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How to Pitch an Idea, According to an Oscar-Winning Actor

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BY CARMINE GALLO,

Matthew McConaughey brings his communication skills to the classroom

After a nearly 30-year career in acting, Matthew McConaughey has learned the art of pitching an idea. His tips will help you sell your next idea or product.

McConaughey recently joined the faculty at Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas, Austin. He participated in a video series that covered topics in advertising, marketing and public relations.

McConaughey packs a lot of information in his video titled, “Crafting a story to sell your product.” Here are three points that stood out for me.

1. Know your audience.

 When McConaughey pitches a movie, he explains it differently to his wife, a studio head or his kids. “Pick your target, study your target and sell your product the best way they will understand it,” he says.

This is a key point that I stress with all the entrepreneurs I’ve coached. A concise elevator pitch should be relatable to a particular audience. Consider age, educational level, and experience in your industry.

Think back to your favorite high school or college class–and the ones you didn’t like. Your favorite teachers didn’t use jargon that went above your head. They made the topic come alive by making it relevant to where you were in your life, using contemporary examples and analogies.

2. Start with why.

McConaughey says a great pitch should start by answering why questions: Why is your product needed?

“What problem are you fixing? How are you making someone’s life better? Is your product more convenient, more sustainable, more enjoyable? Help me understand why I need it as a consumer,” says McConaughey.

I was thinking about the why when I read about America’s fastest-growing privately held companies. OneTrust tops the Inc. 5000. Technically, OneTrust builds a platform to operationalize privacy and security. There’s a lot of jargon in the space. For example, privacy laws are an alphabet soup of compliance regulations: CCPA, GDPR, ISO27001, etc.

Founder Kabir Barday explains why his product is useful for thousands of customers before he dives into the details.

According to Barday, OneTrust builds a suite of digital tools that gives companies a clearer view of all the user data they gather. “This enables them to comply with privacy laws, like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), that give consumers greater control of how and whether com­panies use their data.”

Giving your investors and prospects a clear picture of why your product is needed will help them understand how the product works.

3. Tell a story.

“To get to the head you’ve got to go through the heart,” says McConaughey. “You’ve got to make people feel before people think and choose act on something.”

This is where most business pitches fall short. All too often, entrepreneurs assume that investors want to see data, numbers, charts and forecasts. While that’s true, investors are skeptical of numbers–like potential sales numbers– because they know there’s a fair amount of guesswork in creating those numbers.

Stories are more powerful than numbers in early stage companies because they help investors and potential partners understand where the idea or product fits in the world. One customer story speaks volumes.

If you have a product you believe in, build a story around it that’s relevant to your audience. You’ll be far more successful in selling it.

Feature Image Credit:Matthew McConaughey introduces a special screening of his new film “The Gentlemen” at Hogg Memorial Auditorium at The University of Texas at Austin. Getty Images

BY CARMINE GALLO,

KEYNOTE SPEAKER AND AUTHOR, ‘FIVE STARS: THE COMMUNICATION SECRETS TO GET FROM GOOD TO GREAT’@CARMINEGALLO

Sourced from Inc.

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The future of work is here and there is no going back

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By Jeanniey Walden,

In March, everything changed in an instant. And now, for the past six months, we’ve been living in a remarkably different kind of world.

Our living rooms became boardrooms; our business lunches became Zoom chats and the supply chain was, for a time, crippled. The global pandemic changed the way we lived and the way we worked. While some of us thought the change was only temporary, maybe for a few weeks, we were actually experiencing the dramatic onset of the theoretical topic we all called “the future of work.”

Working from home is no vacation: Productivity is up

Prior to the pandemic, there was a stigma around working from home. There was a notion that it was merely an excuse to have a free day out of the confines of the office. But recent research tells a different story: Now that we’re in the home office, we’re actually working longer, harder and being even more productive.

According to a DailyPay survey — polling employees whose companies give them the option to work remotely — the majority said they work longer hours and claim to be more effective.

Of the respondents, 60 percent said they work more hours from home, with 33 percent of those saying they work eight or more hours per week remotely — that is, more than 400 hours a year. Meanwhile, 48 percent said they are more effective when working remotely compared to 14 percent who claim they are less effective.

