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How to prepare for the death of cookies and privacy reforms of 2024

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By SEBASTIAN DIAZ

Privacy is poised to be a big topic in 2024, with multiple ramifications on the digital advertising front.

Sebastian Diaz, iAB council member and senior digital solutions lead at Bench, explains how marketing teams and agencies must prepare themselves for Australia’s privacy purge, and Google’s cookie phase-out.

Privacy is poised to be a big topic in 2024, with multiple ramifications on the digital advertising front.

As we sit with the stalemate that is the Government’s response to the Privacy Act Review Report, marketing teams as well as agencies must prepare themselves for Australia’s turn for the privacy purge.

This has been a long time coming with the rise of consumer privacy legislation sweeping the globe since Europe’s GDPR’s in 2018.

In addition to that, Google has finally kicked off phasing out the cookie on Chrome this month, with it expected to take full flight in the September quarter this year. Be it legislation or technology changes, brands will have their hands forced in changing their advertising tactics. It’s time to get on the privacy and cookieless train before we feel the pain.  

Let’s take it from the top – what is the Privacy Review? 

Since 2019, the Australian Government has been looking at giving a measure of control to individuals on how their personal information is used in direct marketing and advertising. At the time, they announced the need for the Review to investigate the effectiveness of Australia’s current data protection regime to ensure it “empower[s] consumers, protect[s] their data and best serve[s] the Australian economy”. In February 2023, they published their Privacy Act Review Report, which was met with some concern in parts of the marketing industry.   

Some of the proposed changes that affect the marketing industry include a) a user having the right to ‘opt out’ of their personal information being used in direct marketing, and b) a website needing a user’s consent when ‘trading’ their personal information. However, the semantics around what direct marketing, targeted advertising, targeting and trading are all still in discussion.

The government is now undertaking impact analysis, in consultation with the industry, before coming to a final decision on the Review this year. This has set brands into a tailspin of what to do – particularly those who have been dependent on cookie-based targeting. Without this ability to target and collect users information as easily, brands and publishers are losing one of their most valuable assets.  

How to best prepare for the 2024 cookie and privacy double whammy:

Non-cookie based targeting solutions are making a comeback

What’s old is new and better than ever. Contextual targeting, which is based on the content being consumed, has made a resurgence, as strong as 90s fashion and flip phones, but is much improved. 

While the dust settles on the upcoming cookie changes, it is likely for advertising to step up their reliance on contextually-based environments as an interim, though alternatives to cookies that involve anonymisation-based targeting will continue.   

Contextual targeting has recently been supercharged by AI, which enables it to be delivered and tested with greater accuracy, speed and scale – using a combination of image, video, text and audio content. It’s far less word prescriptive than it used to be, and has proven to drive lower funnel activity. 

What’s old is new again, but definitely stronger.   

Data warehousing is all the rage

If you can’t buy it, make it. And there’s no stronger audience than the audience you already know. With most brands already collecting their customer’s data in one way or another (be it through loyalty programs, email addresses or site activity), 2024 will be the year to scale this up as a necessity.  

 It’s one thing to collect this data – but it’s another to utilise it. Brands often get stuck with this – either due to internal politics or red tape or the lack of expertise in building a valid consent framework and preventing potential data leaks.  

As data volume, variety, and velocity continue to outpace many teams’ capabilities, organisations face the challenge of collecting, transforming and putting customer data to use while adhering to new and evolving regulations. Still, data-first strategies are gathering plenty of advocates.

For brands leveraging significant amounts of customer data for various use cases, investing in a CDP would be a no brainer. As would be engaging in data partnerships with other brands, allowing brands to collaborate on data and utilising this across their marketing activity. Further to this, engaging in a data clean room comes up as one of the best ways forward to remain legally compliant.  

Data providers and publishers are the experts – they’ve been making the change for years

Publishers and data providers have been preparing for regulatory changes for some years – even if they haven’t known what the new regulation will look like.  

Big buying platforms with first party data such as Google (GoogleID), Yahoo (Next-Gen and cookieless), Meta (via Facebook) and Amazon (especially as a major player in the retail media space) are ready to go with their identity solutions. Other interoperable cookieless identity solutions such as The Trade Desk’s UID, or Lotame’s Panorama ID, enabling brands to target first and third party audiences on ‘cookieless’ inventory are also ready. 

Publishers have been testing these cookieless identity solutions, and will be protected once third-party cookies completely exit the ecosystem. 

Know – and embrace – that changes are for the greater good

Change doesn’t come without fear – but what’s most important is to keep perspective as to what drives the need for change, both legislatively and technologically. Though it may feel as though Australia is being dealt a double whammy in 2024, it’s important to remember that the privacy change is ultimately about consumer trust which, according to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC)’s latest surveys, is at an all time low. With privacy becoming a core expectation among 89% of consumers, this expectation demands that brands re-evaluate how they handle their customers’ data to ensure they prioritise privacy focused practices and technology to keep data safe. 

Some big brands such as P&G and tech giant HP have also been very proactive in implementing new cookieless technology and alternative identifiers (such as UID2), and have built consent frameworks that are compliant across privacy legislation worldwide. These players have enjoyed the maximum value from their investment and have built innovative new advertising solutions with a data collaboration platform at the core of their strategy. The same should be done for brands of any size looking to be ahead of the curve and capitalise on industry changes. 

Brands shouldn’t wait for legislation and Google to force their hand – they must prioritise privacy today, and as a framework for their business to make the best change possible, and not a band-aid job.  

By SEBASTIAN DIAZ

iAB Council Member & Senior Digital Solutions Lead at Bench

Sourced from Mumbrella

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A Well-Designed Brand Guidelines Presentation Template

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By Dirk Petzold

Unveiling the artistry: BrandPacks’ Adobe InDesign brand guidelines presentation template is something else.

A brand’s identity is its compass, guiding it through the vast ocean of consumer preferences. Every company, big or small, dreams of a unique and memorable brand image that resonates with its audience. Enter BrandPacks’ latest masterpiece – an Adobe InDesign Brand Guidelines Presentation Template that transcends the ordinary, elevating brand presentations to a whole new level.

Crafted with precision and passion, this 27-page template is more than just a set of guidelines; it’s a visual journey that transforms the mundane into the extraordinary. Let’s dive into the creative waters and explore why this template is the talk of the design town.

Download at Adobe Stock

Please note that this template requires Adobe InDesign. You can get the latest version from the Adobe Creative Cloud website—take a look here.

Brand Guidelines Presentation Template by BrandPacks
Brand Guidelines Presentation Template by BrandPacks
Download at Adobe Stock

1. Visual Symphony:

BrandPacks’ template is not just a document; it’s a symphony of visuals, meticulously composed to strike the right chord with your audience. The modern aesthetics and bold typography create a harmonious blend that captures attention and leaves a lasting impression. Each page tells a story, seamlessly connecting the dots between creativity and consistency.

2. Fully Customizable Magic:

Flexibility is the hallmark of a great design, and this template embodies that philosophy. With 27 fully customizable pages, it provides a canvas for your brand’s personality to shine. From colour schemes to typography, every element is a stroke on this canvas, waiting for your artistic touch. Adapt it to your brand’s unique voice, and watch it come to life.

3. Modern Elegance:

In a world of fleeting trends, timeless elegance speaks volumes. The modern look of this template is not just a passing trend; it’s a statement. The clean lines, sophisticated colour palette, and well-thought-out layouts exude a sense of modernity without compromising on the timeless essence that defines enduring brands.

4. Bold Typography, Bolder Impact:

Typography is the unsung hero of design, and BrandPacks’ template gives it the spotlight it deserves. Bold, impactful, and undeniably stylish, the typography in this template is more than words on a page; it’s a visual experience. From headers that command attention to body text that guides the reader, every word is a brushstroke in the masterpiece.

