Marketing

​For younger workers, the gap is widening between what responsible companies should achieve and what businesses’ actual priorities are. The good news, according to the 2018 Deloitte Millennial Survey : Business leaders have an opportunity to turn things around—and win back millennials’ loyalty.

Today, access to information is unprecedented, consumers are empowered to make smarter buying decisions and marketers have amassed immense quantities of data about consumers. Technology has transformed many industries permanently, but perhaps none as much as marketing.

Until recently, Facebook had dominated the social media landscape among America’s youth – but is no longer the most popular online platform among teens, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Today, roughly half (51%) of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 say they use Facebook, notably lower than the shares who use YouTube, Instagram or Snapchat.

Pity the modern CMO, out there every day trying to break down silos and align internal teams and external partners.

Did you know that 94% of CFOs would increase digital marketing budgets if there were clear evidence the investment resulted in sales? And yet, marketers are still struggling to prove and to communicate how digital marketing efforts affect the bottom line of their businesses.  That’s just one symptom of the longstanding disconnect between marketing and finance – but it’s one that can be overcome.

Retailers still trying to unlock the question of millennial spending patterns, take note: Millennials are sagging under a heavier debt load than Gen Xers faced at this point in their economic lives.

The report tracks the value of the world’s most valuable brands and provides insights on the potential of strong brands. The total brand value of the 2018 BrandZ Top 100 is $4.4 trillion following a record 21% growth – equating to a rise of nearly $750 billion.

Five the key themes firmly set on the CMO agenda: revenue generation, customer experience, data, content and processes.

While agencies have adapted to consulting firms’ disruption of the media landscape and their role as auditors in the client-agency partnership, we feel strongly that Accenture Interactive’s new Programmatic Services unit is a clear conflict of interest, positioning Accenture to engage in media trading and then also be responsible for auditing the trading results and processes of its competitors.

A new study from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and Deloitte, surveying close to 200 chief marketers worldwide, revealed many CMOs are still focused on the traditional storytelling aspect of their position and are less comfortable with aspects associated with driving growth, including acting as revenue science practitioners and customer experience architects.

Can marketing be too efficient? It seems like a silly question, I know, but hold your judgement for a couple of minutes and read on. A review of a new book titled “The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can’t Do” written by Edward Tenner raised a couple of important issues that apply to marketing as well as other disciplines.  by Nigel Hollis

The failure rate of new products has always been high. However, in recent years, a number of nimble upstarts have emerged as fierce competitors to well-established category leaders. Their success has driven many large manufacturers to question whether their resources, scale and processes are weaknesses that should be discarded in favor of a new “agile” playbook emulating these emerging competitors. However, it’s easy to forget that the most prominent new players represent a very small sample, and there are many others who failed to gain traction along the way. This results in “survivor bias” when assessing the performance of small players; because only the surviving brands are tracked, the average performance of small brands is artificially inflated.

Customer engagement is a priority for many, but no single action plan exists for how to measure it. Some brands simply identify and tally customer engagements, while others truly understand the value of each action.

In this post, Dale Beaton, Global Head of Brand Guidance Insights Division at Kantar, considers why marketers need to know what they are trying to achieve and measure their progress toward that goal if they are to maximize the return on their marketing investment.

The Culture Marketing Council: The Voice of Hispanic Market (CMC) announced today that Sprint is the winner of the 2018 CMC Marketer of the Year Award. Sprint joins a prestigious short list of elite brands that have received the award, including Ford, McDonald’s, State Farm, Toyota, and Walmart. Alberto Lorente, multicultural marketing director for Sprint, will accept the award and discuss the wireless carrier’s commitment to the Hispanic and multicultural market at CMC’s 2018 Annual Conference. The session will take place on Wednesday, June 6 at 9:00 a.m. at the Loews Hollywood Hotel in Los Angeles.

Driving frequency of visits and encouraging more small basket purchases is likely to be a key driver of growth for retailers in the first half of 2018; and with 77% of shoppers actively look for a promotion, this could be one way for convenience retailers to help encourage one extra item in the basket behaviours.

The ARF’s Scott McDonald tackled the topic by providing tips on the best use of A/B tests vs. Market-Mix Models (MMM) vs. Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) to measure marketing ROI in an article published in ForbesMagazines. His overall recommendation: “all three of these techniques can provide value, but none should be treated as ‘the answer.’”

The 2018 ANA Advertising Financial Management Conference was chock full of important learnings on marketing finance and procurement.

After Coca-Cola, L’Oréal, and Procter & Gamble ads were found next to violent and inappropriate online content, brand safety became a major concern for marketers. Months later, the dust has settled and brands are deep in discussions about what brand safety means for them—and what needs to happen to create change and avoid future crises.

The ubiquity of the smartphone and its integrated camera has brought about a new era of consumer behavior. One specific form of camera marketing, the use of augmented reality (AR), is quickly gaining traction according to a new report released by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The report is titled Augmented Reality: Is the Camera the Next Big Thing in Advertising?