So, does the future of work translate into the eradication of offices permanently?

Not exactly: only 25 percent of the respondents expect to be working from home for the foreseeable future. And for the essential workers, who kept the economy running — and saved people’s lives — and almost certainly for teachers soon venturing back into the classroom, working from home might not ever be a full-time reality.

Employee benefits are transforming in interesting ways  

From 401k to educational stipends, employers have changed a number of offerings to retain and attract staff in trying times.

Among the most talked-about introductions have been zero-cost benefits around pay. The antiquated system of waiting two weeks to be paid, sometimes with a paper check, now seems as outdated as office buffet lunches. Top Fortune 500 companies are already offering their employees an on-demand benefit that enables their staff access to their pay as they earn it. This provides them with more control over their finances and the safe, contactless digitization that they have come to expect in the new world. In fact, recent research shows that 74 percent of employees noted they are less stressed about their finances with a daily pay benefit.

Employers will almost certainly continue to offer new and interesting benefits. Any way to reduce employee stress can be a game-changer when it comes to the unpredictable nature of events, especially when there is absolutely no cost to the employer, and no needed change management either.

Contactless technology is a life-saver for essential workers

For essential workers in hospitals, supermarkets and fast-food restaurants, the workplace is becoming an increasingly contactless environment that highlights safety and efficiency.

Instead of high-touch punch cards or touch screens for which employees have often had to wait in line, employees can now simply wave an ID card or their cell phone to sign into work.

In supermarkets, scan-and-go technology has accelerated the mobile checkout experience — enabling staff to be re-deployed in other areas of the store — and also creates a safer experience for both the employee and the customer. The new technology comes at an opportune time, too. According to DailyPay’s “Rehire America Index,” the supermarket industry has seen a 63 percent increase in employee levels since January 1.

The hospitality industry is also prioritizing safety through new technologies. For hotels, guests can now use contactless technology to check-in and skip the dreaded long line that is often waiting for us after a long day of traveling. This measure creates a safer and more time-efficient experience for the customer and front-desk employee, who can now tend to more pressing needs of guests.

Diversity in leadership is now a must-have element

In a year that featured important cultural discussions regarding racial inequality,  we also experienced a shift in the need for our companies to reflect society. The business that prioritizes diversity and champions inclusion is more aligned with their customers and better positioned for success.

Research clearly demonstrates that the future of work features more diversity in the C-suite and in the general workforce. Among the respondents, 65 percent said diversity in the overall staff makes a company better-positioned to relate to customers, and 63 percent said having female leaders in a company is good for business. And two-thirds of those surveyed said diversity in company leadership is important when deciding on where to apply for a job.

2020 has been unlike any year in memory. The workplace we know has been remade, but the change also represents a unique moment to reflect and change the way companies operate, from the inside out. Long-entrenched views on such things as remote working and digitization have changed. Diversity in the C-suite is now considered a prerequisite for a company’s viability and long-term success. If the future of work arrived faster than business leaders could have anticipated, they can still take a deep breath — and embrace it.

By Jeanniey Walden

Chief Innovation & Marketing Officer, DailyPay

Sourced from DIGIDAY

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Digital marketing is accelerating – so what’s next?

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By Julio Taylor.

In 2019, Hallam, Google’s Premier Partners Growing Businesses Online 2019 award winners, published one in a series of eBooks: The Future of Digital Marketing: 2019 and beyond. Covid-19 has ground the world to a halt, but has accelerated digital marketing, taking it down paths that have not been ventured before.

The team at Hallam recognises that and we’re at a stage where there is even more to add to this eBook. The Future of Digital Marketing 2.0, contains interviews with several industry experts and aims to break down exactly what the future of the industry looks like, and highlights what businesses and brands need to be prepared for ahead of digital marketing’s next big shift…

An introduction from Julio Taylor, CEO at Hallam

The latest change to digital marketing is something we have been building towards for some time now, and there are several factors behind that.

There is a massive generational change in the workforce, with 70% now millennial or younger.

We’re living in a world where, for the first time in history, the vast majority of the population is born into a digital world as standard. Digital transformation, for me, is the absolute priority and the audience is demanding it.

