds of videos are gaining unapologetic entrance into people’s hearts and minds and we can only guess at how.

CONCLUSION And just as any good conversation begins with the “infinitely changeable and fiercely forward looking” Bowie, it too, ends with Bowie— “The context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything we can envisage at the moment…it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.”

ABSTRACT

Ann Mack, Director of Insight Marketing at Facebook, speaks about the new trend of mobile. Video is especially on the rise and is becoming the primary form of communication on mobile. Advertising on mobile is completely different from advertising on desktop, and Mack offers insight into how marketers can advertise for mobile and understanding that every second on mobile counts.

Seconds Matter: Capturing Attention in Mobile Feed Darby Pappas Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing pappasdarby@gmail.com LinkedIn: @darbypappas Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Video is Now, How to Keep Up

SESSION

Users are starting to communicate through video on mobile.

This is the third step in the timeline of digital. First came text, next was photo, now is video, and the future is VR/AR. 48% of video watch time on Facebook comes from sharing videos. Nearly 20% of time on mobile is spent watching video, which far surpasses time watching video on desktop.

On Facebook, over 100 million hours of video are watched every day. Over 6 months, the time spent watching video on Instagram increased 150%. By 2021, 78% of all mobile data will be video. All of these statistics were further proof that video is on the come up and will continue to become a rising trend. I thought this was extremely interesting that video is the primary method how users are communicating nowadays. I think it’s going to be interesting when VR/AR will become the new form of video in the next decade.

Facebook conducted a study by measuring biometrics and neurological responses to find how people process video content on mobile versus video. The study found that people are more attentive and find more positive reaction with video on mobile. The study also found that people tend to be more distracted and have a higher cognitive load watching video on desktop. The study found that users respond differently with an ad they saw on their mobile device compared to an ad they saw on TV, especially ads with more emotional appeal. I was already aware that users react to ads differently based on the device, but I wasn’t aware that users are especially more engaged to emotional ads when they’re on mobile.

Ann Mack wanted the audience to know that the small mobile screen isn’t that small. Marketers need to think beyond the phone’s dimensions and think about how close a phone remains in distance from the user. The tricky part for marketers is knowing what content to post on which device.

You can’t put the same content that is on a TV medium onto a mobile device because each device gets a different

reaction. That is a huge mistake that marketers are continuing to make. Instead of embracing a new media channel, marketers treat each channel the same and post the same content which is wrong. This would be the first piece of advice I would give marketers because it’s so important to understand how different each media is interpreted. Like I learned in Sara Dietschy’s session, what you post in one channel isn’t always successful in another channel.

Three years ago, digital outpaced TV in terms of time spent globally. This means we are at a tipping point in mobile. Marketers have the opportunity to embrace the mobile market properly by not taking what works in TV and putting it on mobile. Consumer behavior within mobile and mobile feeds is inherently different. Consumption in the mobile feed is frequent, fast, and usually muted. Nearly half of US adults say they check their phone more than 30 times daily, and Facebook makes up 1 out of 5 minutes on mobile. With this data, I realized that there is so much opportunity for marketers to advertise using video on mobile. Users are watching tons of video with the sound off and video tends to be more successful when subtitles exist because we are living such fast-paced lives where we don’t have time to watch a video with sound. The younger you are, the faster you are scrolling on mobile.

Users, especially younger users, are consuming content more quickly and retaining the content more quickly. Content consumed quickly can be even more memorable, which wasn’t what I expected to hear. I would automatically assume that because we consume content so quickly, that we are retaining less but this isn’t the case.

Mack provided insight on how to build for a mobile feed from the start. It’s important for marketers to capture attention quickly, to design for sound-off but delight with sound-on using text overlays & captions and sound to enhance the experience, to frame your visual story and consider if users prefer watching in vertical or horizontal, and to play with sequencing, targeting, and new formats. Sometimes it’s not always feasible to build for mobile feed first. This can be solved by mobilizing your TV campaign and optimize mobile using the same campaign. I think this was useful advice from Mack because sometimes marketers have a TV campaign that they want to share for mobile feed. Marketers can optimize such campaigns by cutting the video shorter, resizing the video to square, and moving the brand mention to the first 10 seconds. This is extremely valuable information because users probably won’t be engaged with the same commercial that appears on TV. My biggest takeaway from this session was that marketers need to alter the campaign based on the medium you’re advertising on because users are engaged differently depending on the medium.

CONCLUSION

Mobile video is becoming the primary form of communication and is taking over communication by photos. Marketers need to adjust to this growing trend and understand that users engage differently based on the medium. When marketers optimize to mobile, they are able to engage the audience much deeper than if they show the exact same campaign throughout different mediums. Video is an important part of advertising and marketers need to focus their efforts on mobile campaigns because mobile has surpassed desktop consumption. Once marketers perform simple mobile optimization, they are able to engage the user like never before.

ABSTRACT

Seconds Matter: Capturing Attention in Mobile Feed Hamilton Tyler Undergraduate: BSBA Finance/Economics hamilton.tyler@du.edu LinkedIn: @hamiltontylerjr Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session How to Capture Mobile Users

Screen size plays a valuable role in the way we consume and process content in the world around us. Consumer behavior has shifted due to the introduction of the smartphone.

Nearly half of adults check their phone more than 30 times a day. The mobile phone is a powerful, attention capturing device. Even though a television screen is much larger than a mobile phone, it does not capture our attention as easily.

Anne Mack of Facebook describes how advertising can be optimized for the device it is viewed on and the environment in which it is consumed.

SESSION

A small screen really isn’t that small in the context of distance. The perception of a mobile phone to the user is larger than it really is. A cell phone narrows the peripheral vision of the user, similar to blinders on a horse. Sight, sound, and emotion are instantly captured and can leave the user detached from the groundings of reality. Every new technology is a prisoner of it’s predecessors as it attempts to adapt consumer behavior. The mobile feed is different from content viewed on a television or a desktop and must be treated as such. By building for mobile first, advertisers can increase ad recall, brand favorability, and view duration. It’s understandable that it’s not always possible for companies to build for mobile first, especially small businesses. By adapting existing assets, such as television commercials, advertisers can reach and engage their audience in ways like never before.

Consumer behavior on mobile devices is inherently different from television. Mobile users are seeking frequent and fast data. A quick break at work can be used to catch up on a Twitter feed, or waiting at a stoplight provides the much needed time to check the score of the big game. Mobile users sometimes don’t consume content with the sound on because of the environment in which it is consumed. In comparison, a television is almost always viewed with the sound on. A television also results in more distraction because there is more going on in the user’s vision. Anne Mack described that only 24% of Facebook ads were understandable without sound, and less than half have identifiable brand cues. It was found that three times more people were engaged when the brand and message were presented in the first ten seconds of the advertisement. The faster consumption rate of mobile feeds is accompanied by a

higher retention rate. It’s not just that users are going through more content, but they are actually retaining the more information.

Mobile is proven to be an effective advertising tool, and arguably more effective than television or desktop. By building for mobile first, advertisers can capture the attention of one of the most important consumer segments, the millennial. If a millennial develops brand loyalty, then the company likely has a repeat customer for the rest of that person’s life. Young people also consume more content because the younger a person is, the faster he or she scrolls. The rapid rate of consumption on mobile means that advertisements are more likely to be seen and remembered.

CONCLUSION

The mobile phone is a powerful device that results in a more attentive user and a more positive interaction in comparison to desktop computers. The desktop provides more distractions and a high cognitive load as well. Advertisers that design for mobile first reap the benefits of increased ad recall, view duration, and brand favorability. Sometimes it is as simple as resizing an ad or focusing on a single, engaging image. Businesses can cut ad conversion costs by adapting existing assets such as television commercials. Building for mobile first is building for the future.

ABSTRACT

Shopping & Sacred Social Space Alana Bierbaum Graduate: M.S. Marketing alana.bierbaum@du.edu Instagram & Twitter: @alanabierbaum Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Shopping Sanctuary

Panelists representing various social platforms including Ebay, Facebook, Flipboard, and Imgur explained what sacred space in the social sphere means and looks like. Sacred space is a term that I was unfamiliar with prior to this session, but when thinking of social media, it leads one to think about the personalized nature of these pages and the curated aspect that entices usage. Relating that to shopping, the level of comfort present in these spaces is conducive to a lack of self-consciousness due to the user feeling like the experience is already theirs and as though they are understood.

SESSION

Sacred space is really offered as value proposition on Flipboard, and interactive platform that allows the user to curate their own magazines compiled of articles of interest. It is a place that allows people to find all things they care about from the best sources in the world. The best content has a home and is supported and is supremely easy to access, an important feature of any social platform is the ease in which the user can interact with it; it should be a seamless experience every time. Flipboard gets a lot of usage through their mobile application because they find that a lot of people use it during their “personal prime time”. This means that they are not generally multi-tasking, and are attentive and engaged with the content they are browsing. In a relaxed state of mind, we as users are typically open and responsive during our personal prime time. Flipboard is both algorithm and human curation in how it works. The content provided for users is not necessarily what is most-shared, but rather what is cool and important. Half of the articles that crop up on a user’s dashboard are what they specifically ask for, and the other portion is made up of connected interests and what stems from that. In terms of collaborative business partnerships, that’s when experimentation comes into play.

Facebook’s primary role is to be a discovery platform allowing engagement with businesses, family, and friends inside a mobile newsfeed. Meaningful connections between people and businesses are the baseline. Facebook ad experiences are distinct to each individual user with personalized ad content being made as meaningful as possible. On Facebook, targeting is very important as is designing for a mobile newsfeed environment. It can’t be the same across devices, as consumption is very different in

each device space, but ease of use in each environment needs to be paramount. With that idea of ease, the current discovery convergence experience allows for the finding and purchase of any item in only four clicks. This is something that Facebook is constantly looking at to increase their place as a destination for shopping and literally anything and everything else online; it aims to be a one-stop space.

Imgur is an entertainment destination both decided on and created by their users. Imgurians are the curators, and the experience is not personalized, it is a space with one feed for everyone. Users on this platform crave a unified feed with a community-like shared experience. That doesn’t make the space any less sacred as editors don’t curate the feed, the users do. Imgur aims to give more than take, as with its inception as a way to fill a need to share images in a quality way. Online advertising often takes more than it gives, something that Imgur is very conscious of and constantly trying to improve upon. Platform brands need to protect their user-established cultures when it comes to advertising to them. An overwhelming proportion of imgur users use ad-blockers, thereby covering up the good stuff. An aim of the company is to encourage people to turn it off due to missed content rather than through methods like guilt.

Ebay is present on 19 social channels, each being different in its culture, so it is important to be relevant on each one. Both with message and format, it needs to be unique to the usage on that platform in order to make the experience addictive.

Within the social sphere, there is a huge opportunity for mobile marketing to develop well past where it currently is. Mobile use is a significant part of the customer journey with almost half of all traffic on social platforms coming from mobile. With that said, the Introduction and expansion of commercial content should make the platform better, not be a hindrance or annoyance, which is a high ask. Platforms are essentially driven by advertising dollars, so that convergence of usefulness and payback needs to be figured out. Specialized markets may be open to more advertising than others such as the fashion space, magazines, home improvement, and similar niche areas. The idea is that these companies should start embracing more strongly the top of the funnel process, not just the blunt object of “buy now.”

CONCLUSION

This panel creates a compelling case for the fact that advertisements need to be tailored for the specific platform on which they are being used. Content is king in any space, and quality content presented on the right platform in the right way is the most effective way to reach people where they are.

ABSTRACT

Shopping & Sacred Social Space Alana Dreimann Graduate: MS Marketing alanaemail@me.com Twitter: @adreimann Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Social Media Camouflage

Social media is being utilized by businesses more than ever to reach their target market and connect with their consumers in new engaging ways. What these brands are working to overcome is the perception that they are invading consumers’ sacred social space. Businesses are trying to authentically connect with consumers across social platforms without creating distrust and negative connotations. In a panel discussion with Christine Cook (Head of Advertising Partnerships at Flipboard), llibert Agerich (Oversees eBay's Social & Content Team), Simon Whitcombe (Leads the eCommerce, Travel, and Retail Verticals within Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook), and Steve Patrizi (VP of Marketing & Revenue at Imgur) we learn how to innovate in the space of social media advertising.

SESSION

Digital and social have transformed the way people buy today. In order for businesses to remain relevant, they need to be where their consumers are and most consumers are online and on social media. To reach these consumers, businesses need to be where people are spending their time. When creating a social media and digital strategy, brands need to keep in mind that the engagement needs to be relevant to their chosen platform. You can't have a blanket solution to talk to customers shopping on different platforms. Social media has become a sacred space that brands are trying to bud into with branded communities and native advertisements.

When people use Flipboard they are not multitasking, they are focused on that content. They design an experience that is important to them. It's a time for people to be responsive with brands in this sacred space. Facebook has a discovery platform where people interact with their mobile news feed.

Everyone's experience will be different because of Facebook’s personalization. Imgur is an entertainment platform that is programmed by its users; votes tell when certain content should appear and where. eBay is present on 19 social channels and each is different from the next, like all brands should be. Businesses are striving to make ads an additive experience. One way brands are doing this is by making their ads native with organic posts. Facebook prides themselves on doing this better than any other social platform. It is also important to note that businesses that take the time to change their content for mobile native

experiences really do reap the benefits.

Sacred has a connection to culture and online communities create their own cultures as much as we do in the real world geographically. There is not one culture that exists across all social media sites. Therefore businesses need to try and understand each culture and then respectfully try to fit into that social media culture. You don't go to France and wear a beret and think you're going to fit in; it’s the same with social media. Another good rule of thumb for businesses trying to fit in on social is to give more than you take, like with entertainment. Flipboard knows about our unique interests and how they intersect. They use this knowledge to make partnerships and advertise to its consumers accordingly. This panel believes that so many consumers use ad blockers because businesses are taking more than they give, which results in annoyance rather than enjoyment from creative content.

Steve Patrizi notes that 76% of Imgur users use ad blockers. A lot of businesses and sites try to use guilt and force to turn off ad blockers. Instead, businesses should do more to create content they people want to watch and feel like they are missing out on without it. Ad blockers also create a challenge in reaching the people they want to sell to, even though they should just want to connect with them. Overall, businesses across all industries need to improve their digital and social advertising strategies to create a more positive and immersive experience across the board.

CONCLUSION

Businesses are using digital and social media advertising more than ever before, however they still have a long way to go to be really successful at it. Native advertisements go beyond the look and feel of the advertisements now. Instead, native ads should be integrated into the culture of the platform and the audience they are trying to connect with online. Brands can provide more than organic content that can inspire and inform users.

ABSTRACT

There are many different social platforms out there today, including but not limited to Facebook, Flipboard, Imgur, Pinterest, Instagram, and many more. Each individual platform however has a completely different feed, and experience. The user’s time is very valuable, and if you are a company wanting to take up some of their time or newsfeed, then you must ensure that you aren’t wasting it.

Shopping & Sacred Social Spaces Kirk Scully Undergraduate: BA Marketing/ EDP Kirkpscully@gmail.com

Instagram: @scullymon Link to Flipboard Magazine: Video & Social Media Marketing Link to Session Don’t you Invade my Sacred Space

The President of Marketing at Imgur, Steve Patrizi, accompanies by Simon Whitcomb of Facebook, Llibert Argerich from Ebay, and Christine Cook from Flipboard all teamed up to give a look into how users interact on different platforms, and how to successfully reach those users through those platforms in a non invasive way.

SESSION

When posting advertisements on line, it is really important to do so in a respectful fashion. When Social Media users are scrolling through their feeds, these turn into their sacred space. Leisure time, can be spent doing whatever an individual wants, so when they spend their time online, they don’t want to feel like they are being abused, or that their privacy is being invaded upon. Therefore it is important to understand how users use a specific platform. How do you embrace that sacred space and utilize it properly to sell goods.

Different Social Media platforms, have a completely different feel. Users do not interact in the same way across every single platform so it is important to target your advertisements differently on different platforms.

On Flipboard magazine, when users are interacting with their feeds, they are not multitasking. Christine Cook stated that “When users are on Flipboard, we have their full undivided attention”. This personal prime time, is a time where users are open to brand messages. This is very different however from a Platform such as Imgur. Imgur is an entertainment destination. It is powered and programmed by the users.

Users decide what type of content should appear when. It isn’t a personalized feed like Flipboard. Imgur users crave the idea of a unified feed. It is one feed for everyone, created by all of the users. The users are in full control. Introduction to commercial content should ideally make a platform better.

Usually however, the introduction of commercial content can

degrade a users feed. How can you make a platform better by introducing commercial content is the question?

Successful brands on Imgur, therefore are giving more than they take. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are giving out free things. They are however not just trying to sell a product. They are giving out inspiration, influence, on top of good products. Advertisers are getting creative and not just pushing out stale content to their users, who would harshly reject such content. This is different from Flipboard however. On Flipboard, Targeting is crucial. Users on Flipboard understand that half of what they are going to get on their feed is what they have asked for. It is up to how however, to fill that need of the other half of what they are going to see. It is exciting to see users find new things which they didn’t even know that they would like.

Users of Facebook, usually engage with their friends and family while on the site. They want to make meaningful connections between people and businesses. Why can’t an advertisement on Facebook be just as meaningful as anyone’s posts? The Goal is to take that sacred space, that feed, and truly personalize it. Therefore, targeting is as well important on Facebook. Users on Facebook, are very critical of measuring business objectives. Therefore, if you can align your objectives, or values with those of users then you are bound to become successful with your advertisements.

CONCLUSION

The goal for incorporating online advertisements into a user social media feed is to actually have the user be intrigued by this content, and in the end purchase what you have to offer.

Their feed no matter what the platform is, is content which in some way or another applies to them, and enhances their experience. Again, I will refer to it as this sacred space.

Therefore the introduction of commercial content should make the feed better, and not make the user feel like their privacy is being invaded.

49% of people don’t buy products in store these days. That is an incredible opportunity.

The convenience of online retail is too real. If you can target your advertisements to users in the correct way on whatever platform they are on, then your chances of finishing through with a sale is high. People are buying things off of the internet, whether you are selling things to them or not. It is important that you get your product in front of them in the right way, at the right time, on the right platform.

ABSTRACT

Shopping & Sacred Social Spaces Madeline Trippe Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing/French madelinerose.trippe23@ gmail.com LI: @madelinerosetrippe FB: @madeline.trippe IN: @mynameis_maddy Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session ”1, 2, 3, Shop!”

Social media platforms were creating with the intent of connecting people. Whether those people be in your close circle of friends or a complete stranger. These social spaces allow people to express their feelings to one another, share their photos and works of art, share their knowledge about business or medicine. These spaces are meant to create communities, spaces where people feel the sense of belonging. Brands and marketers have recognized the potential in finding niche target markets within these communities. Instead of leaving these sacred social spaces alone, pop-up ads, banner ads have bombarded these spaces. Leading consumers to shield themselves from advertisements by turning on ad blockers.

During the session Shopping & Sacred Social Spaces, a panel comprised of Christine Cook, global Head of Advertising for Flipboard, Simon Whitcombe, Director of Global Marketing for Facebook and Steve Patrizi, Vice President of Marketing and Revenue for Imgur. Together they discussed how brands can still penetrate targeted communities within social spaces but become more organic.

Become ads that people want to turn their ad blockers off just to see.

SESSION

Each social media platform serves a different purpose and caters to particular communities based upon the content it produces. Flipboard is comprised of articles and magazines on a full spectrum of content. Perfect for those who enjoy reading copy for content. Christine understands that when her customers are up on Flipboard, reading away about various topics, that her customers are focusing only on Flipboard and the content their reading, not multitasking.

There is a sacred time during the day where Flipboard’s audience is predominately on Flipboard receiving their news.

Instead of adding banner ads to the sides of Flipboard’s site, advertisements are embedded into the articles and while they are noticeable, these ads aren’t distracting and are usually relevant to the topic the reader is digesting. Imgur is a messy space where you truly have to be a part of the community in order to fit in, quite literally. The content on Imgur consists of photos, some of them are hilarious photoshopped pictures, others are memes and gifs. You have to be a member of the site in order to view any content. All the content on Imgur is user generated so it’s in the hands of the

community decide what content is seen, Patrizi believes that user generated content makes a better platform because the community has the power. There are different communities for different topics, it’s a true community where people share their world with others through imagery. And of course, Facebook is dad. Facebook is the most mainstream social media spot, a place that is full of all sorts of ads that make you want to turn ad blockers on.