5. Uniquely Yours:

No two brands are the same, and this template understands that. It offers a unique style that serves as a starting point for your brand’s journey. Tailor it to your heart’s content, and let your brand personality shine through. The result? A presentation that reflects your brand, not a generic template.

6. Suited for Screens and Dreams:

In the era of digital dominance, the size matters – and this template gets it right. With dimensions of 1920 x 1080 px, it is tailored for screens, ensuring your brand guidelines look just as stunning online as they do in print. Seamlessly transition from boardroom presentations to online platforms, maintaining the visual integrity of your brand across all touchpoints.

Download at Adobe Stock

In conclusion, BrandPacks’ Adobe InDesign Brand Guidelines Presentation Template isn’t just a template; it’s a design revolution. A testament to the marriage of functionality and aesthetics, it empowers brands to present themselves with flair and finesse. So, if you’re ready to take your brand to new heights, embark on this visual journey, and let the world see your brand through the lens of creativity and innovation. Brand guidelines have never looked this good.

By Dirk Petzold

https://weandthecolor.com/
Of course, we are on Instagram: @weandthecolor

Sourced from WATC

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With ad spend up, here’s how agencies are preparing for growth

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By Branwell Johnson 

Gather intel, raise profile, and target carefully: those are Branwell Johnson’s ‘three commandments’ for agencies looking to leverage positive ad spend outlook following optimism from the IPA and the AA/WARC.

‘Cautious optimism’: it might sound tentative, but it’s a phrase to give confidence to agencies of all hues as they focus on the coming year.

Various ad industry barometers are showing some rays of sunshine amid the dark clouds of cost-of-living pressures and a potential ‘shallow recession’. It all helps build morale and resilience at a point when agency leaders are reviewing new business strategies, planning where to invest, and evaluating which potential partners can help develop their pipeline.

The recent IPA Bellwether report produced some uplifting headlines, with UK business revising their budgets up to the strongest levels in almost a decade in Q4, providing an optimistic start for the year. Nearly 45% of Bellwether survey respondents said that they were planning budget expansions for 2024/25 – three times the number planning to restrict spending.

The newly-released Advertising Association/WARC report, meanwhile, shows UK ad spend up 15.9% in Q3, exceeding the £9bn mark for the first time for the quarter, while the credit ratings service S&P Global Ratings gave a boost for those agencies looking to expand into the territory with a forecast that US ad spend will rise 7.6% this year.

To provide balance, Sir Martin Sorrell of S4Capital indicated that he doesn’t see much improvement in the macroeconomic environment “and client caution on marketing spend will likely persist”, so agencies are going to have to be smart on qualifying leads and addressing how they are raising their own profile in a competitive environment.

Ad spend is robust

For agency leaders, it’s a question of gathering intel, staying on top of trends and spotting opportunities. By drilling down into various reports, we find the sub-trends that will have agency antennae twitching. S&P’s projections say that US digital ad spend will see the greatest rise over the course of 2024 and 2025, while “legacy” media will stutter this year.

The AA/WARC report points to search (including retail media) and online display (including social), driving higher than expected ad spend; online retailers increased their ad spend by 156% as competition for customers hotted up.

A deeper dive into the Q4 Bellwether shows that the disciplines that have notably benefited from recent ad spend investment include events and direct marketing. The latter enjoyed its greatest upturn since 2005. Events is expected to have another strong year, with a net balance of +17.8% of marketers boosting their events budgets for 2024/25. Direct marketing (DM) also appears to be an area of focus with a net balance of +16.8% preparing to increase DM spend. Main media has a rebound forecast for strong performance with a net balance of +14.2%.

Agency business development practitioners say the numbers are borne out by their own experiences. Pedro Martins, chief growth officer at Total Media, said: “2023 proved to be our strongest year yet (and that’s saying something given our 42 years). Q4 is always a big quarter for us and this year was equally strong.”

Andrew Rose, VP sales EMEA for StackAdapt, points out that with budgets up to the strongest levels in almost a decade, marketers will want to ensure they’re getting the most value – and looking to optimize campaigns for both efficiency and impact.

Rose said: “This shift presents an opportunity to explore innovative targeting approaches, with a laser focus on data-driven insights while adapting to evolving privacy standards as we enter the post-cookie era.”

Luke Willbourn, managing director UK at Talon, adds that the strong growth in events ties in with people wanting to spend more time outdoors, connecting with the environment and people around them, and experiencing the real world. He says: “This calls for brands to create exciting and inspiring experiences that truly engage and offer something meaningful to be experienced together. This not only builds brand awareness but delivers bottom-funnel results too when combined with programmatic out-of-home campaigns.”

Cameron Russell, head of marketing for Royal Mail Marketreach, comments that it’s heartening to see direct mail with its unique capabilities around capturing attention and targeting in the marketing mix, “being one of the principal drivers of marketing growth this Bellwether.”

What sectors are strong?

What sectors are staying buoyant? Sales prospecting tool Winmo has shared data that reinforces the increase in ad spend in retail and e-commerce, with significant jumps in investment for companies including Temu, Amazon, Argos, Boots, and Dreams – and in entertainment with YouTube, Freenow, and BBC all spending more.

A wider look at the business landscape shows retailers Tesco and Sainsbury’s reporting strong grocery sales over the festive period and raising their profit outlook. Travel is also surging, with the World Tourism Organisation projecting international tourism numbers to exceed pre-pandemic levels this year.

And no one should ignore the boost that elections give to media channels. It’s a near-certainty that it’ll be an election year in the UK, while the US ad spend is predicted to jump by nearly a third over the 2020 election investment according to Group M.

There is plenty for agencies to play for – but they must make sure they can use all the tools (from positive PR to punchy thought leadership) to differentiate themselves and highlight their cultural fit with a potential client.

Feature Image Credit: Andre Taissin via Unsplash

By Branwell Johnson

Sourced from The Drum

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Let’s not make the same mistakes with AI that we made with social media

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Nathan E. Sanders archive page& Bruce Schneier

Social media’s unregulated evolution over the past decade holds a lot of lessons that apply directly to AI companies and technologies.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. A decade ago, social media was celebrated for sparking democratic uprisings in the Arab world and beyond. Now front pages are splashed with stories of social platforms’ role in misinformation, business conspiracy, malfeasance, and risks to mental health. In a 2022 survey, Americans blamed social media for the coarsening of our political discourse, the spread of misinformation, and the increase in partisan polarization.

Today, tech’s darling is artificial intelligence. Like social media, it has the potential to change the world in many ways, some favourable to democracy. But at the same time, it has the potential to do incredible damage to society.

There is a lot we can learn about social media’s unregulated evolution over the past decade that directly applies to AI companies and technologies. These lessons can help us avoid making the same mistakes with AI that we did with social media.

In particular, five fundamental attributes of social media have harmed society. AI also has those attributes. Note that they are not intrinsically evil. They are all double-edged swords, with the potential to do either good or ill. The danger comes from who wields the sword, and in what direction it is swung. This has been true for social media, and it will similarly hold true for AI. In both cases, the solution lies in limits on the technology’s use.

#1: Advertising

The role advertising plays in the internet arose more by accident than anything else. When commercialization first came to the internet, there was no easy way for users to make micropayments to do things like viewing a web page. Moreover, users were accustomed to free access and wouldn’t accept subscription models for services. Advertising was the obvious business model, if never the best one. And it’s the model that social media also relies on, which leads it to prioritize engagement over anything else.

Both Google and Facebook believe that AI will help them keep their stranglehold on an 11-figure online ad market (yep, 11 figures), and the tech giants that are traditionally less dependent on advertising, like Microsoft and Amazon, believe that AI will help them seize a bigger piece of that market.