Because of that, there is a huge amount of complexity when it comes to digital marketing and the skill required to deliver deep and meaningful impact. You need expertise in all areas to make that happen, whether that be UX, SEO, PPC, PR, advertising, content marketing, strategy, or technical.

There is also the pace of change to consider. Factors like technology, automation, and user expectations are moving incredibly quickly. The things that were groundbreaking just a couple of years ago are now old news. Some of the topics that were hot just four years ago are now expected.

Within that, the demand for privacy is growing exponentially – partly because of the Cambridge Analytica situation, and partly because audiences are just getting smarter with it.

That has led to changes in legislation, which is restricting the use of third-party data and cookies but has also led to changes in browser design and the technology of devices – meaning it is more difficult to advertise to people, compared to how it was a couple of years ago.

Everybody is advertising, so it’s going to be about what makes you and your brand different from everybody else. That is going to be determined by the creative and the experience.

For me, it’s about precision and persuasion. That’s something we always talk about, and both are important. They are two sides of the same coin. They are extremes. But we’re heading towards an age where both need to be applied effectively.

There is so much more to this topic than the six we have outlined. We will be updating and re-releasing our Future of Digital Marketing eBook very shortly and these six key themes give you a flavour of how much our industry is going to be changing…

ePrivacy will shake the industry up

Arianne Donoghue, our strategic consultant, says: the reality is that advertising has become so focused on data and being able to target users easily that it’s really hard to see how it is going to change.

The issue now is that it may be forced to. What impact will there be if cookies disappear? Cookies, by no means, are the only solution.

There is a technique out there called browser fingerprinting, which takes so many elements of data from your browser like the fonts on your machine, the time zone and the screen resolution. It even looks at little things like the emojis a user uses.

All that data can be pulled through to form a digital fingerprint of who you are. It’s more reliable than any cookie out there. For those interested, there are a number of different sites you can use online to have your fingerprint assessed to see how unique and traceable you are around the internet. This data can also be tracked through your VPN (Virtual Private Network).

The whole point of a VPN is to store your internet history so it is harder to find and track you, but a browser fingerprint can circumvent your VPN. While somewhat terrifying, a lot of this is covered under GDPR and the ePrivacy regulation that is likely to come into force in 2021.

What does that regulation mean for digital marketing?

If cookies disappear, the industry as it has worked for the last 20 years, will just fall over. The reliance there has been on targeting users is not going to be available anymore.

So, for marketers, it is about figuring out what is next. There have been discussions about how contextual advertising is yielding good results in the market space dominated by big players, but we’re not seeing that filter down to the average advertiser.

I’m sure Google and Facebook have a plan and maybe we will see the first steps of that when IOS 14 is released later this year. It feels like we’re waiting for the ‘big five’ to lead and the rest will follow.

A zero-click and visual change to the future of search

Strategy director Ben Wood believesGoogle wants to give the best possible results. But they also want to give the best possible experience on their platform, which is essenially their search results page.

What we will see is that it is going to get more difficult to gain clicks from search because Google is wanting to bring everyone’s content on to their results pages wherever possible.

Take holiday bookings, mortgage calculators, or finding recipes, as an example. Zero-click search will be much more impactful in these areas because you will be able to book flights or tables on Google, demolishing the traffic those websites would otherwise be getting.

Others, like B2B software, will be totally different because Google won’t be able to replicate everything that is on their website. The levels at which clients will be impacted by some of these trends will vary depending on the industry but these features just go to show how susceptible businesses are to the evolution of Google’s search product, and highlights the importance of a diverse traffic acquisition strategy.

Something else we need to be wary of is visual search, which is still not being taken as seriously by SEO’s in the way that I expected.

Visual search has been on the rise for years with platforms like Pinterest evolving their features with a focus on lens technology. Google has latched on to that idea and invested in piloting Google Keen – a new visual way of building boards to track interesting topics.

What I think will be a game changer for many industries is lens/image recognition technology, which allows you to take a picture of something and search for it. Visual search is much easier than manually typing out and, as a service, I think that will continue to improve especially in retail, fashion etc.

