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Brandless, a company which can best be described as an online hybrid of Trader Joe’s and Ikea’s kitchen section, just raised a $35m Series B to be the “Procter & Gamble for millennials.”
Their site launched yesterday, and is already selling everything from colanders to quinoa puffs — all for a flat fee of $3 per item.
And they’re doing it all without a “brand”…or are they?
Fighting the “false narrative” of consumption
Created in 2016 by entrepreneur Ido Leffler and Sherpa Capital partner, Tina Sharkey, Brandless has raised almost $50m thus far on the bet that younger consumers don’t care as much about brands as big CPG companies would like investors to believe....
A recent press release from the Acme Hotel Co. in River North, Chicago, included these phrases: Snapchat Spectacles, Amazon Echo, ESP Guitar, DIY cocktail. Yes, it may be time to provide a translating service for hoteliers trying to keep up with speeding changes related to technology and demographics. This hotel, whose website says it’s targeted at the “tragically hip,” offers Snapchat Spectacles at the front desk on a first-come, first-served basis. The glasses have a button on them which, when pressed, will create a 10-second video “snap” that is wirelessly uploaded to the memories page of a personal Snapchat, readied to be posted for friends and family to see. Of course, the in-room Amazon Echo — one of those personal digital “assistants” now rampant among the tech savvy — can help guests decide where to go in town to get the best videos. The DIY (do-it-yourself) cocktails can be created with an in-room kit that costs $18, makes two drinks “and the shaker is yours.”...
“Slightly disconcertingly, Lewis says he is “so thrilled” by the controversy. This is not because American voters were misled but because Facebook and Google have been embarrassed and forced to reconsider the complex algorithms they deploy to present news articles to their users. It’s a matter of schadenfreude. Lewis has spent much of the three years since he became chief executive at Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal “badgering away” at Google and Facebook, trying to persuade them to change their news distribution methods. “We kept warning them, saying ‘This is an accident waiting to happen – you are treating fake news in the same way as you are treating Wall Street Journal news. This is going to end up biting you.’ And so here it is, biting them!”...
When the US presidential election was called, even Republican strategist Mike Murphy declared data dead. Others have said it’s the end of polling. To those who felt a Hillary Clinton victory was all but certain, Donald Trump’s success at the polls might undermine faith in big data. But this sentiment misunderstands statistics. Data is impartial and accurate; when things go wrong, it’s usually when we try to interpret it. How different people assess risk and make decisions often comes down to how we perceive probabilities. Assigning a probability to an uncertain outcome is part art and science. The most scientific way is to use data—in this case, polling numbers. This time, election forecasts based on polling data were spectacularly inaccurate. They predicted an easy Clinton victory, and assumed that women and college-educated voters would turn out for her in large numbers. In fact, according to exit polls, 42% of women voted for Trump, including 45% of white women with college degrees. Forecasts also predicted hardly any minority voters would consider Trump. But they did. Minority groups voted more for Obama than Clinton. A non-trivial number, nearly one third of Hispanics and Asians, voted for Trump. What seems like a failure of polling data, though, is really our inability to approach the data objectively....
I found this genuine love for the craft of marketing to be a common thread among marketing experts while I was researching and creating the new list of 103 Genuine Marketing Thought Leaders. I noticed every person on the list had a passion for marketing driving them to explore, push the bounds, and do what marketers do best: be creative. For these marketers, “being creative” means everything from using comics to sell enterprise software (Tom Fishburne, #2) and blowing up the idea of branding (Cindy Gallop #9) to understanding the connection between doorknobs and white papers (Donald Norman #8). Ideas from these passionate marketers are changing the face of marketing and how it is executed....
Adobe Digital Insights predicts 2016 online sales will be up 11% and shoppers will be out earlier than ever. 55% of US and UK retailers say Amazon will drive the majority of their holiday sales this year according to research by ChannelAdvisor and Morar Consulting. The National Retail Federation expects US consumers to spend an average of $935.58 with overall holiday sales to rise 3.6% and online sales up 7% to 10%.
