Without a doubt, Rich Kylberg embodies the modern marketing leader. As VP-corporate marketing and communications at Arrow Technologies, a 75-year-old company, he’s brought brand awareness of this $20 billion company with previously little household recognition to new places.
Mr. Kylberg was recognized late last year by The CMO Club for a prestigious leadership award following a successful reinvention of the company’s brand. Here are five of Mr. Kylberg’s traits that many marketers will recognize as essential to effective leadership:
Hearst-owned digital agency iCrossing named Kayvan Salmanpour as its first chief content officer as the agency seeks to create long-term content marketing strategies from a combination of consumer data and battle-tested branding tactics, Adweek reports. In the role, Salmanpour will report to iCrossing CEO Nick Brien and Hearst Digital Media president Troy Young.
Salmanpour arrives at iCrossing from Novel, the “creative content agency with an editorial mindset” that he co-founded in April of 2015. Prior to that he spent four years as vice president, revenue for content marketing platform NewsCred, where he was responsible for building the company’s entire sales, content and business development team after joining as its third employee. Before NewsCred, he spent five years as CEO of Mediaplanet Publishing.
Early last year, Salmanpour inspired headlines when classic but struggling political magazine The New Republic hired him as its chief revenue officer soon after being acquired by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and replacing most of its editorial staff. (TNR’s most senior reporters walked off the job in a “mass resignation” in December 2014.)
Novel was TNR’s “in-house content marketing agency,” and the pub hired Droga5 co-founder and former advisory board member Andrew Essex, who resigned from the agency just over a year ago, to oversee the effort. On his LinkedIn profile, Salmanpour writes that Novel was “incubated” by TNR but eventually signed such clients as Getty Images, Audible, IBM, Casper, Squarespace, Red and Bevel.
“The marketplace is quickly approaching a point where content from brands is in danger of being painted with the same brush as the banner ad today—looked down upon as an example of where we in the digital world squandered our chance to make the Internet great,” Salmanpour told Adweek. “We are focusing a lot more on building and retaining an audience for the brand themselves, rather than sort of renting out an audience. So for us, it’s just creating an offering where brands can access a full-service, content marketing studio for [clients]. Whether it’s for current clients or new clients, it’s about building that really solid offering.”
Back in October 2015, a Bloomberg column suggested that Volkswagen should return to its classic 1959 DDB “think small” campaign as the scandal called “Dieselgate” threatened to damage the company’s reputation and its bottom line. Various marketing and PR experts told Bloomberg, “Volkswagen should use simple ads that hark back to those early days to rehabilitate its tarnished image.”
The company will probably not take that advice.
We come to that conclusion primarily because VW reported its best-ever quarterly profit today. This happened despite the fact that the FTC filed a complaint against the company (which has been with Deutsch in the U.S. since 2009) for false advertising in March and that three state Attorneys General filed suit against the company this week for breaking the law with the full knowledge of executives in a multi-year scheme that was allegedly “orchestrated and approved at the highest levels of the company.”
VW also recently announced that it would pay an additional $2.42 billion in fines related to the scandal, which felled its former CEO Martin Winterkorn.
From the WSJ: “The German car maker’s shares jumped more than 6% after it said first-half operating profit was €7.5 billion, boosted by an improvement at the Volkswagen brand between April and June.” Some analysts have doubts about the future health of the company given the scope and seriousness of the scandal, which will remain in the headlines thanks to the aforementioned suits. But that’s an impressive profit that was down
New York’s attorney general Eric Schneiderman made several big accusations, chief among them that the company’s new CEO Matthias Muller knew about the scandal 10 years ago and that the company “destroyed incriminating documents.”
Back in February, VW made some “very minimal” cuts to its Deutsch team, but we hear that the relationship between client and agency will continue for the foreseeable future.
Deutsch declined to comment for this post, and a VW spokesperson has not yet responded to a related email.
Call it a hunch, but we have a general sense that American consumers simply don’t care all that much about the fact that VW conspired to beat environmental performance standards. We’re more concerned about faulty airbags.
A global cross-brand campaign to celebrate AB InBev’s exclusive sponsorship of Tomorrowland, one of the world’s largest electronic music festivals. At the heart of the campaign is an original song and music video made exclusively for AB InBev’s Tomorrowland partnership in collaboration with globally iconic Dutch DJ and producer, Tiësto, and LA producer and DJ, JAUZ. The video aims to get people fired up for Tomorrowland, and allows those around the world who can’t be at the festival in Belgium to get infected by music. The film has multiple versions with different brands highlighted for different markets – it’s a cross brand campaign.
The Pokmon Go phenomenon has prompted a lot of handwringing over how the trendy creature-grabbing app game tracks mobile location data. Yet, while the game has made the intersection of our digital and physical worlds more tangible than ever, there are already a handful of companies specializing in mobile location data collection, aggregation and distribution — and those firms are building viable businesses by sharing that data with hundreds of ad industry players.
Take location data firm Placed, which provides data representing consumer visits to physical store locations. Its client list has grown to 190 from 80 last summer and includes media firms such as Conde Nast and Accuweather, agencies including IPG Mediabrands and DigitasLBi, and cross-device ad targeting and measurement firms such as BlueCava.
Placed gets billions of location data points from mobile apps that consumers agree to let track their devices in exchange for things like premium in-app features, gift cards or charity donations, including Give2Charity and Placed-owned Panel App. Placed tells Panel App users that data gathered through the app is provided to partners in aggregate and not available at the individual level to third parties and not used to target ads.