Big Tech needs something to persuade advertisers to keep spending on their platforms. Despite bombastic claims about the effectiveness of targeted marketing, researchers have long struggled to demonstrate where and when online ads really have an impact. When major brands like Uber and Procter & Gamble recently slashed their digital ad spending by the hundreds of millions, they proclaimed that it made no dent at all in their sales.

AI-powered ads, industry leaders say, will be much better. Google assures you that AI can tweak your ad copy in response to what users search for, and that its AI algorithms will configure your campaigns to maximize success. Amazon wants you to use its image generation AI to make your toaster product pages look cooler. And IBM is confident its Watson AI will make your ads better.

These techniques border on the manipulative, but the biggest risk to users comes from advertising within AI chatbots. Just as Google and Meta embed ads in your search results and feeds, AI companies will be pressured to embed ads in conversations. And because those conversations will be relational and human-like, they could be more damaging. While many of us have gotten pretty good at scrolling past the ads in Amazon and Google results pages, it will be much harder to determine whether an AI chatbot is mentioning a product because it’s a good answer to your question or because the AI developer got a kickback from the manufacturer.

#2: Surveillance

Social media’s reliance on advertising as the primary way to monetize websites led to personalization, which led to ever-increasing surveillance. To convince advertisers that social platforms can tweak ads to be maximally appealing to individual people, the platforms must demonstrate that they can collect as much information about those people as possible.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much spying is going on. A recent analysis by Consumer Reports about Facebook—just Facebook—showed that every user has more than 2,200 different companies spying on their web activities on its behalf.

AI-powered platforms that are supported by advertisers will face all the same perverse and powerful market incentives that social platforms do. It’s easy to imagine that a chatbot operator could charge a premium if it were able to claim that its chatbot could target users on the basis of their location, preference data, or past chat history and persuade them to buy products.

The possibility of manipulation is only going to get greater as we rely on AI for personal services. One of the promises of generative AI is the prospect of creating a personal digital assistant advanced enough to act as your advocate with others and as a butler to you. This requires more intimacy than you have with your search engine, email provider, cloud storage system, or phone. You’re going to want it with you constantly, and to most effectively work on your behalf, it will need to know everything about you. It will act as a friend, and you are likely to treat it as such, mistakenly trusting its discretion.

Even if you choose not to willingly acquaint an AI assistant with your lifestyle and preferences, AI technology may make it easier for companies to learn about you. Early demonstrations illustrate how chatbots can be used to surreptitiously extract personal data by asking you mundane questions. And with chatbots increasingly being integrated with everything from customer service systems to basic search interfaces on websites, exposure to this kind of inferential data harvesting may become unavoidable.

#3: Virality

Social media allows any user to express any idea with the potential for instantaneous global reach. A great public speaker standing on a soapbox can spread ideas to maybe a few hundred people on a good night. A kid with the right amount of snark on Facebook can reach a few hundred million people within a few minutes.

A decade ago, technologists hoped this sort of virality would bring people together and guarantee access to suppressed truths. But as a structural matter, it is in a social network’s interest to show you the things you are most likely to click on and share, and the things that will keep you on the platform.

As it happens, this often means outrageous, lurid, and triggering content. Researchers have found that content expressing maximal animosity toward political opponents gets the most engagement on Facebook and Twitter. And this incentive for outrage drives and rewards misinformation.

As Jonathan Swift once wrote, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” Academics seem to have proved this in the case of social media; people are more likely to share false information—perhaps because it seems more novel and surprising. And unfortunately, this kind of viral misinformation has been pervasive.

AI has the potential to supercharge the problem because it makes content production and propagation easier, faster, and more automatic. Generative AI tools can fabricate unending numbers of falsehoods about any individual or theme, some of which go viral. And those lies could be propelled by social accounts controlled by AI bots, which can share and launder the original misinformation at any scale.

Remarkably powerful AI text generators and autonomous agents are already starting to make their presence felt in social media. In July, researchers at Indiana University revealed a botnet of more than 1,100 Twitter accounts that appeared to be operated using ChatGPT.

AI will help reinforce viral content that emerges from social media. It will be able to create websites and web content, user reviews, and smartphone apps. It will be able to simulate thousands, or even millions, of fake personas to give the mistaken impression that an idea, or a political position, or use of a product, is more common than it really is. What we might perceive to be vibrant political debate could be bots talking to bots. And these capabilities won’t be available just to those with money and power; the AI tools necessary for all of this will be easily available to us all.

#4: Lock-in

Social media companies spend a lot of effort making it hard for you to leave their platforms. It’s not just that you’ll miss out on conversations with your friends. They make it hard for you to take your saved data—connections, posts, photos—and port it to another platform. Every moment you invest in sharing a memory, reaching out to an acquaintance, or curating your follows on a social platform adds a brick to the wall you’d have to climb over to go to another platform.

This concept of lock-in isn’t unique to social media. Microsoft cultivated proprietary document formats for years to keep you using its flagship Office product. Your music service or e-book reader makes it hard for you to take the content you purchased to a rival service or reader. And if you switch from an iPhone to an Android device, your friends might mock you for sending text messages in green bubbles. But social media takes this to a new level. No matter how bad it is, it’s very hard to leave Facebook if all your friends are there. Coordinating everyone to leave for a new platform is impossibly hard, so no one does.

Similarly, companies creating AI-powered personal digital assistants will make it hard for users to transfer that personalization to another AI. If AI personal assistants succeed in becoming massively useful time-savers, it will be because they know the ins and outs of your life as well as a good human assistant; would you want to give that up to make a fresh start on another company’s service? In extreme examples, some people have formed close, perhaps even familial, bonds with AI chatbots. If you think of your AI as a friend or therapist, that can be a powerful form of lock-in.

Lock-in is an important concern because it results in products and services that are less responsive to customer demand. The harder it is for you to switch to a competitor, the more poorly a company can treat you. Absent any way to force interoperability, AI companies have less incentive to innovate in features or compete on price, and fewer qualms about engaging in surveillance or other bad behaviours.

#5: Monopolization

Social platforms often start off as great products, truly useful and revelatory for their consumers, before they eventually start monetizing and exploiting those users for the benefit of their business customers. Then the platforms claw back the value for themselves, turning their products into truly miserable experiences for everyone. This is a cycle that Cory Doctorow has powerfully written about and traced through the history of Facebook, Twitter, and more recently TikTok.

The reason for these outcomes is structural. The network effects of tech platforms push a few firms to become dominant, and lock-in ensures their continued dominance. The incentives in the tech sector are so spectacularly, blindingly powerful that they have enabled six megacorporation’s (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook parent Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia) to command a trillion dollars each of market value—or more. These firms use their wealth to block any meaningful legislation that would curtail their power. And they sometimes collude with each other to grow yet fatter.

This cycle is clearly starting to repeat itself in AI. Look no further than the industry poster child OpenAI, whose leading offering, ChatGPT, continues to set marks for uptake and usage. Within a year of the product’s launch, OpenAI’s valuation had skyrocketed to about $90 billion.

OpenAI once seemed like an “open” alternative to the megacorps—a common carrier for AI services with a socially oriented nonprofit mission. But the Sam Altman firing-and-rehiring debacle at the end of 2023, and Microsoft’s central role in restoring Altman to the CEO seat, simply illustrated how venture funding from the familiar ranks of the tech elite pervades and controls corporate AI. In January 2024, OpenAI took a big step toward monetization of this user base by introducing its GPT Store, wherein one OpenAI customer can charge another for the use of its custom versions of OpenAI software; OpenAI, of course, collects revenue from both parties. This sets in motion the very cycle Doctorow warns about.

In the middle of this spiral of exploitation, little or no regard is paid to externalities visited upon the greater public—people who aren’t even using the platforms. Even after society has wrestled with their ill effects for years, the monopolistic social networks have virtually no incentive to control their products’ environmental impact, tendency to spread misinformation, or pernicious effects on mental health. And the government has applied virtually no regulation toward those ends.