What’s Walmart’s holiday sales strategy? Value, price rollbacks and features, along with Santa’s helpers at checkout. UPS expects to be busy as well, shipping more than 700 million packages during the holidays, up 16.7% from 2015. Bestblackfriday.com, says Friday’s Black Friday sales may drop by 10% in-store to$9.2 billion though online sales may reach $3 billion, up 13%....
Olympian Ryan Lochte, who was dropped this week by major sponsors including Speedo and Ralph Lauren, has found a brand willing to take him on. Pine Bros. Softish Throat Drops signed an endorsement deal today with Lochte, who will appear in commercial and print ads for the brand. The swimmer thanked the company in a tweet today. Lochte embellished the story of what he claimed was a robbery at gunpoint with fellow swimmers at a gas station in Rio de Janeiro during the Olympics earlier this month, lying about it to NBC's Billy Bush and Matt Lauer (and inspiring some shade from the likes of Al Roker, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver, who all called him out for his behavior). Lochte apologized to Lauer in an interview that aired on the Today Show on Monday, saying that he "over-exaggerated" the events of that night. Lochte's ads for Pine Bros. will feature the tagline, "Pine Brothers Softish Throat Drops: Forgiving On Your Throat," just as the company—and Lochte, himself —is asking the public to forgive him. ...
Have you ever heard an acronym but you didn't know what it meant? It can really throw you off your game in a conversation. I usually try to write it down discreetly or, if I have a laptop, look it up online without anyone seeing. But industry-specific acronyms can have multiple meanings, and sometimes Wikipedia doesn't do them justice. That's why we curated 34 of the most common marketing acronyms and 41 of the most common business acronyms -- and put them into an epic glossary you can skim, study, or bookmark and save for later...
There’s a widening gap between how marketers and consumers feel about brands collecting data and tracking customer journeys. According to a recent report by Edelman and The University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre, 77% of marketers believe their organization should invest in predictive data and 71% of consumers believe that brands with access to personal data are using it unethically. Much of this data is collected by tracking customer journeys, which has gotten more complicated as consumers juggle devices over the course of considering and making a purchase. An OMD report revealed that people swap devices 21 times an hour. The traditional tracking cookie falls short....
Sponsorship spending on the National Basketball Association and its 30 teams totaled nearly $800 million in the 2015-2016 season -- up 8% from the previous year, according to IEG research, part of WPP’s ESP Properties.
The increase is well above IEG’s projected 4.5% increase in overall 2016 North American sponsorship spending and projected 5% gain in sports spending, the firm noted.
“Global expansion, rich content and social media dominance continue to drive corporate interest in the NBA,” stated William Chipps, IEG Sponsorship Report senior editor.
State Farm edged past Anheuser-Busch to become the most active sponsor of the NBA. Eighty-three percent of NBA properties report a partnership with the insurance company, up from 74 percent in the 2014-2015 season....
Shared universes. They're so hot right now. Long before the deep bench of Marvel superheroes started jumping into each other's movies, however, there was something else that united the far-flung worlds of many different movies and shows: fake brands.
Call it product displacement. When the producers of a movie or TV show prefer not to shell out money to get a real brand onscreen, they opt for the unreal.
Marlboro-lookalike, Morley Cigarettes has been tarring the arteries of fictional characters for years, while the preferred chip of cinematic snackers is often Let's. It turns out, however, that many more movies and shows share the same fake brands than one might expect. British-based freelance hub fivesquid has just released an infographic about this phenomenon that shows which brands and products indirectly fueled some unlikely crossovers.
Some are obvious. Anyone who's seen a Quentin Tarantino movie, for instance, knows that Big Kahuna Burger is a thread throughout the self-contained Tarantino-verse. It should come as something of a reality-testing surprise, however, to see the same beer brand appear in both Star Trek and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I mean, come on: The U.S.S. Enterprise would have its own microbrew, for sure. Weird that this is the first thing that's ever been unrealistic about Star Trek.