Seven years after the onset of the global financial crisis, when it was widely said that orthodox economic thinking had failed and should change, it is evident that any such changes have been far from decisive. Some would say it looks pretty much like business as usual. This is not just the case in the academy, where the core courses in university economics departments continue to emphasize basic training (some would say indoctrination) in neoclassical economic principles. It is also evident in the realm of economic policy which continues to be dominated by a neoliberal agenda, augmented by the post-crash politics of austerity. This resilience of mainstream economics makes it essential for dissenters to continually reconsider how best to challenge orthodoxy both in theory and practice. – Frank Stilwell
Frank Stilwell, professor emeritus at the University of Sydney, says that the “heterodox” name we’ve given our movement is academically respectable but strategically weak. He says “heterodox economics” is about too many things – Marxism, post-Keynesianism, ecological economics, feminist economics, complexity economics, game theory plus dozens of other alternative thrusts and that accommodating all these approaches may be blunting our challenge to economic orthodoxy.
Stilwell suggests we lump all these strains into the one powerful idea of a “political economy” … the notion that economies have no natural form and are structured by power relations prone to inequality, corruption and crisis. In other words, he suggests we abandon the idea of economics as a value-free science and embrace it as a forum of political struggle.
“Political economy” he says, has a long and respectable lineage running from eighteenth century through to the twenty first with seminal contributions from Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Veblen, Keynes, Robinson, Mydal, Galbraith, Heilbronner and Piketty, and that from this broader historical perspective, neoclassical economics may be regarded as a side-track that evolved into the dominant orthodoxy because it was championed by a bunch of mathematically minded ‘logic freaks’ who wanted to see their discipline evolve into a hard, value-free science like physics.
Stilwell’s curve ball into our movement makes imminent sense. We shouldn’t be nitpicking between economic alternatives. Our first job is to go for the jugular and bring neoclassical economics to its knees.
— Kalle Lasn, Meme Wars – The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics
For its first brick-and-mortar store, located in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood, Sonos is showing customers how its products could both sound—and feel—in their homes.
The acoustics of a physical space have a huge effect on music being played in it, a fact that, while unsurprising, is often overlooked. With this in mind, the speaker marketer filled its brand new space with special pods meant to mimic residential listening environments, including studies, living rooms and kitchens.
Sensing an opportunity to reduce its reliance on third-party providers, The Washington Post has created a platform for email newsletters that is available for sale as part of its Arc suite of editorial and technology products.
Newsletters are a big focus in digital publishing, where homepage visits are getting harder to come by, but the format has challenges of its own.
Though advertisers and editors closely watch open rates, for example, stats can fluctuate based on whether an email has been “clipped” for being too long. Subscription-based newsletters can be undercut by an action as simple as email-forwarding. And companies like LiveIntent , which places ads in email newsletters, exist in part because publishers still need help turning their inbox access into revenue.
Ragazzo present initiative on social networks created by PPM Brazil, Habib’s house agency of the Group, in order to promote the delivery of service chain restaurants. The campaign consists of a series of five animated GIFs, “Circus”, “Dracula”, “Party”, “Alien” and “Octopus “, seeking to reinforce the concept “Anytime, anywhere”.
Unilever has agreed to buy the Dollar Shave Club subscription grooming service for a whopping $1 billion, giving the world’s second biggest ad spender an entry into one of the most profitable segments of personal care, and Dollar Shave Club a platform for global expansion.
The deal puts Unilever even more in competition with its long-time rival Procter & Gamble Co., whose Gillette brand still dominates men’s shaving globally and in the U.S., with a roughly 80% share of razor cartridges sold in stores in the U.S., according to Nielsen data from Deutsche Bank.
Michael Dubin, founder and CEO of Dollar Shave Club, will stay on as CEO, Unilever said in an announcement. Dollar Shave had an unnamed “strategic investor” in venture funding, one that turned out to be Unilever.
Category: Beyond Madison Avenue Summary: I am a resident of what is arguably the advertisement capital of the world, New York City. Since I also work in this bustling city, I have the fortunate or unfortunate (depending on your viewpoint) exposure to countless billboards and advertisements on my commute to and from work each day. It does not matter which route I take, there is no escaping the sea of ads. However, since I work in the digital marketing industry, unlike most New Yorkers, I actually look at the ads and at times even enjoy doing so.
Google’s new My Activity feature allows individuals to review all the data Google has about them from search to YouTube to maps. While anyone’s first reaction, especially an Android user, is likely to be awe, a second thought should quickly follow for marketers: My Activity will educate consumers about the wealth of data that brands can access, raising their expectations of the relevance and value they should get in return.
I’ve caught myself expecting more from the brands I patronize. While on a business trip, it irks me when Uber’s promotional message doesn’t realize I’ve already moved on from one destination to another, even after I’ve used the app in the new location. I get annoyed when my hotel company bombards me with vacation packages for a city I only visit for short weekday stays. All these companies have access to lots of data about me, and I expect an improved customer experience in return. I’m not alone. Consumers are more likely to buy from brands that are relevant and personalized to them.
The problem is that many marketers are so overwhelmed by the idea of creating personalized, relevant communications that they don’t attempt it, or they try to solve for it in painful ways, such as using dated consumer segments or awkwardly inserting consumer names into generic copy.
Spotify is making its audio ad inventory available to programmatic buyers in its latest effort to capture new ad revenue and make it easier for advertisers to target users listening to music on the go.
The music streaming giant has struck deals with Rubicon, The Trade Desk and AppNexus to make its mobile audio inventory available for purchase in near-real time, through private digital marketplaces. That means an ad buyer can now tweak and serve audio creative to a user based on what they know about the user — listening habits and log-in data from Spotify and first-party data from a client, for example — in a matter of milliseconds. The transaction is automated, and buyers and traders can bid on Spotify’s audio inventory, alongside display and video inventory, in an auction-like environment.
Previously, the company sold audio ads through audio-only ad exchanges at a fixed price, and completed transactions through manual insertion orders.
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