Facebook has the most users, it has the most capabilities and ways to display content, it’s the big red giant in the social media solar system. A perfect example of a platform that must adapt to organic advertising.

How exactly can brands penetrate these social spaces to sell and advertise to consumers without disturbing the peace? Brands must focus on organic placement. Marketing must be strategic, the content must be relevant, fit the consumers needs, wants and behaviors. It must make sense why that ad has been placed for this consumer to see. The content in the ads must address and create an understanding of the consumers cultures. Each social space has small niches that are waiting to be discovered and marketed to, the more targeted marketing can be towards a specific niche, the more likely you are to convert those potential customers. Understand and connect the dots of your prime customers interests.

Expand your range of potential consumers and look to similar brands for new customers, you’ll be surprised by the return. Help your customer by giving thoughtful and relevant recommendations based upon their needs, understand that the power to buy is in their hands and give them options. It’s all about learning about your brands customer and creating specific, targeted marketing to appeal to them.

Advertisements were the first disturbance in social spaces and as an extension, social commerce came about. Now ads have buyable options, where the picture will take you strait to the online store to buy. This presents an opportunity to regain trust with your consumer. People are much more likely to buy a product or service if its quick and easy to purchase, 1, 2, 3, done. Buyable ads present an opportunity to create quick conversion of a transaction. Create beautiful and engaging ads that people end up having FOMO because they didn’t see the ad. On social mobile is overtaking computers, focus on mobile ads over ones on the computer. Make the purchase easier, instead of leading back to the website to purchase, be able to input card and shipping info straight from the ad. The exchange of payment will only become easier, so make it easier on your customers as well.

CONCLUSION

With each social media platform serving a different purpose and having the ability to display content in different ways, there is a unique opportunity for marketers to take advantage not only of appealing to specific communities but creating unique ads for each social platforms. It’s time for marketers to be more innovative, produce content that people actually want to see. We are privy to so much technology and ways to create jaw dropping content yet we don’t. Instead ads on Facebook are bland, boring and literally all look the same. Where’s the ingenuity? People are bombarded by ugly ads that carry no value and serve no purpose for them. Create a purpose, make your customers look. Be a pioneer and create easy, buyable ads to optimize brand sales.

ABSTRACT

This session’s panel included: Carlos Gil of Inc. Magazine as the moderator and social influencers: Cyrene Quiamco, Danny Berk and Shaun Ayala. Over the course of the hour, I learned from some of the top Snapchat influencers and creators who have worked on campaigns with notable brands such as: ESPN, MTV, Samsung, Disney and Fox.

SESSION

Snapchat for Business: Working With Influencers Colby Bjornsen Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing colbybjornsen@gmail.com

LinkedIn:@colbybjornsen Personal Website Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Short-term Video Storytelling-Is the Future

Why should people use influencers? Because it is the most effective way of getting a message out to consumers, in a non-forceful, friendly way. Marketers don’t have the same reach that influencers have. Influencers gain respect and trust from their followers and are able to promote a brand in a friendly and casual manner. Why should brands use influencer marketing over a digital marketing agency?

Because it puts a face to your brand and generates more authentic advertising.

As a brand the three things to focus on when it comes to influencer marketing include: recruiting locally relevant talent, establishing clear and achievable goals, and crafting a clear brief for influencers to follow. While I worked as an intern for Fathom Events we used influencer campaigns to market a couple of our movies. Our first campaign promoted a Barbie movie targeted for young girls and their mothers.

Since this was our first attempt at an influencer campaign we didn’t get the exact results we were looking for. The Barbie photos released via Instagram for our campaign were more sensual than we intended. The captions sometimes didn’t even feature our brand’s name. For the next campaign, we made sure to narrow down our influencers to people who would engage with our targeted audience and promote content that aligned with our brand. Our brief for talent was specific and included the key brand elements required for each post. Future influencer campaigns performed significantly better following these three tips!

A valuable aspect Snapchat provides is that in order to follow someone a user has to manually search, look up and add a username. There’s no interface for browsing users, searching hashtags and anonymously viewing. You must physically follow someone to see what they’re up to. For brands, it guarantees that your audience cares and wants to know what you’re doing. No other platform can provide such a valuable audience following.

However, when it comes to looking for and finding Snapchat influencers for your brand, it can be difficult to locate the best people. The panel suggested using the11thsecond.com and ghostcodes.com to find snapchat influencers that match your brand.

Snapchat is different than other social media outlets because it has an active audience where they can engage and interact with the story. When working with Snapchat influencers specifically make sure to keep your story short but memorable. The whole idea of shortterm video storytelling is the fact that it is not extremely time consuming so don’t turn your story into an entire campaign. The content an influencer creates on Snapchat is about the audience and encouraging them to participate and be a part of the story. Using high energy and making the content fun will result in a more memorable story.

I’ve read a fair amount about influencer marketers as I find them to be a fascinating concept. Regular people getting paid to take a picture or video and promote a brand, sounds awesome! What I didn’t realize is some of the constraints around influencer marketing. Legally, marketers are required to tag sponsored posts as ads. This draws a fuzzy line around what brands are allowed to have influencers post for them. As influencer marketing continues to grow so will the rules and regulations regarding what’s acceptable and what is not.

CONCLUSION

Throughout this session, I discovered insight into why every brand should hire influencers and tips and tricks for using Snapchat in businesses. As Professor Sandra Young reiterated every class “content is king”. She’s right, content is still king but without effective distribution, your content will blend in with the thousands of other messages out there. The importance of influencer marketing has grown rapidly as social media has taken over. In this digital world-people want the best of the best. We have access to endless amounts of information and reviews online and therefore trust what other people have to say over a company simply promoting itself. People often follow individuals they idolize and admire on social media and when you see them using a brand or product you to want to use it.

Influencer marketing is a must if you’re a serious marketer today.

Short-form video storytelling is where the industry is headed. Since Snapchat’s release in September of 2011, both Instagram and Facebook have followed suite introducing Instagram stories (August 2016) and Facebook stories (March 2017) to their applications.

The basic idea with stories is the ability to develop short user-generated photo and video content that disappears after a limited period of time. Short-lived visual interactions lead to in-the-moment content that tends to be unfiltered. It’s a great vehicle to tell a real, authentic, and personable story. It’s no secret that short-form video is dominating the social space.

There is currently no way to show the ROI on a Snapchat campaign. With no analytics, some marketers are timid to give Snapchat a try. However, an influencer can monitor engagement by measuring the number of views a snap receives and the number of snaps being sent back in response. As short-form video storytelling continues to grow, so will the ways to analyze and collect data on the success of the campaign.

ABSTRACT

Snapchat for Business: Working with Influencers Deborah Finestone Graduate: MS Marketing d.finestone@ icloud.com Social Handles LinkedIn Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Why You Should work With Influencers

Several years ago, Snapchat was not a well-known social media platform. Today, snapchat has evolved into a platform with tremendous marketing potential for businesses. To get a stronger presence on Snapchat, brands have begun to work with influences who have large follower bases. Influencers can aid in spreading brand awareness, growing numbers of followers, and content creation. A handful of reasons have been proposed for why brands should work with influencers, some of which include authenticity, creating content that speaks to specific audiences, and the fact that influencers have a robust understanding of how Snapchat works. Before brands decide to work with an influencer, multiple factors need to be considered. First, the influencer should be a good match for the brand and be able to learn about the target audience to create content that will speak to that audience. Second, companies should determine what the return-on-investment (ROI) would be if they were to work with an influencer. Influencers and companies have different definitions of ROI, and logistics should be discussed before beginning work with an influencer. Snapchat influencers can have a significant impact on a brands social media presence, and should be used strategically in social media planning.

SESSION

Snapchat influencers work with top companies, such as ESPN, MTV, Disney, and others. More companies are working with influencers for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that influencers know the art of storytelling on Snapchat, and have the ability to generate professional content. Content includes short videos, product announcements, as well as behind the scenes features. Influencers also use Snapchat to encourage users to follow brands they work with. Consumers look up to and respect influences, and influencers can motivate consumers to not only follow brands on social media, but to look up their products and services. Another pro to using influencers is their storytelling ability. Since influencers spend their time creating content for various brands, they have to be able to tell audiences a story, otherwise, their campaigns will not be successful.

As the marketing landscape changes, there is an increased emphasis on storytelling in messaging. If companies are not telling stories in their marketing campaigns, they are making mistakes.

Advertisements and related content should have a clear message, and these messages can often be communicated through stories. As a consumer, I enjoy seeing how different brands share their stories through their marketing. I also believe that influencers have the ability to teach brands stronger storytelling techniques to implement in future marketing endeavors.

Short form videos are commonly used on Snapchat, and are a great way to create meaningful stories. Not only are these videos frequently used, they are the future of Snapchat content according to the influencers on the panel. Influencers can begin the process of creating short form videos for brands so they will understand how to create similar content in the future to keep up with Snapchat trends.

Influencers can either be hired for a short or long period of time. This depends on the brand as well as the scope of the campaign. However, it is important that brands do extensive research in order to find an influencer that match the personality and vibe of the brand. If the match is not good, then the influencer will have a tough time creating content for that brand. There are multiple methods brands can use to find influencers. In some cases, brands will be familiar with certain influencers and will reach out to them directly. Ghost code apps also can be used to identify influencers. These apps locate influencers by specific categories, and brands can search by category to find influencers. It is critical that brands conduct research on the influence prior to making a connection. Not only should the influencer be a good match with the brand, they also need to be able to relate to and make content for that brand’s audiences. If the content is not related to the wants and needs of the audience, then the influencer will not be a good fit for that particular company. As mentioned previously, influencers need to be skilled at telling compelling stories about the brand and creating content that consumers will enjoy viewing. Influencers tell stories in their own ways, and the storytelling method of the influencer should be evaluated additionally.

Influencers do not only have the responsibility of creating content for brands, they also need to help brands monitor accounts during the 24-hour period when a story is live.

During this time, consumers are most likely to connect with the brand, and someone, whether it is the influencer or a brand employee, needs to be there for the audience to answer questions and create engagement. To me, this is critical. It is more challenging for consumers to reach brands on Snapchat, and if consumers are taking the time to reach out to a brand, someone should be there to respond to and engage with consumers.

CONCLUSION

Influencers will continue to be important for brands on Snapchat. Their creativity and innovative ideas are needed to help brands become successful on the platform. Influencers touch business and marketing in multiple ways. I believe that brands will begin to share more stories through influencers on Snapchat rather than sharing advertisements. If there is a successful relationship between a brand and the influencer they work with, then companies will see a significant increase in the number of followers on Snapchat and increased awareness of the brand and the products and services they offer. Successful campaigns also lead to positive results for influencers. As they create more campaigns, their portfolios will increase and more companies will reach out to them to do work.

Clearly, there are many benefits to working with influencers on Snapchat. However, there needs to be a shift in the metrics used to measure the success of influencers and their campaigns. ROI is a critical marketing metric, and brands need to be sure that they will see value from using an influencer. During the session, an attendee asked the panelists how they measure ROI. Panelist and successful influencer, Shaun Ayala, mentioned that he measures ROI by engagement, and not the revenue that the company receives during and after a campaign. He also stated that it is not about ROI, influencers are about social media engagement and creating meaningful content. This was interesting to listen to. Marketers on mobile platforms need to be measuring ROI. Even though there are multiple methods to measure ROI on social media platforms, revenue and traditional facets of ROI need to be investigated to see if it is worth using an influencer. If a company were to spend several thousand dollars on an influencer and not receive anything in return, would the campaign have been worth it? The answer to this question will be different depending the brand, however, I believe that brands need to carefully examine what their return is going to be. If the campaign goal was to increase awareness of a brand and boost visits to the company website, and both happened, then the campaign could be considered successful. Hiring an influencer can cost a lot of money, and before going through with the process, companies should consider if it will be worth making the investment.

Influencers have huge potential to make an impact on brand marketing. If they continue to create meaningful content for brands and share stories in impactful ways, influencers will remain successful and have a positive impact on the brands they work with.

Snapchat for Business: Working with Social Media Influencers Matthew J. Frost MBA in Marketing Matthewjfrost3@gmail .com Link to Flipboard Magazine Snapchat and The Social Media Influencers who profit from the it has a problem.

ABSTRACT There is a common narrative prevalent in the marketing world that key decision makers don’t best know how to leverage Social Media. Apps such as Snapchat and the recently deceased Vine are an entrenched part of the social life of young consumers. How best to use these platforms to engage with customers is the million-dollar question, and increasingly companies are betting on Social Media Influencers to show them the answer.

The problem with this approach is quantifying a social media campaigns return on investment, especially with the analytical bereft Snapchat, is nearly impossible. So, how do businesses work with the Social Media Influencer community and should they?

SESSION My original notes for this session were incredibly snarky and unhelpful. As the token elder millennial in attendance the panelists, Mr. Carlos Gil and company, were initially annoying and I doubted seriously that they could provide any meaningful information. Yes, Social is here to stay, though teens and tweens now engage more commonly via chat apps, and how brands build and maintain a presence using any of the various apps is incredibly important. Social Media can be a vital part of any marketing campaign, and should be if the engagement makes sense for the Brand.

However, at the start of this panel I had the sneaking suspicion that Mr. Gil and company were selling us something from the “south end or a northbound goose�. My mind was changed when both Mr. Shaun Ayala and Ms. Cyrene Quiamco took over the panel. Experienced marketers, they were able to quantify the return on investment for a curmudgeonly marketing student such as myself.

The key value of short form story apps such as Snapchat is that, in the hands of trusted and popular Social Media Influencers, they leverage an existing personal brand to engage consumers on an individual level.

Though often clunky in the hands or a less experienced user, experienced Snapchat storytellers can build a brand experience for consumers nearly instantaneously. Users already trust the personalities that they follow, so when these personalities introduce new products or services there is less of the knee jerk distrust found with more traditional social media marketing. Snapchat and the influencers that specialize in it are not the only answer to brand relevance amongst younger consumers however, far from it.

The limitation of Snapchat and other social media platforms to drive brand relevance was not addressed by this panel. Social media platforms such as Snapchat excel at creating initial exposure or awareness for companies, especially new brands. However, very little of this awareness can be tracked to the ultimate decider of Brand success, sales. Asked multiple times about how marketing professionals at traditional companies could quantify the profitability of leveraging influencers, the panel never produced a good answer. The youngest member, Mr. Danny Berk, ultimately offered up impressions as his metric.

Circling back to the discussions of Ms. Quiamco and Mr. Ayala, I was struck with the belief that the true value of Snapchat is in the beginning of the consumer journey. This is indeed valuable, though it is probably not worth the money that companies are currently paying for it. Until onboard and connected analytics and are integrated into Snapchat, it’s usefulness will always be called into question.

CONCLUSION

All personal feelings aside, there is definitely usefulness in Snapchat and other similar platforms. Businesses have to think past the “millenials are on Snapchat” narrative and truly use Snapchat to tell a story that engages users on a personal level. It starts a conversation for consumers that, if done well, can tie back to a Brand. Experienced storytellers can be used efficiently and to great effect.

However, as I’ve mentioned before, companies are currently over paying for this service due to a lack of understanding. This misunderstanding is to the benefit of Social Media Influencers and I am doubtful it will last much longer. True Snapchat “rock stars” should begin to be more savvy about how to present themselves to marketing professionals and prepare to take a hit once analytics can truly quantify their contribution to the entirety of the consumer journey.

Though many major brands are leveraging influencers on Snapchat to some effect, the pipe dream of a startup company having their product “snapped” with one of the Kardashians and leading to instant sales is increasingly becoming fiction. Blatant product placement absent an engaging narrative on any social media platform will gain brands little. Also, consumers only need one bad experience with a product or service presented by a trusted Snapchat storyteller to create a social media insurgency. Brands who run afoul of their customers will quickly see Snapchat and other social platforms leveraged to attack them regardless of how many paid influencers they have.

ABSTRACT

Influencers are the new celebrities of social media and a hot topic of conversation at SxSW. As social platforms are becoming more and more integrated into daily business practices, brands are sometimes at a loss of how to connect with their audience, or are simply looking for more exposure.

This is where influencers come in. With extensive reach capabilities based off their tremendous following size, influencers have already gained the trust of their audience, allowing brands to capitalize on that for a price.

Snapchat for Business: Working with Influencers

SESSION

While I personally felt that this session was just an hour long opportunity for the panelists to shamelessly plug influencers, particularly themselves, there was still some useful information provided that initiated deeper thought. Let’s start out with a simple question first: why should businesses use influencers for marketing purposes? This was the posed Logan Leake question that began the session. This is where I first noticed a flaw in the presentation—with the word should. Instead, perhaps asking “What is the value in using influencers for Undergraduate: BSBA businesses?” would have been so much more affluent. I Marketing noticed that I was one of (out of perhaps a handful) the youngest people in the room. The influencers realized who logan.leake@aol.com their audience would be (as they should) and decided to drive the point home that they, being younger and more Instagram:@LoganMatoaka “hip”, are up-to-date with what the younger generation wants, therefore they should be hired to reach that target. As a millennial in that room, I couldn’t help to roll my eyes, but Link to Flipboard perhaps mostly in part because I myself am a marketing Magazine major.

Let’s get back to their posed question, though. “Why should Link to Session businesses use influencers for marketing purposes?” Answer: Because they make professional content as their job. Wow, I didn’t realize that influencers were the only people to make Influencers Influencing professional content as part of their job description? (That Brands to Hire Them was laced with sarcasm if you couldn’t tell). Despite that silly statement I will give them credit for their next statement: “We know how to get the message across in 10 seconds.”

This is actually an incredibly valid assertion. As Snapchat is a relatively new social media, there are a lot of businesses out there scratching their heads on how to best utilize it. This is where hiring an influencer would provide value. Why businesses should use influencers on Snapchat for marketing purposes is a much more concentrated argument that I can get behind.

One of the panelists made the comment that because they know how to use Snapchat this makes them “authentic” to their millennial audience. Authentic in the sense that whatever they’re communicating to their audience is generally well received because it doesn’t feel like direct advertising. This is also a good point in the sense that there are definite techniques required for success on such a transient platform. Everything posted on Snapchat only lasts a maximum of 24 hours. Knowing how to best utilize that time in a particular capacity is a skill that not everyone possesses.

If a brand does hire an influencer as a creator, then the marketing team should be working alongside them in unison and not dictating the “script”. Because of the point that influencers have a degree of authenticity with their audience, their audience would be able to determine when a social media “celebrity” isn’t being authentic. This is much more harmful than if an influencer were not to stick to script. The audience on Snapchat does not want to feel like they are being sold on something. If they decide they want a product or to engage with a brand it should feel like their idea and this is where influencers have a lot of experience. It’s important for the influencer to create their own content and stance and to relay that message how they normally communicate with their audience.

One of the main things influencers have the ability to do with their audience that one might not typically expect on a platform like Snapchat is getting them involved. The panel emphasized how important it is to have your followers actively participate and respond to the influencers Snapchat Stories. Think of it as a good old fashioned Call to Action. This level of engagement reinforces what is being communicated as it allows for the audience to interact beyond simply watching the story, possibly forgetting about it, and moving on to the next.

There were a few disjointed statements some of the panelists made that conflicted with what most marketers know to be true. Such as “There’s an absolute difference between marketing and storytelling” however, if done correctly marketing should be the communication of a story and is highly impactful when mastered. There was also the claim that “marketing doesn’t have personality” therefore, hire an influencer to give your marketing personality. This is entirely false. Brand personas exist for a reason, and it is the brands that recognize and focus on this that are best positioned in the consumers’ minds.

Brand persona is all about the personalization/humanization of marketing and businesses.

Influencers should compliment a businesses’ established personality, not try and invent one for them.

CONCLUSION While I did not always love what the panelist were saying there was definite validity to some of their statements. Perhaps it was an issue of delivery that made me feel the little bit of disdain I felt for this panel but overall there is a definite art form to using Snapchat from a business perspective. Gaining the use of an influencer definitely has its perks but its important for brands to know exactly what they want out of the relationship.

