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There’s something I noticed at Cannes. And I’ve noticed it looking through everything recently submitted to Creative Works. No laughs. Plenty of grit. Under Armour from Droga5 New York. Strong women and gritty poems. New Balance from BMB. Callum Hawkins grits his teeth and runs – 120 miles a week. “There are no short cuts to anywhere worth going." Performance bike brand Specialized have made a film about kids with ADHD. From the gritmeisters at Goodby Silverstein. Then there are the brands that want us to cry....
The digital ad space is murky, and it's becoming increasingly clear that users aren't seeing as many ads thanks to ad-blocking technology. And even when they do see ads, more than 60% of users say they find them annoying and intrusive. Furthermore, people have been shifting to mobile as their primary media consumption device in the last three years, while ad spend lagged. In short, the industry is reactive rather than proactive. As a result, U.S. digital ad revenue has become Google and Facebook, followed by everyone else. But immersive video through virtual and augmented reality could change all that.
There has been an explosion in purpose-driven brand communication the last few years. As Matthew Gardner at Droga5 put it, “Because of the challenge for people’s attention, purpose is the only thing that will get brands to break through. This is not a trend but more of an imperative and should be top of mind for every company. ”When every brand team jumps on the purpose bandwagon, however, the resulting communication can feel pretty shallow. There’s a risk of brands completely overstating why they exist. Particularly when their actual motivation is to capture consumer attention, brand purpose can come across as “ad-deep.” It starts to feel like just one more tick-box on a creative brief....
A spirited panel at Social Media Week in New York spelled out why marketers should stop treating content like ads and start being storytellers. For marketers, all bets are off. It's time to think differently about customer engagement or risk crapping out. “The game has changed. The channels have changed. That means that brands have to change,” Brian Becker, VP of content marketing for JPMorgan Chase, said during the panel “Content: A Brand's Most Essential Resource” at Social Media Week in New York. Becker asserted that many companies still struggle to put consumers' wants, needs, and perspectives into the brand narrative. Content, however, allows them to do just that. “Bring the voice of the customer into your marketing,” Becker said. “That's when you sound so much more authentic.”...
The Golden Age of Advertising, that twenty-year spell running through the fifties and sixties, changed how we market everything, pushing beyond merely being clever or descriptive to thinking through how the audience interacts with an ad, and how empirical research can drive its development.
The revolution pioneered by William Bernbach of BBDO and David Ogilvy of Ogilvy-Mather continues to affect how we market, with a much more pervasive presence in our lives than the marketer’s obsession with Mad Men. The lessons learned during that period provided the foundation for everything we do as inbounders.
And, like any good marketer, they enshrined those lessons in quotable, quippy headlines that are easy to remember and fun to say....
Popular wisdom says that everyone hates advertisements. It’s why Netflix is so popular, cable subscriptions are steadily declining, and ad blocking has grown from 21 million users in 2009 to 198 million in 2015.
Via Brian Yanish - MarketingHits.com
Face it – the more advertising people receive, the more they hate it. As a result, to reach today’s information savvy customers, content marketing trumps advertising.
What was once interesting and special back in the MadMan days is now something we try to avoid. (Check out what Mad Man Leo Burnett had to say about advertising.)
On average, people in the US receive 5,000 brand messages per day according to Razorfish....
Which domains have the most engaged audiences in five verticals: women, politics, business/finance, science, and technology? My team at Fractl, in conjunction with BuzzStream, wanted to find out -- and we found out some really interesting stuff.
To determine the top publishers, we used BuzzSumo to retrieve the sharing metrics on more than 30,000 relevant articles between May 2014 and April 2015 relating to the five verticals mentioned above. In total, these articles earned more than 58 million social shares. We used BuzzSumo to retrieve the top 1,000 articles in each vertical that were published between May 4, 2015 and April 30, 2015 as well.
With this data, we identified the 10 publishers in each vertical with the highest number of total shares -- and learned a lot about content promotion along the way. In this post, we’ll walk you through six key takeaways from our findings that'll help you maximize outreach during your next promotions cycle...
Nothing gets AdFreak readers excited quite like brilliant creative work—with the exception of spectacular creative failures. Our 10 most-read stories of 2014 are pretty good proof of this.Seven of them were about amazing, innovative ads. Two involved boneheaded fails. And the 10th was about porn—another reliable pageview generator—and could be considered a win or a fail, depending on your point of view...
It's the great American pastime.
No, I'm not talking about baseball. Or stuffing your face with apple pie. Or arguing about politics with your family over Thanksgiving dinner. No, I'm talking about the great American pastime of buying stuff.