Visual search and optimisation should be considered as a key part of SEO and right now, that’s not the case. We will see that grow a lot over the next two years and for more SEO’s to take image optimisation seriously and invest in adapting web usability to cope with new features such as visual search functionality for ecommerce just like larger retailers such as Macy’s have started to do by partnering with Pinterest to use their lens (visual search) technology.

Development is no longer just for building websites

Jon Martin, our technical director, says that one of the big things taking shape right now in the digital marketing community is the programming language, Python.

Only a few years ago it was all about PHP because it was open-source, anybody could use it and you didn’t have to pay to learn it. Python, however, is now becoming the go-to tool because it’s nice to work with, easy to learn, and is allowing SEO professionals to do what they want to really quickly.

Developers and SEO professionals need to have a strong understanding of Python, but also have a holistic view of the landscape and understanding of SEO and PPC. Certainly in the future, developers are going to be important in helping businesses and brands automate things that were previously manual.

UX is becoming a ranking factor, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need a new website

Joe Powell, our creative director, explains thatUX is one of the most important elements of digital marketing and underpins everything we do as an agency. The demand for UX consultancy has been increasing through the need for user-ability testing from our clients to validate their theories and mitigate risk before making a decision.

User testing allows us to learn where things have gone wrong, so we’re not making the same mistakes again. A typical flaw of businesses is that they have objectives they want to achieve, but they don’t consider what impact that will have on the consumer. It’s a delicate balance between representing the stakeholder and the users’ needs.

The less resistance you add to the user experience on any platform – whether that’s in-store, on a digital interface, website, or even a book – the easier it is to use, the more intuitive it is, and the higher the probability that it will convert into a sale or enquiry.

There’s a common misconception that improving UX means you need a new website build. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. UX can be practised on a single page or a website and you can make conversion-focused enhancements to existing websites.

There are other options, however. If you’re happy with your current website’s design, but want to increase engagement, then our advice would be to review the experiences of certain areas and make ad-hoc changes to those sections to improve the offering.

A lot of sales teams are interested in getting new websites, but sometimes smaller changes can make the world of difference to CRM.

UX is an immensely important thing to get right. It’s not something that can just be picked up. It is acquired through years of experience and moving through different disciplines, like brand, design, copywriting, development. Every decision has to be made with one question in mind; does this add value? If it doesn’t, it’s not worth pursuing.

SEO and PPC are evolving and will face some challenges

Charlotte Tomlinson, media director, explains:SEO and PPC, for a long time, have been very separate disciplines. There has been a big effort across the industry this year to address that because the results, when the disciplines are combined, are clearly better.

What we’re going to see is SEO and PPC come together to form integrated search and shared data campaigns, which will, ultimately, save money for businesses and brands in the long run.

A great, but simple, example of this is taking the data from a business’ paid campaign to make decisions around what SEO should be optimising in order to drive conversions.

What we’re seeing, quite often, is that what businesses didn’t think was important is actually becoming more so, allowing the teams to pivot accordingly to target audiences and keywords that hadn’t been considered before.

The relationship between businesses and their PPC agencies is also going to change significantly, and that is down to the growth of automation. PPC is going to become very strategic, creative, and consultancy-focused, rather than manual.

There needs to be an education piece around that. Google is at the forefront of that automation and PPC professionals will face a lot of questions by clients when it comes to value for money. It is down to us to deliver that value that in-house teams simply cannot get.

Again, though, that comes back to down integration; design teams and PPC working together to create awesome creative that is going to make advertising more successful than it has been before.

Headless will be the future of web development for the next decade

Martin says that while it has been around a while, Headless, including its various platforms, including Ghost, is a concept that lets you decouple the back and front end of a website.

For example, this allows you to have a WordPress driven website, but your front end looks completely different and you’re not reliant on the WordPress templates to do that. This gives you a huge amount of flexibility when coding, but the big benefit is around speed, performance, and usability of the site.

Essentially, you’re cutting a lot of the time that would be spent loading up WordPress and, instead, focusing on these small, nimble, pages that take far less time to load. This is predicted to be the future for the next decade of web development in the same way responsive web design was previously.

