Marketing

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?

Despite a mandate to drive growth, chief marketers are still stuck in a decade-long rut that has yet to see them fully optimize the lifetime value of existing customers. In 2008, when asked if brands were fully realizing the revenue potential of customers, 76 percent said no. Ten years later, 77 percent of respondents to the same question in a new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council audit still say no, and 10 percent say they are not even sure.

A while back I wrote about the need to break out of the comfort zone in order to create brand growth. The scary thing is that data can be one of the things that helps create the comfort zone. Our data becomes the lens through which we see the world and the real opportunities lie outside our view.  by Nigel Hollis

The apparel market hasn’t reached crisis mode, but shopping behavior has changed in ways that are affecting clothing retailers. Yoga pants are now just pants, fewer consumers have separate work and leisure wardrobes, and younger shoppers are supposedly less materialistic (or maybe just poor), embracing experiences instead of goods.

Digital has a growing share of total media investment for global brands, and rightfully so. Mobile usage in the U.S., for example, has skyrocketed to more than three hours per day, according to last year’s Mary Meeker report. Additionally, some industry onlookers claim that brands are now spending more than half of their media spend in the digital space.

The proliferation of both video platforms and video content has consumers frustrated and unnecessarily struggling to find what they want. And with user experience at the forefront, content providers, media distributors, and tech companies are being forced to improve the discovery, personalization, and “stickiness” of their content.

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.