and great parties!
As you’ll see the secret of great campaigns is that they’re smart, succinct and hold surprise.
http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/festival/
Category: Advertising Agencies
It’s Not Just You: Advertising Insiders Think Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner Ad Was A Disaster
…By Vanessa Wong at Buzzfeed
…The protest alluded to “emotional events and very significant issues that affect the core of American society,” brand consultant Dean Crutchfield told BuzzFeed News. “They piggybacked on a crusade and didn’t have permission to do so. People found it tasteless and crass. It was trivializing grief.”For Pepsi, the debacle adds to a much bigger and more existential problem: Its core product is getting less popular by the day. Soda has become one of the main targets of public health advocates, and cities are starting to pass
For Pepsi, the debacle adds to a much bigger and more existential problem: Its core product is getting less popular by the day. Soda has become one of the main targets of public health advocates, and cities are starting to pass taxes on sugary drinks. Even diet sodas are in decline.
“This is the last thing they need. Their business is pretty fragile now,” said Crutchfield. “This is very embarrassing for the brand.”…
Brilliance Versus Trust?
Conundrum or simple decision? You decide:Bril·liance
ˈbrilyəns/
noun
noun: brilliance; noun: brilliancy
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intense brightness of light.“the nights were dark, lit only by the brilliance of Aegean stars”
Synonyms: brightness, vividness, intensity -
Vividness of color.
Synonyms: brightness, vividness, intensity -
Exceptional talent or intelligence.“he’s played the stock market with great brilliance”
Synonyms: genius, intelligence, wisdom, sagacity, intellect 
Trusttrəst/noun-
Firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.“Relations have to be built on trust”
Synonyms: confidence, belief, faith, certainty, assurance, conviction, credence; reliance
“Good relationships are built on trust”Law: Confidence placed in a person by making that person the nominal owner of property to be held or used for the benefit of one or more others.verb: believe in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of.
“I should have trusted her”
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Turn Me On
Gr
eat brands are about storytelling and brand voice success comes when you mitigate the turned-off reaction.
Answering The Pivotal Question Facing All CMOs: Why Should I Care?
Answering “why should I care?” for the CMO immediately changes the strategy of the approach and the interaction with them. CMOs are drowning in a myriad of media channels from direct to social, with platitudes of business models, ecommerce processes and a quarter to deliver – along with a connected public that can slam out opinions about their brand at any time. The CMOs charge is to build revenue and relevance, but this new normal in marketing brings with it distracting challenges:
- The explosion of touch points is resulting in a lack of control
- Standing out is harder as consumers take more charge and push back
- New, rapid global competition
- Grappling with social media globally with localized interaction
- Clarity on roles and responsibilities with the internal focus on business issues
- Demonstrating the value of procurement, brands and current marketing
CMOs buy ideas to make a gain or avoid a loss. To stand out a business needs to deliver its best case and the winning face that will solve a huge problem for the CMO by answering, “Why should I care?” The key is to make the CMO relevant by piloting the proposed solution with their funded initiatives and demonstrably reveal more value to their business faster. By connecting the CMO to revenue, convincingly showing her what problem you solve and how the investment will move the needle north, an invitation to answer their tough questions will be forthcoming:
- How will you help me demonstrate a strong ROI on integrated marketing?
- Does our ‘story’ and content strategy enhance the customer experience?
- When can we better optimize the purchase pathway and our customer data?
- Where can we get the biggest bang with our social and earned media?
- Are you able to help me balance creative with analytics?
- Can I trust you with my business and marketing strategies?
The old ‘sales funnel’ model where we (consumers) hold a large number of brand options and narrow our choices to an eventual decision aided by advertising has been deracinated. Repetition of old marketing strategies has caused the ouster of many a CMO as has throwing up new brand campaigns bereft of any notion of what the empirical measurement is for effective.
Therefore, what makes the offer different that can deliver ROI? CMOs admire it when there is adherence to their current strategy and how the proposition moves it forward. Ideas might be the currency of marketing, but to spray them without tying them to organizational goals will lose the CMO no matter if its technology or marketing. Pitching tons of ideas that are disconnected to their strategy is akin to saying one has no ideas at all: strategy is more about what you’re not going to do and how that connects to the business goals of their organization.
To get inside the CMO’s head, think like an investor and investors have one thing on their minds: ROI. For CMOs, their investment is the time, energy and resources they place in the hands of their ‘partner’ firms and their ideas. To win over the CMO, the idea needs to generate and show a return, provide data and enable you to ask how you can help them? Rarely are CMOs actually offered! How can the solution make the CMO’s life easier? Demonstrate it contributes to her inventory of alternatives and already her job has been made easier.