We’re only touching the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the influence of AI

Kieran S-Lawler, head of marketing, explains: This is a topic that gets spoken about a lot. AI has got a big role to play in the forecasting of data-driven content. It is still learning – doing so at a supernatural rate – and it will get to a stage where it’s finding patterns and analysis far faster than we ever could.

That forecast might not be 100 percent accurate, but it will give you insight into what life for a particular sector could look like. It’s also got a big role to play with interactive content, too, and how marketers use AI systems to engage and interact with customers.

We’re seeing it with bots already. Bots are not AI, but it gives you a flavour of what we can expect from AI in the future. On the flip side, there’s a general feeling that marketers and content creators are going to be redundant because of the advanced technology, but, for me, that’s far from the case.

Someone is going to be required to feed that AI and inform them what is right and wrong. It will make our life easier and provide us with data and insight that we would otherwise have to spend multiple hours trying to find.

I think we’re only touching the tip of the iceberg with what is achievable with this technology. There’s a lot more to come. Right now, it’s not totally accessible and it isn’t in a format that is easily digestible for marketers to truly use and understand.

Final thoughts

Just as marketers are only touching the tip of the iceberg for AI, we’re also only touching the tip of what the future of digital marketing looks like. The industry continues to develop at a rapid rate and from the future of Google and privacy, to the next steps in platform advertising, data, automation and content, it will all be covered when Hallam releases its new eBook, The Future of Digital Marketing 2.0, this autumn.

By Julio Taylor

Sourced from The Drum

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Targeting Households Using Addressable TV Advertising Is Being Tested

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By Brad Adgate.

After several years, advertisers, content providers, ad tech companies and program distributors have been busy laying the groundwork for dynamically inserted television advertising. Addressable TV allows advertisers to deliver more targeted ads to individual households via cable, satellite or telco set top boxes or web-enhanced “smart” TVs.

The potential for addressable TV advertising could be big. Mitch Oscar, the director of advanced TV strategy for USIM says currently, there are about 54 million MVPD (cable, telco or satellite) households that are linear addressable and 35 million that are ad supported video-on-demand addressable households. As a result, Oscar estimates there are 66 million unduplicated addressable TV households. In addition, Mitch Oscar also notes there are also about 25 million homes with web enhanced TV sets currently capable of receiving addressable TV advertising via automated content recognition (ACR). Some of these homes however, may also be an MVPD subscriber.

Using addressable advertising, an automotive ad can promote a different car model to different households. A politician can insert a different campaign issue to different voters or a prominent packaged goods marketer can advertise different products to different households.

Addressable advertising could give the TV ad industry a much-needed revenue boost. In the first six months of 2020 another 3.8 million homes cancelled their cable TV subscription, resulting in a loss of subscriber fee revenue into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, the ratings for many top tier entertainment networks have been in decline, as viewers migrate to content from streaming video providers. The loss of audiences has also impacted ad revenue, especially during a recession.

In recent years, annual TV ad spend has been stagnant at around $70 billion. Some industry analysts project ad spend for addressable TV advertising could grow from $1 billion in 2017 to over $5 billion by 2021. The cost of an addressable TV ad would be greater than a typical linear ad, with the idea being a more relevant ad message would elicit a more emotional response to an engaged viewer, resulting with an increase of sales. A study from Bill Harvey Consulting found addressable TV advertising has a higher return-on investment than either digital media or linear television.

In the past, addressable ads were limited to the local two minutes each MVPD sells every hour. These MVPDs use their own set top box tuning data, first party data from an advertiser (or third-party data from Experian and Acxiom), as well as other technology to send targeted ads based on zip codes, cable zones or even down to individual households. The amount of addressable advertising inventory will increase notably as national networks, which sell about 14 to 15 minutes of commercials every hour, get more involved.

There are two industry trials currently taking place in the smart TV universe; Project OAR and Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising.

Project OAR: One initiative in addressable TV advertising is Project OAR (standing for Open Addressable Ready) which was created in March 2019. The goal of OAR is to set standards for addressable TV advertising using an open source. OAR is a consortium started by TV manufacturer Vizio and includes many prominent content providers; Disney Media Networks, NBCUniversal, CBS, WarnerMedia’s Turner, Hearst Television, Scripps and AMC Networks. These programmers account for 80% of all linear TV viewership.

