After three years of pandemic-driven anxiety, societal division and occupational burnout, consumers are eager to buy brands and relish in experiences that offer inclusive escape, freedom and joyful rebellion. Indeed, consumers are embracing irreverent and playful brands like Liquid Death, which promises to “murder your thirst” with its canned water and recruited a porn star…
By now it’s clear that anyone betting on the post-Covid inflationary period being a short-term blip rather than the beginning of a long spate of hardship has resolutely lost. Consumer sentiment is increasingly moving from nervousness to existential fear as the “heat or eat” dilemma looms ever larger this winter. As expected, most early responses…
On Tuesday, Ticketmaster enjoyed their largest ticket sales day ever, selling over 2 million tickets to Taylor Swift’s upcoming The Eras Tour. This could have been a quiet victory for the company. Instead, it was the beginning of a week filled with mass vitriol as “Swifties” took to the internet against Ticketmaster and its parent…
We have reached a tipping point. As the value of Apple approaches $250 billion–roughly the annual revenue of GM and Honda combined–few marketers would argue with the claim that brands focused on customer experience (CX) are more valuable than ever. And while Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow is a siren song for the storytelling Mad…
It’s relatively easy and cheap to save a life. Around $4,500 per life if you support the Against Malaria Foundation, and even more of a steal at $3,500 per life if you support Helen Keller International’s supplementation program. So in principle, if we all gave as much as we possibly could to the most cost-effective…
Publishers often express concerns about the programmatic open market, but Bloomberg Media took a more decisive step recently. The company said it would stop serving open-market third-party programmatic display advertising on its website and mobile app when the new year begins. Publishers, advertisers and ad-tech players should pay attention to this development because it validates…
This year’s Hispanic Heritage Month inspired some great work, including investment in education, support of artists and creators, limited-edition collections and more–but also several opinion pieces detailing how brands missed the mark on celebrating authentically. It’s not easy to come up with one tagline or capsule collection that encapsulates the entire Latinx experience. Latinx creatives…
With KFC’s recent social media firestorm surrounding an automated promotional message, it’s important for brands and agencies to reflect on how to prevent communication missteps. All across the advertising world, teams are under pressure to always be creating content, whether it’s to satisfy ever-changing and often capricious algorithms on platforms or to juice more engagement…
If you’ve ever worked in social media or digital marketing for a brand, chances are you’ve had your fair share of moments when panic sunk in as you’ve realized something that should not be live on your channels was published. As someone who has worked in the space for 14 years, I can tell you…
Today’s cannabis retail landscape–defined by striking consumer brands and increasingly mainstream marketing strategies–is nearly unrecognizable compared to the industry’s earliest innings. However, as more adult-use states reach a point of market saturation, cannabis brands must learn to holistically reach their target audiences to maintain and grow market share. On the surface, industry sales appear to…
Once reserved for retail experiences at Apple stores and Disney parks, experiential retail is becoming an effective mainstream brand-building activation strategy. Retail is the physical space for brands to connect with consumers in an omnichannel world, creating memorable experiences. Experiential retail considers humans as connected beings, creating spaces for them to gather around a shared…
Once reserved for retail experiences at Apple stores and Disney parks, experiential retail is becoming an effective mainstream brand-building activation strategy. Retail is the physical space for brands to connect with consumers in an omnichannel world, creating memorable experiences. Experiential retail considers humans as connected beings, creating spaces for them to gather around a shared…
Ever since Elon Musk decided to buy Twitter, accessibility advocates have been preparing for the possibility that the platform’s Accessibility Experience Team would suffer losses. Many were hopeful that someone, literally anyone, with power at Twitter would make a strong enough argument to the new chief twit about the importance of access and save the…
It’s only been a few days since Elon Musk declared that “the bird is freed” upon closing on his acquisition of Twitter–and already he has started to change the company from the inside out. From pending layoffs of a quarter of the staff to the leak that the company is planning to charge $19.99 for…
Adidas finally announced that it is parting ways with Ye, also known as Kanye West. The pressure had been mounting for weeks for Adidas to act, as Ye continued to use anti-Black and antisemitic hate speech in his social media channels and other outlets. The Balenciaga fashion house, JP Morgan Chase, Gap, Vogue and Creative…
From declining sales to increased competition and consolidation, some of the world’s biggest brands right now are on the hunt for new agency partners. Cutting across industries and ranging from Bud Light to HBO Max, Starz, Hanes and Red Lobster, CMOs are under tremendous pressure to make the right decision. This is especially important as…
The future of marketing is inclusive marketing. A lot of brands still develop “mass” market strategies for the mainstream, but it’s important to note that the general market is now multicultural. However, there is a difference between multicultural marketing and inclusive marketing. General marketing is in the past, and the accountability to represent the consumer…
Les Binet and Peter Field pioneered research on the value of a 60-40 spend on brand building versus sales activation messaging. This mix has shown the right balance of driving short-term sales for growing the brand as a whole and can lead to sustained revenue growth and acquisition of new markets while simultaneously keeping a…
Brands and retailers are about to unleash their holiday campaigns. This season, however, the standard practice of buying eyeballs may not be the best way to grab consumers’ attention. With a barrage of messages coming at them all at once, it’s critical to get in front of people at the optimal time: when they are…
Marketers are obsessed with acquisition. So much so that they synonymously refer to it as performance, indicating that to add more is to perform better. We know acquisition is an expensive business, with a cost that’s multiple times higher than retaining existing customers. So if acquisition is more costly than retention, why do we glorify…
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