News You Can Use

The Most Successful Brands Focus on Users–Not Buyers

• Posted: March 15, 2018

What makes a brand successful in the digital age? A joint study by SAP, Siegel+Gale, and Shift Thinking suggests that digital brands don’t just do things differently; they also think differently.

Where traditional brands focus on positioning their brands in the minds of their customers, digital brands focus on positioning their brands in the lives of their customers. Furthermore, they engage customers more as users than as buyers, shifting their investments from pre-purchase promotion and sales to post-purchase renewal and advocacy.
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In Brief: The Slow Death of Internet Cookies

• Posted: March 15, 2018

Over 60% of marketers believe they will no longer need to rely on tracking cookies, a 20-year-old desktop-based technology, for the majority of their digital marketing within the next two years, according to data from Viant Technology, an advertising cloud. Viant.

Advertising and web-based services that were cookie-dependent are slowly being phased out of our mobile-first world, where more individual data targeting is done without using cookies. Axios.

Your Location Data Is Being Sold— Often Without Your Knowledge

• Posted: March 9, 2018

As location-aware advertising goes mainstream and as popular apps harvest your lucrative location data, the potential for leaking or exploiting this data has never been higher.

It’s true that your smartphone’s location-tracking capabilities can be helpful, whether it’s alerting you to traffic or inclement weather. That utility is why so many of us are giving away a great deal more location data than we probably realize. Every time you say “yes” to an app that asks to know your location, you are also potentially authorizing that app to sell your data.

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The ARF CONSUMERxSCIENCE Conference

• Posted: March 9, 2018

Two winning papers to be presented onstage include:

• “What a Shorter Ad Can (and Can’t) Do” – Shorter ads can be good for recall, less useful for ad liking and avoiding clutter (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and Media Science).
• “Connecting Across Generations” – Insights on generational differences and similarities and identifying how a brand breaks through (ABC Disney, Omnicom Media Group, Insight Strategy Group).

One of the onstage panels:

• “Stop Talking and Start Doing Something” – Listen to how members of the media ecosystem are scaling new ways to improve the consumer ad experience (The Wharton School, Turner Ignite, Horizon Media, Fox Network Sales).

To register and to learn more about the conference, visit: https://thearf.org.

NBC on Reducing Primetime Ads and Creating New Ad Formats

• Posted: March 9, 2018

Editor’s Note: This article is a compilation and distillation of reporting from: Broadcasting & Cable, Bloomberg, and AdWeek.

NBCUniversal said it plans to decrease advertising time by 10% in original primetime programming on all of its broadcast and cable television networks and reduce the number of commercials per break by 20%. The reduction in ad time and ad pod lengths will apply to all 50-plus prime-time original shows across NBCU’s portfolio, which includes NBC, USA, Bravo, E!, Telemundo, CNBC and Oxygen. The change will be effective in the 4th fourth quarter.
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WPP’s Sorrell Calls Reuniting Media and Creative Wishful Thinking

• Posted: March 9, 2018

Despite a call by the world’s largest marketer (i.e., P&G) to “reunite” media and creative, don’t expect the world’s largest agency holding company to do that — at least not in the traditional way.

“I think it is very difficult to merge back creative agencies with media agencies to that extent,” WPP Chairman/CEO Martin Sorrell said, “because there will always be an argument about who’s in control.”

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P&G CMO Calls for an End to the “Archaic Mad Men Model”

• Posted: March 9, 2018

Editor’s Note: The following two articles about industry innovators are from Marketing Week and MediaPost, respectively.

P&G’s Marc Pritchard has turned his attention to cutting out the layers of complexity that he believes exist within the agency model. He said marketers have been “steadily outsourcing work to agencies,” but he believes this needs to stop because there are now “too many touchpoints” between marketers and the consumers they serve.

“We need P&G people much closer to the consumers they serve and we need fewer project managers and more brand entrepreneurs. This means renewed partnerships to work with agencies, not through them. We’ll pay for what creates value for consumers, and discern what work should be done by P&G people versus agency people,” he explained.
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How Does Your Firm Use Social Media? (CMO Survey)

• Posted: March 1, 2018

Editor’s Note: The CMO Survey for February 2018 generated 362 responses from top U.S. marketers at for-profit companies and is administered twice a year. Included below is one slide from the 2018 Highlights and Insights report.

The table covers ten criteria for using social media, with brand awareness/building most frequently mentioned.

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4A’s (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Data Summit Conference Report

• Posted: March 1, 2018

Among the topics featured were unconventional uses of data, preparing for the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR – due by May 25th), cross-device measurement, targeting and upcoming industry standards.

Three themes emerged throughout the day: accountability, discovery and how critical it is to be able to navigate the increasingly complex data landscape.
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Study Puts Market Value to CSR Initiatives – Journal of Advertising Research

• Posted: March 1, 2018

Advertising intensity is a powerful driver for the success of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, according to new research published in the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR).

Authors Mahabubur Rahman (Rennes School of Business), M. Ángeles Rodríguez Serrano (University of Seville), and Mary Lambkin (University College Dublin) examined the CSR programs of 264 companies in the S&P 500 for their study.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Marketing Performance: The Moderating Role of Advertising Intensity provides evidence that companies engaging in community and environmental CSR activities reap the benefit of their investment in the form of improved market share.
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