Agency

  In the latest episode of “Behind the Numbers,” eMarketer’s Mark Dolliver discusses how teens indulge in too much screen time, and the extent to which they and their parents see this excessive usage as a problem.

In working with many award-winning agencies over the course of my career, one of the challenges I encounter is how to translate awards into compelling messages for new business development. The most common roadblock is connecting an award to business results for the agency client.  by Mark Duval / Duval Partnership

OTT may be the messiah of modern media.  More than half of 22-54 year olds didn’t watch paid TV in 2017, according to a marketing agency study.  The shift from traditional broadcast, or cable viewing, to more fluid, video-based behaviors is swiftly making its mark.  This year, 90 percent of Millennials claimed they regularly binge-watch.  The thirst for entertainment on-demand is strong and growing.  But what’s behind it?  Simplicity and customization.  The leaders of effortless entertainment — Netflix, Amazon and Spotify — all share a common mission to make people’s daily lives better by surrounding them with what they need, at the moment they need it, through a personalized entertainment experience.

Univision Digital unveiled its digital and social programming for the 11th edition of “Nuestra Belleza Latina” (Our Latin Beauty or NBL) designed to bring the audience closer to the reality competition than ever before.

In my opinion, one of the defining characteristics of great leaders is that they make decisions based on solid data. I have always advocated that individuals and organizations must face the “brutal facts” when dealing with difficult situations in order to develop viable solutions.  By Ralph de la Vega / Chairman at De La Vega Group

You’ve probably heard of an IQ, which scores one’s general intelligence and intellectual competence. But have you heard of CQ? CQ is cultural intelligence, your IQ when it comes to culture.  by Nancy Tellet

The furor over whether brand attitudes predict or follow behavior made me take a step back and re-examine my own beliefs about how attitudes and behavior interact. Assuming that ‘it’s complicated’ is not helpful, I have tried to map out a framework for thinking about how the two affect each other.  by Nigel Hollis

If you think it’s hard to develop a marketing budget, you’re in good company. Most marketers today must do more with less. Faced with steep competition, B2C marketers need to spend every penny wisely.

As marketers, we’ve spent decades leaning on the double definition of “creative” to shirk responsibility. We’ve conflated the traditional creativity of artists, writers, and poets, with the creative side of marketing and advertising — the copywriting, art design, and campaign content.

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

• It is no secret that innovating from within can be extremely hard, if not impossible, at large corporations.
• Part of the reason is that most large companies have a single minded, volume-based, low margin business model: make industrial amounts of one thing and one thing alone, inundate the market with it.

Once every 10 years, the U.S. Census Bureau undertakes a gargantuan task, one that the founding fathers of the United States considered so important they mandated it as part of the Constitution. The decennial census exists to compile an accurate count of every person living in the U.S. and to record basic demographic data such as age, sex, and race. Its primary purpose is to serve as an underpinning for the country’s representative democracy, making sure each community gets the right number of representatives in Congress and that public funds are equitably distributed.  By Michael J. McDermott

Taking a zero-based budgeting approach to enterprise-wide marketing costs can uncover new opportunities and spur more-informed spending decisions.

The vast amount of product information available to consumers through online search renders most advertising obsolete as a tool for conveying product information. Advertising remains useful to firms only as a tool for persuading consumers to purchase advertised products. In the mid-twentieth century, courts applying the antitrust laws held that such persuasive advertising is anticompetitive and harmful to consumers, but the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was unable to pursue an antitrust campaign against persuasive advertising for fear of depriving consumers of advertising’s information value. Now that the information function of most advertising is obsolete, the FTC should renew its campaign against persuasive advertising by treating all advertising beyond the minimum required to ensure that product information is available to online searchers as monopolization in violation of section 2 of the Sherman Act.

As marketing technology, or martech, becomes more sophisticated, companies are finding they can accelerate and optimize everything from basic commercial functions like e-commerce conversion to more complex ones, such as managing multi-dimensional customer relationships across multiple channels. In this interview, Scott Brinker, VP, Platform Ecosystems, at HubSpot, and Jason Heller, a McKinsey partner leading our Digital Marketing Operations and Technology service line, share their insights on the evolving world of martech with McKinsey’s Barr Seitz.

Marketers are invested in accurately identifying their target audiences, but they often miss the mark.

PACO Collective announced the acquisition of Noble Food, an independent food-marketing agency headquartered in Springfield, MO.

Curacao, a Hispanic-centric retailer on the West Coast serving diverse communities in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Tucson and Phoenix, is rolling out a series of initiatives to attract Hispanic millennials and reposition the company as the premier Omni-channel shopping destination for the new generation of Hispanic America.

Tesla founder and all-around tech visionary Elon Musk made waves earlier this month when he tweeted that he was considering taking the electric car company private.  The tweet, which generated wild trading in Tesla stock and reportedly sparked a federal investigation, illustrates the perils of C-level executives acting on their own on social media.

The average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer is 44 months, and the number of first-time CMOs jumped 31% in the past year, according to a recent study by executive search firm Spencer Stuart.

A while back, I wrote a post about the spurious dichotomy between the short and long-term effects of marketing. In it I argued that the separation between the two time frames was a spurious one, but how do you predict whether your marketing will have a positive effect in the longer-term?  by Nigel Hollis