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There’s something I noticed at Cannes. And I’ve noticed it looking through everything recently submitted to Creative Works. No laughs. Plenty of grit. Under Armour from Droga5 New York. Strong women and gritty poems. New Balance from BMB. Callum Hawkins grits his teeth and runs – 120 miles a week. “There are no short cuts to anywhere worth going." Performance bike brand Specialized have made a film about kids with ADHD. From the gritmeisters at Goodby Silverstein. Then there are the brands that want us to cry....
The history of American advertising has always fascinated me. It's amazing to see how much the visual aesthetic evolved as a result of the changing times. Each decade had it’s own unique style of advertising, but one period of time really stands in stark contrast to what we’re accustomed to today. The 1950s were sometimes referred to as “the advertiser’s dream decade.” With the end of the war came a new desire for Americans to spend money. The television was now a common household staple and the advertising opportunities seemed endless. It all sounds perfect, right? The great American dream! The economy was booming and everything was all jukeboxes and wholesome family dinners.Well, not so fast. The golden era of advertising would cause some pretty massive controversies today. The sexism of 1950s advertising is infamous, and for good reason. Sure, we have plenty of offensive ads today, but few hold a candle to the callous ads of the “good ‘ol days.”...
The digital ad space is murky, and it's becoming increasingly clear that users aren't seeing as many ads thanks to ad-blocking technology. And even when they do see ads, more than 60% of users say they find them annoying and intrusive. Furthermore, people have been shifting to mobile as their primary media consumption device in the last three years, while ad spend lagged. In short, the industry is reactive rather than proactive. As a result, U.S. digital ad revenue has become Google and Facebook, followed by everyone else. But immersive video through virtual and augmented reality could change all that.
Well then. Here's one for all you culture buffs who pride yourselves on staying abreast of trends as they come and go each year. New York-based sparks & honey is out with its annual A-Z Culture Glossary of 2017: The Trends You Know to be Relevant, a compendium of cultural trends the agency predicts will...wait for it...change the world in 2017! To get one thing out right up front: Trump is nowhere to be found on the list. This is the agency's third outing of the list which, to date, has received over 2.4 million views on Slide Share. Which makes perfect sense because some of the trends and terms used to describe those trends are just whack. To come up with the list, the agency uses a framework called the Elements of Culture to organize its cultural trends. The 100 trends in the report are broken into the following five categories: Aesthetics, Media, Tech/Science, Humanity and Ideology. Among the trends to watch for 2017 are....
The Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates malicious advertising ”malvertising” costs the U.S. digital marketing, advertising, and media industry $8.2 billion annually. A few years ago malvertising was merely scamming the system: fake ads, fake traffic, fake analytics. Ad tech is a hacker's heaven, an unregulated labyrinth of circumlocution systems for bidding, placing and tracking ads. "All the code is awful and you aren't allowed to change it anyway," says Salon developer Aram Zucker-Scharff. "Usually ad servers claim they run some sort of checks, but considering just how many malicious or badly formed ads get through, it is pretty apparent they don't do much." The hacker's goal is to bill, aka bilk, advertisers for ads no human ever saw. Their fraud takes several forms: Ad stacking piles multiple ads on top of each other. Ad stuffing shrinks ads to invisible 1-pixel squares. Click farms send fraud users to real sites. Clickjacking sends real users to fraud sites....
Therefore, content creators and advertisers may find themselves scratching their heads about how to break through the clutter with compelling branded content that attracts an audience and makes them want more. “While there’s no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to creating impactful branded content, we’ve identified some common themes in our research and content testing that can be used as best practices for making content resonate with audiences,” said Harry Brisson, Director of Lab Research at Nielsen. To better understand how consumers are reacting to this new form of marketing content, Nielsen assessed consumer reactions to more than 100 pieces of branded content and found that a brand’s effectiveness (e.g., how a brand resonates with viewers) is largely affected by the format and environment the message is delivered in. The results of the analysis uncovered three key takeaways that can help brands deliver strong content that resonates with and builds audiences: - Branded content can drive higher brand recall and brand lift than pre-roll - When viewers enjoy content, they view the integrated brands more favorably - Partnering with a publisher can drive ad impact....
