Marketing

Last week, the Doomsday Clock was moved from 3 minutes to midnight to 2.5 minutes to 12. Scientists believe that the chance of the world going up in a thermonuclear puff of smoke is the highest it’s been since 1953. This in the same week that Marc Pritchard, the global brand building officer from P&G, made waves by announcing that P&G, in effect, had moved the hand of the ad-spend doomsday clock to 12. High noon!

Donald J. Trump has been in office for less than two weeks and the level of anxiety it has brought upon our society is unlike anything I’ve witnessed. While most Americans hoped the president would unite the nation and lead the healing process after a highly divisive and contentious election, it is fair to say that he has not.  By Tony Hernandez, CEO, Latino Broadcasting Co. and Founder, Immigrant Archive Project

Today, millions of Americans, nachos in front of them, groaned at the TV screen, sometimes because their favored team fumbled, and other times because the commercial was too mawkish, or dumb, or, and this is becoming the new reality, because it pushed their political buttons.  By David R. Morse

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creatve director, etc. / LMMiami.com

• Here’s a review of the ads on last Sunday’s annual sports & marketing extravaganza.
• As usual, I wrote this off the top of my head, making the effort to view the material as actual consumers do: surrounded by noisy friends and family, eating processed food, mildly inebriated on cheap beer and simultaneously checking various mobile devices.

2016 was  rife with stories pointing out the decay of advertising. The saddest of those suggest we have lost our way. If so, the reason would be that the landscape has changed.

Sir Martin Sorrell announced at a conference I attended toward the end of last year that Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) was the biggest threat to the marketing and advertising industries that would bite in the next year, 2017.  To be honest, I’m sure this is a worry for the country’s highest-paid executive, that huge mega contracts don’t just roll over but are instead replaced by brands commissioning work as and when needed. But what I’m discovering from smaller agencies is that it could be a godsend.

The lines between market research and marketing data are blurring. This really comes as no surprise, however. The convergence of these two disciplines was bound to happen at some point. While both industries are grappling with the implications of what this phenomenon means for the way they conduct research, startups shops are seizing the opportunity.  By Mario Carrasco -ThinkNow Research

No brand or category exists in isolation from the world. To treat them as such is to miss one of the richest inputs into their success.

We know the following truths about Millennials: They are the most highly educated generation. They are digitally savvy. They work to live.  By Karla Fernandez Parker –  Sensis

Since the inception of our nation — and as recently as 2013 — lawmakers have periodically eyed advertising as a potential source of tax revenues because its long-term effects can make it seem more like an investment than an expense. After studying a wide array of research on the issue, two professors from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles have concluded that there is no basis for changing the current treatment of advertising as a short-term expense.  By Erich Decker-Hoppen, director of communications for MASB

Interest in influencer marketing continues to increase—and prices are rising in tandem—but measurement capabilities haven’t kept pace.

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.