ABSTRACT

Just because someone looks great doesn’t mean that they are happy. For years advertisers have put out unrealistic and unreal images of perfection and beauty, now social media has expanded that unattainable ideal. Girls in particular fall into the trap of wanting to look like the photo-shopped, edited, and enhanced models they see on magazine covers and in ads. Young people are being raised not knowing the difference between what is real and what is not, which leads to low self-esteem, unhappiness and even depression.

Social Media Realvolution: What’s After Perfect Colby Bjornsen Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing colbybjornsen@gmail.com

LinkedIn:@colbybjornsen Personal Website Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Healthy Self Image Through Social Media

It’s no secret that the beauty industry has a long history of body shaming. The media definition of beauty is a narrow and non-diverse one. This panel discussed how and why advertisers and influencers should use social media to showcase authentic beauty and real lives. The panel included: Paul Bedwell, owner and creator of Clapit social media network, British model Charli Howard, and clinical psychologist Dr. Vivian Diller.

SESSION

Charli Howard is an advocate for body diversity and positivity. She was incredibly brave to speak out against her modeling agency for being told she was “too big” at a size 2. She was repeatedly told to lose weight if she wanted to save her career. She wrote an open letter on Facebook that went viral. She is fighting a difficult cause against the unrealistic traditional ideals of beauty and has seen an outpouring of support. She never realized how many women have been affected by the beauty industry and have poor self-images. She wants kids to realize it’s not all real. She doesn’t want people to aspire to be something they are not but instead to aspire to what makes them happy.

Dr. Vivian Diller has studied how beauty in the media impacts how we see ourselves. She believes the narrow definition of beauty in our culture has the largest influence of how people view themselves and it is detrimental to children, especially girls in America. Dr. Diller wants people to know the difference between reality and art. Artists use tools like Photoshop and airbrushing to make art for the Advertising and fashion industries.

While working with youth, Paul Bedwell saw the influence social media could have. He recognized the opportunity to empower individuals to use social media responsibility. He

wants audiences to embrace a natural, healthy and individual concept of beauty. In social media you are being commented on, judged and held up to unrealistic standards all the time and Mr. Bedwell wants to help change that.

We, as a society, need to be more responsible for what we put out there, what we “like” and what we are willing to except. In recent years hoards of people have taken to social platforms to talk about body image and to reject our culture’s narrow image of beauty. Body positivity and diversity are trending! People want to see images like themselves.

Advertisers are supposed to sell services and products, but they should consider the negative social impact their marketing has and use their influence to promote diversity and authenticity. More and more models and celebrities (like Kerry Washington, Kate Winslet, and Zendaya) are using social media to promote realistic goals, real beauty, and authenticity. Major companies like Dove (“Real Beauty” campaign), Coca-Cola (“It’s Beautiful” campaign), and Chevrolet (“Find New Roads” campaign) are doing their part to promote inclusion and diversity.

CONCLUSION

The world we live in has constantly bombarded us with a narrow definition of beauty and that message has come with a price for a generation of young women who feel ugly or inferior. Luckily, there have been some positive shifts in marketing strategies within recent years and brands (and the public) are slowing embracing a more realistic and inclusive view of what is beautiful.

Social media has changed the marketing industry. Sponsored videos are more important than print ads. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter have taken “word of mouth” advertising to a whole new level. “Influencers” (social media personalities) have a huge impact on brand promotions. The big influence of social media can play a major role in the evolution towards authenticity. For young people growing up with social media, Digital Marketing has no boundaries. Putting real people at the forefront will help build trust and engage customers with brands at a more personal level. I believe the marketing industry has a moral obligation to use the influence of social media marketing to promote diversity and authenticity.

ABSTRACT

Session: Sold: Will Customers Buy your Big Idea?

All too often in the pursuit of a great customer serving product designers forget that customers will have to pay for their product. It does not matter how good and how useful a product is if the customer base it is designed for isn’t able to afford it. There are many great ways of lowering the cost for new customers and adding value for the consumer without making a product more expensive. By gathering customer feedback without letting customers know about the price of the product they are testing creates an impression which is more positive than realistic. Finding the balance between charging customers too much and not charging them enough for a product is crucial to the success of any enterprise.

Nicholas Kieler

SESSION

Graduate MBA

This session consisted mostly of software and web service developers who had all developed products which benefitted from unusual pricing strategies. One of the panel members had developed a software package which was free at its most basic level but became more expensive once someone wanted to purchase the professional version.

Another panel member had developed a website which was free for users, but for which companies pay to access data and curate their own listings. The panel being made up of successful business owners who had all employed various odd pricing strategies to their advantage did a lot to establish the credibility of the presenters and the information they were sharing.

Nicholas.kieler@gmail.com

www.linkedin.com/in/nic holas-kieler/ Link to Flipboard Magazine How Low Can You Go?

First and foremost, the main theme of the presentation was about the importance of price when designing a product.

When one of the presenters explained that ‘there is no such thing as a product market fit, there is only a product market price fit’ it really resonated with me, and since this panel I have said this phrase literally hundreds of times. I can’t not overemphasize how important this point was, how relevant it is to the state of the industry, and how beautifully succinctly it was expressed. The presenters explained that some companies will test their products and run focus groups without ever mentioning the price, only to spend thousands of dollars producing and distributing something their customer base could never have afforded. It is important to ask the question ‘Is there a market for this?’ and more importantly ‘How much is the market for this willing to pay for it?

Barriers to purchase can include things like the difficulty of the buying process or the skill required for a customer to use a product but the biggest and most common barrier is the price of a product. One way around that initial hesitation is to offer a free version of your product that a customer can try before purchasing the full version. It’s very important to be careful about how much is offered with a free version of a product: If it’s not enough customers may be disappointed and think that the full version will also be bad, if too much is given away however there won’t be incentive for a customer to purchase. It is important to stay wary of ‘Fremium’ strategies for this reason, because making a mistake with how much is initially offered can be disastrous enough to end a firm.

Another very commonly used and effective strategy is to make a price seem very good by comparing it to a much worse price. A perfect example of this strategy is selling small popcorn for $5 so you can sell a large popcorn for $6. Even though popcorn is very cheap and likely people would not buy it at the $6 price point by seeing that a similar product is much less in value but not much lower in cost a customer will think they are getting a deal by buying the more expensive product. It’s important to keep in mind that different prices are associated with different levels of value and appeal to different consumers. Good, better, best pricing is another example of effective pricing strategy. Lots of companies compete to offer services with a lower price to that they can try to increase their market share, but the lowest price is not always the best option. Some customers associate a high cost product with high quality, and trying to beat competitors with a lower price can have the opposite effect as intended. It is important to consider what your target demographic is before you decide on a pricing strategy.

In addition to pricing strategy it is also important to consider cost strategy, as the former has a direct impact on the latter. There are many ways of offering a potential customer value without having to increase the cost of the product to do so. One thing that the presenters talked about was the ‘Network effect’ which is that the value of a product increases with the number of people who are using it. A great example of the network effect is Facebook. If Facebook did not have a lot of users it would not be a very good product, the more users that there are on Facebook the more content is generated, the more connections can be made, and the more customers advertisers have access to. Another way to offer a product with low costs is to offer your buying customers something your free customers are creating.

A great example of a company that does this well is YouTube. YouTube does not directly pay its content creators, instead it gives them a portion of their advertising revenue and keeps some of the revenue for themselves. In this way, YouTube is capitalizing on a resource which for them is free, but for which they profit from because of their facilitation.

CONCLUSION

In the world of business and startups, every advantage must be considered. Any newly created or existing enterprise has to deal with multiple competitors who are all competing for the same groups of people. The success of a firm depends heavily on the ability of that firm to consider every possible factor and to manipulate as many elements as possible to their advantage. To be able to account for as much as possible a firm has to not only be aware of all of the potential factors which are affecting them, but all of the possibilities in all of the strategies that surround that factor.

Pricing is an important part of product design, and product design is an important part of a successful enterprise. It is not enough to know that ‘pricing is important’ which is only scratching the surface of what is true. Pricing is one important factor, but the depth is much greater than many product designers think. To know all of the very different and very innovative pricing solutions means the ability to manipulate this factor much more successfully than a competitor.

ABSTRACT

Known for their satire and posts regarding the 3 H’s of the internet (humor, hotness and humanity, theChive has built a hardworking environment that boasts creativity. Chris Bomely, theChive’s creative director, who has worked with big name companies such as Levi’s, Fiat, Gap and 7up as a freelancer, believes that staying creative is the key to being fresh and successful.

Staying Creative in an Ever Changing Landscape Halle Farago Undergraduate: BA Studio Art and Italian, Marketing Minor halle.farago@gmail.com

Linkedin Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Fostering and Maintaining Genuine Creativity at theChive

SESSION

Chris Bomely claims he’s one of the older people working at theChive within the sea of millennials that have access to two free bars and a huge slide in theChive headquarters. Bomely questions why some of the employees are so spoiled and remembers the fun, hip environment they are allowed to run around in and call their work space. Homely takes the challenge head on to promote creativity within the company that is authentic and sparks the creativity in others. They have a big social media following and a millennial audience that enjoys the comedy as well as the relevant content.

Since Bomely has worked in many spheres of the creative world, he has come up with a series of guidelines to follow to enhance creativity while remaining level headed as well and modest. Here are his three main rules for staying creative: 1.

Do what you did. Whatever got you to the next step, keep doing that. Keep learning from the people and fellow designers around you. And sometimes, take a backseat on a project. 2. Shut the fuck up. Bomely reminded us that here are people in this world with “real” jobs who have to go out and perform laborious tasks and maintenance jobs. As creatives we need to put that into perspective and appreciate people for the other jobs they are doing in the world. Once you’ve understood your place and can appreciate the work of others, think about your voice and when to use it in a meaningful way. If you're bitching about a problem, you're the problem. 3. Be the dude (or dudette).

Employees typically become the kind of workers their manager expects them to be, so work hard and set a good example for other employees, especially the younger ones.

Most importantly, lead and don't manage and work with a happy mindset that will show through in your work.

Bomely’s past experience has also led him to other important life lessons. Ideas don’t come easily so doodle, doodle, doodle. Eventually the right idea will come. Other than practice making perfect, be nice, or shut the fuck up (also a

direct quote from Bomely). Being nice will get one very far, and not just acting nice but being genuinely nice. In a working environment where collaboration is crucial, understanding how you can help others allows for more genuine connections to build within the office setting. Another important concept is to work hungry. If you are wanting a job or a particular position more than anyone else, and truly show that, then you will get ahead.

To stay on top and timely, learn to love a deadline; If you don't get a deadline you won't get the job done. Your best work is still inside you waiting to be produced, but on the other end, if something you make is awful, don't be afraid to say it’s awful. It’s the only way we can grow and learn from our design mistakes. Initiative is important too, so if you're the one that says “give me the project, give me the task”, you'll be the one people come to for advice or to help and even head your own project.

Even when everything in the office can be crazy, make sure in any environment that there is time to wind down and process and think. For theChive, the typical brainstorming session consists of sitting in a black room with a candle and talking about all the projects that are coming up. For inspiration Bomely believes in meditation. Whatever it is that gets you into one thought and forgetting about everything else is that activity or process you should do.

He suggests doing that every day, whether it’s actually meditation, running or swimming, it will allow you to clear your mind of deadlines and hone in on the creativity that is abundant inside of you.

CONCLUSION

Since theChive is focused on reaching millennials and fostering their creativity, these aspects are extremely important to their brand. They are a website first, but they are advertising the three H’s of the internet and writing to attract audience members that agree with, and laugh with, their content. To put out content that is authentic and true to the brand, Bomley is trying to foster a genuine type of creativity among the young employees. It’s important in today’s society to appreciate your work as a designer, and making the most of your creativity for the digital world.

ABSTRACT

Subconsciously Seduced by Sound Kendra Arenkill Undergraduate: Marketing kendraa2@earthlink.net LinkedIn Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Sound: The Secret to Good Advertising

Many successful ad campaigns are successful because of their use of sound. Much of advertising uses subconscious communication, which is exactly the use of sound in advertising. People tend to listen to sound selectively; sound has the power to make people tune-in when they hear something of interest, or simply listen passively. But sound is important because it has the ability to influence emotional memory, behavior and brand selection. That is why it is so important in advertising. In this session, Sam Crowther from A Million Ads takes participants down a colorful learning journey, as he plays audio during the entire presentation to prove his points. Sam explores how brands have come to use sound to successfully communicate their messages in a creative way.

SESSION

Sam Crowther is deaf in his right ear, which is one of the reasons he became fascinated in the workings of the brain its relation with sound. Sound is one of the first of our five senses to develop in a fetus, where we first hear a heartbeat.

From there, we are born into a world in which we are surrounded by sounds, such as birds singing and waves washing up against the shore. We then use our voices to try to communicate as babies, even though we don’t know how to speak, other people are somehow able to understand feelings and emotion through this. Children look for the musical aspects of a person’s voice. In fact, linguistics, or how we express our emotions and actually say things, is critical; this includes volume, tone, and pitch. Great public speakers will use linguistics to their advantage to get an audience to feel and respond a certain way. Great examples of this include Barack Obama, who studied Martin Luther King’s speeches, and current President Donald Trump who made his audience the main focus, harnessing their emotions.

Football players will chant to pump up their emotion before they go onto the field to play, and soldiers sing before going into battle to help unify them. Sound is therefore powerful in its ability to produce strong emotions and elicit responses in others.

While we are surrounded by sound in our lives, certain sounds have the ability to take us back to different points in our life because sound is linked to memory. Hearing a particular song has the ability to remind you of a person or place. Though often times, hearing is passive. There are

countless sounds happening around us at once that much of what we hear, we tune out.

Sound becomes active only when you’re truly listening to the sounds around you. People unconsciously practice the chariot effect; sounds that are relevant, such as your name, will draw your attention, even if the sound is faint and coming from far away. This is the result of our brain still working with the sounds that we passively hear. For this reason, it’s important for advertisers to use sounds that are relevant and stand out to consumers. These days, consumers are not always watching TV with their eyes. Instead, they multitask and also read a book, check their phone, or surf the internet while “watching” TV. This presents a problem for advertisers unless sound is utilized correctly. Advertisers need audio that will make consumers look up from what they’re doing and instead watch the TV commercial.

There are many different audio tactics that can be used to gain consumer interest. Think back to the days of childhood and certain jingles will stand out. During the summer, the ice cream man would drive around playing the same tune over and over, which made the jingle synonymous with ice cream. You often heard the ice cream truck before you saw it, and as soon as you heard it, you immediately wanted ice cream. This is a great example of the power of sound and advertising. Kit Kat, Coca Cola, Meow Mix, and Stanley Steemer are all very different companies that have successfully utilized sound in the form of a jingle. The audio of a commercial can also be used to create a sense of “liking” with the consumer by matching consumer core values or reflecting the things that they like. One example of this tactic is a Carlsberg ad that announced relatable events over the speakers of a sporting event. One such ad was the announcement to a man that his wife was pregnant only to be revealed that it was a joke and an ad to drink Carlsberg beer instead. This tactic pulled the listener in. Using authority through vocals is another tactic to gain consumer attention. Finally, using a scarcity tactic in which a “limited edition” product is announced can have a profound effect on consumers because it creates a sense of urgency.

Advertisers can also take advantage of utilizing sounds that consumers often don’t pay attention to, such as the sound of their computer or phone turning on, or the sounds on an airplane. These are sounds that consumers can relate to (the “liking” tactic) and may draw their attention in advertising. Hearing the sound enough will create an association between the sound and the product.

CONCLUSION

Overall, sound is a very important element of advertising. It’s the brands and ads with memorable audio that stick in people’s minds. People who work in strategy and creative departments of advertising agencies would benefit from putting a lot of time and thought into their audio choices. There are few people who specialize in sound and it would be beneficial if advertising agencies began hiring such specialists. Advertisers should try many different audio tactics to discover the best way to gain audience attention, although this will be different for each company and campaign. The campaign goal should alway be in mind when choosing an audio tactic. There should be a balance between the audio that attract to the consumer conscious and subconscious. The medium is the message, so it is important that advertisers sell sound first and foremost. Professions who are involved in product research and development should also take into consideration the sounds that their products will make, because these will be the sounds that consumers eventually associate with the product. The use of audio will not decline anytime soon.

ABSTRACT

Subconsciously Seduced by Sound

Cars honking, birds chirping, the kettle whistling, leaves rustling on the street – we are surrounded by sounds everywhere we go. Rhythms emerge from the gentle ticktock of the clock, thump-thump of the washing machine or the tap-tap of that nervous student’s pencil. Everything we do is followed by sound. Often, we turn to music when times are hard or use it to express our happiness. Sounds and music are deeply connected to our emotions and our memories. Have you ever gone a day without hearing a song? Probably not. Songs aren’t just musical compositions you find on your phone or computer, they are all around us.

Utilizing this innate need for music and sounds is what can set a part a good marketing campaign from a great one.

Elena Changalidi

SESSION

Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing & International Business Elena.Changalidi@du. edu LinkedIn: /in/elenachangalidi Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session

One of the first things that we hear when we are brought into this world is our mother’s heartbeat. From that point on, we are taken on a journey that is constantly filled with sounds.

Sam Crowther from A Million Ads, seduced us with sweet melodies and catchy tunes in this presentation all about sound.

It is no secret that many people find solace in music. Many find peace, relaxation, motivation, a way to escape - all through a sound playing into their head. We hear sounds around us everyday, from the birds chirping outside, to the keyboard clicks as I am writing this article. We often express our emotions with sounds. Have you ever sent a song to your loved one because you just thought that it fit your relationship perfectly? We’ve all done it, and that’s because music and sounds are an integral part of our lives. Not only can certain genres make you feel more relaxed, specific sounds can also bring back memories. After smell, sound is the closest linked to memory. In fact, there are moments in everyone’s life that is distinctly categorized by music. Maybe it’s the song that was playing as you took your first dance as husband and wife, or the song that was playing when you walked up to get your diploma, or the first note that your child played on the piano. Sounds can transform us into a place in time that is priceless and deeply embedded in us.

There are many ways that marketers can utilize sound and music to draw the consumer in and make them feel a certain way. Ever heard an ice cream? That is a perfect example of a relevant message at the relevant place and time. I’m sure

that sweet melody (no pun intended) came on a hot, summer day that was just begging for you to cool yourself with a cold treat.

Music, much like anything else, is about influence. Sam talked about 6 core weapons of influence and I’ll relay a few of those. First of all, you have to do something that is likable.

People associate themselves with things and products and people that fill the selective categories they have picked. Along with that, there has to be commitment and consistency.

This too, has it’s limits. There needs to be a feasible scarcity that will make people want more. And most importantly – storytelling. The best way to deliver a message is not through stating cold, hard facts but making them flow from one another and creating an impact.

People can tell when you’re lying, and that is a whole lot easier to do when you’re just spitting out random facts.

It is simply not possible for the human brain to register everything that happens on a conscious level. Constantly, we are being exposed to music and sounds that we might not even realize are playing. Other times, it’s because a song or tune has been played so many dang times that we remember it. Theme songs to shows, or movies or commercials, are great at this repetition technique. But the most important part of all those sounds is that they have to fit in context with whatever they are accompanying. How should the music make the consumer feel?

Sam brought up a great experiment where a grocery store had two wines out on display – a French and a German one. For the first few weeks, they softly played French music in the background and then for the next few weeks they softy played German music in the background. When the French music was being played, the grocery store saw sales of 5 to 1 of the French wine. When the German music was being played, the store saw sales of 3 to 1 of the German wine. When asked at the cash register if the music had any influence on the customer’s purchase decision, many of them said that they didn’t even notice that there was anyplaying!

CONCLUSION

By utilizing music and different sounds, marketers can elicit strong emotions in consumers and make connections with their brand that goes down to a very natural place in our minds.

From the day that we are born we hear sounds all around us. Those sounds get embedded in our memories and a random jingle on the street can transport us to a place many years ago. Commercials and advertising use music everyday to engage their consumers with their content and make lasting impressions. Music is something that has always been around and if used properly, can be the most powerful tool a marketer has.

