Last year, TurboTax Live’s “RoboChild” got the tweets, but a masterful integration by our consumer group marketing team earned the consequential brand engagement. Instead of an expensive one-off buzz maker, our RoboChild Super Bowl ad was the moment to amplify a key message from the TurboTax brand campaign that started long before and ended long…
The word trends, much like the over-use of exclamation points and Google Docs, has become an emotional trigger for me–especially as it relates to the Super Bowl. Click here for more. For brands, the entire point of spending $5 million-odd dollars for 30 seconds of airtime is to disrupt. To go against the grain of…
Perhaps, nothing is more symbolic of American tradition and entertainment than the Super Bowl. In recent years, viewership of the Big Game has exceeded over 90 million viewers. As much as viewers anticipate the gridiron showdown, many tune in for the commercials. It is the mecca of advertising, where instead of waiting for commercials to…
Like most Americans and NFL fans around the world, I love the Super Bowl. And like most marketers, I love the attention we as an industry give to Super Bowl ads. Click here for more. The Super Bowl is a long moment wherein competitive agencies cheer for each other and wherein it seems that America…
There’s a hidden cost to even the most successful, buzz-generating Super Bowl ads: All that hard-earned (and expensively acquired) attention can easily bring a website to a standstill or break it altogether. Click here for more. We’re 12-plus years into the “second screen” era, and websites and applications during the Big Game are still frequently…
Over $5.6 million for a 30-second spot–that’s $187,000 per second. And that is so much money. Click here for more. Obviously, the demo those ads are reaching, the group watching the Big Game live, is critical. And up until a couple years ago, you’d have been sure that that demo was a chip-chomping, beer-guzzling, man-boy….
Google’s plan to eliminate third-party cookies by 2022 might be causing some agitation in the digital advertising industry, but hindsight tells us that the third-party cookie has been crumbling for some time. The writing was on the wall with the arrival of smartphone apps (where cookies never worked to begin with) and consumers started to…
This year, at the World Economic Forum, one message was loud and clear: In order to futureproof our companies–and the economy–we must futureproof our people. And the fact is, we have a lot of work to do. Right now, there are more than 7 million vacant jobs in the United States, but many of them…
The recent departure of The Recording Academy CEO Deborah Dugan and her related harassment lawsuit placed a new crisis on the Grammys brand this year. Already dealing with a decline in viewership and significant loss of their key audience demo of adults between the ages of 18-49, the brand was in danger of losing any…
Social ads have become the same billboard you see every few miles of highway, that strange repetitive advertisement you see while streaming your favorite shows. While these paid ads are supposed to convince consumers to stop scrolling and learn about a certain product, companies are still wasting valuable time and money by using tired content…
The Super Bowl is more than snack stadiums and rating points. On the first Sunday in February, America’s largest television audience does something truly remarkable: Viewers look forward to watching ads. And yet, this year’s ad slate threatens to spoil the party. A double-dip of political ads–including two 60-second spots, one each from Michael Bloomberg…
In 2020, we will see a fundamental shift in how people think about the world. This is due to the growing pressure of issues threatening human existence: climate change, space races, income inequality, food shortages, water shortages, fires, floods, etc. As these threats grow, we will see various forms of marketing change mostly because we…
My experience as a CMO was brighter than the picture Harvard Business Review paints, but some things resonate. Like most marketers, I had a privileged understanding of the market, brand needs and value proposition but no way to apply my insights to strategy, product and sales decisions driving growth. That puts CMOs in a challenging…
The Gap announced Wednesday that chief marketing officer Alegra O’Hare was stepping down in the wake of a bumpy 2019 that also saw the resignation of CEO Art Peck. At first glance, there may be little to learn from a recently hired CMO leaving when the CEO who hired them departs. These sorts of executive…
When was the last time you looked up? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately. Amid endless to do lists and nonstop distractions, we spend our days overwhelmed with urgency. We’re so focused on what matters right now that we rarely take the time to look ahead and consider what will matter…
Now that it’s 2020, we’re not quite living in the world the Jetsons imagined, but things have gotten pretty interesting. We can arrange for a taxi ride anywhere in mere seconds with the touch of a screen and happily stay in complete strangers’ homes while traveling. It’s this type of nontraditional thinking that led to…
Partnerships are fairly straightforward, even for the non-marketer. At the most fundamental level, one brand partners with another to achieve a mutually beneficial goal. It could be a donation to raise awareness of a cause, or on the other end of the spectrum, a multi-channel, multi-year, multi-million-dollar endeavor. The concept is simple enough, but what…
For all the talk about the immediate effect of unprecedented political advertising in 2020–politicians crowding primetime, filling media coffers while edging out staple advertisers–there’s been little said about what happens after the party’s over. I see two ramifications with lasting impact on the media business where advertising is expected to slow down in 2021. On…
For years, second-price auctions, with winning bids awarded on a showcase showdown model of a penny over the second highest bid, have been the standard way to buy digital ad inventory. That’s about to change. As Google Ad Manager adopts first-price auctions, the world’s largest ad management platform for publishers is causing suppliers to re-evaluate…
As CES wraps up another year of hustle and bustle, it is clear that technology has not only impacted every aspect of our daily lives, but it is also expanding consumer access points beyond traditional media channels for brands to experiment and innovate around. While some have lamented that CES 2020 offered nothing particularly new…
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