Anecdotal success measurement, however, can quickly turn off a CMO – marketing is not all about telling a great story – it’s about
telling a story that moves the needle: if you don’t know how to measure it quantifiably, resist the temptation. CMOs pilot new ideas constantly, but they need a valid and relevant way to measure the success of those ideas. CMOs generally do not desire to replicate the competition they demand you to know their customer. It’s easy searching what other people are up to, but the secret sauce is knowing the right questions, the ones that lead to unearthing the pain points and needs of their organization and customers, and then tailoring targeted solutions.
More than ever CMOs are vested in making the quarter and are primarily interested in the business outcomes of using services. Consequently sales discussions must focus on business drivers. For example, a true innovation needs a business model – preferably one that’s able to link to their business model i.e., know how they make their money! Products, services, and solutions must be linked to business benefits using the metrics the CMO cares about: footfall, ARPU, retention, online conversion, customer acquisition cost, lead generation efficiency, etc. To accomplish “Why should I care?” it’s critical to connect the offer directly to revenue and specifically show the CMO how the product will further aid her to prove marketing’s value – demonstrably and empirically – to the CEO.
The CMOs 10 rules for agencies
For many large brands item number two or three listed on the company’s Capex sheet says ‘Media’. Therefore, CMOs are constantly battling an imbroglio to
demonstrably prove that marketing is an investment not a cost. Given the CMO’s charge is to build revenue and relevance, added value must be demonstrated beyond ROI and for this new normal in marketing there are new rules of engagement:
1. Answer the CMOs silent question, ‘Can I trust you with my business and marketing strategies?’ because succeeding target is not the only goal and pre determined goals undermine future success. However, that said, more than ever CMOs are vested in making the quarter and are primarily interested in the business outcomes of using services. Integrated marketing brings with it distracting challenges and by connecting the CMO to revenue, convincingly showing how the investment will move the needle north, an invitation to sit at the table will be forthcoming. Consequently sales discussions must focus on business drivers and strategy cannot be made from a sound bite nor can a single strategy work across the diversity of the business; simple solutions to complex problems are often simple, straightforward and wrong.
2. Follow the rules of engagement. How well you play in the sandbox might be a cliché question, but it’s often said that as a client needs more integrated marketing from its agencies, each agency’s competency grows, but their passion recedes. CMOs know they can create different vantage points for their business and achieve amazing results by approaching big marketing challenges as a collection of agencies who possess a willingness to participate and check ‘not invented here’ egos at the door. In the relentless pursuit of growth the simplest answer is to act by partnering with other agencies, client departments and taking a seat at the table, able to inform the CMO about their brand’s future.
3. Do not assume the brand idea is the agency’s, undertake half-baked efforts or simply not care enough about the bigger picture and all involved is a recipe for disaster. CMOs are determined, to the point, efficient, precise, careful, reserved and logical and need to be convinced because they’re highly suspicious of generalities – even the noblest of ideas sometimes do less for them than a siesta or an Advil. Therefore, in the world of creating and sustaining stories, clarity and a shift in thinking that recognizes the difference between truth and fiction is that the fiction has to make sense.
4. Much a do about nothing: the difference between expecting and inspecting lies in the execution. Therefore, avoid ocean boiling and conjuring up strategies out of sound bites; agencies need to create, fashion, execute or construct according to a plan that reflects the CMOs needs, e.g., shareholder value is a result not a strategy.
5. Failure to edit work. The CMO is vested in making the quarter so there’s constrained bandwidth for actionable insights that can move the needle north. The success of contrarian marketing strategies might require CMOs to table prevailing marketing theories and embrace experimentation, but it’s about short-term performance for the client not long form presentations by the agency. IQ is one thing – emotional conviction that comes from experience is another far more powerful and rapid component. To be erudite it’s best agencies apply Rudyard Kipling’s five honest men: who, what, why, where, when and then show the CMO ‘how’ it can be done.
6. Presenting other people’s work. An idea is as real as a bullet and great artists are famous for stealing ideas and extracting something unique – adaptive strategies are what’s called for, but making assumptions about a specific program’s success and the agency’s ‘role’ in its accomplishment is a mistake that can get a firm shot down.
7. Lack of follow up and a slow response like some species of corporate bureaucrat causes a morass. The more an agency wants to achieve the more it achieves. Agencies can find win-win solutions – but a majority of the time, they’re just arranging the budget, time, people levers around to accomplish strategic objectives. Therefore, viability and accountability are critical and prospective proposal writing by the agency is more an attitude than a skill. One consulting firm reported increasing their fee business with P&G by 50% solely by listening
to clients and proactively making suggestions.
8. Attacking a competitor. Agencies must avoid vituperative attacks on a competitor; it’s unoriginal and a somewhat sleazy course of conduct. For a CMO and his team it can feel like shoveling up road kill and leaves a bad taste. Agencies would do themselves a favor if they heeded, Machiavelli, the rapacious Fourteenth Century prince’s advice to deliver good news oneself and bad news through others.
