The American Audio Landscape [REPORT]

Each week, more Americans tune to AM/FM radio than any other platform. What’s more, according to Nielsen’s second-quarter 2017 Comparable Metrics Report, 93% of U.S. adults 18 and older listen to radio every week—more than those watching television or using a smartphone, TV-connected device, tablet or PC.

Advertisers Love Influencer Marketing

National advertisers are so enamored with influencer marketing that a full 75 percent of their companies currently employ the discipline and almost half (43 percent) are planning to increase their spending on it in the next 12 months.

Global advertising confidence rising rapidly, 4.6% growth forecast for 2018 [REPORT]

Amid growing industry speculation about cuts to digital advertising budgets, Zenith has found no evidence that advertisers as a whole are shifting budgets away from online advertising – in fact, its share of global advertising expenditure continues to rise rapidly. Zenith forecasts that advertisers will spend 40.2% of their budgets on online advertising this year, up from 37.6% in 2017.

Confused About the Advertising Industry? Who Isn’t? Read On!

Holding company shares are falling.  Their ad agencies are shrinking, with low morale, low salaries and hiring freezes.  Accenture and Deloitte are the new, growing competitors.  Advertisers are cutting spend but investing in-house.  Chief Creative Officers are disappearing, not entirely due to sexual harassment charges.  Confused by some or all of this?  Read on!

Influencer Marketing 2018 [REPORT]

Strong headwinds are certainly ahead for influencer marketers. For one, it’s looking like this will be the year that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will become more heavily involved. eMarketer has put together this selection of articles, insights and interviews so you can understand what will be critical to influencer marketing in the coming months to be prepared—and to avoid the risks.

DIGITAL ADVERTISING SOON TO GRAB 50% OF ALL AD DOLLARS

For 2018 MAGNA anticipates that a robust economic environment and historically high consumer confidence should generate yet another growth year for the US advertising market. MAGNA is anticipating the overall market to grow by +5.5% to $197 billion. This is an acceleration on last year (+2.7%) and stronger MAGNA’s previous forecast of +5.0%.

Celebrating the Advent of Consultancies

I was reading with huge interest Gonzalo López Martí’s last couple articles on the pros & cons of the different kinds of advertising providers a marketer can choose from and I think he missed one elephant in the room: consulting firms. You know: Accenture, Deloitte, PwC et al.  Allow me to share with you what I recently wrote about that the phenomenon. Here it goes.  By Santiago Olivera – President of Young & Rubicam Buenos Aires

How “Broken” Is Marketing at Major Advertisers?

Marketing is not fully represented by the career-stressed Chief Marketing Officer.  Marketing is not the digital/social specialist or the advertising manager.  Marketing is not the head of promotions or the brand manager.  Marketing is the network of corporate executives, loosely connected by money, expertise and objectives to achieve improvements in shareholder value, presumably from higher product growth rates.  Marketing is the CMO, the heads of Business Profit Centers, the head of Indirect Procurement, the CFO, the CEO and their media, creative and other ad agencies.  By Michael Farmer

The State of Influencer Marketing [PODCAST]

In the latest episode of eMarketer’s “Behind the Numbers” podcast, analysts Debra Aho Williamson and Nicole Perrin dig into influencer marketing: How influential is it, really? And are marketers taking the opportunities (and the risks) seriously?

Unilever Conveys Plans to Continue – Not Cut – Social Media Spend [REPORT]

At the annual IAB Leadership Meeting today, Unilever CMO spoke of the company’s commitment to “responsible” platforms, content and infrastructure, and also conveyed that it will support partners such as Facebook and Google as they invest in improving their platforms. Commentary was somewhat contrary to prior press reports which indicated that Unilever may take a harder line on digital media, much as CPG peer Procter & Gamble did at the same event last year.  By Brian Wieser – Senior Research Analyst – Advertising / Pivotal Research Group

How CMOs Can Get—and Keep—Their Marketing Mix Right

Companies will spend more than $1 trillion globally on marketing in 2017, by one estimate. This puts chief marketing officers stewarding their brands squarely in the crosshairs of CEOs, CFOs and corporate boards, who want to know where all this money is going and what they’re getting in return—“brands be damned.”  To respond to these pressures, CMOs have turned to marketing mix optimization (MMO), an analytical approach to figuring out which elements of the marketing mix—media, creative and so on—are working more and less effectively, and then spending more on the winners and less on the losers.  By Cesar Brea, Laura Beaudin, Andreas Dullweber and Brian Dennehy

Where The Babies Are Booming

One more birth means one more person. Therefore, that births would be one of the primary drivers of U.S. population growth seems to be a deceptively simple conclusion. However, why, how, and where births contribute to the U.S. population growth varies from state to state.

Cultural Cost of Vanishing Brands

Over the past ten years, I have witnessed the disappearance of powerful brands and with it the diminishing of a level of enchantment that once fed our “can do, anything is possible” American view of the world.  This is the first report in a five-part series exploring the impact on people and our culture of powerful brand vanishment and why, more than ever, we need these cultural artifacts back among us.  By Jane Cavalier

Skip to content