Too much of a good thing can be a recipe for disaster. Take digital video ads, powerful and increasingly popular tools for brand marketers. An IAB report from April 2018 revealed that two-thirds of advertisers planned to shift their TV budgets to digital video. So what’s the bad news? As with TV, there’s simply too…
Online advertising is fundamentally changing. With increased pressure to bend to the calls for consumer privacy, corporations and governments are doubling down on regulations to block third-party technology that targets consumers. Recently, those winds have produced the California Consumer Privacy Act, GDPR, Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) and Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) initiatives. All…
The media industry is undergoing a fundamental shift: business models, audiences and revenue sources aren’t what they used to be, and media brands will need to innovate in order to survive and thrive. Today, the most urgent discussions in publishing circles revolve around revenue diversification. Both b-to-b and b-to-c publishers striving to take their businesses…
Ask shoppers if they want to buy products that are better for the environment and most will answer with a definitive yes. Check their shopping carts, however, and you’ll often get a very different story. Eco-friendly products are now widely available across the retail landscape, from all-natural cleaning products to energy efficient appliances to electric…
The agency/client relationship: The pinnacle of business relationships. Partnership centric. Transactional at its core. Often misunderstood. Too often one-sided. Whatever your view, it is a relationship with a great deal at stake on both sides. And depending on how it is approached and managed, it can be very rewarding–or very frustrating. About five years ago,…
Ambicultural Americans struggle to maintain ties to our roots with nearly every consumer choice we make. Marketers can leverage this opportunity if they make their brands relevant to ambicultural audiences by understanding the consumer and evaluating data. But the key to unlocking those insights is to bring diverse voices and life experiences to the marketing…
Henry Ford said that “anyone who stops learning is old, whether 20 or 80.” This concept is especially relevant to people working in the advertising world where trends and digital capabilities are constantly changing. In the spirit of reflection, I spent time pondering the lessons I learned after my first month at an advertising agency….
As more industry attention is being paid to consumer experience as an interplay of physical and digital touchpoints, the definition of experiential marketing is getting used in wide and varying degrees. Some think the “Real People, Not Actors” series of Chevy spots could be construed as experiential marketing while admirers of the Fearless Girl statue,…
At a time when reports of unethical and questionable data use are a seemingly regular occurrence, marketers must double down on their commitment to be responsible practitioners. That means ethically sourcing data, whether it comes from a syndicated audience data provider or a trusted brand partner. As consumers, we talk about ethically sourcing everything from…
Like everything else in this crazy industry, agencies’ approach to managing global business used to be easier. When I started working on my first global brand 20-plus years ago, marketers basically controlled a linear consumer journey. So global really just meant translating unified ad campaigns made up of TV, print, OOH and radio for other…
In 2015, Nobel Prize-winning economists Robert Shiller and George Akerlof published a book with a chilling theory: We are all pawns in a market that thrives on manipulation and deception, filled with sellers that exploit our psychological weakness and gullibility for profit. Whether or not you side with Shiller and Akerlof in viewing this trend…
The phrase “gender nonconformity” is rippling through our culture and affecting every industry. This isn’t just a trend; it’s a fundamental shift in how society thinks about gender. From trans-identified models to androgynous fashion, we are entering a new era. Gender nonconformity is a concept where individuals do not identify within the traditional gender binary…
Twenty years ago, I attended professor Clayton Christensen’s business school class on innovation in which he talked about products being “hired” by consumers. Back then, I was surprised how his view bridged the two realms of products and services. This approach still resonates and is more relevant than ever. Successful businesses create new categories by…
With Google considering following Apple in blocking third-party cookie targeting in its Chrome browser, digital marketing seems on the verge of a seismic shift. In the programmatic era over the last 10 years or so, ad spend in display and paid social have been dominated by their abilities to find audiences via cookies. Much will…
I got my start in advertising by accident. I never went to ad school or film school; I made videos on YouTube that went viral, and brands started reaching out. I’ve worked with brands big and small, and I started to notice that many brands–especially the less established ones–would make the same mistakes with their…
Music continues to grow as a popular area for brands to reach new audiences and convince customers they’re relatable and worthy of their dollar. But as the popularity grows, delivered activations are becoming more recycled. Brands are partnering with the most creative forces in the world and telling them exactly what to do. It’s like…
With the 2020 Paralympics just around the corner, brands will soon start to plan and develop disability-inclusive campaigns. But are conversations about employing people with disabilities also top of mind among those agencies and other advertisers? For some campaigns and brand activations, the Paralympics are a regular commitment that powers up every four years, and…
I hesitate to distinguish multichannel marketing as something that needs to be contemplated, somehow separate from–what? Monochannel marketing? When every element of media is one click away on a device that’s in your pocket or hand every waking moment of every day, the notion of channels is quaint. Media consumption is inherently multichannel, from app…
It’s generally accepted that marketing’s responsibility is filling the top of the funnel through brand awareness and content marketing efforts while the sales team is ultimately responsible for winning new business. This old-school thinking has perpetuated the perception that marketing is a cost center with sales as the revenue engine. It’s this thinking that creates…
It all happened so fast. Eyeballs that had been reliably glued to the television for decades were distracted away, first by websites and later with cell phones in just a handful of years. Meanwhile, brand owners were tempted toward digital channels by the promise of audience targeting and instant response. Digital came as a nasty…
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.