9. Taking advantage of the CMO. Whether it’s bulldozing the CMO to make decisions in the agencies favor through to agency partners ganging up to twist the arm of an approach, many CMOs feel they’re paying too much. Therefore, once vaunted high switch out costs are no longer an agency advantage holding onto the client, as clients now view that as an opportunity to streamline efficiencies. Ultimately CMOs buy ideas to make a gain or avoid a loss so ‘Why should I care?’ is the client’s (real) question that agencies should be asking themselves before the big reveal.
10. Team Chemistry. For the elegant exchange of value in the client relationship fielding the right team is critical. CMOs sit through countless meetings with (supposedly) ‘the smartest team’ in the room, so the best approach for the agency is to work for applause with the team that’s going to do the work. The CMO needs to know there’s good chemistry as they have to spend much of their time with their agency partners – developing roadmaps, writing requirements and business plans, supporting sales and marketing, interacting with partner agencies – all depends on good chemistry. The better the agency is at knowing and communicating what needs to be done and why, the more they will add value and excel in front of the CMO.
At the end of the day, CMOs want actionable advice on growing their business that secures their role. Across the brandscape, CMOs are focused on generating organic growth and achieving innovation. These two are the key drivers for business growth going forward in 2013. Therefore, belief, optimism, courage and preparation might rule the day, but in this new normal in marketing, when it comes to building revenue and relevance agencies should remember what they say in the military, ‘amateurs focus on strategy while professionals focus on logistics.’
Wharton’s Future Of Advertising: Time Spent With The Brand 2020
‘Time spent with the brand’ will be advertising’s most sought after metric entering 2020 as the current concept of brand value, traditional marketing and retail outlets will have further eroded. With the convergence of TV, computers and the Internet, new century advertising’s bright lights and trumpets will unleash their sophistry in 2020 on the US Presidential election, Europe’s UEFA Cup Final and the Olympic Games. All massive media events enjoyed by billions around the world that will be empowered by the new normal in smarter advertising.
By 2020 we no longer subscribe to the old ‘sales funnel’ approach where consumers hold a large number of brand options and narrow their choices to an 
eventual decision aided by advertising. Consumers already limit their brand options at the first consideration stage, seeking out input from peers, reviewers, vendors and competitors. Increasingly consumers are delaying purchase decisions until they’re actually in-store or about to hit purchase – that opens up when and what touch points consumers are most open to influence and how to create positive consumer experiences at those points. Ever more powerful will be point of purchase and Near Field Communications (NFC) offers radical potential to push tailored content and brand offers to a customer’s specific location or share social coupons with their friends.
Encouraging customers to interact, manipulate, and engage with the product by proactively taking part in sharing the brand is the Holy Grail for advertising today: Bain & Co. found that the most recommended company in any given category grows 2.5x the category average. To ensure time spent with the brand, advertising needs to develop its social skills to a whole new level to exploit the huge shift in post-sale behavior. Boomers will be center stage for advertisers in Western countries, a hugely powerful consumer segment that has migrated online and adopted technology with alacrity. New mass audiences have also formed, including one billion young digitized middle-class, ‘Gen C’: connected, community-oriented and content-centric consumers for whom digital is second nature and by 2020 they make up 40% of the world’s population.
Consumption patterns will be tied to the exponential increase in social networking threaded throughout our day, mostly using mobile devices. Six billion “Broadcast Braggarts” will be sharing their lifestream offering hyper personalized information from friends, online status, location, preferred communication, hobbies and shopping habits. This will transform social media advertising opportunities with how we work and how we consume. ABI Research estimate over 136 billion apps will be downloaded worldwide by 2017, much of which is currently unverified. This represents a huge opportunity for advertising to enable content creation by inviting ideas from consumers via co-creation, collaboration and crowdsourcing as viral marketing and peer reviews amongst consumers will be essential to entice ‘shareability’.
The real battle for consumers’ time spent with the brand will rage in the home. By 2020 consumers will enjoy over $1.5 trillion of global entertainment using superfast technology with wireless devices the dominant tool for business, entrepreneurship, and Internet access for billions of consumers. Technology will be intimately woven into our lifestream and with prices for ‘handheld’ smartphone technologies dramatically lower, mobile strategies in advertising will optimize the prevalent fast speeds, NFC, QR cards and RFID technologies across a growing multitude of digital interfaces and physical touch points, all seamlessly connected in the cloud.
