Marketing

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.

Social media wasn’t the realm of any one person, department or organization. It was owned by everyone and no one. The only thing early adopters of social media had in common was the desire to create change.  

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 mission is to create a system that puts content in front of a consumer at just the right moment. But all your work stands or falls on what happens then, and success is no accident. It’s the result of delivering content that communicates exactly the right message, for that particular consumer, at that moment in time. Helping to set the stage for this is your messaging framework.

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

In a recent point of view on Campaign, Rory Sutherland discusses the origins of our “targeting-obsessed scientism” which leads us to focus on ad delivery to the exception of anything else like creative or the recipient’s mindset. Rory calls out Silicon Valley for tricking advertisers, but is this single-minded focus really just the fault of the tech companies?  by Nigel Hollis

Advertisers agree that ensuring brand safety is a perennial problem. But there isn’t a consensus on who is most responsible for it.

  In the latest episode of “Behind the Numbers,” eMarketer’s Mark Dolliver discusses how teens indulge in too much screen time, and the extent to which they and their parents see this excessive usage as a problem.

In my opinion, one of the defining characteristics of great leaders is that they make decisions based on solid data. I have always advocated that individuals and organizations must face the “brutal facts” when dealing with difficult situations in order to develop viable solutions.  By Ralph de la Vega / Chairman at De La Vega Group

You’ve probably heard of an IQ, which scores one’s general intelligence and intellectual competence. But have you heard of CQ? CQ is cultural intelligence, your IQ when it comes to culture.  by Nancy Tellet

The furor over whether brand attitudes predict or follow behavior made me take a step back and re-examine my own beliefs about how attitudes and behavior interact. Assuming that ‘it’s complicated’ is not helpful, I have tried to map out a framework for thinking about how the two affect each other.  by Nigel Hollis

If you think it’s hard to develop a marketing budget, you’re in good company. Most marketers today must do more with less. Faced with steep competition, B2C marketers need to spend every penny wisely.

As marketers, we’ve spent decades leaning on the double definition of “creative” to shirk responsibility. We’ve conflated the traditional creativity of artists, writers, and poets, with the creative side of marketing and advertising — the copywriting, art design, and campaign content.

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.

Marketers are invested in accurately identifying their target audiences, but they often miss the mark.

The average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer is 44 months, and the number of first-time CMOs jumped 31% in the past year, according to a recent study by executive search firm Spencer Stuart.

A while back, I wrote a post about the spurious dichotomy between the short and long-term effects of marketing. In it I argued that the separation between the two time frames was a spurious one, but how do you predict whether your marketing will have a positive effect in the longer-term?  by Nigel Hollis