ABSTRACT

Subcon-sciously Seduced by Sound Eleanor Hancock Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing Minor: French eleanorwhancock@gmail. com LinkedIn Instagram: ellie_hancock95 Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to session Storytelling to the Subconscious with Sound

The digital age is responsible for a dramatic decline in the human attention span. However brand advertising has a powerful secret weapon, sound. More specifically, it is communicating to people’s subconscious with sound. From utilizing the passive nature of hearing to psychologically conditioning people to use selective attention to make people actively listen, relevant sounds have a fascinating effect on influencing emotional memory, behavior, and brand selection. This session by Sam Crowther was an auditory journey that gave extraordinary insight into our relationship with sound and how it is helping brands communicate the way humans do instinctively.

SESSION

Sound is the first sense we experience as a fetus. Whether it is conscious or subconscious, our minds are always aware of it and interpreting it. As we grow, conditioning helps us form opinions on what sounds we find relaxing, fearful, and so on.

For example, the sound of a crying baby or a beeping heart monitor may induce certain memories and feelings associated with concern, fear, or anxiety. Audio is a power most closely linked to memory behind smell. If you make it more musical, it becomes more memorable. Spoken language has a different effect than music. With that said, it’s not what you say it’s the way you say it that can transport us to certain moments in our lives. These memories have capabilities to increase endorphins, suppress pain, induce a physical reaction, or even a communal reaction like in sports games or singing.

Certain things grab our attention. Hearing is defined as passive while listening as active. We give things selective attention, also known as the cocktail party effect. Things that are unusual, relevant, or familiar draw our attention. A classic example is an ice cream truck on a sunny day. The ice cream truck jingle is familiar and relevant making you change your behavior. This is where sound has strong influence in shifting consumer behavior for brands.

Influence has 6 core weapons: 1. Liking We are influenced by people, products, services, and brands that we like. We like things like ourselves. We mirror our own personality back to them. This implies that if you understand your core consumer you should mirror that back to them and

deliver it in a clever way (comedy, emotions, etc.)

2. Authority Human beings are greatly influenced by people of authority. BMW justifies an authoritative position as “The Ultimate Driving Machine” by detailing their engineering decisions calmly, slowly, and clearly.

3 & 4. Commitment & Consistency Once we have committed to a question we like to have a consistent response thereafter. If you ask a consumer a question about their environment and its relevance, providing a consistent response with your product or service will have an influential impact.

5. Scarcity If things are scarce (time, quality, etc.) we are influenced by those things more than anything. It is a survival instinct especially found with food, as an obvious example.

6. Storytelling Storytelling is not just telling people the facts. It is the way in which we deliver facts with feelings and emotions. You can tell if someone is telling the truth by their sounds and voice so, it has to be genuine to be influential. A story creates an experience which cerates reputation. This reputation then represents the brand.

The history of sonic branding comes from the U.S. In the 50’s and 60’s, Coca Cola wanted to reach a younger generation. In the 50's, radio was a primary form of ad reach so they used different popular artists at different times of the day to introduce their product to this market. Airlines are also great examples of sonic brands. In particular, British Airways uses their iconic song played during landing and take off as a way of transporting customers to feelings of relaxation, comfort, and floating on air. This was a very simple and successful ad because, with music, customers were able to imagine their own relatable experience. In fact, recall of brands and products is 50% higher when music is fit in compared to no music and just voice. According to Pavlov’s famous study, memory is based on how we hear things and our emotional reaction to that sound. Yes, we are more complex than dogs but humans are still very perceptible to conditioning. We can’t make a decision without referencing our emotional memory. The human brain is exposed to 40 million bits of information per second but is only able to take in 40 bits per second. These facts give rise to the ways in which brands can use the balance between the subconscious and the conscious to grasp their consumer.

The balance between the conscious and the subconscious will lead in the future of sound.

Today, data shapes audio. Our relationship with music has subtly changed with mixing and remixing. Brands like VW have found different ways to express new technology in the same Golf GTI model through music and sound. Subway wanted to talk to young people so they used a viral song, “The Harlem Shake”, and a young voiceover to offer meal deals. It is apparent that data is playing a major role in generating both unconscious and conscious sound. Measuring the affect of using sound lies in the level of recall and awareness. Brands should use personalization and relevance to carry their brand message forward because they are the keys to greater recall and awareness.

CONCLUSION

Presenter, Sam Crowther effectively put subconscious and conscious influence into practice using only sound throughout his entire presentation. From his voice to relevant audio pieces that sparked emotion and intrigue, he created a memorable presentation. With sound, he tapped into our subconscious and conscious to pull certain memories and feelings. This influence has large implications for brands. As simple as sound can be, it has the power to represent a brand, location, conscious name, or even the past, present, and future.

ABSTRACT

From war cries to popcorn jingles to moans, sound has always been impactful on the human experience. The ability of auditory stimulants to influence human behavior may be greater than recognized. Advertisers have long capitalized on sound to engage audiences, however recent scientific developments and extensive market research have provided some insight into how best to leverage sound to influence consumers.

Subconsciously Seduced by Sound Nick Kruse

Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing NickKruse333@gmail. com Facebook /nick.kruse.77 LinkedIn : /in/nicholaskruse/ Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Sound That Sells

SESSION

Mr. Sam Crowther of A Million Ads, a London data driven creative ad agency, has had a lifelong interest in sound and its’ impact on the human experience. From whispers of sweet nothings to radio ads blaring about the latest sale, human behavior and experience can be drastically influenced by auditory stimulation. Many of the campaigns from his agency have made use of scientific studies regarding human conditioning and physical auditory attributes leveraging them to influence their target audience.

Sound is quintessential to the human experience. It enables us to communicate verbally, and provides another sense to evaluate our environment. The roots of storytelling are the ability to communicate through sound waves. Through evolution various sounds have come to illicit specific responses from audiences. Among those responses are links to memory, both evolutionary and individual. Bird chirps are calming because from having lived among predators, our ancestors learned to associate happily chirping birds with an aura of safety. Birds would flee if danger loomed.

Auditory memory is the second most powerful sense in terms of memory and recollection behind olfactory (scent) memory.

Anyone with an ex who they had a song with, or a parent who smoked a particular brand of cigarettes can testify to the strength of these senses to illicit memories. Music imprints to moments in our lives and can conjure memories of that imprinted moment for the rest of our lives. Another interesting implication of sound and vocalization is singing, and the endorphins relapsed, particularly when groups are sinning in unison. Whether consciously implemented or not, armies from Rome to the modern US Army use group singing or chanting. Religions also make use of this phenomenon.

Tonality, speed, annunciation, accent, and association all play

a large role in how individuals interoperate sound. These ques have been used effectively in human communication likely since the adaptation of human verbal communication.

Although certain facets of music structure may conjure different emotions in different cultures, some of these influencers are universal. Slow, clear, and concise speakers conjure trust and authority across cultures. Similarly fast shaky speakers conjure the opposite impressions among listeners.

Hearing is passive whereas listing is active. Interestingly though sound can influence behavior regardless of an individuals ability to consciously recognize they had been exposed to a particular sound. Sounds individuals do not consciously recognize they were exposed to can influence behavior.

In a targeted music streaming ad campaign conducted on behalf of Subway by A Million Ads, engaging the audience to listen was shown to have considerable impact on the frequency with which the advertised promotion was used in the targeted area. The audio ad used data from the music streaming service and geolocation to say the listeners name and comment on things such as the weather or local sports results. Audiences were observed to engage when their name or local news/weather was mentioned. I would definitely look up if a radio ad addressed me directly, and look around for the Twilight Zone host. Whether or not being frightened at the ads ability to address me directly would affect my appetite is irrelevant, because the campaign was very successful for the Subways it was created for in the UK. In an interesting case study conducted by A Million Ads in a British supermarket. Songs were found to influence customers purchasing patterns on wine. In the study two displays of wine, one German and one French, were placed next to each other in a super market display. the wines had identical pricing. When French music was playing around the display, the French wine outsold the German wine by 5:1. when German music was playing the German wine outsold the French by 3:1. Of the over 100 unknowing participants in this highly ecologically valid experiment, only one recognized that music was playing around the display at all when asked by the cashier at checkout. Furthermore participants were not able to recognize that they were influenced by the music when questioned.

CONCLUSION

Well established jingles are a clear example of the effectiveness of sounds that are consciously heard, on the ability to illicit memory in audiences. The above wine study suggests the effectiveness of sounds that are unconsciously listened to. The ability to manipulate sound to illicit behavior from consumers is slightly frightening in that it is effective in preying on the subconscious in some cases. The efficacy of consciously recognized and well aligned sounds with brands, activities, and the like are well established, but the finding that sound can subconsciously influence behavior has considerably impactful implications for advertisers, and potentially frightening ones for consumers. Used in conjuncture with relevant data on targeted consumers, and other modern marketing practices, influencing consumer behavior could enter a new realm where legislature is

required to protect consumers freedom of choice.

Despite the doom and gloom of the potential of consumer data to be used in conjuncture with subconscious messaging, these studies provide interesting insights into human neurology and evolutionary conditioning. Furthermore, brands may be able to learn to more effectively communicate their offerings to humans, without crossing any sort of ethically blurred lines. Provided responsible advertisers use their understandings of human senses to more effectively convey to consumers value that would benefit them, these finding can have a positive impact on brands and consumers.

ABSTRACT

Robert Cialdini is a well-known and respected social psychologist. He is known primarily for his book, Influence The Psychology of Persuasion, and has also just published a new book, Pre-suasion - A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. In this session, Cialdini discusses the differences between pre-suasion and persuasion with Guy Kawasaki, the chief evangelist of Canva. Cialdini discusses in depth how to change people’s minds based on his previous research.

The Art of Presuasion Kendra Arenkill Undergraduate: Marketing kendraa2@earthlink.net LinkedIn Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Using Pre-suasion for Social Influence

SESSION

Robert Cialdini is most well-known from his research and book, Influence - The Psychology of Persuasion, which discusses the universal principles of social influence. He says, those that embody the six principles of persuasion in their message are more likely to have others say yes. These six principles include: reciprocation (the desire to give back to someone who has given to us), liking (feeling connected when you share things in common), consistency/commitment (the desire to be consistent with what we’ve already said or done and be congruent with internal values), authority (the respect for authority and desire to follow the lead of experts), social proof (people want to follow the lead of similar others) and scarcity (the desire to want the things that there is less of).

When any of these methods is used in a message, the likelihood of someone being persuaded and saying yes is much more likely. There is a seventh principle, though, that Cialdini has discovered and introduced. This principle comes before persuasion, and is called pre-suasion.

There is a moment that occurs before a message is delivered, and this time needs to be utilized. According to Cialdini, this moment is pre-suasion, the process of arranging for recipients to be sympathetic to a message before they experience the message; this then creates a mindset for the recipient of the message and they in turn pay attention to the feature of the message that we want them to. The use of pre-suasion will accelerate persuasion.

Cialdini shared three great examples of pre-suasion in-use. In one example, a furniture store was testing two different homepages for their website to see which performed best.

One of the homepages had an image of clouds as the background and the other website had an image of pennies in the background. The customers that saw the website with the clouds ended up purchasing furniture that was the most comfortable that was offered. Those that saw the background

of pennies ended up buying the least-expensive furniture offered on the website. These images intercepted consumers right before they were beginning to shop and influenced what they bought. Another example was an experience that happened to Cialdini himself.

One day, a father and daughter rang his doorbell. The father said he was raising money for an after-school program for kids. Cialdini ended up donating money because of pre-suasion; the man’s daughter was one of the first things he saw when he opened the door, making it hard for him to say no to the ultimate message. The third example was an email campaign by Royal Caribbean, they tested a subject line that stated they had a limited time offer. In another subject line, it only had emoji's of ticking clocks. The email with the subject line with ticking clocks saw the most amount of success in not only with an increase in the number of emails opened, but also in sales.

The theories of pre-suasion and persuasion even worked in this past election. President Donald Trump used the persuasion method of social truth better than any other politician.

Anytime he was on-camera at a rally, he made sure that the cameras showed a crowded audience behind him. The audience then became the message - a sea of human faces instead of flags and posters. He was also able to get the news media to focus on him. When we observe something repeatedly in the media, we assign it causal features which is used to create change. He was able to utilize consistency and commitment because the people that voted for President Trump do not want to believe that they were fooled, and instead stand behind their decision. All of these factors came into play during this past election, and when looking back, the outcome makes a little more sense.

Ultimately, we’re not aware of pre-suasion because we’re always thinking about what’s happening in the actual message, not what’s happening before the message. It’s important to guide people in the direction that would make it wisest for people to say yes. It is the guide to where we should go next with our choices and behaviors. Cialdini stated that when given the choice between pre-suasion and persuasion, pre-suasion is more important. This is because whatever is top of mind is what ends up guiding behavior. I am impressed with the research and findings of Cialdini. This information is not always thought about, but when considered, it seems like common sense. It is concerning, though, the way in which presuasion and persuasion can be used. Such tactics just make a person more likely to say yes, and they may be saying yes to something that is bad. It’s important for those who use these tactics to be conscious of ethics and their morals to be sure people are saying yes to positive things.

CONCLUSION

Markets are always trying to convince others to buy or invest in their product/service.

Persuasion is necessary for marketers, and pre-suasion can be that much more beneficial. No matter what type of marketer you are, prepping the consumer for the message you hope they receive is important and will make the consumer that much more likely to say yes.

Digital marketers should be conscious of the way they present data to consumers on digital channels. Images are a great way to “prepare” consumers for the data you are presenting and can get them to think what you would like them to before you present the numbers.

Marketers who are in advertising can use pre-suasion, and especially the principles of persuasion, to get consumers to take action and make a purchase. I couldn’t help but be

reminded of the similarities between subliminal messaging and pre-suasion. An image flashed on a screen in less than a second can trigger thoughts inside consumers when they don’t remember seeing the image. This can be a form of pre-suasion as it prepares the consumer for what is to come. Pre-suasion can come in many forms for marketers. It could be a landing page on a website, an image in the background of a PowerPoint presentation, or even the type of music played in an advertisement. The methods will differ for each company and each goal, but should be a tactic used by marketers nonetheless.

ABSTRACT

Mr. Robert Cialdini and Mr. Guy Kawasaki conducted this session, neither of whom need further introduction. Mr. Kawasaki interviewed Professor Cialdini about his most recent book, and more generally his lifetime of studying social influence. In addition to being packed full of eager attendees, this session was packed full of valuable insights from both Mr. Kawasaki and Professor Cialdini.

The Art of Pre-suasion Nick Kruse Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing NickKruse333@gmail.com

Facebook /nick.kruse.77 LinkedIn : /in/nicholaskruse/ Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Persuasion is Manipulation But Hey It Works

SESSION

In addition to touching on points related to persuading individuals and groups, this session focused on the art of “pre-suasion”. Preparation is important in everything.

Researching and explaining how to prepare and prime someone to be more receptive of persuasion was both interesting and valuable.

Professor Cialdini began by going over the six universal principles of social influence. Below are the summarized and paraphrased versions of those.

• Reciprocation is when you do something for someone and they feel obligated to do something in return. An example being that giving out free chocolate at a candy store increased sales by 45%.

• Liking refers to the tendency to like the people who are like us. Negotiators reduced stymied or deadlocked negotiations from 6% to 3% if they are first asked to share something they have in common • Consistency refers to a persons tendency to want to say yes to things related to what they’ve said and done already. For example in the UK’s NHS system rather than filling out a patients reminder card for their next appointment, reception made people fill out their own card with the date and time of the appointment. This lead to a 18% reduction in no shows and saved millions of pounds for the NHS • Authority is in reference to a person appearing to really know their stuff. This is exemplified by the increased effectiveness of negotiations when irregular numbers are used rather than even numbers with zeros on the end. A quote of $953 for a repair may be more readily accepted than a quote of $1000 for that same repair • Social proof refers to the tendency of peoples preference to say yes when those around us, like us, are doing what’s being recommended. A great example of this is the mimicry of Apple headphones following their release up

• until today.

• Scarcity is when people want more of things they have less of. For example signs saying “only 3 per customer” doubled sales of a variety of products in grocery stores in a study.

The above list is reflective of psychological, sociological, and economic theories that have been applied to persuading people and influencing their decisions.

Professor Cialdini defines pre-suasion as “The process of arranging for recipients to be sympathetic or agree to a message before they experience it.” Moreover, his recommendations in regards to pre-suasion center around priming a target. Specifically focusing a person on images, words, or settings consistent with the central element of the intended message can accelerate persuasion. By channeling a persons attention to the critical element of your message, subconsciously, you can influence their perception of that message. A fitting example of this tactic is peoples purchasing behavior when the images of an online furniture retailer were altered. Individuals in the group who were shown images of pennies tended to buy cheaper furniture, whereas individuals who were shown images of fluffy clouds tended to buy more comfortable luxurious furniture.

The argument of per-suasion is just a negotiation and sales oriented description of the Framing Effect, a psychological phenomenon first studied by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1981 that has been elaborated on considerably since. Their study is often used in ethics and law classes, as they posed participants with a moral dilemma regarding 600 patients and treatments for them. Participants were presented two options with identical outcomes. One was framed as “save 200 lives”, and the other as “400 people will die”. Both options had identical implications but 72% chose the save condition. These presuasion recommendations are examples of this phenomenon in business and personal settings.

Professor Cialdini provides valuable insights into this phenomenon and how to leverage in business and social situations. He provides studies and anecdotal situations where specific variants of this phenomenon are analyzed and he then makes generalized recommendations based on them. Having read a plethora of psychological, economic, and neurological journal articles on this and related phenomenon, I can whole heartedly say that Professor Cialdini recommendations and interpretations are much more palatable and much more easily applied to real life situations because of the context and simplicity of his discussion and recommendation.

A great example of framing, in regards to digital marketing, is the content of the subject line of an email marketing campaign. Additionally web design can be just as influential. An example provided by a email marketing campaign for a cruse line in the UK found statistically significant differences in the frequency with which people opened the email.

Simply including a ticking clock emoji in the subject line alongside the text, increased opening from 3% without to 15% with the emoji.

Politicians are beautiful case studies for the efficacy of these tactics. Barack Obama pioneered a few tactics that were used heavily in the most recent election. Rather than

stating the amount of campaign contributions, he said the number of contributors.

Additionally he placed people representative of his target demographic seated behind the podium so as to literally frame himself with those faces for TV. He also directly addressed some of the crowd as if he were speaking in a more intimate setting. Professor Cialdini commented on Trump’s successful use of these as well as other persuasion and pre-suasion tactics. Trump tried to frame himself as a legitimate candidate before he presented any semblance of a platform. His regular blame shifting is also reflective of these types of tactics.

CONCLUSION

Pre-suasion is an effective means of priming someone to be more receptive to an impending message or suggestion. Pre-suading eases persuading, and is effective in nearly any situation.

ABSTRACT

Social Phycology is a fascinating field. It has applications for every industry. This session was an engagement with one of the field’s experts, Robert Cialdini. He wrote the popular book, Influence: Science & Practice. During this fireside chat, he talked about the latest trends that have been discovered in social psychology. He also gave an overview of his new book, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade.

The Art of PreSuasion Marshall Miller Undergraduate: BS Computer Science, MarshallDavidMiller@ gmail.com @_marshallmiller Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session The Art of Pre-Suasion

SESSION

Robert Cialdini believes that the human mind is very more malleable. By using certain phrases or actions, your viewpoint or argument has a far better chance of being received. Cialdini asserts that there are six universal principles of social influence which one can utilize. They include: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Reciprocation Liking Consistency Authority Social Proof Scarcity

Notice that part of the title of Cialdini’s new book is “Presuasion”. This different than Persuasion. The latter, per, is the content or material that is put in. It consists of how you build your message to make it appeal. Pre, on the other hand, focuses on the beginning or before the message is relayed.

Pre-suasion is the process of arranging the message in a way for recipients to be sympathetic to a message before they experience it.

Cialdini referenced numerous studies to indicate how Presuasion is used. First, he explained the reciprocity factor of influence. This one was pretty intuitive. If you do something for somebody, they are more likely to help you in the future.

Customers at candy stores and ice cream store for example, are 45% more likely to purchase if they are given samples from employees.

Robert Cialdini discussed a recent study where a furniture company implemented two different versions of their website’s landing page. One version had a background with clouds. The other had a background with pennies.

Customers who came to the website and saw clouds ended up buying more comfortable furniture. Customers who saw pennies ended up buying the least expensive furniture. The study concluded that customers can be subliminally influenced to make certain decisions.