Global media spend will be more than $1.6 trillion and endless varieties of curated advertising strategies would have evolved with the industry more intertwined. To fund budgets many big brands are piling down Madison Avenue looking for efficiencies they can add to their marketing budgets. Coke plans to strip out $550M of costs to fund future marketing and other major advertisers are following suit. To match the demand for fresh ideas, agency holding companies will devise new structures with their specialist businesses bundled under their main agencies with clients more involved and agencies forced to adopt pay-for-performance models that our archaic system of agencies employing a few creative teams to drum up category busting ideas simply won’t cut.
By harnessing communities across multiple platforms, advertising can create new value pools by placing consumers at the center of the brand experience: 1 in 3 people come to a brand through a personal recommendation. Advertising needs to create demand by being harbingers of change; whether online, mobile or televised, the experiences we have with advertising need to undergo big changes and we have the mind-set, skills and next-generation media to engage (4Screen) consumers who have more power than ever. Take 3D, it will be super efficient, enhancing the immediacy of the pictures and offering controls that allow the viewer to change their viewpoint or zoom in and out – watching from home will offer an experience never thought possible. And we’ve hardly seen the potential of technology to customize outdoor advertising and sponsors’ localized messages aimed at different segments and market sectors simultaneously.
Four consumer trends will have direct impact: ‘Nomad,’ the mobility of people to move to different places creating multiple opportunities for localized brand engagement. ‘Downsizing,’ the growing trend for calorific control and quantity, such as dosing, has diverse implications for interconnected advertising. ‘Back to the Farm’ speaks for our enchantment with all things green and will force big brands to open deeper two-way conversations with consumers as witnessed with Nestle and it’s poorly handled Palm Water debacle. Finally, ‘Bring it Home’ will have major implications for consumers’ time spent with the brand as a direct result of the ‘debtcade’ having forced billions of people back to their homes for entertainment and food – battle for the lounge.
In the battle for the lounge, advertising is facing the challenge of change by the click and becoming more interconnected. New century advertising must not try and compete as technology companies, or as social networks, or as mobile providers. Advertisers must compete as content creators with an understanding of how to deliver valuable content to the right audience at the right time, in the right place by deploying social media and mobile technologies. What does advertising need to do now for this future: be useful, enable sharing, be entertaining, provide knowledge, enable connections, enhance the experience, encourage community building and ultimately solve how to entice consumers to pay for their social media!
The Future For Marketing And Agencies
Marketing as a business and cultural force has been transformed. Whether it’s PR, advertising, branding, digital, CRM and social the world of earned, 
paid, shared and owned media is going to through a seismic shift that will impact the marketing:
1. New Revenue Models Generating Value.
Business models for digital content distribution are changing, with licensing and service-based delivery models replacing traditional sales-based distribution. Globalization, societal changes, explosion of platforms and channels, the end of spin and digital versus social is driving the need for change also. To optimize this need for value creation agencies need to create value and new revenue models by being promoters of change; whether TV, online or mobile.
2. Multiple Channels.
From cars to clothes digital media is exploding. Consumers consume more media, from more sources, and in a greater range of formats than we imagined — news websites, movie-streaming services, mobile apps, ebooks, live-streaming video, on-demand TV, podcasts, video-sharing services, audiobooks, news aggregators, blogs, social networks, music subscriptions and a plethora of formats yet to be invented. This means that managing and protecting brand reputation is becoming ever more complex with the expansion in how people receive information.
3. Measurement.
With the new buyer behavior that spans consideration, evaluation, purchase, use, enjoy, recommend and either bond or go back to consideration – marketing providers need to develop its skills to a whole new level to exploit the huge shift in post-sale behavior. Therefore, encouraging customers to interact, manipulate, and engage with the product by proactively taking part in sharing the brand is the holy grail. This along with the ubiquity of smart devices and the rise of social and digital marketing makes it easier to measure.
4. Changing Structure Of In-house Departments.
Businesses are constantly growing in their sophistication and hiring in-house more talent that can engage all levels of the marketing mix. This trend will require agencies to understand the new value exchange with their client and mirror these changes. The key for agencies is understanding what clients want and the need to review new structures to engage with the client, including strategy and creativity. Ultimately being better sparing partners to CMOs who are building complex in-house teams.
5. New Revenue Streams.
What is the future of marketing and what are the business models that sustain it including social and SEO. How do we create content that generates value/revenue without becoming a commodity amongst millions of free outlets? Can consumers be charged for the content? Which ad formats, techniques and innovations are working — and which are not? Can agencies help clients compete as content creators that generate new revenue?
These combined create new parameters surrounding the execution of marketing campaigns for the client and their agency partners. The first is the need for intelligence for both market knowledge and in the agencies team’s skills. The second variable is engagement which includes new revenue steams such as SEO. Third is how the team is structured to match the client’s needs and the fourth is better ideas and content through collaboration. Get those right and you’ll have an engaged client, a brand controlled audience and the optimization of the client’s marketing and media.
PUNCH & KISS 