Unlike those other pastimes, however, which have remained relatively unchanged over the years, the way we buy has evolved considerably. For example ...
In 1914, you might've been tempted to buy a (non-branded) pastry after noticing a delicious smell emanating from the local bakery.
In 2014, you might be tempted to buy a Pop-Tart after seeing a commercial for Pop-Tarts on TV, or after reading an article about Pop-Tarts on The Wall Street Journal website, or after hearing about (or attending) a Pop-Tarts-brandedsummer concert series....
There was a time in the not so distant past when funny ruled advertising. Whether absurd and awkward, sharp and wry, or broad and ball-busting, comedy in all its forms was the dominant language in marketing. Then something changed. Quietly at first, then in a more pronounced fashion. In the beginning, certain people (not us) would find themselves discreetly, incredulously, wiping a tear from their eye while watching an ad online. These individuals might blame things like new parenthood on the lapse in steely resolve. “It’s nothing,” they’d say, brushing off the moist impact of a touching story, adding a defensive reminder that, c’mon, they weren’t made of stone!
But then, things began to escalate. Ad-induced tears flowed across the land, and even diehard cynics started admitting to welling up over commercials. And these weren’t just your public service announcements, carefully crafted to emotionally manipulate you into action on issues that were already emotional powder kegs. These were spots for shampoos, for Internet services, for banks, for soft drinks, for retailers, for peanut butter, for beer! They were contemplative, moving, and all scored with the Piano Chord of Emotion. Even Super Bowl viewers were no longer safe from baldfaced lunges at the cockles. Pretty soon the promise of a good cry became an engine of social sharing.
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The history of American advertising has always fascinated me. It's amazing to see how much the visual aesthetic evolved as a result of the changing times. Each decade had it’s own unique style of advertising, but one period of time really stands in stark contrast to what we’re accustomed to today. The 1950s were sometimes referred to as “the advertiser’s dream decade.” With the end of the war came a new desire for Americans to spend money. The television was now a common household staple and the advertising opportunities seemed endless. It all sounds perfect, right? The great American dream! The economy was booming and everything was all jukeboxes and wholesome family dinners.Well, not so fast. The golden era of advertising would cause some pretty massive controversies today. The sexism of 1950s advertising is infamous, and for good reason. Sure, we have plenty of offensive ads today, but few hold a candle to the callous ads of the “good ‘ol days.”...
The Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates malicious advertising ”malvertising” costs the U.S. digital marketing, advertising, and media industry $8.2 billion annually. A few years ago malvertising was merely scamming the system: fake ads, fake traffic, fake analytics. Ad tech is a hacker's heaven, an unregulated labyrinth of circumlocution systems for bidding, placing and tracking ads. "All the code is awful and you aren't allowed to change it anyway," says Salon developer Aram Zucker-Scharff. "Usually ad servers claim they run some sort of checks, but considering just how many malicious or badly formed ads get through, it is pretty apparent they don't do much." The hacker's goal is to bill, aka bilk, advertisers for ads no human ever saw. Their fraud takes several forms: Ad stacking piles multiple ads on top of each other. Ad stuffing shrinks ads to invisible 1-pixel squares. Click farms send fraud users to real sites. Clickjacking sends real users to fraud sites....
The ongoing McDonald's creative review initially included all three of the ad industry's largest holding companies. But WPP made headlines earlier this month for bowing out (leaving incumbents Publicis and Omnicom in the running), and the alleged reasons behind its decision are even more intriguing. The client required competitors to complete their respective pitches in 60 days, with a June 30 deadline, and presented contracts forbidding future partners from turning a profit on base compensation, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Agencies would allegedly operate at cost before meeting unspecified targets for performance-based pay. "Clients have always had the power," said Bryan Wiener, executive chairman of 360i. "And performance-based compensation is not a new topic either, but it's very hard to find ways to make it work so that all parties are aligned. "McDonald's did not respond to Adweek's requests for comment on the claims, which stirred controversy among creative agencies. One source who requested anonymity described the terms as "unheard of" and noted, "I don't know of any business that operates that way."...
