Marketing

Every Monday morning across America, retail executives file into conference rooms to review weekend sales performance across channels. They study mountains of numbers from physical and online checkouts, mobile sites, e-commerce analytics, and information taken from store intercepts and online customer surveys.

Duncan Southgate, our Global Brand Director for all things Digital at Millward Brown, thinks I spend far too much time dissing digital advertising. In a recent email to me he wrote, “I don’t see us writing articles about how TV ads suck.” OK, Duncan, let’s see where that comment takes us.

If there’s one thing all Millennials have in common, it’s an immersion in the digital world. If they weren’t fully born in the digital age, they spent formative years and entered early adulthood in a rapidly changing environment of phones, computers and devices that connect them to each other and the world.

Trends and innovation are also moving at breakneck speed, powered by an engaged, sophisticated, curious global consumer.

Millennials are the most active video viewers of any US age group, and according to research from TiVo, this demographic primarily watches TV shows.

The Federal Trade Commission’s long-awaited guidance on native advertising came out just before Christmas, a time when everyone is distracted. Meanwhile, publishers and marketers are still mulling it over, considering what it means for them.

Two weeks ago, the Federal Trade Commission pulled the IAB over for driving the industry under the influence of self-delusion.  It turns out running ads that “assimilate into the design” — so much so that “the viewer feels that they belong” — is exactly what not to do.  

If you’ve had your fill of “future of marketing” prognostications, here’s a no-nonsense checklist to reflect on the health of your marketing with resolutions you can adopt immediately to start the year right.  

Whether it’s commenting on a one-handed grab a football player made, sharing pictures of a night on the town or re-posting a trending news story, social networking has become just another part of the media lifestyle for many U.S. consumers.  For instance, social networking on a PC reached more than 27% of black adults in a typical week—the highest of any multicultural group among PCs. The weekly reach of social networking on smartphones was highest among Hispanics (75%), while on tablets it’s highest among Asian-American adults (21%).

Growth comes from reflecting on and analyzing both success and failure. As we flip the calendar to a new year, we thought it would be helpful to share the five most common advertising mistakes that we’ve seen in the CPG category in hopes that we can all avoid these potential traps in 2016.

As we ring in an election year, we should allow for our (economic influence and) Cultura to serve as a catalyst to cultural understanding in the U.S. with an appreciation for where we come from and our collective desire to be an instrumental voice for Hispanic America.  By Gabriela Alcántara-Díaz – Founder and President of Semilla

In recent years we have witnessed seismic shifts in the way people consume content and the technology that’s available for buying, selling and measuring its impact. Kantar Media’s CEO, Andy Brown, gives his predictions as we look to the year ahead.  By Andy Brown – CEO / Kantar Media

When buying programmatically, there are many important factors that come into play. Being able to buy display, as well as inventory across channels via a single platform, are two of the top ones, according to US media practitioners.

Advertising endeavors to do many things: inspire, motivate, persuade. One thing that it almost certainly never attempts to do is “creep out” its intended audience. However, when consumers talk about targeting, one of the phrases they most frequently use is, in fact, “creeped out.”  By Joline McGoldrick – Research Director / Millward Brown Digital

And one day you come to the realization: everything we’ve heard about those darned Millennials has been previously said about us Hispanics. Hopelessly spoiled? Check. Unruly? Check. Mentally scattered and unable to follow instructions? Check. Collaborative? Prone to self-employment and job hopping? Check. Hey, don’t take my word for it, y’all.  By Gonzalo López Martí /  LMMIAMI.COM

Healthcare, as an industry, is uniquely positioned to create powerful social innovation by virtue of the connections between patients, as well as within the community of doctors. The fact that there are almost no good examples of social healthcare brands cannot be written off purely to FDA regulations (or the lack thereof) in this area. The root of the issue is a lack of understanding of how social and technological innovations really affect culture, and how marketing needs to reflect it. A presence of social platforms is a far cry from an understanding of what it is to be a social brand.

Category management in the food retail industry is stagnant, according to a new study by Food Marketing Institute (FMI), Deloitte Consulting LLP, and Winston Weber, but a roadmap to a more insightful shopper-centric way of doing business is accessible in today’s market. The collaborative business planning study suggests that the biggest shortcomings of category management relate to being too product-focused and too narrow in approach.

SAP Hybris announced the findings of an October 2015 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of hybris titled “The Contextual Marketing Imperative: the evolution of personalization from push messaging to one-to-one personal customer experiences.”

This is the second consecutive year the ANA surveyed its members to identify the Marketing Word of the Year. Members chose from 13 words that also included ad blocking, customer journey, disruption, experiential, fraud, the Internet of Things, mediapalooza, sharing economy, and viewability.

Most people don’t shop in isolation. They are inspired, informed and assured by others throughout the path to purchase.