Marketing

It’s time to eliminate three words from the marketing procurement vocabulary: “commodity,” “vendor”  and “supplier.”      

Last week I took part in a roundtable with some of our clients in Poland. The conversation, led by Pavel Ciacek ranged from the big picture to the specific, but when it came to making data more meaningful three things stood out.  by Nigel Hollis

In an era of rapid technological change, digital identification provides a significant opportunity for value creation for individuals and institutions.

Sales alone are not the sole measure of success when a brand launches a new product. To truly understand the value of innovation, we need to understand its category impact—and that means measuring incremental innovation.

What is the right media mix?  It’s a question that marketers are constantly asking themselves and their agencies.  It appears simple enough, but complexities arise early in the process.  What’s the budget?  What is (are) the objective(s)?  These are only a couple of the questions that complicate these decisions.  In today’s world, any determination of media mix modeling includes data.  With thousands of media vehicles — let alone marketing channels — available, the process of managing data for all of these options can quickly become unwieldy.

Recently a client asked how various digital behaviors impact brand equity. Answering this question is challenging; not just because of the widely varying forms of digital behavior, but because that behavior can both influence equity and be influenced by it.  by Nigel Hollis

In the latest episode of “Behind the Numbers,” Andrew Lipsman, principal analyst at eMarketer, details the emergence of digitally native consumer brands and how they developed so much heft in a relatively short period of time.

Reading an article in The Atlantic made me realize that one of the biggest barriers to successful brand-building is probably our own inherent bias to short-term outcomes. If so, what might we be able to do to offset that bias?  by Nigel Hollis

According to the latest study by ID Comms in partnership with the 4A’s released last week, U.S. advertisers are failing to get the most value from media pitches because of flawed processes and lack of communication. The study reminds me of a blog post that Toby Jenner (COO of Mediacom) released in September where he stated, “Want a better relationship? Run a better pitch process.” And as an agency search consultant for almost two decades at AAR Partners, I couldn’t agree more.  By Lisa Colantuono,  AAR Partners

Chapter Three:  African Americans: When once asked to define jazz, Louis Armstrong replied: “Man, if you don’t know, don’t mess with it.” The same could be said about race. For earlier generations, race, like religion or politics, was not seen as fair game for polite dinner conversation. At least not among whites. Things have always been different for African Americans, who at least in the company of each other, have always tended to talk freely about race and racism. Blacks have had their group identity forged in the fires of slavery and Jim Crow, a couple of words whites are not sure it’s even okay to mention. Race has been an integral part of the daily lives of most African Americans and its derivative, racism, is experienced in myriad forms: unemployment, incarceration, crime, getting turned down for loans, and missed taxicabs. For blacks, race has always been a subject that demands to be addressed.  By David Morse / New America Dimensions

Recent press reports have suggested that the $130 billion-plus media industry can simply pivot from Nielsen’s currency grade measurement with ease and take comfort in using alternative data sets to operate business as usual.  These suggestions are misguided and, at the worst, could be harmful to the stability of the industry and, at the very least, could if taken seriously diminish some important opportunities.

As people conduct ever more of their lives as consumers and social animals online, they leave telling and durable traces of their behaviors, values, and inclinations behind them in digital repositories. Marketers have not been slow to recognize the opportunities presented by this information or to capitalize on them.

iProspect released their fourth annual whitepaper, 2019 Future Focus: Searching for Trust, built to help marketers navigate and master the notions of truth and authenticity in the hyper-sensitive global media landscape today. The report predicts that those businesses grounded in credibility, relevance and reliability across all their marketing channels will see trust at the very foundation for their success in the digital economy.  

In a survey of 412 US client-side marketers conducted by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), 78% of respondents claimed to use an in-house agency, up from 58% in 2013. (An “in-house agency” is defined as a department, group, or person who has responsibilities that are typically performed by an external advertising or other communications agency.)

The new report finds that fast food, candy, sugary drinks, and unhealthy snacks represented 86 percent of food ad spending on Black-targeted TV programming, where Black consumers comprise the majority of viewers, and 82 percent of ad spending on Spanish-language TV, in 2017. According to researchers, food companies spent almost $11 billion in total TV advertising in 2017, including $1.1 billion on advertising in Black-targeted and Spanish-language TV programming.

Direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands are on a rapid ascent, disrupting traditional retail. These digitally native brands are experts at cutting out costs and efficiently acquiring customers. They are also succeeding as “brands” in a very traditional sense—by identifying the unmet needs of modern consumers.

Chapter Two:  Hispanic Americans – There have been Hispanics living in the present-day United States since the Spanish started roaming around Florida looking for the Fountain of Youth. But it was the 1980 Census that led some white Americans to wonder whether the country was “browning.” The Census made headlines when it proclaimed that there were 14.6 million Hispanics living in the U.S., an increase of over 50 percent from 1970. By 1990, the number, largely driven by immigration, had increased to 22.4 million. Headlines were made again, big time, when the 2000 Census showed that there were 35.3 million, meaning that Hispanics had surpassed African Americans as the largest minority in the country. In 2018, that number was more than 60 million, over 18 percent of the U.S. population. The number of Hispanics in the U.S. is expected to grow to 106 million by 2050, at which time Hispanics will make up nearly 30 percent of the population.  By David Morse / New America Dimensions

Advertisers across industries share a common challenge: how to know which marketing activities are actually driving profit and which are wasting spend.  One way to answer these questions is a measurement approach called marketing mix modeling. Marketing mix modeling calculates the total effect that every marketing channel and its key dimensions, such as product and geography, have on sales and other performance metrics, while controlling for exogenous factors such as weather and seasonality that impact business performance.

No longer a futurist’s daydream, artificial intelligence (AI) is attracting significant investment and growing quickly. According to a December 2018 estimate from tech research firm Tractica, the direct and indirect application of AI software generated $5.4 billion in worldwide revenues in 2017, and is forecast to produce a whopping $105.8 billion by 2025.

In this video, Keith Reinhard, Chairman Emeritus, DDB, states, “We over-appreciate data and under-appreciate data”, and he is right. We tend to over-appreciate the data which tells us what people do, and under-appreciate the data that tells us why they do it.  by Nigel Hollis