This illustrates Pre-suasion. Pre-suasion accelerates persuasion.

Cialdini said that the key to this kind of influence is asking this question: “What can I put before I send the message to set up a ‘channel’?” A way this is done is by stressing a sense of scarcity. When retail stores display signs indicating that an item has a limited quantity, customers deem it to be more valuable. These items end up selling quickly. A similar tactic is having a sign next to an item say, “limit 3 per customer.”

Another demonstration I thought was interesting was how medical offices in the United Kingdom began having customers write down the date for their next appointment right before they left the office. By doing so, millions of pounds were saved and the number of no-show visits decreased.

Menu items at restaurants which have asterisks next to their names have an increased probability of being purchased of 13-20%. These asterisks might indicate popular menu items which produce a sense of authority. The restaurant is saying, “these are popular items and you should like them.” Techniques like these are so effective because as consumers, we have a tendency to be more focused on what is going on in a message. We don’t think about what’s going on before the message is relayed.

Cialdini submits the idea that if we send people to a certain dimension of their argument, it will be easier to them to say “yes”. A common illustration of this is headlines, or titles that catch our attention with phrases like, “Are you an adventurous person?” Subject lines in emails like this one, employ a mechanism of social proof. The individual must compare themselves to the greater population. Not wanting to be different, they tend to agree.

These types of subject lines have a far greater likelihood of getting clicked.

Social Proof also plays a role in selling products. Commercials, advertisements, and social media posts all make a point of including people who look like us. This makes products appear more trendy (like white iPhone headphones).

Constructing a strategy to set a “pre” mood or suggestion can also have a significant impact on trust. Warren Buffett is a master of this. In each of his annual letters to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett discusses mistakes or failures he has made that year. Consistently, right from the beginning, he is transparent. This helps him be perceived as more honest and self aware which are character traits of a leader who has a populations best interest at heart.

CONCLUSION

I was very amused by Cialdini’s talk. While he backed up his theories with lots of statistics and case studies, I felt it was a technique to make him seem more believable. Cialdini did introduce a new concept to me (Pre-suasion) which I can work to employ in my career and everyday life. Throughout the talk, I was a skeptical at times because I felt as though he was utilizing his own techniques to try and sell his new book.

ABSTRACT

The Future of Luxury Alana Bierbaum Graduate: M.S. Marketing alana.bierbaum@du.edu Instagram & Twitter: @alanabierbaum Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session An Evolved, Luxurious Future

A panel of industry thought leaders reflected on the change rapidly happening amongst consumers becoming more interested in experiences than material ownership. This adaptation also requires businesses to adapt alongside consumers to provide enhanced experiences coordinated with their products. The new age of luxury is already underway. As someone who does see great value in experiences that impact and shape my life, I was anxious to hear the business perspective, one which I usually see as simply wanting to sell a product rather than actually and authentically benefit the consumer.

SESSION

In today’s market, millennials are acting as change agents. The desire for meaningful experiences is outpacing that of staple luxury materialism. That’s not to say that some don’t still want to splurge on an expensive item, but the shift is being made towards items that hold more customized value and come with an experience that elevates the purchase. Status is something being created in new and varied ways as opposed to how it has been historically established. The word status is generally attributed to a display of wealth and standing in society. To some, that mindset is the same, but for others there is growth and status is shifting to mean one’s standing in society while giving back to it and having a purpose.

Luxury is a mindset, firmly cemented by some as meaning ‘stuff.’ However, it is becoming less about possessions and more about self-expression and character. It is no longer idealized by the masses and actualized by the able to simply have a mansion filled with champagne and diamonds. People with means are focused on being more ethical, fit, and actualized than the masses, and that is becoming the new luxury. Obviously, not every wealthy person falls into this enlightened category. Many businesses in the luxury sphere are taking heed of this and becoming more ethical, transparent, and philanthropic as well, trying to align with their clientele. A mission and message translates from an economic and philosophical level going from brand to consumer within their relationship. Increased loyalty from consumers happens when the relationship is a synergistic one, meaning the DNA of brand represents what the customer deems important in their own lives. We want to support businesses that we feel a connection with and a shared understanding.

Customization has also become the new display of luxury. In the world of liquor, cars, and fashion, the art of slow has become a resurgent trend. These processes, when conducted slowly and on a per-item basis rather than mass-produced tend to ensure a more highquality product, and by very definition, a luxury one. In alcohol, customization is available to create the sensory experience that the customer wants, and mood-enhanced cocktails can be prepared by skilled bartenders with soothing or happiness-inducing flavorings, as per the wants require. Johnnie Walker offers a very exclusive mentoring session, specified to exact customer requests as an experiential luxury. In the auto industry, personalized Jaguar vehicle development can take about five years, so it is a very premiere and timeintensive process that yields the precise desires of the client. The aim by any of these companies is to create an enhanced and memorable experience, depth is built with the company and the product, and the beneficial result often comes in the form of lifetime loyalty.

Brands serve as storytellers to the consumer. Content can be created in any variety of ways to reach people everywhere that they are, and in the ways that are most convenient to them. For a brand, being clear and concise about their purpose within the marketplace and as a company is crucial for connecting with people. If the message is too complicated, attention will be lost. Storytelling is really anchored in people and experiences. Consumers feel an affinity towards and are interested in other people, their craft, and their expertise. Utilizing this interest to create compelling and honest content is important. For example, there is a very noticeable lack of women engineers at Jaguar/Land Rover. For this reason, the company partnered with Getty Images due to there being a lack of a real modern portrayal of disciplines within the automotive industry, so they featured the female engineers that they do have and told their stories through imagery. As the Olympics does every two year, spotlighting individuals within a business in order to tell their story helps tell the story of the business and thus the story of the brand, and invites people in. Now, as a moment, is an important time for brands with the awakening going on in the social fabric of our country. Core beliefs of employees and a company need to be backed up by brands and it is beneficial for brand to stand up and force embrace important conversations. Being truthful and impactful may turn off certain customers, but those who share the company’s values will then believe in them even more. It is important to take a stand and be ready for what comes with that. Customers lend their support with their dollars when their core beliefs are reflected. We live in an age, in theory, of great transparency, and authenticity and transparency should be a primary goal of all brands, and especially luxury brands that are still aspirational.

CONCLUSION

This panel was highly insightful and a fresh take on the oft trodden soil of how millennials are changing consumerism. Experiences outrank ‘things’ and meaning is assigned to everything around us. As a person to falls straight into the millennial category, it was nice to hear the perspective of top business people speaking of luxury in a different way, it seems like they’re actually hearing us. That is quite unusual as we are traditionally cast in an unflattering light as a segment as a whole, but customization and experiences in particular are what add texture to life and it seems those values align with those of the panelists in this session.

ABSTRACT

The Future of Luxury Alana Dreimann Graduate: MS Marketing alanaemail@me.com Twitter: @adreimann Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Luxury is Experiential

Luxury continues to evolve as brands change to remain relevant. Leaders from Diageo, Jaguar Land Rover, PSFK and Warrior Poets come together to discuss the meaning of luxury in an adapting market. Fiona Pargeter (Head of Global PR Communications at Jaguar Land Rover), Morgan Spurlock (award-winning and Academy Award-nominated writer, director, producer and Founder & CEO of Warrior Poets), Piers Fawkes (Founder and Editor-in-Chief of PSFK), and Sly Saller (Chief Marketing Officer for Diageo) discuss how luxury is changing from a consumer standpoint and how businesses are adapting to meet new wants and needs through experiences.

SESSION

Luxury is a sign of status. People use luxury brands as a way to show off and demonstrate their status in society. Now social media plays a role in luxury and this demonstration of status. People associate themselves with status in different ways; originally status was about showing wealth and status in society. For example, in old England it was a status symbol to have a pineapple. Status today is less about what I own, but instead about whom I am.

Wellbeing and luxury are now being paired, if you are more fit and economical you are better than others? Maybe having a spa treatment or affording luxury gyms? People want to buy packages that explore different areas, maybe wellbeing or the slow food movement. One rum company partnered with Michelin star restaurants to do a slow food experience that was soulful. People become brand loyal early on and it's supported by corporate beliefs and culture. Spurlock helps brands understand what their message is and what their brand DNA is.

Personalization and customization are on the rise and a symbol of luxury today. A great example of this is what Jaguar is doing, primarily in the Asian market. It takes five to six years to develop a car with thousands of people working on the development of a new vehicle. Jaguar added a special vehicles department to work on customization.

Jaguar reduces anxiety for its consumers, especially in the Asian market (Singapore and China) by flying the head of design to visit these customers to create the perfect vehicle for them. Some customization Jaguar has been incorporating into their vehicles include steering wheels that checks your

pulse and have a sensory element to detect stress or anxiety, and massage seats. Jaguar tries to put the customer first and give them what they want and need. A lot of car manufactures are bringing people with less money the luxury experience with luxury vehicles at a lower price point, but the experience is still incredibly different to what Jaguar is doing with personalization.

Luxury is sometimes more about the experience and something you can talk to people about for a lifetime, brands don't want to sell stuff they want to sell an experience. They still sell stuff, but they add partnerships and packages that sell an experience with the brand to add value. With booze, it also starts with the customer to create a personalized experience.

Now artificial intelligence can help with this to give you a customized answer of what kind of booze you will like (like IBM Watson Experience at SXSW). Jaguar is now using artificial intelligence to learn people's habits, if it's cold the car will heat your seats, if it's a certain hour of the day it will play your favorite song or radio based on your mood.

The possibilities to connect with audiences continue to evolve. Diageo does a lot of partnerships, like with Cocktail Courier, if you like a certain drink they will bring you all the ingredients. Jaguar partners with Red Cross; it's a long and authentic partnership. They even provide rescue vehicles. They don't shout about it because they want to have class and subtly help. The organization has a real desire and purpose to help this cause, not just for PR purposes (or so says their global head of PR). Brands should have a relatable purpose to connect with their customers. Your brand is a promise and your brand and product have to live up to that or your customers will walk away. You want your employees to be in line with your core beliefs because they are the ones expressing what matters to the brand and force the important conversations. If it's not authentic, don't do it. If you're not real, people will find out. The world is transparent.

CONCLUSION

In the next 5 years there is going to be a bigger change than there has been in the last 100.

It is critical for businesses to remember to be true to your brand, be authentic, and have a purpose ingrained into the corporate culture.

ABSTRACT

The Future of Luxury Matthew J. Frost MBA in Marketing Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Can the Experience of Luxury be Separated from it’s Price Tag?

Increasingly, the world economy is moving towards a sharing economy. Workers change their jobs frequently or work gigs, being their own bosses. A massive amount of debt plagues many American consumers, making disposable income nonexistent. With consumers spending what little money they have on experiences and student debt, how does the Luxury good sector survive? Companies that sell 20-year-old scotch and $80,000-dollar SUV’s are at a disadvantage in this new model. True, there is a small population of extremely wealthy individuals, but how many cars and watches do they need?

With this question in mind, panelists from several leading luxury goods companies got together to discuss their outlook for their industry and it’s future.

SESSION The concept of “luxury” has been around, arguably, since man’s earliest days. In 17th Century England, Pineapples were the ultimate mark of wealth. In Holland for brief time during the same century, the entire economy was based on the ownership and speculation of tulips. What has remained constant is the human desire to show wealth and status amongst peers. The concept of luxury is changing though and several key players got together to discuss them, amongst them famed documentarian Morgan Spurlock.

“It’s about mission and message”, Spurlock opined. What matters to consumers, the panelists agreed, is the experience of luxury. Whether it’s a swiss watch boutique or a Range Rover, consumers pay for the experience of buying and possessing a luxury good. Many also expect that experience to last past the point of sale but throughout the life of a product.

Spurlock now works as a brand strategist and content creator with his company Warrior Poets and spent much of the session discussing how luxury brands can package experience devoid of even their product. His fellow panelist, Ms. Syl Saller CMO of the alcohol conglomerate Diageo, agreed. Much of her work is currently focused on how to expand the experience of luxury alcohol for consumers. Whether it means ensuring Johnny Walker is in more bars or specializing whiskey experiences in various cities for customers, the personalization of a luxury experience is at the heart of much of her planning.

Ms. Fiona Pargeter of Jaguar/Land Rover agreed and began a discussion about creating a boutique experience for customers based on access. “We offer bespoke vehicles, where costumers

can visit their car in progress and tour the factory.” By providing access to the brand, Jaguar curates a new experience for consumers that imparts individualized value and ownership.

Ms. Pargeter also discussed how Jaguar offers region specific changes to their vehicles. For example in China a scent system is integrated into it’s Range Rover models.

Mr. Spurlock jumped on this point to talk about what, I feel, will be the ultimate win for luxury brands. By personalizing and introducing luxury experiences at different price points, Spurlock argues, Brands can build a larger consumer base even within the experiential economy of the future. The brands that do this effectively, regardless of product, will see increased success and will have a map for future success. Ms. Saller agreed and talked about some steps that some of her various brands are taking in this regard. “ We’ve created a process where you can help create your own blend of Johnny Walker.” By creating this individualized experience for whiskey consumers, the brand builds and emotional connection that engenders life long brand loyalty. This is Ms. Saller’s theory anyway, and I had reason to believe it. Ms. Pargeter added her agreement, stating that any moves she makes for personalization has to start with knowing the consumer and the culture they come from. Her previous example of scent enable Range Rovers was a huge hit in China. It would likely fall flat in the United States.

Mr. Spurlock than shifted the discussion to his area expertise, storytelling. “Brands are storytellers, they need to create content that speaks to and reaches consumers where they already are.” I found this point to be especially useful and at the heart of much of my own understanding of brand. The story, the narrative matters for every brand, doubly so for high priced luxury goods. Mr. Spurlock’s point was unanimously agreed upon by the panel.

Digitize that narrative was also highlighted as an important facet of this strategy as well.

The session ended with an in-depth discussion by the panelists about how best to integrate the concept of purpose and philanthropy into the DNA of a brand. How consumers experience that a brand is tied to the natural and political environment matters, Mr. Spurlock argued. Ms. Saller agreed and discussed how the sense of heritage and environment is integrated into many of her alcohol brands. “Most of our whiskey’s are made in small communities that have had those distilleries there for hundreds of year.” Alcohol brands, especially high value whiskey, constantly focus their advertising on showing the craftsmanship and local heritage inherent in the brands. How many times have you seen an elderly distiller observing a whiskey barrel?

In the end all of the panelists for hopeful for the future of the luxury industry, though they are more than likely a tad biased. However, given their argument I fervently believe there will still be a place for fine whiskey and automobiles in the future. What that place looks like will increasingly be smaller and more personal. Those consumers that desire luxury goods will always exist and increasingly they will use these products to express not only their financial status but their philanthropic leanings as well.

CONCLUSION

Luxury goods have always been an interest of mine. I can’t afford many of them, but the way in which brands such as Rolex and Range Rover have built and maintained their brand narratives is fascinating. With prices no longer tied to cost or inflation, status and prestige are the primary factors at play I the luxury space. Yes there is amazing craftsmanship and quality at play. But, the amazing way that these brands leverage brand status and platform to provide value to their products is amazing. Given this session I am quite convinced that this will not change in the future, but adapt to spread smaller pieces of the luxury experience amongst a larger customer base.

ABSTRACT

The modern male consumer is completely different from their forebears. Yet many companies are still targeting products and services to them as if Don Draper himself wrote the adds. The old adage that “Sex Sells” driving marketing for male centered products is increasingly becoming out of date. The new male consumer, throughout the world, is an increasingly sophisticated and thoughtful consumer.

The New Man Code: Targeting the Modern Male Matthew J. Frost MBA in Marketing Matthewjfrost3@gmail.com

Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session The Male Consumer isn’t as one dimensional as some companies hope

Reaching these customers requires that brands view them in a new, more holistic light. This panel explored how businesses are still getting their male targeted marketing and how some are getting it right.

SESSION

With a giant picture of Don Draper on the screen, this session expertly framed how the changing male demographic is effecting companies and products they sell.

When the picture of Don, that bastion of misogynistic behavior, dissolved into Jimmy Fallon it was clear where the session was going. With the founder of Movember, Adam Garone, as lead panelist the session sought to define who the modern male consumer was and holistically what was actually important to him. No longer, all the panelists argued, could Brands simply trot out a woman in a sexy outfit to sell hamburgers. The new male consumers are more multifaceted and expressive than their fathers and grandfathers.

Mr. Garone began the session by sharing the story of the creation of Movember. An international Non-Profit, Movember is dedicated to educating and helping men with their mental and physical health. By utilizing humor and the ridiculous of mustaches, Mr. Garone and his foundation began a conversation that hasn’t stopped. “What we’re finding is that men aren’t talking to each other, and that’s not healthy.”

Initially focused on cancer prevention, Movember has expanded to include a focus on male mental health as well.

The foundations success has proven that the stereotypical beliefs about male psychology isn’t true and isn’t working.

Men have feelings and want to express them, the unfeeling male consumer isn’t real.

Mr. Jeff Moran, head of influencer marketing for spirits maker Pernod Ricard USA, echoed the sentiment and offered his

findings as well. The alcohol market had traditionally thought that men only respond to sexual imagery and advertising. Historic examples of vodka and tequila advertisements were shared, with one notably showing a woman in a cage while a man drinks in a chair. “We know that this doesn’t work anymore.” What Mr. Moran and his team have found is that best way to target male consumers was to speak who they actually are and who they want to be.

The panel than went onto explore data compiled by Ketchum Digital that pointed to what men actually found useful. Of the top 10 most important things to men, a successful career and an active sex life came in at number nine and ten respectively. What Ketchum found was that the most important things to men were living a long and healthy life and being in control of their lives. Being a good romantic partner and a good parent were also high on list, indicating that men desperately seek to improve themselves and be useful and important to the ones they love.

The panel ended with an attempt to debunk two commonly held beliefs about male consumers. The first, that men are lone wolves how don’t talk about their feelings, was already proven categorically false by the work of Movember. However, the findings point to the fact that men share and work best in groups and when talking side by side. Unlike female consumers who may sit in a circle with friends and talk, guys open up more should to shoulder with friends and family while doing something. The second myth, that men are unhappy about the rise of women, was also debunked.

Men don’t resent women, at least most don’t, instead they love them as mothers, sisters, wives, daughters. These personal connections tie male consumers to the success of the women in their lives. Any marketing that is anti-woman or attempts to portray them solely as sexual objects will fall flat. Brands who don’t realize this face the danger of their marketing falling flat and becoming instantly lampooned. Sex isn’t the only thing that sells, and increasingly the panel agreed, it’s not selling at all.

As the session came to and end, all panelists discussed their hope for the future of advertising for men. At the end of the day, men seem to do better when their striving for a better version of themselves and a better life for those they care about. Brands that are able to authentically speak to these two drives will continue to see success. Brands that attempt to sell Vodka with sexy robots will increasingly become broke laughing stocks.

CONCLUSION

What this data is hinting at is that if you want to truly reach modern male consumers you need to leverage an aspirational image that ties to family and community. Some brands who have been the guiltiest sexualized advertising are even starting to get the message. The Hardee’s/Calr’s Jr. franchise recently launched a new campaign where a middle age actor playing the fictionalized head of the company comes out of retirement. Walking in on his son in the midst of a bikini shoot he grabs “Jr.” by the ear and promises to fix the company.

The move by Hardees is an interesting example of a company admitting that sexualized advertising isn’t working while simultaneously owning their mistake. The interplay between and elder and junior company head paints a family picture that is instantly recognizable to

men, dad laying down the law and helping a son fix a mistake. Whether this new campaign will ring true with consumers remains to be seen. However, if even burger franchises are realizing that sexualized and stereotypical male centric advertising isn’t working their may just be hope yet for other brand who haven’t gotten the message.

ABSTRACT

The New Man Code: Targeting the Modern Consumer Nicholas Kieler Graduate MBA Nicholas.kieler@gmail.com

www.linkedin.com/in/nic holas-kieler/ Link to Flipboard Magazine Smarter, not Stronger

Ads for men used to be about sex and domination, but the modern male has different interests. In the past advertisements for men were all about showing scantily clad women or showing a man succeeding over his rivals, but the tone has shifted as the culture has evolved to support a different set of values. Today’s men are more interested in being competent, knowledgeable, successful, and fulfilled than they are about being considered the ‘alpha’ of their peer group. In order to successfully market to the new male perception, it is important to offer them an opportunity to develop themselves and to learn something new that they can share with their friends. the best way then to target the male consumer is to convince them that your product is an avenue to their continued self-improvement.

