(TrendHunter.com) The ShockStop is an intelligently designed bicycle handlebar stem suspension accessory that is designed to absorb energy when you’re riding over bumps tin the road.
While shock-absorbing…
Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: Nostalgia marketing is the advertising equivalent of comfort food.
In a time when most marketing focuses heavily on the future, it transports us back to a simpler place where our current problems don’t matter and the hustle and bustle of modernity just melts away. Instead of anticipating the next great thing, nostalgia marketing…
Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: Thank you for inviting me here tonight.
I’m not usually invited to speak at high class affairs like this. I usually get invited to horrifying events like the “The Programmatic Real-Time Digital Insider Summit” or some other majestically titled festival of horsesh*t.
There comes a time when even Jann Wenner needs a little help from his friends.
After a five-decade run full of interviews with pop stars and presidents, the founder of Rolling Stone is selling 49% of the iconic magazine to an Asian billionaire’s son. It’s the first time Mr. Wenner has admitted an outside investor, a deal that encapsulates the plight of an industry fighting to stay relevant in an online age. Wenner Media LLC also owns Us Weekly and Men’s Journal.
Founded in 1967, Rolling Stone became a fixture of American pop culture, helping launch the careers of writers and creative artists over almost 50 years. But like many of its peers, the magazine has steadily lost advertising and readership to nimbler online alternatives. In 2014, Mr. Wenner tasked his son Gus with devising a digital strategy. Now Mr. Wenner, who started Rolling Stone from a San Francisco warehouse, plans to relinquish as much of his magazine as possible without ceding control.
The recent departure of Arianna Huffington as editor-in-chief at The Huffington Post, the company she co-founded in 2005, left publishing even more bereft of female leaders than before.
Then again, The Huffington Post already had a male CEO in place, just like Time Inc., The New York Times Co., Cond Nast, Hearst Corp. and its Hearst Magazines unit, Meredith, Bloomberg Media, The Financial Times, Guardian Media Group, Gannett, Tronc, Dow Jones, Forbes Media, Politico, BuzzFeed, Vox Media, Vice Media, Mashable, NPR, Fusion, Mic and Business Insider.
Some executives worry that the imbalance is bad not just for women’s chances for advancement but for their products and their businesses as a whole.
Ahead of this summer’s annual upfront bazaar for ad time in the new TV season, nearly every network group was hawking new data-driven targeting products, upgrades to previously released audience optimization technology and opportunities for marketers to move beyond traditional Nielsen guarantees.
Both Fox Networks Group and NBC Universal said they were ready to strike deals with advertisers using metrics that weren’t based on Nielsen age and sex demographics; Viacom introduced five products designed to make audience buying more accessible to a broader pool of marketers; and Discovery Communications announced its own data and analytics platform.
It was a strategic move by network groups, which have been looking for ways to make themselves more valuable amid sagging ratings and to offer alternative metrics while the industry awaits more comprehensive, cross-platform measurement by Nielsen. And it seemed an opportune time because the marketplace was in their favor as more marketers shifted dollars back to TV.
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of regularly appearing columns from Shelly Palmer. –Ken Wheaton
Glassholes, rejoice! Your hopes and dreams are about to be fulfilled by a $129 pair of video-recording Spectacles that its creator calls a “toy.” But while they are going to be super-fun to play with, Snap Inc.’s Spectacles are a serious brand extension for the company that created ephemeral visual conversation.
So Long, Snapchat, We Hardly Knew Ye
Marketers have dramatically increased the content they churned out in the past year, but people aren’t paying any more attention to it, according to an analysis of $16 billion in client spending by marketing analytics and software firm Beckon.
In a report to be released during an Advertising Week presentation Wednesday, Beckon said clients tripled the pieces of marketing content they churned out in the past 12 months — encompassing video and images circulated both in paid and unpaid media. Yet aggregate consumer engagement — such things as likes, comments, and shares — with that content remained flat.
Just 5% of content generated 90% of consumer interactions, according to Beckon. “In other words, 19 of 20 pieces of content pieces get little to no engagement,” the report concludes.