The World Advertising Research Center (Warc) has issued its annual rankings of the most effective marketing campaigns and the agencies and advertisers driving effective results. Ranked number one, "Penny the Pirate" developed by Saatchi & Saatchi and OMD for Australian optical chain OPSM combined traditional and digital media, producing an engaging printed book and app to highlight vision problems in children. More than 126,000 parents bought the reading book, the number of eye tests conducted by OPSM increased by 22.6% year-on-year, and its sales also grew by more than one-fifth (22.4%). The Warc analysis found that 55% of the world’s most impactful campaigns are digital-led. Eleven of the 20 top-ranked campaigns led with digital channels. Notable uses of digital included the ‘Live Test Series’ (ranked fifth) by Volvo Trucks -- its YouTube video views of over 100m reached far beyond the brand’s niche target audience of truck drivers and resulted in a 23% growth in sales in the fourth quarter of 2013 -- and "If We Made It" (ranked sixth) by Newcastle Brown Ale, which used online video to parody the advertising hype around the Super Bowl, increasing volume sales by over 20%....
The underlying reason? Today’s shoppers are skeptic of pure play tactics. They see value in connecting and acquiring rather than reliance on a brand’s library of products. As a result, they are looking for shopping destinations or inspirational sites.
Perhaps that’s why brands are agog over social commerce.
For those unaware, it is the concept of utilizing social networks to increase sales transactions. Actionable marketing expert Heidi Cohen defines it as the maturation and evolution of social media meets shopping....
Marketing has invaded every part of our lives, but it developed relatively recently, not emerging until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A lot has changed since then, with strategies shifting from outbound marketing that “interrupts the consumer” to inbound marketing, which is focused on understanding them. The market speaks, and it’s up to professionals to identify the needs of consumers — and then sell to them.
Since first successful national marketing campaigns made their way out of Madison Avenue our society has learned to respect the value marketing brings to a firm. Now more than ever, marketing has cemented its role as not only an asset to sales, but to customer acquisition, relationship management and retention.
From the very first radio ad in 1922 to the age of the Internet, marketing has responded to consumer behavior and moved deftly from trend to trend. Take a look to see where marketing is now, as well as just how far it has come....
The U.S. women's soccer team has a roster of stand-out stars, but their individual strengths work best when they play as a team. That's the gist of a new, minute-long "American Woman" ad Nike launched as part of a bigger #NoMaybes campaign designed to elevate the team's profile during the FIFA Women's World Cup this week.
"We didn't want to go into this trying to make a women's spot—we wanted to make a soccer spot," said Michael McGrath, partner at Thousands Creative, the Portland, Ore., agency that created the ad.
Thousands Creative's own profile is getting a boost because of the work. The two-man shop was founded just a year ago by a pair of former Nike employees and currently has neither a website (just an empty Tumblr) nor publicly listed contact info....
Tired of struggling to crank out the endless streams of content needed to appease today’s consumers? You’re in luck! There is an option for burned out business owners, and that’s user generated content. This technique, in conjunction with the growth of popular social media websites, allows modern businesses to delegate some of these brand-building responsibilities to an unlikely voice -- their customer.
Having users contribute to your content creation efforts has another interesting advantage, as consumers are more interested in hearing the views of their peers than reading cleverly written sales messages.
According to Bazaar Voice, 64% of millennials and 53% of baby boomers want more options to share their opinions about brands, while other studies show consumers trust user generated content more than all other forms of media.
In light of these trends, there’s never been a better time to start using user generated content to engage your readers and build trust with them. Here are ten brands that have leveraged user generated content in the past to help inspire your own campaigns....
Almost every major brand harnesses Twitter to share news and build up a dialog with their customers. But, surprisingly, very few of the people behind those brands — the marketing teams, agency executives and creators of the tech that power digital advertising — use Twitter in the same way for themselves.
The Twitter accounts of most top marketers and agency CEOs are rubbish. They aren't even updated regularly.
That's why we pulled together this list of the best people in advertising and marketing to follow on Twitter....
Gisele Bündchen kicks butt in a new ad breaking today for Under Armour's "I Will What I Want" campaign by Droga5. The supermodel and wife of NFL quarterback Tom Brady (a fellow UA athletic endorser) also shows off her kung fu and yoga abilities at iwillwhatiwant.com/gisele, which will stream real-time comments from social media. Leanne Fremar, executive creative director for UA's women's brand, gave Adweek a sneak preview of the 60-second film, which rolls out Thursday on YouTube. Look for the raw, real video to go viral—much like the previous one with Misty Copeland, which has been watched nearly 6 million times.
Have you been brought to tears by an ad, or five, over the last while? It's not hormones/your meds/the lunar cycle/the polar vortex.
Here, we look at the most weepy ads of the last few years and talk to ad players about why brands have gotten so damn emotional....
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A funny thing happened on the way to Cannes.