Have a look at the other fake brands in movies and shows in the infographic below....
This is a fundamental shift not only for the TV channels, which will have to completely rethink their revenue model, but also for brands, which find it incredibly, and increasingly, difficult to capture the attention of empowered, impatient consumers. An obvious solution is product placement, a company paying for its product to be featured prominently in a film or television program as a form of advertising. According to PQMedia, the U.S. product placement market grew by 12.8% in 2014, to over $6 billion, and is set to reach over $11 billion by 2019. The trouble is that the huge success of product placement is causing a dip in its credibility and effectiveness as a marketing channel. Audiences are increasingly skeptical. Research by Eva A. van Reijmersdal of the University of Amsterdam suggests that when product placement becomes too prominent, it affects attitudes negatively because viewers become aware of a deliberate selling attempt. Product placement can also lower audiences’ evaluations of the focal entertainment product (the film or the show), as recently demonstrated by Andre Marchand and colleagues. And it’s particularly true when audiences like the film or show....
Over the years, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has morphed from a production company free-for-all to an agency shindig to a place where serious people insist that “serious business is actually getting done.” There is also, thankfully, a lot that remains unserious in Cannes. This is the cradle of cutting edge trends and what-were-they-thinking lapses in judgment. To make sense of what we’ve seen this week, here’s what’s in and out at Cannes 2016. (For easy reference, here’s last year’s list. Remember Periscope?)
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Traditional advertising went after “share of mind”–the idea was to get you to associate a brand with a single idea, a single emotion. Volvo: safety. Jaguar: speed. Coke: happiness. The Economist: success. Bang, bang, bang, went the ads, hammering the same idea into your mind every time you saw one. Advertising briefs evolved to focus the creatives on a single USP and a single message. Tell them we’re the Ultimate Driving Machine. Tell them in a thrilling way. It worked when you saw ads infrequently on television, in a Sunday magazine, or on a billboard on your morning commute. It hasn’t worked online. Audiences have stopped engaging with advertising. Big brands like Pepsi and P&G have slashed investment in Facebook spending. The agencies’ response has been to create new formats of ads that take over a page, dominate our mobiles’ screens, and generally scream at us. And when somebody screams at you for long enough, you put in earplugs and ignore them. Or, in the case of the online world, you install an ad blocker, as much of the U.K. population has now done. Yet there are many brands online that people don’t want to block. We asked over 5,000 people around the world to tell us about the brands whose content they actively sought out, then analyzed what those brands did. The results were surprisingly consistent. Popular brands had multifaceted personalities. They could make you laugh, or cheer, or lean forward and take notes. They’d stopped hammering away at a share of mind, and were expanding to achieve a share of emotion....
It seems like every few months a new buzzword gets thrown around and this month’s buzzword is MAdTech. “Have you heard about MAdTech? It’s going to be game changing!!” Oh really? While I appreciate the excitement that the buzz creates, the excitement seems to revolve more around the hopes of change than around utilizing a viable solution and innovative technique to get results. So, what exactly is MAdtech? Well, to put it concisely: it is the combination of Marketing technology and Advertising technology, hence “M+Ad = MAd”.1 Let’s examine what MAdtech means for the automotive industry, and how your dealership can smash the competition with this powerful capability....
Hey, remember the good old days before smartphones? That golden age where you actually had to use a landline to contact friends, use paper maps and log on to a whirring desktop computer to access the Internet? Well, guess what, many of today’s young influencers and consumers of the future don’t.
In fact, even if your earliest memories of a mobile phone are a chunky Motorola, you could probably take a tip or two from the younger generation to inform your content marketing efforts. Why? Because they are the connected generation, brought up on social media and smartphone use. They will see your snake game and raise you a Pokemon or three and this is all from the age of 11.