Inscape, a data-tracking company owned by Vizio, developed OAR’s technology using ACR. In June 2020, OAR began the first phase a live test which provides more relevant ad messages for both linear and on-demand on smart TV’s. Participating were Fox, ViacomCBS, NBCUniversal, Scripps, and AMC Networks. A second phase is scheduled for mid-August 2020 and will include Disney Media Networks, Discovery, Hearst Television and WarnerMedia.

Project OAR is available on 10 to 13 million web-enhanced Vizio TV’s. One of the goals, is to build scale by allowing more partners into the consortium with hopes they will be available on all “smart” TV’s. This will require the participation of TV manufacturers Samsung, LG and Sony. Also, as part of the OAR consortium are TV ad delivery companies; Comcast’s FreeWheel, AT&T’s Xandr, Google Ad Manager and Invidi that are implementing technical integrations.

Nielsen Advanced Video Advertising: In February 2019 Nielsen launched AVA, focusing on addressable advertising for web enhanced TV sets. The announcement had come after Nielsen acquired addressable TV technology provider Sorenson Media, which was in bankruptcy protection. Nielsen integrated Sorenson with ACR technology from Gracenote and Qterics, a smart TV software and privacy management company, to accelerate their addressable TV initiative.

AVA will be using 15 million smart TV sets from LG Electronics. The addressable initiative has the participation of nine national content providers; A&E Networks, AMC, Discovery, Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal, Univision, ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia. They account for about 90% of all linear viewership. Nielsen had launched a two-phased beta version in January which has been extended until the end of 2020 due to the pandemic. Mitch Oscar notes, as a long-time ratings supplier, Nielsen may be serving ads and verifying the impressions, instead of using a third-party, this could be an issue for advertisers.

On Addressability: In June 2019, Comcast, in partnership with Charter and Cox, formed On Addressability, an addressable consortium with a goal to develop industry definitions and standards, provide education for advertisers, and identify best practices and business standards for transacting on addressable campaigns. Also, the three cable operators hope to pool what they learned from offering addressable advertising to help other content distributors do the same. In June 2020, AMC Networks became the first content partner followed by Discovery in late July. Canoe Ventures provides the backend ad tech support. Collectively, the three cable operators have about 27 million addressable ready TV homes.

Measurement Challenges: With several trials taking place there are several industry issues facing addressable advertising such as inventory maintenance, revenue sharing and privacy. Another issue is audience measurement. Prasad Joglekar, the SVP & General Manager TV, cross platform products at Comscore says, “Addressable TV occupies somewhat of a middle ground between traditional linear TV and digital video advertising. Today, most addressable TV advertising is viewed as an evolution of TV. As such, the default measurement lens that gets applied is the traditional TV lens, which ratings and panel based. This leads to 3 significant measurement issues that various industry players are sorting out:

First, the things that make addressable TV interesting – the ‘breaking’ of the live spot, the delivery of multiple advertisements within the same unit etc. – are precisely the things that make it impossible to measure with a panel, or as a traditional age-gender rating. Trying to shove what is inherently an impression-based buy into a spot-based measurement scheme doesn’t work.

Second, for national addressability, a 30-second unit must be individually enabled in 3 to 5 different operator and distribution platforms. Each operator’s addressable insertion, pacing and reporting stack is unique. It is a hard and laborious process to measure each platform individually, and then combine the numbers to create a true national view.

Third, when an ad is made addressable, some impressions are targeted, but the vast majority are not. On average, ~30% of the impressions in a spot will be targeted. The impressions not targeted are seen as suspect or remnant and tend to be devalued. Decorating those impressions with useful, actionable audience attributes, across the 3 to 5 operators described above, is a measurement and planning problem that must be solved.”

As the industry continues to test addressable advertising and develop standards, Mitch Oscar agrees that similar to digital media, the currency for addressable advertising should be audience based, instead of ratings based, that has been the traditional measurement for linear TV for decades.