Likewise, few or no guardrails are in place to limit the potential negative impact of AI. Facial recognition software that amounts to racial profiling, simulated public opinions supercharged by chatbots, fake videos in political ads—all of it persists in a legal grey area. Even clear violators of campaign advertising law might, some think, be let off the hook if they simply do it with AI.

Mitigating the risks

The risks that AI poses to society are strikingly familiar, but there is one big difference: it’s not too late. This time, we know it’s all coming. Fresh off our experience with the harms wrought by social media, we have all the warning we should need to avoid the same mistakes.

The biggest mistake we made with social media was leaving it as an unregulated space. Even now—after all the studies and revelations of social media’s negative effects on kids and mental health, after Cambridge Analytica, after the exposure of Russian intervention in our politics, after everything else—social media in the US remains largely an unregulated “weapon of mass destruction.” Congress will take millions of dollars in contributions from Big Tech, and legislators will even invest millions of their own dollars with those firms, but passing laws that limit or penalize their behaviour seems to be a bridge too far.

We can’t afford to do the same thing with AI, because the stakes are even higher. The harm social media can do stems from how it affects our communication. AI will affect us in the same ways and many more besides. If Big Tech’s trajectory is any signal, AI tools will increasingly be involved in how we learn and how we express our thoughts. But these tools will also influence how we schedule our daily activities, how we design products, how we write laws, and even how we diagnose diseases. The expansive role of these technologies in our daily lives gives for-profit corporations opportunities to exert control over more aspects of society, and that exposes us to the risks arising from their incentives and decisions.

The good news is that we have a whole category of tools to modulate the risk that corporate actions pose for our lives, starting with regulation. Regulations can come in the form of restrictions on activity, such as limitations on what kinds of businesses and products are allowed to incorporate AI tools. They can come in the form of transparency rules, requiring disclosure of what data sets are used to train AI models or what new preproduction-phase models are being trained. And they can come in the form of oversight and accountability requirements, allowing for civil penalties in cases where companies disregard the rules.

The single biggest point of leverage governments have when it comes to tech companies is antitrust law. Despite what many lobbyists want you to think, one of the primary roles of regulation is to preserve competition—not to make life harder for businesses. It is not inevitable for OpenAI to become another Meta, an 800-pound gorilla whose user base and reach are several times those of its competitors. In addition to strengthening and enforcing antitrust law, we can introduce regulation that supports competition-enabling standards specific to the technology sector, such as data portability and device interoperability. This is another core strategy for resisting monopoly and corporate control.

Additionally, governments can enforce existing regulations on advertising. Just as the US regulates what media can and cannot host advertisements for sensitive products like cigarettes, and just as many other jurisdictions exercise strict control over the time and manner of politically sensitive advertising, so too could the US limit the engagement between AI providers and advertisers.

Lastly, we should recognize that developing and providing AI tools does not have to be the sovereign domain of corporations. We, the people and our government, can do this too. The proliferation of open-source AI development in 2023, successful to an extent that startled corporate players, is proof of this. And we can go further, calling on our government to build public-option AI tools developed with political oversight and accountability under our democratic system, where the dictatorship of the profit motive does not apply.

Which of these solutions is most practical, most important, or most urgently needed is up for debate. We should have a vibrant societal dialogue about whether and how to use each of these tools. There are lots of paths to a good outcome.

The problem is that this isn’t happening now, particularly in the US. And with a looming presidential election, conflict spreading alarmingly across Asia and Europe, and a global climate crisis, it’s easy to imagine that we won’t get our arms around AI any faster than we have (not) with social media. But it’s not too late. These are still the early years for practical consumer AI applications. We must and can do better.

Feature Image Credit: STEPHANIE ARNETT/MITTR | GETTY, ENVATO

Nathan E. Sanders archive page& Bruce Schneier

Nathan E. Sanders is a data scientist and an affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and a fellow and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Sourced from MIT Technology Review

 

 

Nathan E. Sanders archive page& Bruce Schneierarchive page

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Reach Your Fullest Potential with These Extraordinary Daily Habits

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By Guy Kawasaki & Madisun Nuismer

Below, co-authors Guy and Madisun share six key insights from their new book, Think Remarkable: 9 Extraordinary Habits that will Transform Your Life and Illuminate the World. Listen to the audio version—read by Guy—in the Next Big Idea App.

Think Remarkable Guy Kawasaki Madisun Nuismer Next Big Idea Club

1. Sweat the small stuff.

People are judging you all the time. They judge you not just by the big things, like your degree and your work experience, but also by tiny things that you may not even notice anymore. For example, what’s your email address? Are you still hanging out on aol.com? Do you still have a yahoo.com email address? That’s embarrassing.

Another small detail. What does your avatar look like? Is it a picture where your face is cropped out of a wedding reception? Is it a picture where you pose with your frat brothers or sorority sisters, or have you taken a good portrait photo that shows you’re likable, competent, and trustworthy?

2. Adopt a growth mindset.

A growth mindset means you believe that you can learn new skills. You can have new interests; you can develop yourself. You are but a slice of time. Time changes, and you will change with it.

A fixed mindset is quite the opposite. It means that you believe that you are what you are. You’re not going to be any better and you’re not going to be any worse.
Adopting a growth mindset means believing you can learn new things. You can assume new tasks—you can do all those things. If you want to make a difference, and if you want to be remarkable, you have to have a growth mindset.

3. Make yourself indispensable.

Andrew Zimmern is a famous chef who had a TV series called Bizarre Foods, where he went all over the world eating bizarre things. When he was about thirty, he became the world’s oldest intern. He had three internships at once. His career advice is this: wherever you are, make yourself indispensable.

“Indispensable people get more opportunities.”

This will open up opportunities for you. This will mean that you will get more attention. How do you make yourself indispensable? You do whatever it takes.

When he was working for the TV station, they asked for someone to help lay cable, so he raised his hand. They asked for someone to set up lighting, and he raised his hand. They asked someone to help with video editing, and he raised his hand. Pretty soon, he was indispensable. And guess what? Indispensable people get more opportunities. You have to pay the price. It’s that simple. Make yourself indispensable.

4. Do good shit.

There is no better way to say this. If you want to be remarkable, it’s not about positioning yourself as a thought leader or a visionary. What you have to do is do good shit.

This means you’ll make a great product. You make a great service. You’ll make a great team. You’ll build something, and you’ll make a difference. You don’t have to be Steve Jobs. You don’t have to be Jane Goodall. You don’t have to be Elon Musk.

You can change one person, one team, or one classroom. This person can even be yourself, but you have to do good shit. When you do good shit, the people around you will have no other choice but to think that you are remarkable.

5. Fulfil your success oblige.

There’s a concept called noblesse oblige, which refers to the obligations of the nobility to help people less fortunate. My father explained this concept to me when I was in high school, and I have come not to like the term. It has a haughty, upper-crust arrogance to it—“I’m such a wonderful noble person that I realize I have to help you peons”—which is a total crap attitude.

Rather than fulfilling your noblesse oblige, I suggest that you fulfill your success oblige. This means that when you are successful, you realize, yes, it’s because of your growth and your grit, and you’re making yourself indispensable and you’re doing good shit—but it’s also because lots of people helped you. Lots of lucky things came your way. You are not solely responsible for your success. Because you aren’t solely responsible, you understand that you have a moral obligation to help others. You went through a door to become successful. Your obligation is to leave the door open—even better, make the door bigger so other people can enter. That’s your success oblige. I believe that in the first third of your life, you’re underpaid. In the second third of your life, you’re overpaid. The last part of your life is when you build your legacy. This is when you pay it back.

