Agency

Go-to-market is a business-critical, highly complex and carefully sequenced process for global brands today. With companies spending some $1.5 trillion annually to promote their products, effectively managing the marketing supply chain ecosystem has become essential to brand performance and market success.

Reaching consumers is a constant challenge for marketers and advertisers competing in an increasingly noisy marketplace. However, consumer reaction to digital marketing suggests that some efforts may be doing more harm than good.

Last week saw an interesting piece by Mindshare’s Global CEO Nick Emery published in Campaign and widely circulated on social media.  It generated much praise from beyond GroupM and WPP.  Andrew Stephens from the independent agency Goodstuff along with your humble correspondent were amongst many tweeting their appreciation of an insightful look at the many challenges facing media agencies and the need for new operating models.  Here are two key thoughts behind Nick’s piece.

In a recent interview with Advertiser Perceptions, an organization that provides data-driven intelligence to marketers, I was asked, “Will the full-service agency model survive?”  As part of their survey, I was shown the results of how advertisers had thus far answered the question.  It was pretty close between those that said yes (42%) and those that said no (32%).  Twenty-six percent were not sure.

A couple of weeks ago Mark Rabkin, VP, Core Ads at Facebook, posted ‘New Medium, New Rules: video in the mobile age’. It is a good summary of the challenges facing advertisers when it comes to engaging people in the mobile age and supports what Kantar Millward Brown has been saying for years: mobile is not a tiny TV.  by Nigel Hollis

Most people know that a can of Pepsi or Coke sitting on a kitchen table in a movie or TV show is product placement, an oh-so-subtle advertisement without words or action. The item is there to be noticed, even unconsciously, which may lead to a purchase or trip to the refrigerator. Until recent years, these indirect advertisements have been fairly simple. The practice dates back to the 1930’s.

In 2012 a leading retailer began looking for a new chief marketing officer. The job description made the opening sound exciting: The new CMO would play a big, important role, leading the company’s efforts to boost revenues and profits. It seemed like the kind of opportunity any would-be CMO might desire.  By Kimberly A. Whitler and Neil Morgan

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

• Memes, memes and more memes.
• Clogging the arteries of the interwebs like cholesterol of maximum viscosity.
• Fails, hacktivism, dancing cats, surfing cats, grumpy cats, juvenile jokes, moronic hastily photoshopped visual puns, fake news, post truth, hatchet jobs, idle defamation, character assassination, trolling, trolling and more trolling, tabloid dirt, celebrity sex tapes, hacked private footage of bedroom activity, stolen selfies, cybernecking.
• Guilty pleasures. Schadenfreude. Braindead escapism. Ironic consumption.

Advertisers are wrong about fraud: It’s a problem that can’t be completely solved. We are not going to eradicate it, the same way we are not going to wipe out robbery or eliminate illness. A more realistic — and effective — approach is to manage fraud, both by taking measures to prevent it, and by working to detect it once it occurs so that we can mitigate its most detrimental effects.

Marketing leaders and agencies are finding it increasingly difficult to keep pace with growing demands to localize and adapt their creative strategies. Facing a widening range of digital and physical channels that each require rapid adaptation in order to remain relevant to individual geographic, cultural and customer audiences, too many organizations are failing to take the necessary steps to improve their capacity and agility, according to a new study by the CMO Council.

America is in the midst of seismic changes. Unprecedented demographic shifts.  Rising educational attainment. Migration of young talent to urban centers. A technology revolution reshaping our economy and empowering consumers in ways previously unimaginable. What does this mean for the face of tomorrow’s consumer market? Are we witnessing the emergence of a new mass market?

This iteration of the report focuses on the distinctive media palates across generations –  and, most notably, Generation Z. While generations like the Baby Boomers and Millennials are well known and add their own unique value to the media landscape, the lesser studied Generation Z is quickly maturing into adulthood and will soon make their presence known.

We don’t see many Big Ideas any more.  Content may be king, but content is forgettable, millions of tiny ideas in a million different places.  Can anything new be said about a product?  Or an industry, like the advertising industry?  Well, I’m not a creative — more like a dreaded management consultant.  Nevertheless, here’s a cross-industry Big Idea, free for the asking: Ad agencies are just like cruise ships!  Don’t dismiss this out of hand. Read on!

Well, not entirely free. Let me explain. Recently, I had lunch with a procurement manager from a technology company that we’re pitching, and she gave me some insights from the other side on what it feels like to work with an agency.  

Millions of Americans gathered to celebrate LGBTQ Pride last month, which also marked two years since the Supreme Court ruled in favor of nationwide marriage equality.  That historic June 2015 ruling legalized the new definition of family.  In today’s media landscape, brands need to follow suit.  If they want to be successful, companies can no longer ignore the LGBTQ community in their advertising.

The agreement will further extend Ogilvy’s US Hispanic service offering and strengthen MARCA’s current capabilities in digital, social media, and analytics.

About a million immigrants receive U.S. green cards each year, but fewer than half are new arrivals from other countries. The majority already live in the United States on temporary visas, according to recently released U.S. Department of Homeland Security data that show that the two groups have different profiles.

There was, for once, big news at the annual advertising festival in Cannes, France, but it had nothing to do with who won the grand prizes.  Er, um, pardonnez-moi, grand prix.  Ratherm the 2017 event — formally, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity — will be remembered for a startling announcement midway through by Arthur Sadoun, the new Chairman and CEO of the giant Publicis Groupe agency company, that he was bidding adieu for the next year to Cannes Lions, along with other awards shows and events such as CES and South by Southwest.

The News Media Alliance – representing almost 2,000 news organizations – called on Congress to allow publishers to negotiate collectively with dominant online platforms. The objective is to permit publishers to have concrete discussions with the two dominant distributors of online news content, Google and Facebook, on business model solutions to secure the long-term availability of local journalism produced by America’s newsrooms.

reVolver Podcasts appointed Joe Uva as non-executive chairman of the board to lead the company’s managers on all governance matters, and to help the company with its strategy and business development.