Just in time for the all-crucial holiday season, Old Navy has filled its six-month vacant chief marketing officer slot. The Gap Inc.-owned retail chain has tapped Jamie Gersch, most recently CMO at fast-fashion chain Charlotte Russe, as senior VP-chief marketing officer. She starts at the end of October.
Before joining Charlotte Russe last year, Ms. Gersch spent 14 years at Gap Inc., and as VP-marketing at San Francisco-based Old Navy, she oversaw communication strategy across all channels and led annual and seasonal marketing. As CMO of Old Navy, she’s replacing Ivan Wicksteed, who had been with the clothier for three years, recruiting the likes of Elizabeth Banks, Amy Poehler and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in its advertising, before departing in March.
“Jamie’s combination of passion for our brand, experience driving results in the business, cross-channel experience, and creative smarts made her the ideal CMO for our brand,” said Sonia Syngal, who was promoted to president of Old Navy in April, in a statement. “I know she’s going to accelerate Old Navy’s brand vision and help us continue to deliver an incredible, inclusive and accessible shopping experience for our customers around the world.”
Data sharing partnerships are happening at a furious pace but a Visa and Oracle pairing can show how ads affected actual sales transactions, rather than just visits to a store location. The partnership spins Visa’s transactional data into targetable audiences and campaign measurement tools for advertisers. Banana Republic is one of several merchants that accept Visa credit cards that have tested the system developed by Oracle and Visa over the past 18 months.
The ad targeting and measurement services, both coming out of a beta testing phase, use Visa transactional data associated with participating merchants. The information, which is aggregated and stripped of personally identifiable data, is matched with Oracle IDs in order to help marketers build audiences for targeting mobile and digital ads, or help them measure whether ad exposure led to a sales transaction. For examnple, a quick-serve restaurant might use the service to reach consumers that regularly buy breakfast at fast food places, or to determine whether people who saw an ad actually made a purchase.
Ads using Visa data can be targeted and measured on Twitter or Facebook, or in ad exchanges or through other Oracle media partners. “We can create that segment and then port it out to all our various partners in ad tech,” said Michelle Hulst, VP-strategic partnerships and business development for Oracle Data Cloud.
The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has assembled a think tank backed by more than 20 major marketers to fix what may be marketing’s biggest problem: figuring out what really drives media success or failure.
The MMA Marketing Attribution Think Tank (MATT) will “rethink the world of marketing measurement and attribution,” according to the group. It’s backed by executives from Procter & Gamble Co., Unilever, Nestle, Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola Co., J.P. Morgan Chase, American Express, Mastercard, Bank of America, Samsung, T-Mobile, Hilton, Choice Hotels and 1-800-Flowers, among others. The group planned to introduce the initiative during its SM2 Innovation Conference in New York on Tuesday.
The first initiative of MATT focuses on “multi-touch attribution” (MTA)which seeks to sort through the many factors that contribute to purchase decisions rather than simply attributing them to the last thing consumers did or saw before buying something.
Fox Networks Group is making another move in its effort to reinvent the TV ad model for the digital age. The company named David Levy to the newly created role of exec VP of non-linear revenue.
Mr. Levy, chief operating officer and co-founder of TrueX, the ad-tech firm Fox acquired in 2015, will lead sales, monetization strategy and operations for all non-linear platforms, which includes Fox.com, Fox apps and video-on-demand, among others.
The appointment comes just weeks after Fox unexpectedly announced the departure of Toby Byrne, who had been leading ad sales for the entire portfolio since October 2014. Fox is currently searching for Mr. Byrne’s replacement.
Wingstop has hired two Publicis Media agencies as it prepares for its first national media push, including its first TV campaign.
Performics and Starcom USA won the business after a competitive process, said Wingstop Chief Marketing Officer Flynn Dekker. Performics will oversee all search and social for Wingstop, while Starcom USA will be responsible for strategic media planning and activation.
The chicken wing chain, which has more than 900 locations worldwide, is still working with Barkley as its creative agency of record.
Audience buying is a lot like buying produce. In order to know if it’s any good, you really have to know what you’re buying. You want to know whether it’s fresh or how old it is or, worse, if it’s gone bad. You might even want to know where it was grown.
