Marketing

The winning focus for any consumer packaged goods brand is stated in its name — the consumer. These brands, more than any other, are faced with the challenge of ensuring their consumers have an effective and seamless marketing experience. In light of this focus, the CPG brands that will reign supreme in the marketing landscape are those that move away from a multi-channel approach and begin directing their marketing power towards true omni-channel tactics.

“Data-driven,” in short, is now the standard for how successful businesses manage their advertising and marketing efforts all around the world. And in the process, its practitioners are serving to elevate the role and contribution of the marketing function itself, which now serves as the central hub for orchestrating customer experiences that are richer, more compelling and more profitable for all parties to the engagement.

After a long period of talk and nice conference discussions, is the start of 2017 finally turning out to be the start of really doing something about transparency? With today’s massive P&G announcement, it would certainly appear so. We’ve had a lot of talk and it’s probably fair to say that media agencies have had to be, shall we say, “inventive” with how they keep margins up — but could we now be seeing a year of clamp-downs?

So O&M is tearing down the financial walls that separate the different operating groups within it, starting in the U.S., with a promise that all other markets will follow over the course of the year.

Programmatic advertising is increasing in popularity with US advertisers. eMarketer predicts that investment in programmatic display will grow by more than 26% in 2017, reaching almost $31 billion . But even as demand for programmatic grows with brands and media buyers, many publishers still struggle with how to manage, price and sell such inventory, leading to lower-than-expected revenues.

Marketers, media buyers, publishers, and digital advertising technology executives say that “better reporting, measurement or attribution” will be the top industry issue this year—a shift from 2016, when “cross-device audience recognition” took the lead position, according to “The Outlook for Data 2017: A Snapshot into the Evolving Role of Audience Insight.”

Pointing not only to an influx of fake news and spam, but also an ongoing challenge to distinguish what’s real and what’s not, Google took down 1.7 billion ads last year that violated its advertising policies—more than double the amount it removed in 2015.

The financial services industry is no stranger to the Hispanic market. Many of the largest national and regional banks, insurance companies, tax preparation and investment firms have been targeting the Hispanic market for years.  By Jose Villa – founder of Sensis

In order to gain the credence of a wary audience, we have to stop selling and start communicating. Advertisements have become invisible to most and for those who still see them, skepticism has replaced intrigue.

9 of the 10 Top 10 Multicultural (MC) Millennial Designated Market Areas (DMAs) are among the Top 10 Overall Millennial DMAs in the U.S.

Recent exposure to live TV over the New Year holiday reminded me that excessive ad exposure is not just an online phenomenon. There is something fundamentally wrong when the same ad airs ten times or more in the space of an hour. Maybe this excessive frequency is a phenomenon of lack of ad inventory or the practicalities of media buying or does it reflect a misplaced belief in the power of repetition?  By Nigel Hollis

Over a few short decades, shopping options have expanded from local stores and cash transactions, to chain stores and credit cards, to anytime/anywhere shopping both on and offline, enabled by mobile apps and wallets. And not all shoppers are using every channel equally, especially when it comes to digital.

At Captura Group we are passionate about the Spanish language. Being a Hispanic digital agency, it’s in our DNA. On our Hispanic Online Marketing blog, we’ve talked about the importance of nuance, the benefit of a dual language strategy, and even when to use Spanglish to connect with U.S. Hispanics.  Our commitment to the Spanish language is why we were thrilled to learn about expanded text ads coming to Google Adwords. Expanded text ads essentially give advertisers more room to communicate, with 50 more characters in each ad.  By Shuree Jones, Captura Group

It’s Monday morning and Luke, the BIGCO brand manager, walks into his office. He asks the digital assistant device on his desk how BIGCO’s Acme soft-drinks brand performed over the weekend. After a second, the assistant replies that Acme’s share of sales has fallen by 0.5%. Luke asks what’s driving the decrease, and is told it’s due to issues in the BIGCO West region. His digital assistant offers to email Tom, the sales manager, with a summary of their findings.  By Michelle Kennedy, Program Manager, Thought Leadership

Marketers are struggling to get a handle on cross-channel attribution, judging by several efforts now in progress.

The traditional shopping mall is under threat. Here is how to meet the needs of digital customers.

Thanks to digital disruption, the nature of consumer packaged goods companies is changing. Rather than simply selling goods, leading CPG companies are looking to create and curate customer experiences. These experiences are underpinned by a new form of collaboration, using platforms to connect with consumers like never before.

It is a truism that media fragmentation has created a headache for those buying and selling media, and for those companies like us who are responsible for measuring it. Twenty years ago, the world was a far simpler place for brand advertisers: TV was king and digital advertising was a merely a ‘fad’. Fast forward 20 years and we know that digital advertising wasn’t a fad, but TV is still king and although some budgets have migrated, its resilience is broadly steadfast.

Brands need to have a better understanding of the combined power of different media to maximize the impact of their media spend says Duncan Southgate, global brand director, media and digital, at Kantar Millward Brown.

The way we interact, the way we make decisions and the way we learn are all being shaped and influenced by the rapidly developing and increasingly accessible computing technology around us. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the use and adoption of AI.