Marketing

There is a wide range of skills and salaries represented in the marketing industry, and a marketer’s career path can take many forms. This makes staffing a marketing team with the right players and laying the right stepping stones for your own career a challenge. To make the right decisions, it is essential to stay on top of industry trends.

ANA client-side membership is overwhelmingly female, white, and heterosexual — but nonetheless is more gender and ethnically diverse than CMOs at ANA member companies.

Marketers seek more customer data, but many struggle to make sense of what the numbers are telling them.

Data is still core to being a successful marketer, but there’s a more tangible consumer resistance rooted in privacy as a result of the recent Facebook issues. So where does that net out for marketers?

A recent study by the IAB UK is simply titled ‘Digital Ad Effectiveness’ and the analysis, which references work conducted by Kantar Millward Brown among others, finds that digital is indeed effective. So how come TV, radio and other studies find digital to have a weaker influence? Is it simply a matter of biased research?  by Nigel Hollis

We’ve now reached the crux of the matter when it comes to the ad biz.

You can say that Cinco de Mayo is a “crown import,” and we pretty much owe it to Corona (Crown) — a Mexican beer. It might have been the effect of too much beer, or maybe just too much marketing. Blame it on the guac, the fajitas, the uplifting sounds of mariachi bands, the colorful Mexican flags, the margaritas, the beer … and more beer. And don’t forget the lime — another clever marketing stunt that demonstrates, once again, that advertising really works! Other beer brands have followed suit, but this “historic event” has turned so proprietary for Corona that nobody else comes close. Corona has even gone as far as to write “Cinco” with the very distinctive Corona font!  By Luis Miguel Messianu, Creative Chairman-CEO Alma, Miami

GroupM released a new report, “State of Digital,” offering intelligence on consumer media consumption and advertising investment trends worldwide. Among a series of publications by GroupM prognosticating media marketplace futures the world over, the new report focuses on the impact of technology and digital capabilities on consumers and advertisers.

Total media ad spending worldwide will rise 7.4% to $628.63 billion in 2018, according to eMarketer’s latest report, “Global Ad Spending: The eMarketer Forecast for 2018.”

Fifty-nine percent of marketers’ digital advertising budgets are currently allocated to digital video, a consistent climb in share since 2016, according to the “Digital Content NewFronts: 2018 Video Ad Spend Study”. Furthering the trend, more than 50 percent of buyers plan to increase digital and mobile video spending in the next 12 months, with the additional spend primarily coming from expanding budgets.

Millennials’ behavior is among the most scrutinized, but don’t be too quick to stereotype this generation.

TBWA’s cultural insight studio, Backslash, released a report identifying a new modern era of American activism, coined Pan Activism. In a nationwide research study, conducted with strategic brand research consultancy Hall & Partners, it was found that 85 percent of Americans took some form of activism in the past year, such as conversing with those who have differing beliefs or donating to a local business or national tragedy. The findings indicate that modern activism is no longer defined by fringe groups with singular big battles but it is more mass and characterized by small, everyday actions.

Despite a long and relatively steadily improving economy, consumers remain so focused on value that pricing remains retailers’ most pressing business worry.

Here, Duncan Southgate, Global Brand Director, Media, explains why marketers should always look beyond simple, generic rankings when deciding which media channels to use.

For Millennials and most modern consumers, television has been a key part of our daily lives — whether it’s looking forward to relaxing and watching a show after a long day at work or cheering on a favorite sports team during the playoffs. However, the rise of technology has changed the way people consume visual content, making it tough for television to compete with the digital world. Could television really be dying a long, slow death? Here are four reasons why digital media is causing the death of television and why marketers should ditch television for digital media.

Navigating the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) landscape has become difficult. It’s not just the consumer path-to-purchase that’s grown in complexity. The playing field for manufacturers and retailers has evolved as well. Notably, for the first time since 2009, the total number of brick-and-mortar stores in the U.S. has declined. As we’ll review a little later, this hasn’t affected all channels to the same extent, but it does highlight the importance of handling product assortment and distribution with utmost efficiency.

The imperative to compete on the basis of customer experience is heightening the job security risks of chief marketing officers who are struggling to keep up with new digitally driven ways to engage, satisfy and enrich the experience of more mobile, savvy and fickle consumers.

How much time do American consumers spend each day with their multimedia devices, tablets, computers, AM/FM radio, TV, or their smartphones?  By Pierre Bouvard

The fast-moving-consumer-goods industry has a long history of generating reliable growth through mass brands. But the model that fueled industry success now faces great pressure as consumer behaviors shift and the channel landscape changes. To win in the coming decades, FMCGs need to reduce their reliance on mass brands and offline mass channels and embrace an agile operating model focused on brand relevance rather than synergies.

Yes, the 72-million strong Millennial generation is coming into their own and are starting to buy stuff. Enamored marketers are salivating (or running scared) at the prospect of serving them.  Older marketers, and students of consumerism, remember the defining impact of the last mega-generational cohort, the Baby Boomers; how they shaped consumer trends, created categories of products and services, and generally made or broke one’s business success.  By Stephen Palacios, Principal, Ahzul