SESSION

This session consisted of several male marketers talking about the techniques that they have recently successfully utilized in their various marketing campaigns. Their presentation compared ads from several decades ago to ones which were more recently created and explained the thought process behind both. Each presenter explained how the changing culture had impacted their campaigns and how they had used the shift in male perception to their advantage. While there were many useful insights from the presenters, it is important to keep in mind that these were advertisers who were not just sharing a new marketing framework but also talking about the different products that they market regularly. Most of the panelists went back and forth between explaining marketing concepts and talking about the products and movements they had been pitching while showing their advertisements to the audience. While the experience and the examples helped to provide credibility, the constant exposure to advertisements and the large amount of time devoted to talking about the benefits of their products made the presenters seem just as interested in selling than they were explaining a concept.

Overall the presentation was best viewed with just a dash of skepticism at the overly persuasive tone.

The modern male consumer has shifted in their viewpoints over time. A recent study shows that what males consider most important has changed to be more wholesome and more involved than ever before. While values like ‘a good sex life’ and ‘having fun with friends’ were near the bottom of

the list near the top were things like ‘being a good father’, ‘living a full life’, and ‘growing as a person’ were near the very top. The traditional concept of using sex and machismo to sell products doesn’t make sense in the context of where the values of the modern male consumer lie. A commercial which is centered around these old sorts of values is likely to come off as sexist and juvenile compared to how males feel about their world around them.

Instead it is important to appeal to the new values of the modern male: intelligence and personal success.

One way that advertisers have been successful on capitalizing on these new developments in the male perspective is by tying products to a sense of community, personal success, and fear of missing out. The modern male consumer doesn’t want to feel like he is being left out of something important that other people are using to their own benefit. One example of how this tactic is used is the creation of the Movember movement. This movement was started to raise awareness about men’s health especially as it relates to prostate cancer. The idea was to have people grow mustaches to show their support for men’s health and to help raise awareness on the issue. By having a campaign based on wearing facial hair a certain way the Movember Foundation created something that men wanted to be a part of, especially because the movement is associated with health and wellbeing. While this may seem only tangentially related to personal success this movement is tied very closely with living a long and fulfilling life, which for men is how they view being successful. What makes the Movember movement so successful is their ability to utilize the desire to be part of something which supports them.

Another arguably more powerful marketing tool is the appeal to male intelligence. Almost every male has the desire to be smarter than they are, and more than that they want to seem smart around their peers. The best way to offer a male consumer the feeling that your product is making them smarter is just to educate them on it. A very successful recent advertising campaign for Jameson whiskey involved finding local barbershops, supplying them with Jameson, and educating them on the finer points of whiskey tasting. These barbershops were then encouraged to educate their customers about whiskey and Jameson during their visits. The result was a sharp increase in local sales as well as a huge increase of mentions of Jameson in social media. This is because by educating male consumers on whiskey they can give them something to feel smart about and to show their friends about how smart they are. It is this combination of wanting to be educated and to show others their level of education that becomes such a powerful marketing tool for male consumers.

Male consumers will tell their friends everything they have learned about something, and once they do those male consumers become educated and want to relate their knowledge to their circle of friends. By tying this knowledge to the product by showing that it is smart to consume your product, you create a growing legion of males who show off to their friends by consuming your product and explaining to others why they should consume your product.

CONCLUSION

The culture and perception of consumers is constantly shifting to adapt to the times. In a few decades male consumers have changed what they care about most, and likely in a few more decades they will be interested in an entirely different set of values. While it is useful

to know what certain demographics of consumers value when making an advertisement campaign it is more useful to know that what people want is always changing. The rules for a good advertisement campaign are in a constant flux, and trying to put together a good campaign without being on the pulse of what’s happening is impossible. It is important to remember to do adequate research into who you are trying to sell to and what their values are before you create your campaign. What worked yesterday won’t work today, and what works today won’t work tomorrow.

ABSTRACT

We all have voices of insecurity inside our heads telling us we can’t do something or that everyone else is going think we’re “full of shit”. Sometimes these voices of doubt fuel us, other times they inhibit us from being the best we can be, but almost always everything turns out to be okay in the end.

And according to John Lennon, “if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” Speaker Michael Nieling, founder and creative director of Ocupop, shared his life experiences of dealing with his imposter complex, Benecio, and how he “proves that asshole wrong.”

They’re Going to Hate This and Think I’m Full of Shit

SESSION

I came into this session with no idea that I would feel the things that I felt. Nieling spoke about some of the darkest times in his life and how his overarching desire for success ultimately lead him to false happiness and a severe anxiety attack. But more on that later.

He began his story with his imposter complex he so lovingly named Benecio. All his life he has dealt with performance anxiety to the extreme, still to this day, in fact. But with this Undergraduate: BSBA anxiety of not being the best he could be, came the Marketing incredible fight to be the best as often as he could. As a student he would stay up studying for hours, sacrificing sleep, in order to understand the material being taught. He logan.leake@aol.com never wanted to be in a scenario where he would be called on and not know the answer. His fear of being wrong fueled Instagram:@LoganMatoaka him. He was even so concerned with others thinking he couldn’t do something that if he ever couldn’t he would at Link to Flipboard least convince them that he could (and then learn it later).

This is how he said OcuPop essentially came to be—by Magazine convincing someone that he could do something he might not actually be able to do.

Link to Session

Logan Leake

Inspiration or Imposter?

In short, his performance anxiety enables him to overprepare, setting him up for success. Now, it takes a special kind of personality for someone to react in this certain way.

This type of fear does not fuel everyone, though, the idea of failure is a great motivator to many. However, Nieling took this to the extreme. He wanted people to know how hard he was working. He would send emails at all hours of the day to show people that while they were sleeping, he was up at 4:00 AM working. He barely slept. He was fueled by caffeine and the fear of not being good enough. While that fuel had been able to provide successes in his life, a human body can only take so much abuse in the form of lack of sleep and food.

He began to lose weight and time spent with his family. He was able to recognize the fact that he would take a business call over playing with his children but even that didn’t stop his insane lifestyle. It wasn’t until the scare of what he first believed was a heart attack that made him take a moment and slow down.

After he had driven himself to the hospital (totally appropriate for the type of person he was) and had been admitted, he was told he had had a severe anxiety attack, rather than a heart attack. His body had finally broken down in protest. This is where in the session that I began to actually cry a little. I had put myself through so much stress in high school, of all places, to be the best that I could be in order to ensure that I could leave Mississippi for college. I was enrolled in the International Baccalaureate program which chipped away at parts of my soul and muted my spunk each and every day. I would hardly sleep in high school due to the amount of work I had and studying I could be doing. I felt guilty if I slept more than five hours a night as there was always something more that I could be doing.

I experienced my first panic attack in high school. Everything came crashing down one evening after I had gotten so worked up over something that I found myself trying desperately to breath through intermittent sobs. I wanted so badly to not be in a program that made me put so much pressure on myself but I was afraid to leave. I thought that if I dropped the IB program that meant I was a failure and that no university would accept me.

It actually took a few sessions with a psychologist for me to discard those thoughts and help me realize that happiness and sanity is so much more important than being “the best.”

CONCLUSION

I have been privileged enough to have spent the last four years at a prestigious business school that gave me the incredible opportunity to attend SxSW and hear Michael Nieling confirm all my decisions in doing what is best for me and my sanity. While this session really wasn’t one to describe any advances in tech or marketing it proved to be perfect in the sense that sometimes we have to take a step back and breathe in order to be successful.

ABSTRACT

This article gives a quick count of my experiences outside of the interactive portion of the festival. The diversity in Austin, and the diverse crowd the festival draws, creates a unique melting pot from which attendees, including myself, can hear from and learn from perspectives from far, near, high, and low.

SESSION

Things Above and Below Jack Tinkham Under Graduate Marketing/Psychology jacktinkham@gmail.com Link to Flipboard Magazine The Culture of SXSW

South by Southwest is hands down the most culturally diverse festival I have ever been in attendance of. Held in the heart of Austin, an established hub of culture and diversity, South by Southwest attracts attendees from all over the globe to create a rich melting pot of different face, experiences, and thoughts.

When not attending sessions most of my time was spent on Rainey Street, a three block strip of old homes turned bars just south of the Austin Convention Center. For those who have not been Rainey street is the physical manifestation of the unique “Keep Austin Weird” (yes, they actually say this) tag line that describes the city. Each bar on Rainey street is unique in it’s own way, some specialize in fun cocktails and rock and roll while others offer a place for attendees to listen to electronic music.

My favorite of the bars lay at the bottom of Rainey Street and goes by the name of half-step. During the week two of my favorite record labels, Majestic Casual and Counter Records, sponsored a party at half-step in which a number of reputable groups played for a small crowd. While I have been to many music festivals, events, and concerts before, this was the first time I was able to meet the artists I love and establish a rapport with some industry tunas.

The private party I attended at Half-Step was quite similar to the fashion of the music festival. As opposed to building stages where a single line-up plays at the same place, concerts at Rainey were small, somewhat private, and well targeted to a small homogenous following. So well targeted in fact that bars and concerts on Rainey street provided an excellent window of opportunity for effective marketing.

Sponsoring parties allowed attendees, who already have an expressive connection with the bar they attend due to its unique characteristics, to form a value expressive association with the brand due to its overarching presence at the party.

Nearly a mile North west of Rainey street was 6th street, another hub of cultural, diversity, music, food, and people! 6th street offered a large number of bars and restaurants with live music. Perhaps the most interesting part of 6th street was the disparity in wealth between the wealthy who fly to Austin for the festival and the local homeless who inhabit a large shelter on 7th street.

During our time on 6th my group and I stopped to speak with a few homeless people to gauge their feelings toward the disparity.

One man, E (which we assumed was short for Eric but never really knew), had admitted to smoking crack cocaine immediately before our encounter, but still agreed to speak with us.

E thought of South by Southwest as an opportunity, not for crime, but to network with someone who has the potential to change his life. In 2015 E had met a man who wanted to make a documentary about E, but the conversations fell through. Another man who went by Carlos felt overlooked by the crowds and out of touch with humanity. He described a tolerance he developed to the pain he felt when other humans ignored his presence.

Diversity was a presence I grew up with in my hometown on the south-west side of Chicago, but has been absence since my move to an affluent part of Seattle and later to the University of Denver. Travelling to Austin for South by Southwest, a city and festival teeming with diversity and culture, was a refreshing experience that heightened my senses and made me feel truly young and open. Whether it was in the music, the food, the films, or the people, diversity and it’s fruits hung everywhere.

CONCLUSION

The culture and diversity at South by Southwest is miraculously refreshing. Austin fully embraces weird, which draws unique characters who influence those around them to let go of formality. The human limbic system is open, and so too were (most of) the attendees of South by Southwest. My experience in Austin has already had a large influence over the way I perceive others, especially the homeless. I hope future students stay after the interactive festival to really immerse themselves in the culture and to keep Austin weird!

ABSTRACT

This is your brain. This is your brain on Ads. Kendra Arenkill Undergraduate: Marketing kendraa2@earthlink.net LinkedIn Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Advertising’s Surprising Effects on the Brain

Advertising exists to impact consumer buying decisions.

Though many questions exist regarding consumer behavior and how advertising actually affects consumers. What actually causes consumers to buy? This session explains the research that has been done to look at what actually happens to consumer’s brains as they see and watch different advertisements. Neuro- and behavioral science is able to answer some of the pressing questions regarding consumer purchasing behavior. This session hosted a panel of neuroscience experts and was led by Dr. Naomi Grewal who works at Facebook. The other panelists include Pranav Yadav from Neuro-Insight US Inc., Aaron Reid from Sentient Decision Science, and Manuel Garcia-Garcia from The Advertising Research Foundation. Each panelist was given a time limit of ten minutes to present their own personal research on the subject.

SESSION

Dr. Garcia-Garcia was the first panelist to present. He works at the Advertising Research Foundation, where they curate objective, original research through education, events and networking for the advertising industry. He notes that the strength of neuroscience methods lies in their ability to uncover emotional reactions better than any other method.

Using neuroscience in tandem with traditional advertising testing leads to better product sales predictability. His research was completed last year and analyzes how neural pathways lead to great creative advertising. What he found, was cross-platform advertising outperforms single platform advertising. This resonates with consumers more because they end up seeing the advertisement more frequently, and therefore they are more apt to remember it. Dr. GarciaGarcia’s research also saw strength in advertising that is unified, meaning the creative campaign has the same message and creative content across all channels in which it is shared. Having a unified creative strategy across multiple platforms also enhances memory. Today, only 38% of campaigns use creative work that is customized to the platform it is shown on. This is a problem, especially when the content is not optimized for mobile content. Consumers are looking at different places of a mobile ad than they are on a ad on larger screen, such as a TV. Advertiser’s need to bring eyes back to the TV because most often, people are multitasking (on their computer or cell phone, reading a magazine, etc.) while they are “watching” TV. For TV

advertising to be successful, advertisers must create great audio that will interest people into looking up at the TV. Finally, Dr. Garcia-Garcia stated that there exists a large opportunity with mobile advertising. Consumers are blocking ads online, and TV is passive. Mobile, on the other hand, is active so the advertising needs to be more complex and interactive.

Consumers, especially millennials, are constantly on their phone and this is a platform that needs significant attention from advertisers.

Dr. Reid, from Sentient discussed the research he had been working on for the past three years. When he asked consumers if they thought advertising affected their buying decisions, 95% of consumers said no. Yet, these same consumers are the ones that marketers are asking - “did you like our ads?”. Such conscious evaluation of ads, when used with online views of an ad, only accounts for 14% accuracy in stating ad effectiveness. It is therefore important that marketers know more than the general population’s “opinion” of how an advertisement can be improved. Instead, marketers need to know how an advertising makes consumers feel. An example proving this point is the Anheuser-Busch “Born the Hard Way” commercial that was first shown at the 2017 Super Bowl game. This ad went viral with 21.7 million views the next morning, despite how controversial it was. When the feelings were measured of consumers watching this ad (through facial decoding) it was apparent that by the end of the advertisement, consumers really liked it. Implicit and indirect behavioral measurement techniques - such as eye-tracking, facial decoding, and response latency - are helpful indicators of consumer’s true feelings toward advertisements because you not only discover their emotions, but also the nature of their emotion for the ads. Marketers need to be sure that their measures are valid and reliable when predicting consumer behavior. Facial coding, for example has 42% accuracy in stating ad effectiveness and sentient prime implicit techniques have 65% accuracy in stating ad effectiveness.

Finally, Dr. Yadav works at Neuro-Insight US Inc., the only neuro-marketing firm to have both scientific and commercial validations. This company measures consumer engagement, emotional intensity, attention and approach and withdrawal from advertisements. Dr. Yadav’s research proved that the context of an advertisement plays an important role into the advertisement itself (such as the time of day the ad is shown, the TV show during which the ad is played, etc.). Advertising messaging becomes effective when it resonates with consumers in long term memory. Once it is in long term memory, consumers are much more likely to act on the the call to action of the ad. Advertisements that connect with a human core value helps consumers not only remember the advertisement by moving it to long term memory, but it also elicits consumer emotion.

Many advertising agencies do not partner with neuroscience firms to discover the effects of the advertisements they’ve created. From experience of working at an advertising agency myself, advertising success is typically measured through sales, views, media impressions and engagement. As many of the doctors mentioned, many consumers are not aware of the actual impacts of advertising on their consumption habits. Even if an advertisement didn’t resonate with a consumer, the exposure of the product/brand would still make an impression on the mind of a consumer.

CONCLUSION

The information in this session is especially important for marketers who work in advertising.

First, advertisers need to be sure that advertising campaigns are integrated across many different platforms. Mobile should especially be one of those platforms. The message should be unified across all channels, and the advertisements should be correctly optimized for each platform. Asking for consumer sentiment (conscious evaluation) should be limited while other techniques, such as facial decoding and eye-tracking, should be used more often as these techniques are more accurate. Finally, those working in advertising should be sure that the marketing content speaks to a core human value so the ad is more likely to go to consumer’s long term memory. This advice is helpful for both agencies and clients.

ABSTRACT

We live in a world of abundance, and that includes advertising. The fight to get a consumer’s attention is so intense that companies struggle everyday to come up with original content just to be disappointed with the results of their marketing campaign. By utilizing nuero-science research, advertisers can create ads that will compel consumers to act and engrain the brand into their mind.

This is Your Brain. This Is your Brain on Ads Elena Changalidi Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing & International Business Elena.Changalidi@du. edu LinkedIn: /in/elenachangalidi Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Marketing is a Science

SESSION

This session had an amazing panel of Pranav Yadav, CEO of Neuro-Insight US.; Dr. Aaron Reid, Founder and Chief Behavioral Scientist at Sentient Decision Science; Dr. Manuel Garcia-Garcia, SVP of Research and Innovation Global and Ad Effectiveness at The Advertising Research Foundation; and Naomi Grewal, North America Consumer Insight Manager for Facebook. Dr. Garcia-Garcia started the talk off with the proposal of the idea that neural pathways are the way to great creative. For something to really resonate with people and actually stick, there needs to be a cross-platform unity that is customizable. The effect of this cross-platform approach is much like a kicker effect – it gets the brain of the consumer going and helps them focused on your brand.

According to his research, only 38% of campaigns use creative that is customized to the platform they are running it on. What this means is that their message becomes muddled depending on where the consumer is seeing it. One of the key components to keeping an audience engaged with the content is ensuring a unified, consistent message that is tailored to the platform you are on. Dr. Garcia-Garcia brought up some interesting statistics about how many people are distracted when watching TV – only 35% of the time are people’s eyes on the actual TV screen. A great way to snap their attention back to the screen (or any form of advertising where permitable) is to leverage the power of sound. This not only gets their attention back to the content at hand, but also boosts emotional connections up to 15%.

One of the biggest challenges today is the existential threat of ad blocking to digital advertising. There are over 380 million ad blockers that cost more than $41.4 billion.

Because of as blockers, the effectiveness rate of pop-up adds has decreased by 50%.

Dr. Garcia-Garcia brought up a study he preformed where they tracked the eye movement of people on their screens and almost every single one got tracked looking for the little

“x” at the top, right hand corner when a pop-ad came up.

Dr. Aaron Reid took a slightly different route by starting off his time with talking about how to predict if an ad is going to go viral. By doing a research study on over 14,000 consumers with 200+ ads, Dr. Reid was able to gleam the fact that it does not actually matter how the consumer feels about the ad, it matters how the ad makes the consumer feel. I think everyone remembers the Super Bowl ad that Budweiser ran this year. Well, that ad has gotten 21.7 million view online. Why was it so successful? It made the consumer feel. The most successful ads are the ones that are able to get the consumer to have emotional connection to it and have a level of self-association. By scaling on the ability to make ads connect to consumers on a personal level, brands would be able to see real growth in their marketing efforts.

Pranav Yadav furthered this conversation by pointing out that a lot of decision making takes place in the subconscious and that validation is key for both advertising and commercials.

Not only that, but if an ad, and consequently the brand, does not make it into a consumer’s long term memory, they will not act on it. Brands are always communication in one way or another and long-term encoding should be the most important measure for them. Much of this has to do with ensuring that the ads that are running are making the right connections in people’s minds. Yadav showed an example of a commercial for peas, where the middle of the ad had a freeze frame on a beautiful, ripe, pea plant in the middle of the field that cut to the brand and the end of the ad shortly after. Then he showed a different ad, where it was the same man, the same music, the same language, but the setting was different. This one was for a fish product from the same company and the freeze frame stopped on an image of the beach, then cut to the product and the end of the ad. The retention for the brand (which was the same) and likelihood that people would actually buy the product was substantially higher for the first ad because it actually made a connection in the consumer’s mind.