A spirited panel at Social Media Week in New York spelled out why marketers should stop treating content like ads and start being storytellers. For marketers, all bets are off. It's time to think differently about customer engagement or risk crapping out. “The game has changed. The channels have changed. That means that brands have to change,” Brian Becker, VP of content marketing for JPMorgan Chase, said during the panel “Content: A Brand's Most Essential Resource” at Social Media Week in New York. Becker asserted that many companies still struggle to put consumers' wants, needs, and perspectives into the brand narrative. Content, however, allows them to do just that. “Bring the voice of the customer into your marketing,” Becker said. “That's when you sound so much more authentic.”...
The Golden Age of Advertising, that twenty-year spell running through the fifties and sixties, changed how we market everything, pushing beyond merely being clever or descriptive to thinking through how the audience interacts with an ad, and how empirical research can drive its development.
The revolution pioneered by William Bernbach of BBDO and David Ogilvy of Ogilvy-Mather continues to affect how we market, with a much more pervasive presence in our lives than the marketer’s obsession with Mad Men. The lessons learned during that period provided the foundation for everything we do as inbounders.
And, like any good marketer, they enshrined those lessons in quotable, quippy headlines that are easy to remember and fun to say....
Popular wisdom says that everyone hates advertisements. It’s why Netflix is so popular, cable subscriptions are steadily declining, and ad blocking has grown from 21 million users in 2009 to 198 million in 2015.
Via Brian Yanish - MarketingHits.com
Face it – the more advertising people receive, the more they hate it. As a result, to reach today’s information savvy customers, content marketing trumps advertising.
What was once interesting and special back in the MadMan days is now something we try to avoid. (Check out what Mad Man Leo Burnett had to say about advertising.)
On average, people in the US receive 5,000 brand messages per day according to Razorfish....
The U.S. women's soccer team has a roster of stand-out stars, but their individual strengths work best when they play as a team. That's the gist of a new, minute-long "American Woman" ad Nike launched as part of a bigger #NoMaybes campaign designed to elevate the team's profile during the FIFA Women's World Cup this week.
"We didn't want to go into this trying to make a women's spot—we wanted to make a soccer spot," said Michael McGrath, partner at Thousands Creative, the Portland, Ore., agency that created the ad.
Thousands Creative's own profile is getting a boost because of the work. The two-man shop was founded just a year ago by a pair of former Nike employees and currently has neither a website (just an empty Tumblr) nor publicly listed contact info....
Tired of struggling to crank out the endless streams of content needed to appease today’s consumers? You’re in luck! There is an option for burned out business owners, and that’s user generated content. This technique, in conjunction with the growth of popular social media websites, allows modern businesses to delegate some of these brand-building responsibilities to an unlikely voice -- their customer.
Having users contribute to your content creation efforts has another interesting advantage, as consumers are more interested in hearing the views of their peers than reading cleverly written sales messages.
According to Bazaar Voice, 64% of millennials and 53% of baby boomers want more options to share their opinions about brands, while other studies show consumers trust user generated content more than all other forms of media.
In light of these trends, there’s never been a better time to start using user generated content to engage your readers and build trust with them. Here are ten brands that have leveraged user generated content in the past to help inspire your own campaigns....
Nothing gets AdFreak readers excited quite like brilliant creative work—with the exception of spectacular creative failures. Our 10 most-read stories of 2014 are pretty good proof of this.Seven of them were about amazing, innovative ads. Two involved boneheaded fails. And the 10th was about porn—another reliable pageview generator—and could be considered a win or a fail, depending on your point of view...
