Agency

As consumers use more and more connected personal devices to organize, curate and discover media, the opportunities to reach them through advertising has exploded.  By Steve Davis / Global Director, Advertising Intelligence, Media Division

Brand growth is the mantra of marketers. Today the number of new tools available to help marketers achieve brand growth is multiplying annually. The new focus is on large scale databases, data science, artificial intelligence, biometrics, and the beginnings of a true marketing science. However, all of this is competing for attention within the context of established marketing processes, advertiser-agency relationship structures, and higher order degrees of complexity of communication. The result is that  “good enough” often substitutes for adoption of proven innovations.

Earlier this year, the pandemic thrust many Americans into a new lifestyle. We worked, learned, parented and cooked at home, shifting how and where we ate, watched TV and listened to music. It even altered our sleeping habits. But a funny thing happened on the road to re-emergence: Consumers, used to choosing when, where and how much content they connect with, found that by working from home they actually had a newfound choice when it came to their jobs, thereby giving employees a chance to achieve a better work/life balance.

COVID-19 has turned an industry term into something far more literal. Will brands continue to promote the safety of their products when the pandemic ends?

The good thing about change is that it opens a dialogue about what needs to happen next. So I wonder, as data gets bigger, will it become more inclusive or has Hispanics and other minority populations, yet again, been left out of the conversation?  by Mario Carrasco

Esports describes the world of competitive, organized video gaming. But who is its audience? And why should brands and marketers pay attention? In this episode, we sit down with Ben Paro, Category Director of Sports and Gaming at MRI-Simmons, as he explains the rise of this unique and faithful segmentation. Tune in to understand the innovative entertainment that eSports is serving up- and the opportunities it gives brands and advertisers.

While the market research industry has mostly embraced the Black Lives Matter Movement, I urge fellow researchers to go beyond issuing a powerful statement.

Solis Health Plans announced a partnership with Major League Baseball’s Miami Marlins, winners of two World Series championships.

Today’s charged sociopolitical climate has underscored the importance of multicultural media for Black and Hispanic audiences, a new study from Horowitz Research finds. Three-quarters of Black (74%) and Hispanic (73%) consumers are at least occasional consumers of Black or Hispanic targeted media and 44% and 42% are frequent consumers, according to Horowitz’s State of Consumer Engagement 2020 study. The study, which was fielded in May 2020, also found that six in 10 Asians are at least occasional consumers of media targeted to them.

Advertising agencies are exceptionally complex businesses, driven by digital / social media innovations, large and fragmented scopes of work, procurement-led fee reductions, holding company-led downsizings, and client pressures to get brands moving again. Agencies have developed hyper-targeted digital executions and ROI tracking tools to help their clients. What they have not done is develop new and better metrics for managing their own businesses.

Pan-ethnic labels describing the U.S. population of people tracing their roots to Latin America and Spain have been introduced over the decades, rising and falling in popularity. Today, the two dominant labels in use are Hispanic and Latino, with origins in the 1970s and 1990s respectively.  More recently, a new, gender-neutral, pan-ethnic label, Latinx, has emerged as an alternative that is used by some news and entertainment outlets, corporations, local governments and universities to describe the nation’s Hispanic population.

However, as I have often found when writing posts over the last 14 years, the subject matter got away from me and I ended up with a summation of what all brands should do to drive profitable brand growth.  by Nigel Hollis

Univision Communications Inc. unveiled sponsors for the 17th annual “Premios Juventud” (Youth Awards), the summer’s premier Latin music celebration.

Calle Ocho Live announced that the late Celia Cruz, the Queen of Salsa, and Ivy Queen, the Queen of Reggaeton, will perform in an epic virtual duet of the Calle Ocho Live festival that is taking place October 4th.

Agency search consultants can provide a valuable service to marketers and agencies by running a well-structured agency review. This guide provides the industry with ten Best Practice Guidelines for agency search consultants, with the goal of creating an environment where all parties are clear about the role of search consultants in the agency search process.

Nielsen’s latest Diverse Intelligence Series consumer report, Cultural Connectivity Transformed: How Latinos are connecting while social distancing, explores how the Latino community is connecting through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Clipped by shrinking budgets and C-suite demands to demonstrate ROI for all their expenditures, marketers now face a curveball the likes of which they have never seen before: dealing with the marketing impact of COVID-19 and radical changes in consumer behavior. There will be winners and losers when the dust settles, and the media-spending decisions that marketers make now will have implications well into the future.

The biggest advertising agencies can be found in the largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. Since the days of Mad Men, Adland has been firmly centered in cities where trends are set, where art and culture thrive.  Somewhat ironically, for an industry stunted at diversity and inclusion, advertising feeds on the vibrant cultures that coalesce in urban America. So, what does the advertising industry look like without big cities? That’s a question we may be asking ourselves as the pandemic radically changes our ways—and locations—of working.

Fast-paced changes have upended FMCG/CPG operations. Predicting demand today is increasingly complex given ongoing shifts in consumer behavior. Does your data re ect pandemic-driven shifts, or tell you what to plan for next?

The WGAW’s Inclusion and Equity Group has released its third Inclusion Report to call attention to the lack of inclusion and equity in the entertainment industry, providing detailed data on the status of writers from historically underrepresented groups.