CONCLUSION

With so much coming at the consumer each and every day, it is hard for brands to make a lasting impact, let alone get someone to buy something based on an ad they saw. The key to this dilemma is quite simple – make the consumer feel and associate the brand with themselves. If a brand can leverage the power of neural science and ensuring that ads are encoded into people’s long term memory, then they can get people to act on their ads. So much of how people work has to do with validation and self-association that harnessing that can make any ad successful. People want to have an emotional connection and by playing content that is highly emotional or even absurd, that can create a place for your brand in someone’s long-term memory – the place any brand should aspire to be.

ABSTRACT

This is Your Brain. This is Your Brain on Ads. Taylor Figge

We are now in the Digital Age where advertisement clutter has taken over every avenue of our lives. In one day, we are exposed to TV ads, billboard and radio ads (including Spotify ads) when we drive, push notifications, email ads, and banner ads as we surf the internet on our phones, tablets, and computers. We are being over stimulated with ads.

People only pay attention to a small fraction of the ads they are exposed to and ignore the rest. How do brands stand out and make sure their ad is a part of this small fraction?

They need to understand what catches a person’s eye and drives them to feel a strong enough connection with the brand that they buy the product. This session is made up of three thought leaders in consumer neuroscience who each take a turn presenting their findings on what drives consumer decision making.

Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing

The success of advertisement is in the strategy.

Understanding the latest finding in consumer neuroscience and taking them into consideration when you create a new advertisement can lead to a successful strategy.

btfigge@gmail.com

SESSION

https://www.linkedin.co m/in/taylorfigge/ Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Success in Advertising

So what have the top researchers in consumer neuroscience found?

Dr. Manuel Garcia Garcia, SVP of Research & Innovation Global & Ad Effectiveness at The Advertising Research Foundation, says that advertisers need to focus on Neural Pathways to great creative. What he means by this is that ads need to be customized and unified across platforms. As mentioned above, people are exposed to ads on their phones, computers, tablets, TVs, and radios all in one day.

Brands need to make sure that if a campaign involves rolling out ads on a variety of these platforms they need to make sure the message is consistent. When the message is consistent, it makes a huge difference and enhances the memory. Each advertisement enhances the next and increase the chance of a consumer to make a purchase.

Customization is also crucial. According to Garcia, only 38% of campaigns use creative customized to platform today.

Advertisers can’t just take a piece of creative from a TV advertisement and put it on mobile and assume it will work.

Content creators need to design with the type of media in mind so that they can optimize it correctly. I learned about this concept in my Advertising Media Strategy class this Winter with Gregory

Wagner. We learned that certain aspects of creative work better with Certain media. For example, if you want to demonstrate something, TV is the best medium because people can see a demo and listen to directions. Radio and panels in magazines also work because radio incorporates the vocal aspect of it and different panels in a magazine incorporate the visual direction aspect of it. If the creative calls for bright colors, TV or print is the best. And if the creative calls for digital advertising, it is better to use banner ads than pop-up ads because pop-up ads can be really annoying. It was really cool to have already learned this before going into the talk because it made me feel like I was up-to-date on the most relevant topics being discussed in the industry.

Once you have chosen the right media for the creative, you need to make sure the advertisement appeals to the viewers emotions. When asked if advertising impacts what you buy, 95% of people say no. So how can advertisers fix this? With emotional appeal and gaining a better understanding on how the ad makes the viewer feel about the brand.

Using biometrics, pupil tracking, and facial coding, researchers can not predict whether or not an ad will go viral or be a total flop like the recent Pepsi fiasco. Researchers use these techniques to gain a better understanding of what is going on in a viewer’s mind when they watch an ad. It is used to predict implicit self-identification with a brand following initial exposure to advertising which determines if it will go viral or not. Ads must speak to the viewer at some more core value level in order for them to self-identify with the brand. The most important human metrics to measure are attention, memory, affect, preference, and self-relevance. The most important thing for an ad to be successful is for it to end really well on the ‘branding moment’. This happens in the new Anheuser-Busch commercial and that is why it was a successful Super Bowl commercial. I thought it was interesting that this commercial was used as an example in the session because we also talked about this ad being particularly good in my advertising class this winter (way to go DU!).

CONCLUSION

The panelists in this session presented a number of great advertising tips for success. They backed up all of their tips with research to prove what occurs in the brain when a human is exposed to ads using these tips. I really liked this session because it combined two of my interests: the brain and advertising. I also really liked how relevant it was to my recent studies. I thought it was cool how much I had just learned in the classroom was brought up in this session. This shows me that my teachers are up-to-date on what is happening in the industry which is really inspiring!

ABSTRACT

This is Your Brain.

This is Your Brain on Ads Nick Kruse Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing NickKruse333@gmail.co m Facebook /nick.kruse.77 LinkedIn : /in/nicholaskruse/ Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session The Science of Advertising Psychology

I recently took a class on Decision-Making and Neuroeconomics lead by Dr. Peter Sokol-Hessner. His lab focuses on studying affect and decision-making. Throughout the course I was constantly relating the studies and phenomenon's to their implications in marketing. This session was centered around the first wave of advertising specific studies in affect, decision-making, and consumer neuroscience that could hold their own in the scientific research community. Dr. Manuel Garcia-Garica will be releasing the first consumer neuroscience book later this year. This session is centered around objective studies analyzing the efficacy of advertisements.

SESSION

In addition to Dr. Manuel Garcia-Garcia of the Advertising Research Foundation the panel consisted of Dr. Aaron Reid of Sentient Decision Science, Mr. Pranav Yadav of NeuroInsight US, and Ms. Naomi Grewal of Facebook. A more fitting group of panelists on this topic does not exist. This session may have been the fastest I’ve ever typed notes.

Neuroimaging is much better than asking how do you feel about the ads. fMRI’s look at the variances in blood flow throughout the brain at small increments over a period of time. Eye tracking and facial recognition coding are also effective measurements.

One of the primary focuses in this field has been evaluating and developing cross platform campaigns. Campaign consistency and efficacy across the various media channels is crucial for modern advertisers to understand. Unified campaigns with the same creative strategy had significant and consistent activation in areas of the brain associated with memory. This was not the case for inconsistent campaigns.

Shockingly only 38% of campaigns do not use creative customized to each targeted platform.

65% of audiences for TV ads had their heads down throughout commercials. Leveraging audio is the most effective means of brining their eyes back to the TV. Once their eyes were back, a 15% increase in emotional activation was observed.

Ad blocking is an existential threat to digital advertising. 380 million ad blockers are installed on mobile devices and 236 million on desktops and laptops. These ad blockers cost the

industry 41.4 billion globally. From my perspective the most effective means of addressing and resolving this issue is to create a more symbiotic relationship between advertisers and consumers. Data driven targeting, coupled with objective research based creative can allow for advertising which is beneficial for both consumer and advertiser. Visual focus on TV ads is very central, whereas mobile tends to be right side heavy and wandering. Copy size on mobile is really important, if its too small its significantly less effective. Consumers will be able to see relevant engaging content, and advertisers will be able to get their message and value proposition into the minds of the most relevant consumers segments.

Although we are closer to this mutually beneficial relationship today than yesterday, advertising is not quite there yet. Ad-blocking contributes to this because it incentivizes some advertisers to use black hat methods to get in front of consumers. Ad-blocking also contributed significantly to the proliferation of sponsored content, particularly of the shittiest variety. Some sponsored content is edging closer to the aforementioned symbiotic relationship. The research discussed here and the research that will follow it is a lynch pin in edging towards this goal.

Asking how viewers feel about ads is much less valuable then measuring how the ad makes them feel about the brand represented. Implicit self identification with brands is huge in establishing brand preference and loyalty. When viewers see an ad of a brand they like, there is significant activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (a brain area responsible for emotional processing). This same activation is observed when people are shown photos of themselves and from their time in college. Self identity activates the same regions as brands an individual already likes. Brands truly are defining of a persons’ individuality. This emotional sentiment can predict if an ad will go viral.

The Budweiser Super Bowl 51 ad was evaluated and provided some valuable insights.

Attention-eye tracing, affect-facial coding, memory-implicit association, and desirability were all measured. The ad begins very dark, literally and figuratively, and ends in a very positive light. The branding moment occurs at the end. This juxtaposition and creative execution was effective at influencing viewers feelings about the brand. A significant: lift of implicit positive emotional association, increase in pride and gratitude, and decrease in anxiety were observed in the overall population of the study.

Another interesting case was conducted on ads for Birds Eye. One ad for each, peas and frozen fish was used. In the fish ad, the branding moment (key product placement) occurred while the shot was focused on the narrator standing on the beach. The pea ad centered the branding moment on a shot of a field of peas. The ad for peas had significantly more memory recognition than did the fish ad. This example has some confounding variables, so to adjust for those researchers conducted a second trial. The first condition used the same fish ad as the first trial, whereas the second utilized a version where the branding moment occurred during a shot of a school of fish. The second condition had a 7% increase in memory retention, which was statistically significant. Long term memory retention is the most effective means of establishing an emotional connection with a brand.

The first most valuable means of triggering long term memory is personal relevance, the second is a tie between emotional intensity and visual interest. TV is passive, whereas

mobile is active. Do something the user can interact with. On mobile platforms in particular, viewers wont wont watch something don’t like. YouTube and Hulu must engage on preroll skippable ads within 5 seconds. Snapchat and Facebook must engage in 1 second, then more deeply in the next 2-3. Neuroscience and the related research tools discussed here can assist in fostering this engagement.

CONCLUSION

Advertising is changing. The analytical side is growing rapidly and disrupting traditional agencies and practices. Despite this research and data driven shift, good creative is essential for effective advertising. Hopefully a symbiotic relationship between ads and viewers is on the horizon.

ABSTRACT

This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain on Ads. Kirk Scully Undergraduate: BA Marketing/ EDP Kirkpscully@gmail.com

Instagram: @scullymon Link to Flipboard Magazine Psychology of Advertisements

Do you ever wonder exactly what it is that makes people stop to look at an advertisement? Or what it is exactly that makes people feel the need to buy something? The session I attended, led by Panel Pranav Yadav from Neuro-Insight US Inc, Aaron Reid from Sentient Decision Science, and Manuel Garcia-Garcia from The Advertising Research foundation, discusses cross-media consumption, screen size and physiological response to advertising. It was really interesting to look into how consumer neuroscience plays a roll in what will resonate with someone, across different screens.

SESSION

Every companies mission, indirectly is to help advertisers succeed more in the open world. How is the emergence of new technology changing media consumption patterns? How is Facebook, and Instagram changing the way that people consume media?

Dr. Manual Garcia-Garcia, started the Advertising research foundation, an objective research organization. Thie organization consists of 5 main parts, advertiser, agency, media, researcher, and ad Technology. He has done a lot of research into consumer neuroscience. He has found that Traditional ad testing + neuroscience in turn results in better predictability. Using neuroscience has uncovered emotional reactions to advertisements better than any other methods have before.

Having an opportunity like that brings much more money into such a sporting event. In less than a week, I am going to another Red Bull event called Red Bull Slopesoakers. The event is a freestyle skiing oriented pond skim. The idea is revolutionary, and would not have existed had it not been for Red Bull. What they are doing is incredible, and brings in money into sport’s and industries where there previously hasn’t been much.

CONCLUSION

The main focus of this session was to question the idea of what would happen if Sponsorship and Sports were to no longer be separate concepts. What if the leagues become entirely obsolete? Would we even need the stadiums? Would the experience of sports become n entirely new experience?

Would that be bad or good for industries. Red Bull is one of the leading companies, blurring the line.

The amount of support they are able to provide for Sports which have never received any support is incredible. They are innovative in the creation of new sporting events, and spectator events.

If the type of brand recognition which Red Bull has managed to accomplish was incorporated with other non sports oriented brands inside of the sports industry, then the amount of innovation would be bottomless. Team loyalty would turn into Brand Loyalty.

Brands could be able to push the boundaries of the sporting experience.

Coming from an individual who has been invested in the skiing industry for the last 5+ years of my life, there needs to be a push toward more Brand orientation in order for the industry to stay afloat. Athletes simply can’t generate any money throughout the season because the competition is too high. If consumers were able to root for Brands as well as athletes then Brand loyalty would increase resulting in a greater amount of revenue generated for the top brands. .

ABSTRACT

This session’s panel included: Brian Salzman of RQ Agency, Brian Irving of Hampton Creek, Katie Cheng of Samsung US and Zach Iser of ICM. Over the course of the hour, I learned how to identify the best influencers for your brand, how to truly determine “influence” and ways to engage with influencers to build a more effective branding strategy.

SESSION

Trust Me, I’m ’Influential’ Colby Bjornsen Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing colbybjornsen@gmail.com

LinkedIn:@colbybjornsen Personal Website Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session The Power of an Authentic Influencer

Influencer marketing is about authenticity. It’s a “type of marketing that focuses on using key leaders to drive your brand’s message to the larger market.” Rather than marketing to general consumers on a broad level, you inspire or hire influencers to do the marketing for you via their own social channels. It’s a root in connecting people to brands through online communication. Influencer marketing however is not the same as a paid sponsorship. The relationship between a brand and an influencer goes much deeper than a one-off paid post. The connection between a company and an influencer comes from building a relationship over time. Always look for a long-term partnership as it will be more relatable for consumers. It must be a genuine and natural pairing between influencer and brand to make influencer marketing successful. The panel described the partnership between an influencer and a brand similar to dating, it must be a physical and emotional connection where both parties are equally interested in each other. Treat the influencer well and they will treat your brand well in return.

Why should people use influencers? Because it is the most effective way of getting a message out to consumers, in a non-forceful, friendly way. Marketers don’t have the same reach that influencers have. Influencers gain respect and trust from their followers and are able to promote a brand in a friendly and casual manner. Consumers want to invest and spend money on brands they trust and believe in. Why should brands use influencer marketing over a digital marketing agency? Because it puts a face to your brand and generates more authentic advertising.

Good influencers do things for your brand not only because they are getting paid but because they truly love your brand.

Find someone who actually uses your brand—it’s not always the biggest celebrities who are the best for your brand either. When paired successfully, consumers will understand why you two would

partner together. You never want the audience questioning the relationship. Well the transactional value might not come for a while, you are constantly getting insights and exposure to their audience. If your main objective is to achieve brand awareness than influencer marketing is an exceptional option for your brand as it is difficult to measure direct influencer revenue at this time. Now that there is software out there that can fake likes and comments on Instagram, it’s harder for brands to measure ROI. However, you will know if your brand is generating awareness and reaping the long-term benefits.

As a brand the three things to focus on when it comes to influencer marketing include: recruiting locally relevant talent, establishing clear and achievable goals, and crafting a clear brief for influencers to follow. While I worked as an intern for Fathom Events we used influencer campaigns to market a couple of our movies. Our first campaign promoted a Barbie movie targeted for young girls and their mothers. Since this was our first attempt at an influencer campaign we didn’t get the exact results we were looking for. The Barbie photos released via Instagram for our campaign were more sensual than we intended. The captions sometimes didn’t even feature our brand’s name. For the next campaign, we made sure to narrow down our influencers to people who would engage with our targeted audience and promote content that aligned with our brand. Our brief for talent was specific and included the key brand elements required for each post. Future influencer campaigns performed significantly better following these three tips!

CONCLUSION

I’ve read a fair amount about influencer marketers as I find them to be a fascinating concept. Regular people getting paid to take a picture or video and promote a brand, sounds awesome! What I didn’t realize is some of the constraints around influencer marketing. Legally, marketers are required to tag sponsored posts as ads. This draws a fuzzy line around what brands are allowed to have influencers post for them. Brands should always be authentic and honest with their customers and never try to cover up a paid-sponsorship. As influencer marketing continues to grow so will the rules and regulations regarding what’s acceptable and what is not.

Throughout this session, I discovered insight into why every brand should hire influencers and tips and tricks for using it in business. As Professor Sandra Young reiterated every class “content is king”. She’s right, content is still king but without effective distribution, your content will blend in with the thousands of other messages out there. The importance of influencer marketing has grown rapidly as social media has taken over. In this digital world-people want the best of the best. We have access to endless amounts of information and reviews online and therefore trust what other people have to say over a company simply promoting itself. People often follow individuals they idolize and admire on social media and when you see them using a brand or product you to want to use it. Influencer marketing is a must if you’re a serious marketer today. But—don’t be afraid to leave a relationship (with an influencer) if it’s not working well with your brand.

ABSTRACT

Turning Inspiration Into Action on Instagram Kendra Arenkill Undergraduate: Marketing kendraa2@earthlink.net LinkedIn Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Instagram and the Future of Social

Currently, Instagram is the second largest social networking platform, being used by 600+ million users. The platform has been making a lot of big changes that are both beneficial for users and businesses, which were explored in depth in this session. Instagram is different from other social networking platforms based on the way users engage with and post content. It’s a place users come to find inspiration, reveal photos of their lives, and stay connected to the people they care about the most. Businesses now have even more ways to engage with consumers via Instagram sell products, advertise, and gain customer awareness. Finally, users can take direct action on the platform to not only be engaged, but also make purchases. Michael Hondorp, from the retail team at Instagram, discusses all the ways that marketers can get involved and succeed using Instagram to promote their business. I attended the encore session of this talk, so unfortunately Craig Brommers, Gap Inc.’s CMO, was not able to stay to explain the way Gap is using Instagram for marketing.

SESSION

Today, we live in the age of mobile technology. No matter your age, mobile is taking over a large part of the way we live, communicate and function. Mobile technology is a reality and this is our culture. That being said, people are not communicating the way they used to with each other.

Technology is allowing us to communicate faster, easier, and more frequently than ever before. Messages can be sent to one another with the touch of a button. Platforms like Instagram and technology such as smartphones are enabling a social species that allows us to communicate all around the world, with all walks of life in real time - through visual, written and audio communication. Instagram is just one social platform allowing this type of communication to happen, and the platform is currently experiencing three massive human shifts in human behavior. The first of which is the transition to mobile devices. This is where the consumer audience is looking - so brands are becoming ever more present on mobile devices through the use of video, optimized advertising, and apps. Mobile phones took only five years to reach the same number of consumers as it took when TV was first discovered. The second shift in human behavior is the transition from search to discovery. Half of the time we are spending on technology is being spent on our phones, and half of the purchases we make are done on a mobile device.

We, as humans, are able to see and experience more to life because of our phones. Finally, the last shift in human behavior is the transition from text to visual communication. Visuals are able to communicate more than text in less amount of time. This shift in human behavior, along with discovery, is where Instagram fits in perfectly. Instagram’s mission as a business is to strengthen relationships through shared experiences, which they are accomplishing through visual communication.

Instagram’s global community is vast. They currently have more than 600 million active users and this number continues to grow daily. 400 million users are on the platform interacting daily. Instagram also has 500,000 active advertisers on the platform, and 150 million plus active stories at one time. For businesses who want to use the platform, Instagram has a creative shop where they work directly with businesses to help them create advertisements on the platform to stand out and fit in the with news feeds of their consumers. Businesses on Instagram are able to touch consumers in multiple ways. First, it’s important for businesses to have an active account. Consumers can then follow the brand and see postings at least once a day, if not multiple, times a day. 70% of consumers follow at least one business on Instagram. By posting actively on an account, consumers are able to learn about products/services being offered, and gain awareness of the brand. 60% of consumers say they have learned about a business's products or services through Instagram.

Finally, brands can gain significant amount of awareness if they are putting up content that consumers like - it must be creative, fit for the platform, and fit with their target consumer’s feed. If done well, consumers may even be so influenced that they’ll take action. 75% of consumers say they have taken some sort of action towards a brand after seeing them engage on Instagram.

Making consumers take action can be difficult, though. Instagram says it’s first important that brands are optimizing their content for the mobile platform. But it’s also important to be immersive, don’t just show consumers but actually be part of the story. On Instagram that may mean using an interesting layout, a boomerang, hyper lapse or posting an Instagram story.

Consumers love interaction that is taking a “behind the scenes” look at a company, or discovering a promotion from the platform. Instagram has made many great changes to help businesses also, such as ads within stories, shop-able posts, and carousel photo posts. All of these updates will help the brand get in the forefront of the consumer. Unique posts can help highlight product benefits, differentiate the brand through great story, and show the values of the brand. It can be hard to keep up with change - even as a consumer I feel like I can’t keep up with technology. But when I see a brand engaging in features that are new to a recent app upgrade, I’m impressed. I think these changes are great for businesses, but will also provide convenience to consumers who want to shop from a post, for example.