Of course, your target audience might not fall into the teenage or early twenty-something bracket. But in a world where Eric Lassard, a boy of 12, has (amongst other ventures) launched an app, social platform and is publishing his second book, ‘From Dublin to Silicon Valley’, perhaps your business might pick up a tip or two straight out of the mouths of babes. For connecting with millennials and those that come after is the future of your business…
With everyone claiming to be an expert should you listen to? This list of 103 marketing thought leaders is made to help answer that question. It's also incorporated into Twitter lists so you can easily follow everyone with a single click.
When Sonos unveiled its first connected speakers over 10 years ago, it may have seemed a bit gutsy. At the time, the idea that Wi-Fi would blanket every home and serve as reliable way to pipe music from room to room wasn't necessarily a given. But having checked off its first big bet as a safe one, the company is ready to roll the dice on another unconventional idea: The music industry is about to explode again. And increasingly, it's betting, music will be even more integrated into our everyday lives. This isn't to say that record labels will see their profits return to pre-Napster levels—Indeed the entire structure of the music industry is fractured across many more players now—but according to Sonos's chief marketing officer Joy Howard, the rise of paid subscription services will lead to a new phase of the music industry. And the streaming boom is only just getting started. "In the first six months of this year, the number of paid subscriptions have doubled," Howard said at a session hosted by Fast Company as part of its 2016 Innovation Festival in New York City. "That’s the fastest that they’ve ever grown. Now people are saying that in the next 15 years, the music industry will double in size across the entire ecosystem."...
Tourism campaigns for Caribbean destinations often have a similar aesthetic—sandy beaches, honeymooning couples, frosty drinks by the pool. But the Belize Tourism Board and its agency, Olson, had enough of that. For its latest ad campaigns, the BTB focused on local experiences unique to Belize and making flying to the country easier. Three years ago, Olson started working with the BTB, launching "Discover How to Be," a campaign that showcased the country's culture and experiences you can have there. Olson and the BTB also worked with Southwest Airlines and WestJet Airlines to open up more routes and direct flights to Belize from the U.S. and Canada. The strategy worked—the campaign was responsible for increasing travel to Belize and boosting the country's GDP by 2.24 percent, according to the Central Bank of Belize.
BrandShare Content
"We set rules from the beginning—no honeymooners, no frozen drinks, nobody getting a massage by the pool," said Kevin McKeon, chief creative officer at Olson. "We want to go for someone who's a little more ambitious about what they're looking for in a vacation. The takeaway is you're going to meet some fascinating people and come back with a story you didn't expect to have."
Its latest campaign, "A Curious Place," which launched this week, continues that theme. Videos feature a cacao farmer, a meat pie seller and "Coconut Leo," a Belizean who climbs trees upside down and cuts down coconuts.
A few weeks ago, amid the pollution- and Zika-filled media run-up to Rio, a press release issued by the Olympic organizing committee for PyeongChang, Korea (where the 2018 Winter Olympics will take place) received little notice. The single-page communiqué carried news about a white striped tiger named Soohorang. Rendered with computer graphics, the creature wore a cheesy grin and posed like a track star. Soohorang, you see, had just been chosen as the next official Olympics mascot. The practice of choosing a creature to represent each Olympics is now in its 44th year. It’s a job that falls to the host city’s organizing committee, which frequently relies on marketing research to create the mascot and public surveys to choose one, with final approval resting with the International Olympic Committee. While some mascots are human (children, usually), most have been animals (bears, raccoons, owls, etc.) And with the advent of CGI, several mascots have fallen into what’s generously termed the fantasy-creature category. But whatever the breed of the mascot, most have shared one thing in common: They’re a little—and sometimes very—freaky. ("Loony," to quote Time magazine, or "downright scary" in the appraisal of ESPN.) But why?...
The landscape of content is evolving. In an age where most advertisements fall victim to the "skip" button, it takes something truly creative to make people pay attention.It's no longer enough to simply create a straightforward ad -- to shine, content must make us laugh, cry, think, and believe. There is no bigger stage for celebrating advertising that moves us than the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. This year's recipients blur the line between marketing and art, delivering pieces of content that push the boundaries of media.Get inspired by 21 of the best below....
