Agency

The growing Hispanic population in the U.S. and their proclivity for home cooking is helping fuel consolidation among Hispanic grocers. The latest being Bodega Latina’s purchase of Fiesta Mart.

As a Millennial marketer, it’s a weird feeling to listen to panels and read articles from current CMOs, CEOs and Marketing Directors explaining how to reach the “elusive Millennial.”  Hello!  We are right here in the audience; just ask us.  Millennials, born between 1980 and 1995, have experienced the launch and rebranding of social media sites, search engines and online shopping sites.  We are aware that our data is being collected and now influencing advertising creative and what ads are personally delivered to us.  In my opinion, this very recognition and insight makes Millennials the very opposite of elusive.

Terms like “emotional marketing” and “share of heart” advertising almost always conjure up images of tearful, romantic goodbyes or tender moments between loved ones. They’re thrown around much too often, alongside terms like “inspirational” and “aspirational,” in an attempt to describe emotional connections. But they fail to say much of anything.

National advertisers are so enamored with influencer marketing that a full 75 percent of their companies currently employ the discipline and almost half (43 percent) are planning to increase their spending on it in the next 12 months.

If I had received Wall Street analyst Brian Wieser’s most recent note to investors a day earlier, I would have thought it was an April Fool’s prank, but the fact that it is datelined April 2nd, affirms that it starts off with Wieser’s perennial sense of humor: A mock exchange between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explaining his infamous “dumb as f***s” quip to a Senators at a Congressional hearing on consumer data privacy slated for later this month.  by Joe Mandese

In an open letter to CMOs, Tom Roach, Managing Partner at BBH, shares data-points designed to prove that a strong brand is a company’s most valuable asset, and asks that his letter be forwarded to the CEO. If you check out the letter you will find that four of the proof points come from work done by Kantar Millward Brown.  by Nigel Hollis

Association of National Advertisers (ANA) client-side marketers are making strong progress in achieving gender balance among CMOs, but in stark contrast there remains significant work to do in attaining ethnic diversity.

The bad news is that Madison Avenue values people at a rate that is considerably below minimum wage. The good news is that most people are okay with that.

Renée Lavecchia and Federico Hauri have been named Chief Client Officer and VP/ Executive Creative Director respectively for Y&R Miami and the Bravo Group.

NGL Collective announced the addition of Christy Kaplan as Sales Director to lead its sales efforts on the West Coast.

Lieberman and FRC announced that Raul Lopez has recently joined as Senior Vice President of its newly created Multicultural Market Research practice.

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

• The question is not “if” but “when.
• When will our minds be seamlessly integrated with software to operate hardware?
• Remote limbs, organs, machinery.
• Fleets of self-driving vehicles.
• Aircraft.
• Armies.
• Or… other minds.
• What will happen the day we find ourselves surrounded by artificial intelligence?

TV Azteca announced a strategic investment and partnership with Vault Analytics.  The deal includes a TV Azteca minority stake in Vault Analytics and will fast-track and broaden Vault’s TV products.

The bad news for agencies and other external marketing services providers is that two-thirds of marketers are moving more toward in-house capabilities. The bad news is only 3% of them feel they have perfected the skill sets necessary to adequately handle them internally.

Listening to a recent radio interview once again reminded me of the power of message over targeting. Brands will never get the conscious deliberation that a political campaign might, so it is far less about ‘messages’ and far more about creating ideas that evoke a positive response from the target audience. But it is the idea that still matters the more than targeting.  by Nigel Hollis

Years of irrelevant marketing has made one thing clear: ads are more meaningful when tailored to consumer interests. Relevance and personalization in ads can increase consumer brand awareness, recall and affinity. It also leads to action. A recent report from Segment found that personalization caused consumers to make an unplanned purchase, spend more than planned, and become a repeat customer. To activate this kind of large-scale relevant marketing, it’s important to recognize personalized brand experiences are best achieved by choosing ad slots based on the user, not the content. And this approach is powered by programmatic.

The current situation surrounding Cambridge Analytica and Facebook over the use of potentially sensitive consumer data is substantial. Embedded in the wide-ranging commentary surrounding this incident has been a hard-hitting debate about the direction our industry must take.  By Bob Liodice, CEO, ANA

Traditional and online retailing are increasingly intertwined as customers seamlessly shop across touchpoints and the industry uses both platforms to better serve them, according to the annual State of Retailing Online study released by the National Retail Federation and Forrester.

Nielsen and CNN jointly announced that they are expanding their relationship to provide daily national television measurement to CNN en Español. As a result of the new agreement, CNN en Español will leverage Nielsen data (C3/C7) during this year’s upfront season, an annual event during which TV networks preview their upcoming programs to advertisers.

“I told you so.” It’s unlikely that Tim Cook — maybe the most respected exec in Silicon Valley — would use such callow words.  Yet that’s exactly what he’s telling anyone who ever doubted that consumer data mining would result in scandals like the one currently engulfing Facebook.