Marketer optimism in the overall economy dipped slightly. The same holds true when comparing to the previous quarter. Superior product quality and customer service remain the top two overall customer priorities. In general, product company customers prioritize quality and innovation while service company customers prioritize trusting relationships.
The advent of digital advertising forever changed how media is bought and sold, with advances in programmatic technology leading the way. The appeal of programmatic buying is easy to see, addressing many of the challenges associated with traditional ad sales. To name just a few of the staple ways in which programmatic technology improves advertising transactions, it lets buyers use audience data for targeting; grants access to premium but often challenging-to-buy inventory; and automates complex buying workflows.
The year is 2024, and more than 50 percent of American product purchases are made through e-commerce thanks in part to the rise of “app-tapping” (waving your phone to purchase a product) and speak-to-purchase ads that merge TV and streaming content with in-home digital assistants. Video games and social media are as popular as ever, though more and more people prefer to hang out in virtual-reality “PlaceScapes,” where savvy marketers are starting to invest. The process once known as advertising is nearly unrecognizable as companies rely on artificial intelligence to disseminate targeted ads based on billions of data inputs, though tougher privacy laws and the proliferation of ad blockers continue to pose challenges. By Chuck Kapelke
The Latino Donor Collaborative (LDC) released Latino Gross Domestic Product Report: Quantifying the Impact of American Hispanic Economic Growth, a study that for the first time ever calculates the full Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the American Latino population. At $2.13 trillion, the estimated U.S. Latino GDP is the seventh largest GDP in the world, with American Latinos driving growth of the U.S. workforce and economy.
Technology is transforming Latinx consumer behavior, from shopping to communication and media consumption, according to Descubrimiento Digital: The Online Lives of Latinx Consumers, released by Nielsen. The majority (60%) of Latinx consumers were either born or grew up in the internet age, compared to 40% of non-Hispanic Whites. This means today’s Hispanic consumers didn’t transition to the internet; they were raised with it.
Once every 10 years, the U.S. Census Bureau undertakes a gargantuan task, one that the founding fathers of the United States considered so important they mandated it as part of the Constitution. The decennial census exists to compile an accurate count of every person living in the U.S. and to record basic demographic data such as age, sex, and race. Its primary purpose is to serve as an underpinning for the country’s representative democracy, making sure each community gets the right number of representatives in Congress and that public funds are equitably distributed. By Michael J. McDermott
Taking a zero-based budgeting approach to enterprise-wide marketing costs can uncover new opportunities and spur more-informed spending decisions.
The vast amount of product information available to consumers through online search renders most advertising obsolete as a tool for conveying product information. Advertising remains useful to firms only as a tool for persuading consumers to purchase advertised products. In the mid-twentieth century, courts applying the antitrust laws held that such persuasive advertising is anticompetitive and harmful to consumers, but the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was unable to pursue an antitrust campaign against persuasive advertising for fear of depriving consumers of advertising’s information value. Now that the information function of most advertising is obsolete, the FTC should renew its campaign against persuasive advertising by treating all advertising beyond the minimum required to ensure that product information is available to online searchers as monopolization in violation of section 2 of the Sherman Act.
As marketing technology, or martech, becomes more sophisticated, companies are finding they can accelerate and optimize everything from basic commercial functions like e-commerce conversion to more complex ones, such as managing multi-dimensional customer relationships across multiple channels. In this interview, Scott Brinker, VP, Platform Ecosystems, at HubSpot, and Jason Heller, a McKinsey partner leading our Digital Marketing Operations and Technology service line, share their insights on the evolving world of martech with McKinsey’s Barr Seitz.
In marketing, it’s important to keep pace with demographic change. Even better to stay ahead. Right now, for instance, significant changes in the U.S. cultural landscape have made multicultural marketing imperative. By Mario X. Carrasco is Co-Founder and Principal of ThinkNow Research
Determining audience “identity” has become a major priority over the past year for U.S. marketers, many of whom plan to increase their investment in finding and developing identity solutions.
In 2018, it’s a given that agencies must be able to connect their creative excellence to data and technology. Picking up where that post left off, I want to cover the top three things that will hurt your agency’s prospects for new business now. My list includes the top concerns and challenges we see coming up repeatedly for agencies. By Mark Duval / Duval Partnership
The major trade associations representing the advertising industry — are jointly writing to express opposition to the addition of the new census question that asks, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?”
Personalized communication with every customer is the future of marketing. McKinsey partners Julien Boudet and Kai Vollhardt say it’s easier than many marketers think, if you begin with the data you have. By Julien Boudet and Kai Vollhardt
The magnitude and pace of change in the US market have undermined traditional growth models for many consumer-packaged-goods companies, especially larger ones. Companies need to combine greater agility with new types of scale advantage to compete more effectively.
The truth of the matter is that amidst the extreme change (with a splash of chaos) that our industry is currently experiencing, it’s our job to change the story that, in my opinion, seems to have gotten away from us. Only if WE change the story, can WE change the outcome. So what’s the story I’m hearing out in the marketplace? It depends who you ask, but for some it’s “Spanish-language media is dying.” For others, it’s “Total Market is killing our industry,” or “no one can seem to get the in-culture formula right.” To me, it’s all just negative bullshit. No one is immune to the shift the media and marketing industry is experiencing for more reasons than I can count on two hands (that’s ten fingers, folks). By David Chitel / NGL Collective
Clashing egos and feuds over the company’s future have engulfed the U.S.’s largest Spanish-language broadcasting outlet, according to The Wall Street Journal. Is Univision, the company that Jerry Perenchio built with $400 Million and sold for $13 Billion crumbling? By Gene Bryan / HispanicAD
An overt degree of speculation surrounds the future state of our industry. To me, what’s coming is not such a mystery. The future of marketing and advertising will be increasingly personalized, tech-enabled and data-enhanced. Consumers will continue to choose what they consume and brands will continue to try and influence what consumers choose to consume.
Audio plays an important role in the daily lives of hundreds of millions of Americans, and the listening audience of radio is as diverse and varied as the fabric of the American melting pot itself. In fact, radio is America’s top weekly reach platform, both overall and with Black and Hispanic consumers; 75 million of whom tune in each week. In the first quarter of 2018, the radio reached 92% of Black consumers each week and 96% of Hispanic consumers.
Agencies, like brands, need consistency. Agencies used to have access to the C-suite within brands but that’s no longer the case. It’s time for agency leaders to step up and rebuild agency C-suite relevance again. By Thomas Barta