I interviewed over 200 remarkable people for my podcast. And guess what? Everybody came to the end of their career and realized, “I need to help the next generation.” You progress through growth, grit, and grace—those are the three stages of becoming a remarkable person.

6. Make your decisions right.

So much of our effort—data wonks, analysis, and all this great quantitative stuff—is about making the right decision. It’s as if, with enough work and data, you can make the absolutely singular right decision. I think you are deceiving yourself if you believe that’s how the world works.

Instead, I recommend that you take your best shot at a decision, knowing full well that it could be wrong. There are always unforeseen or mistaken circumstances. Who knows, lightning strikes and your decision is wrong.

“[Remarkable people] take whatever decision they made and then work to make it right.”

So rather than focusing only on making the right decision, remarkable people make their decisions right—which means they take whatever decision they made and then work to make it right. That is about implementation. That is about actualization.

I went to a surfing competition in Manhattan Beach about six months ago. The way a surfing competition works is you have a limited amount of minutes, and you have six other people in the water with you. Much of surfing involves looking out to sea and making a decision. Is that the right wave? Is that the right place to sit? Is this the right time to turn and paddle?

I watched my daughter, and on one wave, she was sitting in the absolute wrong place. She not only couldn’t make the right decision, the decision was made for her. This wave just came down and was going to crash on her. It looked like impending doom, but what did she do? She turned and paddled. Instead of focusing on making the right decision, she made the decision right. She turned, paddled, and caught the wave.

With all of these insights, you will make a difference. You’ll be remarkable, and you will murder your mediocrity.

To listen to the audio version read by co-author Guy Kawasaki, download the Next Big Idea App today:

By Guy Kawasaki & Madisun Nuismer

Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva, an online graphic design tool. Formerly, he was an advisor to the Motorola business unit of Google and chief evangelist of Apple. He is the author of APE, What the Plus!, Enchantment, and nine other books. Kawasaki has a BA from Stanford University, an MBA from UCLA, and an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

Madisun Nuismer is the producer of the Remarkable People podcast. She has a BA in Public Health from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She also attended the Institute of Integrative Nutrition and is a certified holistic health coach.

Sourced from Next Big Idea Club

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New email rules from Google and Yahoo will change your inbox (and your communication strategy)

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BY AMIT BENDOV

New policies signal a major change for brands that have relied on ‘spray-and-pray’ techniques to drive sales.

We all know the pain of misguided sales spam—and lots of it—cluttering our inboxes. Whether it’s emails to our personal addresses that assume our buying habits of a decade ago are the same today, or sales pitches to our work addresses that are completely irrelevant to our roles and responsibilities, we’ve become overwhelmed with poorly targeted emails. Statista found that spam accounted for 45% of the 333 billion emails sent daily in 2022, while research from Gong shows that only 4% of emails are ever even opened.

Why are business leaders still accepting this antiquated and ineffective way of doing things?

This month marks the beginning of new policies from Google and Yahoo to limit the bulk email sends that result in billions of irrelevant and poorly crafted sales pitches emailed daily. This signals a major change for brands that have relied on “spray-and-pray” techniques to drive sales. And for B2B brands, this too should be a wake-up call.

  • How will these new policies reshape how sales teams think about attracting customers?
  • Will mass emails become generally unacceptable in our professional inboxes, in addition to our personal ones?
  • And how will the disruption of a commonly used sales tactic impact bottom lines?

THE HISTORY OF SPAM

The first bulk emails were sent by Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager for a computer company, to promote the company’s products to some 400 people. Thuerk said in a 2007 interview that “complaints started coming in almost immediately” after sending the emails, but more importantly, the company “sold $13 million or $14 million worth of DEC machines through that email campaign.” With that, cold emailing as a sales tactic was born.

In the decades that followed, the practice grew, and email marketing tools enabled sales teams to contact an ever-growing list of potential customers, forsaking personalized outreach for a broader pool of recipients.

While more data-driven approaches to sales emails have been introduced over the years, the overwhelming volume of irrelevant sales pitches has led to widespread fatigue. In fact, Gong’s research found that 87% of buyers say that the emails they receive are not relevant to them.

This practice can convert to sales. Even if only 4% of bulk emails are opened, that translates to 40,000 people opening those emails for every million sent by a salesperson. But companies need to ask themselves if irritating and alienating the other 960,000 people is an acceptable sacrifice. And, even more importantly, are they missing out on valuable opportunities by not sending thoughtful, personalized messages to the appropriate buyers out there?

RETHINKING SALES SPAM WITH AI

The technology industry is at a pivotal moment. AI is transforming the ways we work, live, and interact with each other. Now bulk emails can be drafted by generative artificial intelligence far more quickly than by a marketing and sales pro.

The potential impact for teams sending out large email campaigns is significant. Will the rise of gen AI mean that inboxes are flooded even more? Can AI make a difference in how these companies communicate with prospects?

AI can also bring new knowledge and perspective. Using AI to draft emails based on a few lines of context isn’t new, innovative, or effective. But done right, it can actually help companies cut down on the volume, and instead target the right customers with the right message.

We’re seeing new applications of AI that capture and analyse customer interactions to create content and thoughtfully personalize outreach based on a holistic view of the relationship. These applications might be the new approach that could reshape how sales teams develop and assess their outreach programs, from the initial outreach to a prospective customer . . . and over the entire relationship.

The era of relying on volume over strategic precision is over.

AI as a blanket solution won’t solve this problem for businesses. Not all of these tools are created equally, and those without the proper knowledge will only exacerbate the problem. However, there is potential for well-designed AI tools to help teams change their approach.

HOW TO CREATE CHANGE

Google’s and Yahoo’s rules are a positive first step to end spray-and-pray practices, but sales teams will need to do more. The good news is that there’s a path forward that not only doesn’t harm the bottom line but also can improve it.

Business leaders need to stop accepting this practice as the status quo and rebuild these programs from the ground up. Teams have often been measured and evaluated on “activity metrics”—how many emails have been sent, how many phone calls have been made. They should instead be measured by meetings booked and qualified opportunities, giving sales teams the motivation, time, and resources to focus on targeted, relevant outreach.

Similarly, leaders should make sure that their teams haven’t become over reliant on email. Research from McKinsey shows that the number of channels that B2B companies use to interact with other businesses has doubled in the past five years, and includes email, phone, web conference, chat, and social. Leaders should ensure that their teams can meet those potential customers where they want to be met.

The onus is on business leaders to evolve their strategies. While a spray-and-pray approach may have worked in the past, the tides are changing, and to stay competitive, businesses need to take a step back and reimagine how their sales teams operate. And they need to do it soon, before their last emails go unanswered.

Feature Image Credit: 84 Video/Unsplash

BY AMIT BENDOV

Sourced from Fast Company

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‘Broadcast-level scale’: Why retail media networks view in-store as their next frontier

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By Peter Adams

At NRF’s Big Show, companies like Walmart pitched in-store as an advertising channel on par with TV.

NEW YORK — Retail media networks are entering either their 2.0 or 3.0 era, depending on who you asked at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show this past weekend. Numerical variance aside, experts agreed that 2024 heralds the next chapter for a fast-growing channel, though one whose path forward remains murky amid a race to standardize ad formats and measurement.

Retail media is still primed to attract heftier investments now that Google’s plan to enact the death of the cookie is in effect, hampering a bedrock digital ad-targeting method. However, speakers at the NRF confab seemed more eager to highlight the ways they’re trying to refashion old chestnuts, including in-store assets, to fortify their newfangled advertising bets than talk about the search and display offerings (or retail media 1.0) that have put the category on course to generate a $100 billion in revenue over the next several years.

Repositioning brick and mortar as a brand-building tool versus simple shopper marketing was a theme threaded throughout discussions and interviews on the show floor. Only time will tell whether consumers view it as more than a message plastered on the aisle or their shopping cart with some additional tech bells and whistles.

