Marketing

Good customer experience leaves people feeling heard and appreciated; it minimizes friction, maximizes efficiency and maintains a human element.
 

Being in multicultural advertising, I’m always looking for images to use in presentations and on behalf of client work. What I’ve discovered is how hard it is to find any kind of diversity in the Hispanics represented in stock imagery.  by Karla Fernandez Parker

In a survey of 120 CMOs worldwide by marketing consultancy NewBase, 43% of respondents said they outsource their programmatic efforts. No other marketing function had an outsource rate this high.

Many of you are familiar with WARC research data.  It probably won’t surprise you that the company’s recently published Global Ad Trends overview has a significant portion dedicated to the challenges of digital advertising.

Over $46 billion will go to programmatic advertising in the US this year, according to eMarketer’s latest programmatic forecast—about $10 billion more than last year.  That means 82.5% of all US digital display ads will be bought via automated channels in 2018.

To continue to compete, CPG companies must increase agility, reskill the C-suite, and leverage millennial talent.

In this post Bill Pink, Head of Brand Guidance Analytics in North America, considers whether brand marketing is less important than it was in days gone by.

Attention. Human-viewable. Audience. Fraud-free. Sales.

Are the marketers and advertisers that the Executive Director of the Culture Marketing Council (CMC) speaks to every day aware of the power of Hispanic radio? Are they actively using Spanish-language radio stations to reach an important consumer segment?

No, no and no. Stop. Niet. Nein. Stay away! Don’t even think about it. Leave it to me! I do this for a living, seriously. It’s how I pay for my frijoles! Yankee go home!

As a Millennial marketer, it’s a weird feeling to listen to panels and read articles from current CMOs, CEOs and Marketing Directors explaining how to reach the “elusive Millennial.”  Hello!  We are right here in the audience; just ask us.  Millennials, born between 1980 and 1995, have experienced the launch and rebranding of social media sites, search engines and online shopping sites.  We are aware that our data is being collected and now influencing advertising creative and what ads are personally delivered to us.  In my opinion, this very recognition and insight makes Millennials the very opposite of elusive.

Terms like “emotional marketing” and “share of heart” advertising almost always conjure up images of tearful, romantic goodbyes or tender moments between loved ones. They’re thrown around much too often, alongside terms like “inspirational” and “aspirational,” in an attempt to describe emotional connections. But they fail to say much of anything.

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.

In an open letter to CMOs, Tom Roach, Managing Partner at BBH, shares data-points designed to prove that a strong brand is a company’s most valuable asset, and asks that his letter be forwarded to the CEO. If you check out the letter you will find that four of the proof points come from work done by Kantar Millward Brown.  by Nigel Hollis

Association of National Advertisers (ANA) client-side marketers are making strong progress in achieving gender balance among CMOs, but in stark contrast there remains significant work to do in attaining ethnic diversity.

The bad news is that Madison Avenue values people at a rate that is considerably below minimum wage. The good news is that most people are okay with that.

The bad news for agencies and other external marketing services providers is that two-thirds of marketers are moving more toward in-house capabilities. The bad news is only 3% of them feel they have perfected the skill sets necessary to adequately handle them internally.

Listening to a recent radio interview once again reminded me of the power of message over targeting. Brands will never get the conscious deliberation that a political campaign might, so it is far less about ‘messages’ and far more about creating ideas that evoke a positive response from the target audience. But it is the idea that still matters the more than targeting.  by Nigel Hollis

Years of irrelevant marketing has made one thing clear: ads are more meaningful when tailored to consumer interests. Relevance and personalization in ads can increase consumer brand awareness, recall and affinity. It also leads to action. A recent report from Segment found that personalization caused consumers to make an unplanned purchase, spend more than planned, and become a repeat customer. To activate this kind of large-scale relevant marketing, it’s important to recognize personalized brand experiences are best achieved by choosing ad slots based on the user, not the content. And this approach is powered by programmatic.

The current situation surrounding Cambridge Analytica and Facebook over the use of potentially sensitive consumer data is substantial. Embedded in the wide-ranging commentary surrounding this incident has been a hard-hitting debate about the direction our industry must take.  By Bob Liodice, CEO, ANA