Feature Image Credit: GETTY IMAGES

By Brad Adgate

Brad Adgate is an Independent Media Consultant

Sourced from Forbes

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Why Social Commerce Could Eclipse E-Commerce

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By Bradian Muliadi.

Online commerce platforms have changed the process by which we discover and purchase a product. In fact, research has forecasted that e-sales will exceed $735 billion by 2023 as 81% of consumers search for products they need to buy on Instagram and Facebook, making the two channels a massive reference hub for shopping.

However, social commerce is not simply a way for social channels to increase traffic to your traditional sales channels. Instead, it is a new kind of commerce in which the entire shopping experience — from viewing to checkout — takes place in a social media channel. Traditional online store structures, such as websites or applications, are no longer the only way for consumers to shop online as the social media platforms that users love have become accessible storefronts. The surge in social commerce is likely due to the fact it benefits both the consumer and the brand: Social commerce cuts a significant length in a user’s buying journey by allowing them to take action immediately after seeing an advertised product, therefore eliminating the web sign-in process or app downloads, as well as reducing common issues for brands such as abandoned carts.

A Commerce Ecosystem Like Never Before

Since 2019, Instagram has tested in-app checkout. The Facebook-owned company also allows influencers to tag the products they endorse, which enables users to shop for products without even following the brand’s account. These influencers are an important factor in the social commerce industry. As we are expecting a market size of $9.7 billion in 2020 for influencer marketing, the ability to shop directly from an influencers’ post represents a massive opportunity for brands and research has shown that 63% of social media users between the ages of 18 and 34 trust influencers’ recommendations more than they trust brands.

Of course, that’s only a glimpse of how social commerce is charting a revolutionized shopping experience. Social media has an overwhelming amount of information that shows the likes, behaviors and relationships among users. This is increasingly important as users begin to expect personalized and algorithm-customized content. Roland Berger cited that almost three-quarters of users expect advertising content tailored to their preferences.

Social Commerce To Grow In Many Platforms

Instagram is one of the largest social media applications globally and a leader in social commerce as one-third of its users have bought something directly from an Instagram ad. eMarketer predicts that Instagram’s advertising revenue will increase by 47% in 2020, largely due to shoppable ads.

TikTok, dubbed the fastest-growing social app, has 800 million active users monthly. A large portion of its users are under the age of 30, making TikTok a viable channel to reach out to Gen Z, a market with $143 billion in spending power. The app is currently looking to test the social commerce functions that have succeeded in their Chinese-developed twin app, Douyin, such as the ability for users to zoom in on items that appear in a video and shop them directly on the app. Currently, the ability to link a post to a product page is available in most countries where TikTok is available. A “Shop Now” call to action has also been used by brands to turn creators’ content into in-feed ads.

Social commerce features that we have seen up to this point are only the beginning of a new era of shopping. Most social media apps are developing new ways that allow users to shop directly from their platform. Facebook allows cataloging products, managing sales and running ads for businesses big and small all over the globe. Pinterest enables ads with a “buy” call to action to appear in a user’s Pinterest board as well as targeted ads based on personal pins. Snapchat has partnered with Shopify to allow brands like Kylie Cosmetics to provide an in-app checkout option for U.S. users. It won’t end there.

Beyond unifying the fragmented online purchase experience to provide a smoother shopping experience for users, social commerce’s promise also lies in the democratization and empowerment of online sales for small to medium businesses, by providing a platform that enables an end-to-end purchase journey from product discovery to the final transaction. Although this means more competition among brands and platforms, it also means more consumer choice, which is always a good thing for online shoppers.

Feature Image Credit: GETTY

By Bradian Muliadi

Founder & CEO at Analisa.io | Instagram & TikTok Analytics. Read Bradian Muliadi’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

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Magnite: Huge Upside Potential In Connected TV

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By Andres Cardenal, CFA

Summary

Magnite is facing a challenging environment due to the recession, but management is seeing a strong rebound in revenue going forward.

CTV revenue is growing at 50% year over year currently, and the opportunities for long-term growth are exceptional in this market.

Magnite is a risky stock due to industry cyclicality, competitive risk, and uncertain profitability levels.

The upside potential is enormous if the bullish thesis plays out well.