“It’s a channel with broadcast-level scale,” said Ryan Mayward, senior vice president of retail media sales at Walmart Connect, during a panel about how physical stores could usher in the “golden age” of retail media. Walmart Connect has recently taken its product demoing program in-house and expanded advertising on an owned and operated in-store radio network called Walmart Radio.

“One hundred and forty million customers a week shop in our stores. That’s bigger than any broadcast TV network can deliver,” Mayward continued. “I think the store, as an advertising channel, is as relevant to the shopper marketer as it is to the chief marketer.”

A Super Bowl-sized opportunity?

Other retail media networks signalled their ambitions to ramp up in-store bets at NRF, viewing it as a key piece in realizing a pitch around omnichannel capabilities and providing a full view into the customer journey. Despite the bump e-commerce received during the pandemic, about 85% of transactions still occur at brick-and-mortar locations in the U.S., per CB Insights data cited by one conference attendee. Physical retail also gives smaller networks a possible advantage over Amazon, a platform that commands the lion’s share of retail media spending but has struggled to iron out its brick-and-mortar strategy.

“[In-store] is the biggest opportunity left for retail media networks to capitalize on. Generally, it’s by far the larger conversion location,” said Evan Hovorka, head of product and innovation at Albertsons Media Collective, in an interview. “A lot of the traffic, the time spent, the impressions and the conversions are in that store center.”

7-Eleven, the largest convenience chain in the U.S. with over 13,000 locations, is also scaling up its radio ambitions this year, bringing a program currently in about 2,000 stores to the entirety of its North American network. The move will make the c-store’s radio station the largest in the country, claimed Marissa Jarratt chief marketing and sustainability officer, during an on-stage discussion.

Instacart, the grocery delivery platform, is beginning to pilot ads on its artificial intelligence-powered Caper Carts. Deli and bakery screens, electronics department TVs and cooler doors, enabled by vendors like Cooler Screens, were some of the other in-store advertising avenues championed at NRF.

“I think physical retail is the new TV because it provides so much of what linear TV is no longer able to provide, which is scale, brand safety and reaching the right audiences,” said Andrew Lipsman, an analyst at Media, Ads +Commerce, on the same panel as Walmart Connect’s Mayward. “Increasingly, it can start to fill that role that TV is leaving behind.”

While it’s been clear for some time that in-store advertising has benefits, like placing a brand message close to the point of transaction, some on the NRF show floor were more measured about the opportunity when compared against conventional brand-building tactics.

“In-store should be able to shine bright for a few things, but nothing tells a national brand story like a Super Bowl ad,” said Hovorka. “It’s just that there’s less and less of those opportunities on linear.”

Easier said than done

The fast rise of retail media has pushed network owners to quickly learn the ropes of complicated programmatic ad tech, either building out that infrastructure internally or, more commonly, partnering with established third parties for scale and cost-effectiveness. A renewed emphasis on in-store formats sounds, on paper, potentially more intuitive for a crowd that has sometimes been stodgy with tech adoption, drawing on retailers’ rich history of shopper marketing.

But experts said that delivering a cohesive in-store experience will prove to be one of 2024’s biggest challenges, especially with the longer-term goal of threading the needle between digital and physical measurement and sales attribution.

“If you’re a large company like us with 2,200 stores, all with different footprints, different banners, different constraints, trying to bring a consistent look and feel to a complementary ad service is difficult,” said Albertsons’ Hovorka. “Where we’re pushing ourselves is to really tie that all into a single vision, single strategy, so we can tell an omnichannel story better to our investors to our brands.”

As in the digital realm, retailers may enlist the help of vendors with more established tech know-how to enact their visions of a better-monetized, more digital store. Indeed, NRF’s Big Show was host to plenty of vendors touting those very same capabilities in a sea of booths that stretched across the Javitz Center in Manhattan. But third-party relationships can be messy and add layers to an already complicated retail ecosystem where different players are fighting for a piece of an increasingly lucrative pie.

“A lot of vendors are coming to them now. There’s a price to that. It could be on a programmatic exchange that they don’t control,” said Matt O’Grady, Dunnhumby’s president of Americas, on the NRF show floor.

“I’m a little sympathetic to the retailers because I think they’ve been burned in the past with other in-store technologies that they probably spent a lot of money on — radio frequencies and things like that — that may not have worked out,” O’Grady added.

“You’ve got to have great creative to get somebody to stop in an aisle and watch an ad.”

Evan Hovorka -Head of product innovation, Albertsons Media Collective

Preparation for the in-store evolution is leading companies like Albertsons to invest more in sourcing, negotiations and legal given the amount of sensitive data and contract work involved in the process. The grocer earlier this month partnered with Capgemini on automation tools that serve to improve media planning, operations and content creation.

“I think what we’ll look for is more localized campaign objectives, being able to target specifically within certain regions, within certain zip codes,” said Hovorka. “We’ve launched our AI and automation investment now to prepare for that in-store work later this year.”

If and when more sophisticated in-store tech is implemented, retail media networks will have other factors to consider if they want to truly transform the channel into a storytelling machine. Chief among them: Are the ads from their brand partners actually any good?

“What everybody’s got to remember about brand building, and this is not just relevant to retail, is the value of creative,” said O’Grady. “You’ve got to have great creative to get somebody to stop in an aisle and watch an ad.”

Feature Image Credit: SDI Productions via Getty Images

By Peter Adams

Sourced from MARKETINGDIVE

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YouTube is making millions off a new breed of climate denial, a monitoring group says

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BY REUTERS

A CCDH found that 70% of climate denial content focused on attacking climate solutions as unworkable.

YouTube is making millions of dollars a year from advertising on channels that make false claims about climate change because content creators are using new tactics that evade the social media platform’s policies to combat misinformation, according to a report published on Tuesday.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) used artificial intelligence to review transcripts from 12,058 videos from the past six years on 96 of Alphabet’s YouTube channels. The channels promoted content that undermines the scientific consensus on climate change that human behaviour is contributing to long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns, the report said.

CCDH, a non-profit that monitors online hate speech, said its analysis found that climate denial content has shifted away from false claims that global warming is not happening or that it is not caused by greenhouse gases produced from burning fossil fuels. Videos espousing such claims are explicitly banned from generating ad revenue on YouTube, according to Google’s policy.

Instead, the report found that, last year, 70% of climate denial content on the channels analysed focused on attacking climate solutions as unworkable, portraying global warming as harmless or beneficial, or casting climate science and the environmental movement as unreliable. That’s up from 35% five years earlier.

“A new front has opened up in this battle,” Imran Ahmed, chief executive of CCDH, said on a call with reporters. “The people that we’ve been looking at, they’ve gone from saying climate change isn’t happening to now saying, ‘Hey, climate change is happening, but there is no hope. There are no solutions.’”

YouTube is making up to $13.4 million a year from ads on the channels that the report analysed, CCDH said. The group said the AI model was crafted to be able to distinguish between reasonable scepticism and false information.

In a statement, YouTube did not comment directly on the report but defended its policies. ”Debate or discussions of climate change topics, including around public policy or research, is allowed,” a YouTube spokesperson said. “However, when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos.”

CCDH called on YouTube to update its policy on climate denial content and said the analysis could assist the environmental movement to combat false claims about global warming more broadly.

Feature Image Credit: Dado Ruvic/Reuters

BY REUTERS

Sourced from Fast Company

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Internet Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide in 2024

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By Kristy Snyder

Move over print ads and direct mail: Internet marketing is the new trend. Digital marketing accounts for 56% of total marketing spend, and the industry as a whole is expected to reach over $786 billion by 2026.

This means that if your company isn’t already dabbling in online marketing, it needs to be. Use this beginner’s guide to internet marketing to learn more about the basics.