Malls are lumbering, claustrophobic dinosaurs, while anchor stores like Macy's and Kohl's are shuttering hundreds of locations. Fresh Direct and Peapod make it easier and quicker to stock a cupboard than wading through the jam-packed neighborhood Kroger, and Amazon and eBay and Overstock sell, well, everything.
Who needs retail anymore?
In fact, 71 percent of U.S. consumers say they still prefer to buy from physical stores even if the same products are available online, according to a recent TimeTrade survey, which also found that 85 percent like to shop in stores because they say they want to "touch and feel" items before buying them.
Online shopping accounts for only about 9 percent of total consumer retail spending, according to the most recent quarterly figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. But make no mistake—everyone from retail behemoths to specialty boutiques is feeling the pressure to adapt more seamlessly to the digital world, to bring in that all-important foot traffic and to deliver an experience that consumers can get nowhere else....
A quarter life crisis is something that most people can relate to. You wake up, look around, wonder what your purpose is, and come to grips with the idea of actually becoming an adult. Most twentysomethings leave it as that and take a bit of time to wallow, soul-search, and (more often than not) commiserate with friends. Not Samantha Jayne. In her mid-20’s, Jayne was working at an ad agency when she encountered her first taste of a quarter life crisis. She wasn’t happy and needed to decide what to do about it.
Jayne had always loved writing, so she started a Tumblr and Instagram chronicling her struggles. She made up poems about her everyday ups and downs and called her blog and Instagram, “Quarter Life Poetry.” The poems she came up with are about working, shopping, her love life, student loans, and other issues relevant to millennials.
Today, the 26-year-old has over 104,000 followers on her Instagram account, and recently released a book version of her project. One of the promotional videos for the book garnered over 10 million hits on Facebook alone. It’s safe to say that Jayne knows a thing or two about how to capture the attention of millennials. She recently spoke at the NewsCred 2016 #ThinkContent Summit and shared her thoughts on how to really speak to millennials....
It's unclear if the Brexit will have any specific effects on the digital media industry in the short or long term, but there are numerous potential consequences already on the table.
Earlier this month, Group M, the global media arm of WPP, tweaked its TV and newspaper ad spend forecast to compensate for a potential Brexit, according to The Guardian. Previous forecasts said U.K. TV ad spend would grow 7.1% in 2016, but that number drastically reduced to 2.6%. Furthermore, Group M lowered its total U.K. ad spend growth estimates from 7.2% to 6.3%.
This decrease stemmed from ad buyers' hesitation to spend money in the weeks before the referendum. Had the U.K. voted to remain in the EU, the ad market likely would have stabilized. But a vote to leave would have placed more downward pressure on U.K. ad spend, according to Sir Martin Sorrell, the CEO of WPP.
But even with these adjustments, the estimates still place the U.K. as one of the fastest-growing ad markets.
Father's Day was very likely a tense affair for Salt Lake City resident Baron Brooks, whose dad Arthur made a full-page, $900 personals newspaper ad for him without his permission. Not only that, but the ad makes Baron sound like a total jerk, too. The ad, which appeared in an Idaho paper for reasons we'll get to in a moment, is written from Baron's point of view and states that he is looking for a wife who fits very specific criteria. Specifically, the ad calls for a woman "between the ages of 34-38," which is 10 years younger than Baron, and "height and weight proportional," which is basically like saying "no fat chicks." The ad also expresses a preference for politically conservative women ("If you voted for Obama or plan to vote for Hillary you are not for me") who are "willing and able to have children as soon as possible," which is why Baron's dad put the ad in an Idaho paper; that state is pretty safely red for the time being. Baron, as one might imagine, is totally mortified by his dad's machinations, especially now that they've gone viral and will ironically make it harder for him to find a soulmate, since most people think he wrote the ad himself....
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The "brandless" brand that's getting traction with millennials and other consumers.