In my experience, marketers too often ignore these seemingly tiny details (source, age, scale). Instead, they defer to their digital media partners. In fact, an alarming 56% of marketers feel they don’t have enough visibility into the data used to define their target audiences, according to Forrester Research. The results are wasted dollars and poor return on ad spend as they speak to the wrong people or the same person over and over. Like rotten food, it’s enough to make someone sick.
One question that moderator Lester Holt did not pose to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during their first debate on Monday night: What do you think of each other’s ad strategies? And yet Trump let us know anyway, pointedly bringing up the Clinton campaign’s attack ads twice while addressing other questions.
The first time was in response to Holt bringing up Trump’s longstanding support of so-called birthers who insist that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. “He has really started his political activity,” Clinton said, “based on this racist lie that our first black president was not an American citizen,” adding that “Donald started his career back in 1973 being sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination. Because he would not rent apartments in one of his developments to African-Americans.” After addressing the birther issue (“I was the one that got him to produce the birth certificate and I think I did a good job…”), Trump circled back to the Justice Department suit and threw in his first objection to Clinton’s ads. Here it in context:
As far as the lawsuit, yes, when I was very young, I went into my father’s company. We, along with many, many other companies throughout the country — it was a federal lawsuit — were sued. We settled the suit with zero, no admission of guilt. It was very easy to do. But they sued many people. I notice you bring that up a lot. And I also notice the nasty commercials you do on me in so many different ways, which I don’t do on you. Maybe I’m trying to save the money. Frankly, I look at that, and I say: Isn’t that amazing? I settled that lawsuit with no admission of guilt but that was a lawsuit brought against many, many real estate firms, it’s one of those things.
How big is Snapchat? How sorry is Facebook? How advanced is Google? How long does Twitter have left?
These are all questions swirling around Advertising Week, where the industry has gathered for its annual digital rush in New York. The executives from the major platforms were on hand to capture the attention of brands needing guidance on where to spend their money online.
Here’s what everyone from Imran Khan of Snapchat to Carolyn Everson of Facebook were offering.
BBH North America CEO Pat Lafferty and New York Chief Creative Officer Ari Weiss are both leaving the agency, according to an internal memo obtained by Ad Age.
The memo, sent to staff by Creative Chairman John Patroulis, states that Mr. Lafferty and Mr. Weiss are leaving to pursue new opportunities, but their next endeavor is not linked, according to someone with knowledge with the matter.
Mr. Patroulis wrote in the email that Mr. Lafferty is “a terrific leader and we’ve gotten better with him around.”
When data giant Acxiom scooped up data onboarding company LiveRamp in 2014, it felt like the pieces were finally falling together for Acxiom CEO Scott Howe. The company had shed its information security business and still planned to divest other divisions that detracted from Mr. Howe’s strategic mission to remake the Little Rock-based firm into the streamlined agency-friendly data services firm of tomorrow. The former corporate VP-advertiser and publisher solutions at Microsoft, then on the job at Acxiom for three years, told Ad Age, “This is a big acquisition for us.”
It was almost an understatement. LiveRamp has become a major growth generator for Acxiom, which had it not innovated by realigning its focus around what the industry has come to call “people-based marketing,” could be languishing as a washed up data broker. In August, Acxiom reported Q1 2016 revenue for its Connectivity business, led by LiveRamp, was $31 million, up 52% compared with Q1 2015. The division has around 300 customers, according to recent earnings reports.
While Acxiom remains one of the largest aggregators and suppliers of third-party data, its LiveRamp acquisition propelled it toward Mr. Howe’s goal to become a conduit for connecting offline, personally identifiable data to digital channels. It helped spur intense interest in this type of service by a variety of brands with huge customer databases but a lack of knowledge or wherewithal to use that information to find those customers across channels and reach others like them.
With just over a month to go before the U.S. presidential election and one day after the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, we’d like to know how our readers are leaning.
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| THE ORIGINAL? Painting “Le Viol” / “The Rape” – 1934 Source : Moma Artist : René Magritte (Belgium) |
LESS ORIGINAL Influencia Magazine – 2016 Source : Influencia Agency : Glory Paris (France) |
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