What Is Internet Marketing?

Internet marketing—also known as digital marketing—is the process of using online channels to help an audience learn more about your products. Using tools such as websites, email, online advertising, social media and more, you can reach potential consumers, educate them on your offerings and hopefully convert them into customers.

Types of Internet Marketing

Internet marketing is far more than just setting up a website. There are many different approaches to leveraging digital platforms. Here’s a look at some of the most popular types of internet marketing. Keep in mind, many of these overlap, which is why it’s best to utilize several when crafting your overall internet marketing strategy.

Content Marketing

Content marketing encompasses all consumable materials you might use to promote your company. It includes everything from blog posts to infographics to podcasts. The goal of content marketing is to establish your expertise, promote your brand and provide some sort of value to consumers. That might be by educating them on a new subject, providing a relevant tip or even offering entertainment.

To effectively utilize content marketing, you’ll need to pair up with copywriters, video editors, graphic designers and more. Define your objectives for each piece of content by planning and researching, create the content and then distribute it across various online channels including your website, email newsletters, guest posts and more. Depending on your strategy, content marketing can bleed over a lot into social media marketing and SEO marketing.

More and more small businesses are throwing weight into content marketing. In fact, 30% said they’d be increasing their content budget up to 10% in the following year. If your business jumps in as well, you can enjoy increased audience retention, higher conversion rates and increased brand awareness.

SEO Marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO) marketing involves perfecting your content so it ranks highly in search engine result pages (SERPs). SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate compared to just 1.7% for outbound leads, so getting listed higher on Google can definitely be financially worthwhile.

This doesn’t mean paying Google to place your ad higher. Instead, it means following Google’s E-E-A-T criteria to naturally hack the system. What does E-E-A-T mean? It stands for:

  • Experience: Your content is created by someone with first-hand experience in the field.
  • Expertise: Your content is highly researched or created by an expert.
  • Authoritativeness: Other sites link to your content.
  • Trustworthiness: Your content is accurate and your site has good security.

Of course, there’s more to SEO marketing than E-E-A-T. You also want to use good keywords that potential customers are searching for and optimize your on-page title tags, meta descriptions, headers and images. Also, this should go without saying, but your content should be well-written, relevant and not filled to the brim with keyword stuffing that makes it hard to read.

Social Media Marketing

In social media marketing, you’ll use platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube to promote your brand and connect with potential customers. And there’s a lot of them out there—an estimated 4.89 billion people spend an average of 151 minutes on social media per day.

Running a social media marketing campaign is not as easy as it sounds, as you’ll need to stand out in a crowded sea of competition. This involves planning out posts in advance, creating a posting schedule and setting an advertising budget. Posts on social media usually include a mix of photos, videos, text and stories based on your brand and your products.

Using social media marketing gives you the chance to interact with followers, humanizing your business and brand. You can also use it as a way to drive traffic to your website, generate leads, increase brand awareness and build relationships.

Affiliate Marketing

Humans are easily influenced. That’s likely why affiliate marketing has grown so much in recent years. It involves partnering with a highly influential individual or entity that can promote your product or service to their followers. For every sale or lead they generate, you’ll pay them a commission.

While affiliates can promote your product on their blog or website, social media is the most popular platform. As many as 61% of Gen Zers and Millennials trust recommendations from social media influencers, and 33% and 26% have bought a product based on an influencer’s recommendation in the last three months, respectively.

Don’t worry—you won’t have to go out into the wild yourself to find affiliate marketers. You can often sign up for an affiliate network that links you up with eligible influencers. Then, you’ll give them a personalized tracking URL and any assets or guidance they need to promote your product. The rest of the campaign is in their hands, meaning you don’t have to worry about anything.

Email Marketing

Email marketing involves sending targeted, personalized and relevant emails to a specific audience with the aim of promoting products, services or fostering customer engagement. These aren’t just random users; instead, they’re people who have willingly signed up for your email newsletter, whether that was through a promotion or after creating an account.

Email marketing can drive a return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every dollar spent. That’s more than any other type of marketing. To take advantage of that potential, you’ll need to provide meaningful content to your subscribers. It should educate them on your products, announce important updates or even inform about special promotions. Design and formatting are also crucial for establishing a brand identity.

You can monitor the performance of your email campaigns by using an email marketing platform. You’ll want to track open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates and unsubscribe rates to measure the effectiveness of your emails.

Internet Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

While internet marketing and traditional marketing can share the same goals, they’re actually quite different. Each one has a distinct approach to promoting services, products and brands. Here are the key differences between the two.

Communication Mediums

For an internet marketing campaign, all of your communications take place online. You might use a variety of platforms, including websites, social media, emails and search engines.

Traditional marketing, on the other hand, takes place off-line. Your ads are shown in person, such as on billboards, direct mail flyers or print publications. They can also be in non-digital media, including radio, television or podcasts.

Demographic Targeting

One of the great things about internet marketing is that you can custom-target specific demographics. Maybe your ideal audience is women in their 30s who are interested in Taylor Swift. Platforms such as Google, Facebook and Instagram let you narrow down the exact type of people you want to show your ads to, making your promotional spend more effective.

Unfortunately, traditional marketing doesn’t always offer such highly targeted approaches. Often, it involves targeting people who live in a certain geographical area. You may be able to somewhat tailor television or radio ads based on the time of day or show that’s on, but there’s still no way to guarantee who is watching or listening.

Budgeting

On the whole, internet marketing is cheaper than traditional marketing. Consider the cost to reach 1,000 people (also known as the cost per mille or CPM) in each category. In 2022, the CPM for social media marketing was $8.15. Reaching the same number of people with direct mail, on the other hand, could cost anywhere from $300 to $3,000.

Lead Tracking

It’s incredibly easy to track internet marketing campaigns. You can collect data on impressions (how many times people see your ad), the number of clicks and even conversions. It’s simple to compare different versions of an ad to see which is performing better, or even look at the actions customers took after clicking your ad.

With traditional marketing, all of this is a lot more complicated. Sure, you can monitor website traffic and sales after starting a new campaign, but you’ll never really be sure if it was the ad that increased your traffic or another factor. Calculating your ROI can be a lot more challenging.

Interactivity and Engagement

If done correctly, internet marketing facilitates two-way communication. For example, imagine you run an ad on Facebook. Users can comment, like and share the ad, giving you greater reach than you’re paying for. You can also reply to their comments and messages, directly answering any questions that arise so they’re more informed on your solutions.

This isn’t quite as intuitive with traditional marketing. Sure, it’s possible to offer a phone number or email address for people to reach out to, but it’s an additional step that many won’t bother to take.

Global Reach

Obviously, internet marketing can reach a lot more people than traditional advertising. The world is just a few clicks away, and you can set up ads that people will see across the globe.

But for many businesses, that’s not always necessary. For example, if you’re a localized business that only services American customers, it’s probably not helpful if you run ads that go viral in China. You may appreciate the limited geographical reach of traditional advertising, especially if you’ve found good niche publications or programming to advertise with.

Internet Marketing Strategies

Now that you know a little more about the ways to market your company on the internet, exactly how do you go about doing it? These internet marketing strategies can guide your efforts as you initialize your first campaign.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

As part of SEO marketing, you’ll need to optimize your website so it stands out in SERPs. You can do this by strategically using keywords in your content. You’ll also want to craft compelling meta tags and descriptions—these are what show up in Google search results.

Optimizing headings and content, structuring user-friendly URLs and effectively linking within your site are a few more good tips. The technical aspects of your website are also important, including site speed, mobile responsiveness, sitemap structure, URL structure and overall user experience. There are plenty of SEO tools that can help you if you get stuck figuring this stuff out.