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President Donald Trump often labels media companies as "failing." He's taken shots at BuzzFeed during press conferences. He's repeatedly pounded on CNN, and particularly enjoyed that network's recent journalism stumble. And of course, Trump has hammered the MSNBC show "Morning Joe" this week, causing a political firestorm that has stretched across both parties. If you follow the advertising business, you'd not be surprised to hear that traditional media business models are under a lot of pressure as consumer consumption habits are going through rapid changes driven by technology. But here's an ongoing question: are the media companies Trump refers to as "failing" actually failing? Here's a look at how these companies are performing from an audience and financial perspective....
I only really started caring about marketing (and the intersection of advertising, technology, and media) a couple years ago when I started at Contently as an intern. It’s been a never-ending crash course ever since. Digital marketing changes rapidly, and it’s only getting more complex. As soon as you think you understand the space, you realize a minute later that you’re not even close. This year in particular, with its many shocking pieces of news and trends, has upended many assumptions I’ve held about marketing. Here are four of the most important trends that have changed the way I think about my job....
The conversation around artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning today seems de rigueur, particularly in light of the recent introduction of “chat bots” by Facebook and other notable tech companies. With each new advancement in the field also comes the obligatory pronouncements of the impending 'robot apocalypse'. Not so much in the Terminator, Skynet-esque sense, but rather the extent to which robots can eventually replace humans in roles where decision-making is more constrained. While there have been some promising developments, machine-based intelligence is still at the stage where it can increase efficiencies to an almost infinite scale, but still struggles to provide adequate context to the intended audience. How then can there be a role for them in creative process? I would argue that AI can be used to drive creativity today, but only in tandem with input from human designers....
It’s been a year of milestones for mobile, and it appears that another threshold will be reached this year: mobile devices are close to capturing the majority share of US online ad revenues, according to the latest revenue report [pdf] from the IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Indeed, mobile devices accounted for 47% share of online ad revenues in the first half of this year. That’s a huge jump from 30% share of revenues during the first half of 2015. With mobile advertising growing at a rapid pace – up 89% year-over-year in H1 – it’s not hard to imagine that they’ll claim a majority of online ad revenues by year’s end. Overall, online ad revenues increased by 19.1% year-over-year during H1 to $32.7 billion, though growth was not distributed evenly across formats: - Desktop search spend decreased by 12%; share of total spend declined to 27%; - Mobile search spend more than doubled (a 105% increase)....
There has been an explosion in purpose-driven brand communication the last few years. As Matthew Gardner at Droga5 put it, “Because of the challenge for people’s attention, purpose is the only thing that will get brands to break through. This is not a trend but more of an imperative and should be top of mind for every company. ”When every brand team jumps on the purpose bandwagon, however, the resulting communication can feel pretty shallow. There’s a risk of brands completely overstating why they exist. Particularly when their actual motivation is to capture consumer attention, brand purpose can come across as “ad-deep.” It starts to feel like just one more tick-box on a creative brief....
The ongoing McDonald's creative review initially included all three of the ad industry's largest holding companies. But WPP made headlines earlier this month for bowing out (leaving incumbents Publicis and Omnicom in the running), and the alleged reasons behind its decision are even more intriguing. The client required competitors to complete their respective pitches in 60 days, with a June 30 deadline, and presented contracts forbidding future partners from turning a profit on base compensation, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Agencies would allegedly operate at cost before meeting unspecified targets for performance-based pay. "Clients have always had the power," said Bryan Wiener, executive chairman of 360i. "And performance-based compensation is not a new topic either, but it's very hard to find ways to make it work so that all parties are aligned. "McDonald's did not respond to Adweek's requests for comment on the claims, which stirred controversy among creative agencies. One source who requested anonymity described the terms as "unheard of" and noted, "I don't know of any business that operates that way."...