CONCLUSION

These tips from Instagram are key for marketers when engaging on social channels with their consumers. Starting an account and posting regularly is just the start. That’s where the brand can begin engagement and be an active part of the community. It’s equally important that brands then create and expand their mobile presence. Get creative and have fun trying new types of posts, such as a carousel post, a story, or a boomerang. Giving consumers a variety of

creative posts will help increase engagement and ultimately drive business results. Finally, it’s important that marketers stay up to date with the latest Instagram updates. Consumers are constantly upgrading, so it’s important that they see their favorite brands engaging in the updates as well. Being a brand that is one of the first to try a new update feature will also stand out to consumers. Overall, it’s important that marketers are utilizing the power of Instagram to help build brand validity and authenticity, customer awareness and engagement.

ABSTRACT

Turning Inspiration Into Action on Instagram Colby Bjornsen Undergraduate: BSBA Marketing colbybjornsen@gmail.com

LinkedIn:@colbybjornse n Personal Website Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Strengthen Your Brand on Instagram

Behind Facebook, Instagram is the largest social platform with over six-hundred million active users. In this digital era, mobile is our culture. We are always on our phones. While some believe, technology is tearing us apart, Michael Hondorp of Instagram believes it is bringing us together. It allows us to connect with anyone around the globe instantaneously. We can transcend borders and cultures and communicate with people we’ve never met. Through the transition to mobile phones people have shifted to both textbased and visual communication to connect. With over five million businesses on Instagram, a brand must stand out amongst competition while fitting in within the context of its audience. Hondorp shared some insider tips on how brands can move inspiration and discovery into action on Instagram.

SESSION

Instagram’s mission is to strength relationships through shared experiences. Seventy-percent of Instagram users follow a business on Instagram and seventy-five percent of us take action based on what we see on Instagram. The challenge for a business is discovering how to drive people to take action based on the content and ads they put on the platform. Hondorp recommended being immersive by creating video content using Instagram’s popular features such as hyperlapse, Boomerang, layouts and stories. By blending in with other non-branded content on Instagram your brand will appear fun, hip and friendly.

Storytelling with emotion is another key to success. By arousing emotion your audience becomes more involved and attached to the story. The Instagram Stories feature is a great vehicle to tell a real, authentic, and personable story.

You can connect with an audience on a deeper level by providing a live view, taking audiences behind-the-scenes of your brand. Bringing users backstage at the Oscars, on the runway of New York Fashion Week or inside a NFL lockerroom before a big game are all examples where Instagram Stories have reached a huge audience. When you show the ugly, along with the beautiful, people will be more invested in your story.

Another aspect of making an impact with your brand on Instagram is building a strong following. Brian D. Evans, founder of the Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America, released his secret (yet simple) social media growth hack- “incorporate leadership into your content, by showing/

telling people exactly what you want them to do.” After performing an Instagram case study, this proved to be the most impactful method for growth. As an avid Instagrammer myself, I see how this could be beneficial. I subconsciously listen to what certain posts tell me to do. For example, “tag someone who you want to travel here with” or “comment if you agree.” It’s fun to feel a part of something, especially if the post made you laugh or interact with the brand.

Influencer marketing is a popular topic in today’s social media frenzy. As a brand, the three things to focus on when it comes to influencer marketing include: recruiting locally relevant talent, establishing clear and achievable goals, and crafting a clear brief for influencers to follow. While I worked as an intern for Fathom Events we used influencer campaigns to market a couple of our movies. Our first campaign promoted a Barbie movie targeted for young girls and their mothers. Since this was our first attempt at an influencer campaign we didn’t get the exact results we were looking for. The Barbie photos released via Instagram for our campaign were more sensual than we intended. The captions sometimes didn’t even feature our brand’s name. For the next campaign, we made sure to narrow down our influencers to people who would engage with our targeted audience and promote content that aligned with our brand. Our brief for talent was specific and included the key brand elements required for each post. Future influencer campaigns performed significantly better following these three tips!

CONCLUSION

In summary, to be successful as a brand on Instagram you must: grow your community, interact with users, expand your brand presence, tell an authentic story and experiment with the app’s newest additions. The future of Instagram will unleash a new shopping feature that will allow users to easily navigate from the app to a product page containing more information on the product/service as well as the availability to purchase. With mobile devices changing the way people shop, on-the-go purchase revenues have skyrocketed.

Like Pinterest, Instagram wants their platform to be a place to “discover” goods and services. This new shopping feature will do that and so much more. Each Instagram shopping post will feature a “tap to view” icon on the bottom of the photo. When users click the screen, a tag will appear on the products for sale in the image. Once a tag is selected users will be taken to a detailed view of the product where they will be able to learn more about the item without ever leaving the Instagram app. If the consumer decides to purchase the product they can easily select the “Shop Now” link to go directly to the business’ website. This feature has already been rolled out for select brands and a small group of iOS users in the United States. It won’t be long being shopping on Instagram is released globally.

ABSTRACT

Michael Hondorp of Instagram discusses the importance of brands connecting with users on Instagram. Gone are the days where users just buy a product, they now want to know more about the brand and understand what they stand for.

With mobile growing at exponential rates, marketers must learn how to stay connected to users on mobile devices. This session talks about how brands are using Instagram to drive impact and conversions.

Turning Inspiration Into Action on Instagram

SESSION

With Instagram being the 2nd largest platform behind Facebook, it offers an abundance of opportunity for brands to advertise on. Instagram is the platform for visual inspiration. Humans are always seeking connections with other people but now humans want more of a connection on mobile. The session begins when Michael Hondorp of Darby Pappas Instagram talks about the three massive human shifts in technology. First, we have transitioned from desktop to Undergraduate: BSBA mobile and this enables us to connect with people on a Marketing whole new level. The majority of purchases are made on mobile. It took TV 67 years to get 1 billion people, while pappasdarby@gmail.com mobile took 5. This is major because it shows how fast growth is occurring with the new development of technology.

Second, we have transitioned from search to discovery. We LinkedIn: @darbypappas are no longer seeking out information and typing what we need. Instead, technology is able to tell us what we want. We Link to Flipboard are consuming and creating content and discovering new things at a greater rate. Third, we have transitioned from Magazine text-based communication to visual communication.

Nowadays, the easiest way to get information is through Link to Session images and video. We have abandoned a world where communicating through text was the norm. The norm is now How to Drive Conversions through images and video.

on Instagram

Instagram’s new mission is to strengthen relationships through shared experiences, which is now done through community behavior. 600 million members are active on Instagram, where 400 million are coming back daily.

Instagram is home to 5 million businesses and business accounts have been the core component of the Instagram community since launching the app. 70% of Instagram users follow a business, 60% learn about products and services, and 75% of users take action. Hondorp gives advice on how to move people to take action. First, you must think mobile first. This is just like other sessions have mentioned and it only reinstates the importance of this. Volvo did a great job

of this by offering a mobile-first test drive where mobile users were exclusively exposed to this offer. Another means of doing mobile first is through shopping on Instagram. This campaign allows users to tap to view products, see tagged products, shows a detailed product view, and converts to the business website. Instagram also launched Save, where users can save photos of images and products they like. I wasn’t aware of the Instagram shopping feature, but it is an important feature for retail products, especially smaller businesses. Second, you must be immersive. Marketers can do this by showing AND telling their product to users. They should also create immersive video content using Instagram’s features of hyperlapse, layout, Boomerang, and stories. These are all creative ways for marketers to get users to take action. Third, you should highlight the benefits and differentiate your brand. For example, Gap brought back archives of classic modeling shots, Lamer showed how-to tips for their products, and Lexus embraced sustainability in their posts. Fourth, you should storytell with emotion. Users want to see that brands offer emotional appeal, and McDonald’s did this by leveraging their product through an emotional holiday with their #seasonscravings campaign. Arcteryx integrated storytelling into their campaign and showed incredible adventure shots with their products. These are all examples of how storytelling helps users relate to your brand.

150+ million Instagrammers use stories every day, and businesses can use it to transition from showing just the epic to the everyday side of their business. On the topic of stories, features include Boomerang, Live, @mentions, links to see more, and stickers. Stories are thought starters and you’re able to play with time, play with promos (time-sensitive promos and product launches), tutorials (retail, beauty, food), discovery, and behind the scenes (shows authenticity to finished products). Airbnb did a great job at their campaign of bringing ads to stories and the campaign was successful. I actually knew about this story beforehand because I wrote about it in my SXSW article, so it was interesting hearing about it from an actual employee of Instagram who worked on the campaign himself.

Hondorp offered closing advice on what brands can do today to improve their Instagram.

Brands should engage as an active part of the community where users and brands exist on the same playing field. Brands should create and expand brand presence, and have fun while driving business results. Lastly, brands should play with Instagram’s newest additions such as stories, shopping, and multi-photo posts. I enjoyed this session because I wasn’t aware of some of the features that Instagram offered that I’m able to use to engage with other brands. I think brands can use these features to make themselves relatable to Instagram users because sometimes it’s hard to relate to large corporations. Luckily, users have the chance to take an inside look at large brands such as Gap and get a behind-thescenes look at how they operate as a business.

CONCLUSION

Brands are using Instagram to make themselves more relatable to users. Features such as stories, shopping, boomerang, and multi-photos are ways that brands can engage with users and give them a closer look at not just the product, but the brand itself. Instagram is doing a great job at connecting businesses to users, and these features give brands the opportunity to connect even more. As Instagram rolls out more features, businesses can continue to use them to their advantage.

ABSTRACT

Michael Hondorp of Instagram discusses the importance of brands connecting with users on Instagram. Gone are the days where users just buy a product, they now want to know more about the brand and understand what they stand for.

With mobile growing at exponential rates, marketers must learn how to stay connected to users on mobile devices. This session talks about how brands are using Instagram to drive impact and conversions.

What's Brand Got to Do With It?

SESSION

With Instagram being the 2nd largest platform behind Facebook, it offers an abundance of opportunity for brands to advertise on. Instagram is the platform for visual Darby Pappas inspiration. Humans are always seeking connections with other people but now humans want more of a connection on Undergraduate: BSBA mobile. The session begins when Michael Hondorp of Instagram talks about the three massive human shifts in Marketing technology. First, we have transitioned from desktop to mobile and this enables us to connect with people on a pappasdarby@gmail.com whole new level. The majority of purchases are made on mobile. It took TV 67 years to get 1 billion people, while LinkedIn: @darbypappas mobile took 5. This is major because it shows how fast growth is occurring with the new development of technology.

Second, we have transitioned from search to discovery. We Link to Flipboard are no longer seeking out information and typing what we Magazine need. Instead, technology is able to tell us what we want. We are consuming and creating content and discovering new Link to Session things at a greater rate. Third, we have transitioned from text-based communication to visual communication.

Nowadays, the easiest way to get information is through How to Drive Conversions images and video. We have abandoned a world where communicating through text was the norm. The norm is now on Instagram through images and video.

Instagram’s new mission is to strengthen relationships through shared experiences, which is now done through community behavior. 600 million members are active on Instagram, where 400 million are coming back daily.

Instagram is home to 5 million businesses and business accounts have been the core component of the Instagram community since launching the app. 70% of Instagram users follow a business, 60% learn about products and services, and 75% of users take action. Hondorp gives advice on how to move people to take action. First, you must think mobile first. This is just like other sessions have mentioned and it only reinstates the importance of this. Volvo did a great job

of this by offering a mobile-first test drive where mobile users were exclusively exposed to this offer. Another means of doing mobile first is through shopping on Instagram. This campaign allows users to tap to view products, see tagged products, shows a detailed product view, and converts to the business website. Instagram also launched Save, where users can save photos of images and products they like. I wasn’t aware of the Instagram shopping feature, but it is an important feature for retail products, especially smaller businesses. Second, you must be immersive. Marketers can do this by showing AND telling their product to users. They should also create immersive video content using Instagram’s features of hyperlapse, layout, Boomerang, and stories. These are all creative ways for marketers to get users to take action. Third, you should highlight the benefits and differentiate your brand. For example, Gap brought back archives of classic modeling shots, Lamer showed how-to tips for their products, and Lexus embraced sustainability in their posts. Fourth, you should storytell with emotion. Users want to see that brands offer emotional appeal, and McDonald’s did this by leveraging their product through an emotional holiday with their #seasonscravings campaign. Arcteryx integrated storytelling into their campaign and showed incredible adventure shots with their products. These are all examples of how storytelling helps users relate to your brand.

150+ million Instagrammers use stories every day, and businesses can use it to transition from showing just the epic to the everyday side of their business. On the topic of stories, features include Boomerang, Live, @mentions, links to see more, and stickers. Stories are thought starters and you’re able to play with time, play with promos (time-sensitive promos and product launches), tutorials (retail, beauty, food), discovery, and behind the scenes (shows authenticity to finished products). Airbnb did a great job at their campaign of bringing ads to stories and the campaign was successful. I actually knew about this story beforehand because I wrote about it in my SXSW article, so it was interesting hearing about it from an actual employee of Instagram who worked on the campaign himself.

Hondorp offered closing advice on what brands can do today to improve their Instagram.

Brands should engage as an active part of the community where users and brands exist on the same playing field. Brands should create and expand brand presence, and have fun while driving business results. Lastly, brands should play with Instagram’s newest additions such as stories, shopping, and multi-photo posts. I enjoyed this session because I wasn’t aware of some of the features that Instagram offered that I’m able to use to engage with other brands. I think brands can use these features to make themselves relatable to Instagram users because sometimes it’s hard to relate to large corporations. Luckily, users have the chance to take an inside look at large brands such as Gap and get a behind-thescenes look at how they operate as a business.

CONCLUSION

Brands are using Instagram to make themselves more relatable to users. Features such as stories, shopping, boomerang, and multi-photos are ways that brands can engage with users and give them a closer look at not just the product, but the brand itself. Instagram is doing a great job at connecting businesses to users, and these features give brands the opportunity to connect even more. As Instagram rolls out more features, businesses can continue to use them to their advantage.

ABSTRACT

Turning Inspiration into Action on Instagram Hamilton Tyler Undergraduate: BSBA Finance/Economics hamilton.tyler@du.edu LinkedIn: @hamiltontylerjr Link to Flipboard Magazine Link to Session Inspiring Action on Instagram

Instagram is the second largest social media platform in the world, behind Facebook. The core difference between Facebook and Instagram is that Instagram’s core community since launch is businesses. There are currently over five millions businesses on Instagram and over 600 million active users to consume the content created by them. Instagram invokes the user to explore and discover new content. New businesses can start from the ground up and easily develop a loyal following of Instagram users. It is an incredible tool for businesses when utilized properly. Michael Hondorp, the retail lead for Instagram, describes how businesses can move people to take action by thinking mobile first, being immersive, highlighting the benefits, and telling stories with emotion.

SESSION

The rise of mobile devices has caused shifts in consumer behavior, both online and offline. Many people would argue that mobile culture causes a dehumanizing effect through the isolation of individuals burying their heads in their devices.

Michael argues the opposite and believes that technology brings the world together. It creates new opportunities to share and learn from one another. Mobile culture has caused a rapid transition from a desktop to mobile world. The transition is faster than any previous consumer behavior shifts caused by technology. Mobile allows people to discover and explore new content at rates faster than ever before.

Communication has shifted from being text based to picture based. It is easier for users to get information from a picture, which Instagram is built upon. Mobile culture comes first now because it has caused so many consumer behavior shifts that provide new opportunities for marketers.

Mobile devices capture the attention of the user more than televisions and desktops. Users can be immersed in the digital world in only a matter of seconds by reaching into their pocket. An immersed user means nothing without immersive content. The user will simply continue scrolling through the limitless amount of information available to him or her. Businesses shouldn’t just show a product, but rather should bring the user into the story and conversation.

Instagram features such as hyperlapse, boomerang, and stories provide that experience. It’s interesting as a user to see these features being utilized more and more often. There is no standardized way to present immersive Instagram

features. There are constantly new ways that companies are utilizing features to create innovative marketing approaches. It provides a memorable and unique experience to the user that cannot be imitated.

The most interesting part of this session for me was realizing that Instagram is based around the promotion of businesses. Instagram seems similar to Facebook, but is very different.

Facebook advertising is much more direct and in your face. The user knows when he or she is viewing an ad on Facebook. Instagram advertising is much more subtle, perhaps it is a recommendation for a business based on past interests. Businesses on Instagram produce content on a regular basis that brings value to the consumer, unlike the targeted ads on Facebook. Instagram humanizes even the largest businesses and most popular celebrities so that they are approachable by the average user.

CONCLUSION

Instagram is home to many businesses to drive impact though organic discovery. The nature of Instagram invokes exploration and discovery for the user. Businesses need to move people to take action by taking a mobile first approach and being immersive. Immersive content brings the user in, and then content that inspires emotion captures memories. By telling a real story, companies are differentiating themselves from the rest of the pack on Instagram. Even the largest of companies seem approachable on Instagram. Story telling with emotion gives people the opportunity to relate to the message that is being expressed by the business. The Instagram world is designed for businesses, so why not take advantage of it?

ABSTRACT

A panel of experts from four different brands had a discussion about an interface that is rarely discussed enough – voice. Voice is sometimes tricky because, like the title of the session says, it’s invisible. It’s not as tangible of a medium, but it can make a large impact. Voice and brand reputation are so closely tied, so how do you leverage your voice to influence the way that people think about you for the better?

Voice: The Invisible UI Nobody Speaks About Lane Bretschneider BSBA Marketing, Minor: French lanebret85@gmail.com

How to Use Voice to Guide Your Brand Image

SESSION

This session was a panel about the importance of using voice as another way to connect with your audience. I think that at the core, though, the panelists really spoke more about why voice is so essential for building your brand and helping your customers perceive you as you think they should.

Fortunately, there are a lot of different ways to incorporate your voice into the everyday functions of your business. One way is through social media. Another is through more formal platforms like podcasts or vlogs. Your voice doesn’t necessarily have to be words directly out of your mouth either. It could be that you represent your voice by supporting or advocating for something, or maybe you simply go out in public and talk to people. Essentially, although your brand isn’t always your voice, your voice is always your brand.

It seems that trust is one of the integral elements to building a brand reputation that people engage with and start to build any kind of loyalty towards. The nice thing about trust is that it means a lot to people when they build it over time.

The not so nice thing about it, though, is that trust takes a long time to establish and is easy to break. The best way to get people to trust you is to be transparent with them.

Showing your audience that you have nothing to hide from them makes you more relatable, and relatability is key because people are much more willing to trust others like themselves. One of the examples that the panel mentioned for a great company that has found success in trust building is Airbnb. They have created a platform on which strangers trust other strangers to stay in their homes. Without Airbnb’s platform for that, you might as well be walking down the street and asking random people if you can sleep in their bed that night.

It’s hard to wrap your head around how much trust is involved in this process, and against all odds, Airbnb has created the platform that makes it possible.

Hearing the panelists speak about their experience with voice, I was reminded a lot of a session that I attended at last year’s SXSW conference. In that session, I watched another panel talk about how they’ve each built influential tech brands specific to their audiences.

The underlying message that was the same across the board in that session was the fact that you have to know your customer base extremely well in order to connect with it. The panelist from Under Armour, for example, explained that their customers care about cutting edge differentiation that often has a technological focus. At the time, the company had just released its HealthBox, a product with IoT capabilities that was supposed to connect with multiple facets of a customer’s life in order to make them happier and healthier all around.

In a way, the release of HealthBox was a great example of how Under Armour lets its customers know they’re listening.

The other company from last year’s panel that I was reminded of here in this session was a smaller startup called Hello Alfred. That was a company that connected working people with “Alfreds” or butlers who would take care of all kinds of household chores for them when they were gone at work. In very much the same way that Airbnb had to build a platform of trust, Hello Alfred did as well. I remember the panelist from the company talking about how they even raised barriers to entry quite counterintuitively in order to properly vet the people they were taking on as Alfreds. In this way, they not only talked about how they cared about their customers’ trust and safety but they went out of their way to show it too.

CONCLUSION

I think voice is a concept that doesn’t get talked about enough. We live in a very visual society where larger quantities of content are demanded time and again. I think voice, however, is really where people are able to distinguish more between qualities of content.

Conveying an authentic tone (or not) goes a long way, and my opinion is that it’s a lot harder to be disingenuous when you communicating with voice.