Agency

First in a five-part series: eMarketer co-founder Geoff Ramsey sits down with top marketing executives from around the world to discuss the critical challenges they face and what they’re doing to address those challenges. Today’s topic: Digital transformation.

The advertising and consumer industry has completely transformed over the past 50 years. Every year professionals are discovering new and innovative ways of research and implementation to effectively reach the most consumers within their target market. Recently, the concept of incorporating cultural considerations in marketing has allowed industries to reach a new level of consumer insight. Although complex and not an easy feat to delve in to researching, there are endless benefits of taking the time to understand culture in regards to marketing. But, many businesses are still refusing to do so due to culture’s complexity and a tendency to minimize cultural differences. Furthermore, the U.S. Hispanic market is a perfect example of a uniquely targetable audience due to its size and shared values. From a business standpoint, marketers cannot bear to lessen the importance of cultural intelligence without drastically affecting their performance.  By Kayli Bomar / Florida State University

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) presented “The OTT Co-Viewing Experience: 2017,” a comprehensive study revealing that more than half (56%) of those co-viewing on over-the-top (OTT) say that they regularly talk about the brands or products they see while watching content on television screens. Moreover, brand-related multitasking behaviors are particularly strong among OTT co-viewers, including chatting on social media about the brands they see, conducting brand-related searches, and even making purchases online.

New data from Hub Research suggests that TV watching habits may be at a tipping point, with the majority of US TV viewers saying they mainly watch their favorite show via a digital source.

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

• You know what they say: in Hollywood nobody knows anything.
• The line alludes to the inability of even the most experienced moviemakers to know in advance whether a movie will be a box office hit.
• The history of Tinseltown is littered with flops with the best talent and the fattest budgets, the highest screening scores and even the best reviews.
• The art & craft of making movies, not unlike that of making ads, is an obscure art for odd people.

As Co-President and Chief Operating Officer of Alma Isaac Mizrahi begins his term as chair of AHAA: The Voice of Hispanic Marketing, three new members have joined its Board of Directors. Stacie de Armas, vice president of strategic initiatives & consumer engagement at Nielsen; Christian Martínez, head of U.S. multicultural sales for Facebook; and Marco Vega, co-founder of We Believers, will work closely with AHAA’s governing bodies, committees and executive director to support the organization’s strategic plan, which elevates the quality of Hispanic marketing in the U.S. and focuses on the value of segmentation and power of specialization.

The ANA Alliance for Inclusive & Multicultural Marketing (AIMM) today announced a set of key priorities for the coming year that are specifically designed to help marketers increase their focus on multicultural marketing to help drive overall corporate growth.

Nielsen launched Marketing Budget Explorer.  Streamlining the media planning process, Nielsen’s new media budget forecasting solution is an intuitive, web-based simulation tool that will enable brand marketers to easily evaluate thousands of combinations of marketing allocations and budget options, to make more informed, media planning decisions.

As a researcher who has worked in the sample industry for over a decade, I was surprised that I had never asked myself the question, “why do people take online surveys?” It’s a practice that we just kind of take for granted in our industry. Researchers often assume that the primary driver is incentives, as every panel gives some sort of incentive to panelists to encourage participation. But because the incentives are small, there must be a more fundamental reason people take the time to check a few boxes.  By Mario X. Carrasco – Co-Founder and Principal of ThinkNow Research

More and more millennials are finally earning and spending serious money. But millennials’ finances often remain fragile, constraining their expenditures. When they make purchase decisions, marketing is just part of what influences where their money goes.

Today’s marketers are in constant competition for consumers’ attention – not just with each other but also with people’s social feeds.  Consumers have more ways than ever to discover, research, purchase and promote products and services, but what content and sources do people seek out, trust and find most influential?

Nielsen announced an agreement to use Comcast’s set-top box data in its local television measurement service. With this agreement, Comcast becomes the fourth major cable or satellite provider whose non-personally identifiable TV viewing data is being integrated with Nielsen’s comprehensive panel data.

Whenever there is an outbreak of the measles, mumps or some other vaccine preventable infectious disease we hear a lot about herd immunity. The notion that if 90%-95% of a population is vaccinated infectious diseases cannot get a toehold in a population. This idea, however, may be providing us a false sense of security because for herd immunity to work, vaccinated individuals need to be distributed evenly among a population to act as buffers against transmission and it turns out they’re not.

Twenty-eight years! Why did we wait so long to tie the knot? Well, it wasn’t legal until June 26, of 2015. But we could have had a non-legally binding commitment ceremony or filed to be a civil union years ago.  But another way to look at it is, why get married at all? It won’t change who we are and what we feel for each other, not really. Is it for the benefits? Sure, that’s a small part of it. Is it to declare our love for each other, and announce it to the world? Okay, that too. Part of the matter is, and this is why we’ve waited so long, and why we’re doing it at all: same sex partners have fought hard for the right to marry. It was a stunning achievement, something nearly unthinkable 28 years ago, certainly unthinkable when I was a boy growing up in the blue-collar mill town of Manchester, New Hampshire, in the 1970s.  By David Morse – New America Dimensions

Growth has become hard to come by for many industries around the globe, and uneasy political and economic environments have made it even more difficult for agencies as companies curtail their ad and marketing spending.  By David Hohman, Managing Director, Nielsen Agency Solutions

If you are running a big brand it must seem like you have a large target painted on your back. Every other brand in the category wants a share of what you already have. And stories of big brands losing out to newcomers are everywhere. But are big brands really dying?  by Nigel Hollis

The pace of change in today’s corporate world is astonishing. A quick glance at the most highly valued companies of 2017 compared to those in 1990 will make obvious how rapidly things have changed on Wall Street and board rooms across the nation. In 1990, the most highly valued companies in the U.S. included mostly petroleum, automotive and prior generation electronics whereas today, companies like Apple, Comcast, Tesla, Facebook, Google and Amazon have quickly taken prominent positions as employers, innovators and highly sought-after blue chip stocks. 

By César M Melgoza, Founder & CEO of Geoscape

Is it blasphemous to say CMOs have outlived their usefulness? Marketing looks nothing like it did 10 years ago, yet the title of CMO still lingers like that well-worn suit in the back of your closet.

US consumers are spending more time with their digital devices than ever before, and that holds true while they’re already watching something else. eMarketer estimates 177.7 million adults will regularly use a second-screen device while watching TV this year, an increase of 5.1% vs. 2016.

To most industry experts, at forums like ANA and elsewhere, the only sure thing in advertising these days seems to be changed. Forecasters keep painting a future about the profitability of digital over analog and all things; Google competes successfully with the Global giants of Advertising; and Facebook reveals the powers of the 6-second spot. Where are we these days? Enter the growing content-creation activity by agencies.