Marketing

Once upon a time, “stores” were buildings made of bricks and mortar that sold an inventory of a few thousand products during regular business hours. The digital revolution changed all that: e-commerce retailers created web shops that were open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The 2017 Marketers Confidence Index rose by 6 points from a year ago to 69 out of 100 possible points. Despite overall confidence in marketing increasing, 30 percent of marketers say they are more concerned that their organization is not investing in the right customers. This is a 13 decrease in confidence compared to how marketers felt one year ago.

In the digital age, consumers are always shopping around. New research shows that hooking them early is the strongest path to growth.  By David Court, Dave Elzinga, Bo Finneman, and Jesko Perrey

News that the Department of Justice is investigating “bid rigging” by ad agencies to favor in-house agency facilities highlights how competitive bidding works in the world of advertising and exposes a problematic industry practice, one that undermines the trust between agencies, clients and vendors.  By Alex Blum

As many of you know, I care deeply about the “how” of marketing: How are budgets allocated? How are results measured and tied back to plans and activities? How are marketing departments set up for maximum success? How are agencies contracted, managed and incentivized for their contributions? How is “new news” still allowed as a phrase in marketing presentations?  I care deeply about figuring out how to do marketing before doing the actual job. And so should all marketers.

If media is to change in 2017 then the way it’s assessed also needs to change. That means better, more relevant metrics, measures that reflect how media can add value to a brand and drive business success.

What do my customers want? The savviest executives are asking this question more frequently than ever, and rightly so. Leading companies understand that they are in the customer-experience business, and they understand that how an organization delivers for customers is beginning to be as important as what it delivers.

Isolating and diagnosing the effectiveness of your brand’s communications can be difficult even on familiar ground. With Hispanic consumers, even more variables are in play. These are the most common mistakes brands are making in measuring Hispanic campaigns — and how to avoid them.  By Aleena Astorga Roeschley – Communicus, Inc.

We all know that creativity matters when it comes to advertising, but I will bet that this is where the agreement stops. Is creativity a means to get attention, a means to focus attention on the brand or a means to accentuate an impression of the brand? In reality the answer is all three.

So what is the Hispanic Millennial Mistake? The mistake is when a Brand manager or marketer decides to focus the majority of its marketing dollars on a bicultural, bilingual Hispanic millennial and thus, shifts a large portion of Hispanic marketing dollars away from its core Hispanics base; that’s if a Brand has one. Many Brands are barely beginning to market their products to Hispanic and now they just want to focus on Hispanic millennials.  By Jose L. (Joe) Lopez –  Lopez Marketing Group

Like any art form, movies are a mirror of our society. And as the U.S. continues to evolve into a minority-majority nation, studios are challenged to produce stories that reflect the changing faces of American moviegoers. By Hilary Dubin / Univision Insights

CMOs are getting a lot of attention from the trade press these days, where writers drag in the usual suspects — Big Data, analytical skills, experiential marketing, Instagram, programmatic buying, Facebook, mobile platforms, Millennials, AI, Virtual Reality, etc. — to demonstrate how CMOs need to become superhuman masters of everything new and challenging, pushing themselves and their marketing organizations to achieve higher levels of marketing and technological sophistication.  By Michael Farmer

As retailers begin to expand beyond geographic boundaries, they also face pressure from consumers to “keep it local.”  Balancing globalization with localization has quickly become a priority for retailers looking to connect with their customers both in home markets and abroad.

Traditionally, brands have the option of either cutting cost or putting up prices to boost margins are deciding to go for a more premium positioning.

Today’s consumer goods industry was built on brand marketing. For decades, the focus was on high-impact campaigns across TV, billboards and radio, with companies seeking to develop slogans and brand narratives that resonated with consumers of all ages and backgrounds.

Leaders struggling to find capital they can use to drive growth may want to look at all the investments they’ve made in the name of loyalty. That’s because loyalty programs typically cost more, and deliver less, than many realize.

If one were to equate the difference between the 4As and the ANA — the two associations which govern the ad/media agency and brand marketer communities respectively — to the differences between the Confederacy and Union states, the case for, or against, transparency should become abundantly clear.  By David Smith and Tim McHale

Picture the scene: you’re trying to share a video with a couple of friends to illustrate a point you’ve been arguing about for the last half hour. As the video loads, an ad pops up at twice the volume of what you’ve been playing before. You groan and turn the volume down, but you’ve missed the chance to skip the ad and get bounced to your browser as the brand site loads. You switch back to YouTube but the conversation has moved on and your friends have lost interest. Advertising has ruined the moment.

An in-depth analysis of the current state of media ROI analysis has found that while progress has been made toward development of methods that enable near real-time cross-platform attribution and ROI analysis, much work still needs to be done and few viable integrated systems for looking at consumer behavior cross-platform are yet available.

Consumers are loyal to brands that respect their privacy, and that demonstrate their trustworthiness by safeguarding customers’ personal information.