The World Advertising Research Center (Warc) has issued its annual rankings of the most effective marketing campaigns and the agencies and advertisers driving effective results. Ranked number one, "Penny the Pirate" developed by Saatchi & Saatchi and OMD for Australian optical chain OPSM combined traditional and digital media, producing an engaging printed book and app to highlight vision problems in children. More than 126,000 parents bought the reading book, the number of eye tests conducted by OPSM increased by 22.6% year-on-year, and its sales also grew by more than one-fifth (22.4%). The Warc analysis found that 55% of the world’s most impactful campaigns are digital-led. Eleven of the 20 top-ranked campaigns led with digital channels. Notable uses of digital included the ‘Live Test Series’ (ranked fifth) by Volvo Trucks -- its YouTube video views of over 100m reached far beyond the brand’s niche target audience of truck drivers and resulted in a 23% growth in sales in the fourth quarter of 2013 -- and "If We Made It" (ranked sixth) by Newcastle Brown Ale, which used online video to parody the advertising hype around the Super Bowl, increasing volume sales by over 20%....
The underlying reason? Today’s shoppers are skeptic of pure play tactics. They see value in connecting and acquiring rather than reliance on a brand’s library of products. As a result, they are looking for shopping destinations or inspirational sites.
Perhaps that’s why brands are agog over social commerce.
For those unaware, it is the concept of utilizing social networks to increase sales transactions. Actionable marketing expert Heidi Cohen defines it as the maturation and evolution of social media meets shopping....
Marketing has invaded every part of our lives, but it developed relatively recently, not emerging until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A lot has changed since then, with strategies shifting from outbound marketing that “interrupts the consumer” to inbound marketing, which is focused on understanding them. The market speaks, and it’s up to professionals to identify the needs of consumers — and then sell to them.
Since first successful national marketing campaigns made their way out of Madison Avenue our society has learned to respect the value marketing brings to a firm. Now more than ever, marketing has cemented its role as not only an asset to sales, but to customer acquisition, relationship management and retention.
From the very first radio ad in 1922 to the age of the Internet, marketing has responded to consumer behavior and moved deftly from trend to trend. Take a look to see where marketing is now, as well as just how far it has come....
For social media marketers, creative selection is influenced by granular audience segmentation and “shareability,” as well as traditional concerns like target audience and desired effect.
Nowhere is this a more complex decision-making process than in the case of video, which has a great deal more variables to consider than image-based advertising (e.g. music, length, editing) but also a good deal of evidence validating its effectiveness.
It’s this efficacy that is drawing more advertisers to video, and notable new developments in the space have helped codify best practices to the benefit of advertisers still determining whether to invest in the medium.
Examining these improvements, along with how some of Nanigans’ (my employer) most successful customers are using the format, should provide advertisers with some valuable insights in terms of campaign management and creative choice....
Which domains have the most engaged audiences in five verticals: women, politics, business/finance, science, and technology? My team at Fractl, in conjunction with BuzzStream, wanted to find out -- and we found out some really interesting stuff.
To determine the top publishers, we used BuzzSumo to retrieve the sharing metrics on more than 30,000 relevant articles between May 2014 and April 2015 relating to the five verticals mentioned above. In total, these articles earned more than 58 million social shares. We used BuzzSumo to retrieve the top 1,000 articles in each vertical that were published between May 4, 2015 and April 30, 2015 as well.
With this data, we identified the 10 publishers in each vertical with the highest number of total shares -- and learned a lot about content promotion along the way. In this post, we’ll walk you through six key takeaways from our findings that'll help you maximize outreach during your next promotions cycle...
Consumers may tune into TV on a regular basis, but they mentally tune out rather fast in favor of the array of "second screen" options.
On average, television holds a consumer’s attention only 39% of the time, a rate that pales in comparison to the attention rates laptops (70%), tablets (76%) and smartphones (77%) command.
That’s according to a new report from Nielsen and YuMe, a digital video ad tech firm, expected to be released Wednesday morning. MediaDailyNews got an early look at the data....
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![BuzzFeed, New York Times & Huffington Post: Which Popular Media Sites Succeed With Certain Audiences? [New Data] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/DI7A9F45oA-feCB6y6DrFjl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
A funny thing happened on the way to Cannes.