Don’t forget about off-page SEO! It involves building high-quality backlinks, engaging in social media, collaborating with influencers, contributing guest posts and participating in relevant online communities.

User-Friendly Website Design

Did you know that 88% of online users won’t return to a site after a bad experience? Furthermore, 61% of users say they’ll bail if they can’t find what they’re looking for within five seconds. All of this means that you need to nail your website design.

Users want a site that’s easy to navigate, especially if they’re coming to a landing page from one of your ads. Make sure to include well-structured menus, a logical flow of content and an efficient search function. They’ll also want it to load fast, so optimize your image sizes and enable caching to improve site speeds.

Also, make sure your site is responsive and accessible. Responsive design ensures your website functions well and appears correctly on various devices. To improve accessibility, use readable fonts, suitable font sizes and proper colour contrasts to enhance readability.

Social Media Outreach

Actively engaging with your social media community is essential for building a loyal following. Responding to comments and messages and participating in discussions demonstrate your brand’s genuine interest in its audience. That’s especially true if you’re running an ad and people have questions. Leaving these concerns unaddressed can cause people to lose trust in your brand.

And your social media outreach doesn’t have to stand on its own. Link up your posts with your content strategy so you don’t have to come up with all original content.

Finally, choose the social media platforms where your target audience is most active. This lets you tailor your content and engagement strategies accordingly.

Customer-Centric Approach

A customer-centric approach means you place the needs, preferences and satisfaction of the customer at the forefront of all marketing efforts. The primary objective is to deeply understand your target audience, empathize with their challenges and provide tailored solutions that meet their specific requirements.

To do this, you’ll need to do lots of customer research and profiling. Develop detailed customer personas to create a clear and accurate representation of your ideal customers. Then, map out the entire customer journey—from the first interaction to conversion and beyond. Identify touchpoints where customers engage with your brand, and try to understand their motivations, concerns and expectations at each stage.

Using this information, create tailored messaging and content. Establish a feedback loop where you regularly review customer feedback, analyse data and adapt your strategies accordingly.

Pay-per-Click Advertising

It’s totally possible to craft an internet marketing campaign without spending any money. But if you want to guarantee people will see your content, then you’ll want to try pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. This is when you pay advertisers such as Google or Facebook to display your ad to relevant audiences.

The good news? You’re not paying for every person who sees the ad. Instead, you only pay whenever someone clicks on the ad. Now, there’s no guarantee that someone who clicks on your ad will make a purchase or create an account on your site. However, at least you’re only paying to reach interested consumers.

There’s a lot more to PPC ads, including bidding and ad placement. If you’re interested in trying out this strategy, we recommend checking out our guide on PPC advertising, which dives deeper into the nitty-gritty of it all.

Bottom Line

Internet marketing is a powerful tool that’s cost-effective, reaches a global audience, helps target the right people and provides measurable results, engagement and insights. In short, it’s a must-do for your small business.

There are a lot of different methods you can utilize to reach online audiences, but we recommend pairing several together to see the best results. That way, you can tackle your marketing efforts in every digital frontier, from social media to email to video. The result? Hopefully, your business will see a boom in sales, brand awareness and customer trust.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Kristy Snyder

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7 Innovative Marketing Approaches to Boost Your Sales in 2024

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By JESSICA WONG

The year 2024 looks promising for marketers who are willing to embrace technology without sacrificing community.

Within less than two decades, marketing as we know it has changed almost beyond recognition. At the beginning of the century, business owners and marketers had a limited choice of channels through which they could reach potential customers. For small businesses, some of those channels were cost-prohibitive.

The state of marketing in 2024

Over the past two decades, digital marketing has transformed how companies find customers. Type ‘the state of marketing 2024’ into any search engine, and the results will most likely include some of the following key elements: personalization, use of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), creating community, and a degree of uncertainty.

As economic challenges and wars continue to wreak havoc on economies worldwide, forecasts for business performance remain volatile. Still, a handful of trends have been slowly emerging in marketing and are set to become key elements of winning marketing strategies in 2024. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, some of those revolve around the use of technology. At the same time, there is a distinct trend toward human connection. Marketers can make use of both to benefit their brands.

1. Personalized marketing strategies

Gone are the days when entire families gathered in front of radios and TVs to watch a certain program and the advertising content delivered during breaks. For several years now, marketers have emphasized targeting specific audiences rather than using a broad approach.

Experts predict that leading brands will take things one step further in 2024 and introduce true personalization, basing the information consumers see on their needs immediately. Imagine a weather change, for example. As soon as the rain starts, you see adverts for rain gear, umbrellas, and articles discussing weather patterns. The goal is to make content more relevant than ever before.

2. Interactive content and experiences

Interactive marketing communications are also gathering pace. To take advantage of them, marketers can use elements like polls and quizzes to create stronger connections with their target audiences. The goal is to transform the passive connection between the brand and the consumer into active, memorable communication.

Product images and basic videos may no longer be enough to help a product stand out. Instead, leading brands will utilize augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to allow their customers to experience new products and innovations.

3. Innovative use of social media

Social media marketing and advertising have become a core element of the marketing strategies of businesses of all sizes. Social media platforms offer targeted access to audiences, activities can be tailored to fit most marketing budgets, and the platforms lend themselves to community-building.

Over the past few years, ephemeral content that is available briefly and then disappears has been growing in importance. As consumers’ attention spans grow ever shorter, content like Facebook or Instagram stories becomes more easily digestible than longer-form offerings.

Aside from this type of disappearing content, live videos, social commerce offerings, and interactive storytelling that allows the audience to decide the outcome of a story will continue to grow.

4. Embracing new technologies

Most of the key developments in marketing in 2024 will be driven or supported by emerging or developing technologies. Artificial intelligence (AI) has already made its mark on 21st-century marketing, with nearly two-thirds of marketers telling Hubspot that they are utilizing AI for market research, content creation, and improving the user experience their brands are delivering.

Chatbots have become common on many brands’ websites, improving the user experience by allowing customers to access support 24/7. Combined with AI, chatbots are becoming increasingly more capable. Voice search and other voice-driven technologies are another element of leading marketing strategies in 2024.

5. Community building and user-generated content

The continuing rise of technology has led to something that could be seen as a counter-trend – the demand to create community among audiences. Early examples of these communities include Facebook’s community chat feature in groups or Instagram’s broadcast channels. Both give brands and creators another option to open conversations with multiple users.

In addition, brand communications are no longer a one-way street from the company to the consumer. Some of TikTok’s most popular videos show consumers using products and sharing their experiences authentically and in a highly relatable manner.

6. Sustainability and purpose-driven marketing

Today’s consumers expect more than profit-making from their favorite brands. More and more, discerning consumers are choosing businesses with a greater purpose, such as environmental or social commitments. Two key elements of purpose-driven marketing are searching for sustainable solutions and giving back to the local community.

Highlighting a company’s work in that area will appeal to conscious consumers, but brands must demonstrate a real commitment. Superficial commitments and activities may grab consumers’ attention in the short term, but they are unlikely to deliver long-term benefits.

7. Cross-channel integration

A cohesive and integrated approach to marketing has always been considered best practice. Even though brands can use different channels to reach different audiences, marketing messages must align across those touchpoints. Most audience members will see a brand’s content in different places. Inconsistent messages will be confusing and may drive potential customers away.

2024 is looking promising for marketers willing to embrace technology without letting go of the need for community. While not without its challenges, this year has the potential to transform the way marketers use emerging technologies like AI to create the strongest brand-consumer connections yet.

By JESSICA WONG

Founder and CEO of Valux Digital and uPro Digital.

Jessica is the Founder and CEO of nationally recognized marketing and PR firms, Valux Digital and uPro Digital. She is a digital marketing and PR expert with more than 20 years of success driving bottom-line results for clients through innovative marketing programs aligned with emerging strategies.

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