Agency

Category winners in the 17th annual Association of National Advertisers’ Multicultural Excellence Awards competition were announced.

At the start of 2017, the new administration and Congress set tax reform as one of their highest priorities. As work on that began in earnest, it became clear that the reduction in the full deductibility of advertising was once again in play.

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

• We shop to fill the void of our existential tedium.
• We live to shop and we shop to live.
• We shop, therefore we are.
• Shop, return, repeat.

What customers want and what businesses think they want are often two different things. Here’s what customers are looking for.  Anyone who has gotten an unsolicited and irrelevant offer related to something they’ve done online knows that creepy feeling that “someone is watching me.” This kind of reaction is the third rail of today’s drive to personalize interactions with customers.  By Julien Boudet, Brian Gregg, Jane Wong, and Gustavo Schuler

A new fiscal year is in sight and you still have no measurable Hispanic or multicultural budget. You’ve shown the C-suite the purchasing power numbers, the demographic trends, and the generational trends to no avail. Well, you’re not alone; 49% of respondents in a recent CMO Council study admitted they do not have a multicultural marketing initiative in place.

A couple of weeks ago I suggested that I would come back to the idea that there is a right time to advertise to someone. Right now the marketing world seems to have decided that the right time to get a message to someone is as close to point of purchase as possible, but is that really true?  by Nigel Hollis

What are the steps that creative ad agencies can take to rekindle revenue growth?  We recall that agency fees have been under downwards pressure for quite some time due to brand globalization, client obsession with “shareholder value,” the rise of procurement, the fragmentation of media, the scrapping of AOR relationships and the stagnation of brand growth.  These factors have driven fees downwards and reduced the length of client relationships.  The agency scramble for new business has pitted agency against agency in an industry price war.  Where is this headed?  Can any agency “break out” of this deadly cycle and join the Madison Avenue Makeover Club?  Is there a way to restore ad agency revenue growth?  By Michael Farmer

Marketing in Spanish in the U.S. may not seem like an innovation from our purview in 2017, but when the first recognized full service Hispanic advertising agency in the United States opened up in 1962 it was a paradigm-shifting marketing event. It was one of the first times national brands and companies marketed their goods and services in the U.S. using a language other than English. Again, upon retrospect this doesn’t seem like a significant innovation when we look at the immigration patterns and changing demographics at the time but for the courageous few that had the foresight and business savvy at the time to look at this shifting tide and create the business case, it was an innovation that birthed a multibillion dollar industry, Hispanic Advertising.  by Mario Carrasco

The future of agencies is less about actually preparing for the future, but making changes today in the way we work and how we deliver results for our clients. Most of the advertising industry is grappling with the idea of full-service shops versus unbundled, more focused agencies; when in reality it does not matter where we sit or what the agency focus is because this isn’t going to help us overcome the key issues we’re facing.  by Keith Mackay

Recent studies from key players in the world of ad tech tell quite different stories of how video ads seem to be performing, based on completion rates, viewability rates, clickthroughs and more.

2016 may very well be remembered as the year that America’s racial divide became undone. The ubiquity of shootings of unarmed black men.  The ascent of Black Lives Matter, not to mention Blue Lives Matter and All Lives Matter.  The candidacy of Donald J. Trump and its nativist, prejudiced rhetoric.  Pick any random evening, turn on the nightly news, and you are sure to see evidence that, especially in racial terms, the country seems to be coming apart at the seams.  By David Morse – New America Dimensions

Culture shock is another important factor that has played a role in the development of the New Latino segment. Culture shock can be defined as “a meta reaction both to strangeness and to the awkward feelings provoked by strangeness in an escalation of anxiety” (Korzenny et al., 2017).  Culture shock, as the name implies, occurs when one enters a culture different than his or her own and discovers he or she does not know how to navigate it appropriately. When Latinos come into the U. S., they begin to question their host culture as well as the culture they left behind.  By Alessandra Noli  – Florida State University / Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication

I have already written about this before, and I think this is probably one of the biggest misconceived concepts marketers have in this country. One that keeps fueling the “one size fits all” Total Market approach.  By assessing their choice for headline, even the Pew Research team show a little bias towards the chart on your right side (Share of Latinos who Speak Spanish) instead of focusing on the chart on the left (Absolute number of Latinos who speak Spanish).  By Isaac Mizrahi – Co President, Chief Operating Officer at Alma

Covered California is sending videos like “Guadalupe’s Story” to potential customers, to encourage them to sign up for health insurance.  The way human brains are wired, it just doesn’t make sense to us to buy something now that we may not need for years in the future.

Pfizer, Eli Lilly and the other companies engaged in creating and selling pharmaceutical drugs or treatments are expected to spend $4.4 billion on television commercials this year.  That’s a seven percent increase from 2016, according to Kantar Media research.  With $5 billion a likely TV ad sales outcome next year, Univision Communications Vice President of Business Development, Dennis O’Leary, wants to see more of this spending directed at the nearly 60 million Latinos living across the United States.  By Simon Applebaum

Experiential plays a powerful role in driving the how, when, and where millennials spend their dollars and willundoubtedly become one of the most influential and relevant engagement channels for the generation to follow….Generation Z. For legacy brands, experiential marketing is incredibly important as it inspires people to action and force CPG marketers to rethink how they connect with people outside of the aisle and beyond the screen.

Massive cybersecurity breaches have become almost commonplace, regularly grabbing headlines that alarm consumers and leaders. But for all of the attention such incidents have attracted in recent years, many organizations worldwide still struggle to comprehend and manage emerging cyber risks in an increasingly complex digital society. As our reliance on data and interconnectivity swells, developing resilience to withstand cyber shocks—that is, large-scale events with cascading disruptive consequences—has never been more important.

Who will succeed and who will fall short as the retail sector goes through a wave of creative destruction?  eMarketer’s latest report, “The Future of Retail: Nine Things to Watch for in the Coming Year,” digs into questions of pricing, technology and even politics as key factors over the next 12 months.

Some 32% of marketers plan to bring programmatic buying in-house, and more than 50% of marketers and agencies believe this complex job will ultimately become the responsibility of the brand.

You’re in a new city, with an hour before a business meeting. You need to focus on your presentation, but you also need something to eat. Your connected watch finds several local quick-service restaurants and chooses one based on how busy it is, your company expense policy and your dietary preferences—using your vital signs to ensure you’re eating a balanced diet. (Did you really have bacon maple pancakes for breakfast?). While you keep working, the watch tells your self-driving car to take you to the restaurant. Based on local traffic, the watch will alert you when it’s time to leave for your meeting. And because you’re in a hurry, it will pay the bill. Hopefully, it will leave an appropriate tip.