For the better part of my advertising career I worked with commodity and specialty brands. This was especially true in the chemical industry. Consumer brands such as M&M’s or Revlon would prefer that their customers not know too much about what really goes into the making of their favorite snack, nail polish color, or fragrance. We referred to these brands as the name behind the name you know.
Continue reading
Well, it’s finally happened – social media networks are being forced to come clean about how and where they make their vast fortunes. To most of us, these networks started as benign play things where we could post pictures and inflate our digital persona to make us look cooler than we actually were. As with most technology platforms, investors became involved and what started as a noble endeavor to make the world a better place was replaced with “how can this be scaled and monetized?”
Continue reading
Understanding marketing’s contribution to revenue generation has two sides. Traditional brand value and awareness measurement require research, focus groups, and surveys to understand the customer’s emotional connection with the brand and their acceptance or rejection of the brand’s promise.
Continue reading
Like the mythical double-headed serpent, advertising is in a process of rebirth. This can be attributed to an overcrowded internet, hell-bent on engagement, and a resurrection of creative advertising focused on long-term brand building.
Continue reading
I recently performed a google search using the queue — crap internet content — which returned 2,770,000 results in 0.68 seconds. This statistic alone should speak volumes about the current state of the internet and the questionable quality of the content that is pumped out for public consumption. With so much underwhelming, misdirected, me-too, and opinion-stated-as-fact content available for consumption, it’s no wonder our attention spans are being reduced to microseconds.
Continue reading
Recently I attended Colorado Ad Day on the CU Boulder campus. Steve Babcock, Chief Creative Officer for Vayner Media, presented his thoughts on creating and producing branded content. Steve is an advocate of producing “show approach pilots” much the same way that networks produce episode pilots to measure audience engagement and interest.
Continue reading
McKinsey and Company recently published “An incumbent’s guide to digital disruption.” In the guide, they suggest that all incumbent businesses are susceptible to digital disruption and the four phases that executives should be aware of and plan for so as not to go the way of the dodo bird. Siting examples for the music, newspaper, and travel industries, McKinsey charts the path of creative disruption. Below is my interpretation for small to mid-sized B-to-B firms, having lived through digital’s onslaught of the advertising business.
Continue reading
In today’s cluttered marketing environment, standing out from the competition has become more challenging. Everywhere we turn, thousands of brands are vying for our limited attention span. This overload has conditioned us to be hyper-sensitive to brand messaging delivered through advertising, POP marketing, and social media platforms, or as I prefer to call it, our “BS” meters are working overtime.
Continue reading
In the not too distant past, social media was embraced by brands as a conduit to engage with users in hopes of creating a personal relationship. Diaper brands embraced mommy bloggers, food brands created recipe sharing websites, Facebook created the wall where users posted enhanced digital profiles of their exploits and lives. Titans of corporations envisioned social media as a way to reduce advertising costs because in their view, social media was free. Free in the sense of no media expenditures, content was provided by the users and as a bonus it came with a rudimentary form of ROI based on likes, opens and click-through rates.
Continue reading
It seems that the entire advertising ecosphere has become infected with the cheaper/better virus.
Startups think that agile marketing can introduce their idea/App/product exclusively through social media. Thinking that social media can be scaled and user comments controlled to reach and influence the intended target audience with enough impressions to influence the next round of investor backing is naive.
Continue reading
Life After Advertising 