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Magnite (NASDAQ:MGNI) is a relatively small company with enormous opportunities for growth in programmatic advertising over the years ahead. The company is facing considerable challenges, and a position in Magnite is inherently risky. Nevertheless, the upside potential may be well worth it.

Solid Performance In A Challenging Period

Magnite is the largest independent sell-side omnichannel advertising platform in the world. The company is the result of a merger between Rubicon Project and Telaria; this merger is quite recent, as it was completed in April of 2020.

Rubicon brings a large presence as a scaled programmatic exchange to the table, while Telaria provides leading connected TV (CTV) capabilities, so the merger makes a lot of sense from a business perspective.

Scale and presence are key sources of competitive strength in the sector, and Magnite is very well positioned in that regard. The company has access to over 2,000 publishers in 50 countries, with over 150 billion daily impressions and more than 600 employees globally.

On the other hand, things are not easy for Magnite nowadays. Advertising is a very cyclical industry, so the recession is a major setback for the whole sector. Besides, implementing such a merger in times of work from home and rampant uncertainty can be a colossal challenge.

But Magnite still delivered better-than-expected numbers for the second quarter of 2020. Reported revenue increased 12% year over year to $42.3 million, the number surpassed analysts’ expectations by $4.7 million.

Even more important, management highlighted some very positive trends in revenue during the quarter.

Since our last earnings call, we have observed a steadily improving revenue recovery. We noted in our last earnings call that we had observed revenue stabilizing in April and early May at a level of roughly down 30% year-over-year on a pro forma basis. Revenue in May and June continued to recover, with June down only 17% year-over-year on a pro forma basis, resulting in a 24% year-over-year decline for the full quarter. Since the start of this quarter, we have observed even greater recovery, with Q3 revenue quarter-to-date nearly breakeven year-over-year on a pro forma basis. And since the start of Q3, we have observed even more rapid acceleration in CTV revenue growth, currently running at roughly 50% up year-over-year

The company also measured ad spend trends in U.S. regions that were impacted by a resurgence in coronavirus. Those regions initially showed a slowdown in April and May, and numbers started to recover in the following months. With the new hotspots in July, Magnite detected no corresponding slowdown in spending in these areas, and demand even continued to grow in these regions.

A Massive Opportunity In CTV

CTV is arguably the most promising driver for investors in Magnite over the years ahead. Management said in the conference call that CTV revenue was growing at over 50% year over year recently, which provides validation to the bullish thesis in the stock.

According to estimates from ARK, OTT ad revenues are expected to increase 7x in the next five years, from nearly $6 billion in 2019 to $44 billion in 2024. Magnite is expected to generate only $202 million in revenue this year, so even grabbing a very small share of this opportunity could be a powerful driver for the company.

Source: ARK Invest

Management is seeing an acceleration in the CTV market recently, with the largest industry participants such as Hulu, Disney (NYSE:DIS), Roku (NASDAQ:ROKU), Peacock, Sling, and Pluto benefitting from strong subscriber growth, increased consumer viewing time, and solid ad spend growth.

There is also a significant increase in CTV ad inventory. This is driven by both short-term factors and long-term drivers. In the short term, consumers are watching more CTV during the pandemic. From a secular perspective, consumers are cord-cutting and canceling satellite subscriptions while they turn their attention to CTV. Advertising dollars are obviously going in the same direction as consumers’ eyeballs over the long term, with or without a recession.

Source: Magnite

The CTV revolution was well in place before the pandemic, and the trend seems to be accelerating recently. Advertising is obviously affected by the economic slowdown, but the recent data from Magnite is indicating that the prospects for a recovery in the middle term look quite promising.

Risk And Reward Going Forward

The risks that come with a position in Magnite are undeniably high. Mergers always carry lots of challenges, and especially more during a global pandemic and a recession. The numbers from Magnite are quite strong considering the circumstances, but economic uncertainty will probably weigh on the stock in the short term.

Management is expecting to be profitable at the EBITDA level next quarter, but this still remains to be seen. Even assuming that the company can start producing positive EBITDA numbers in the near term, there can be a long path towards full profitability. Sell-side companies have traditionally struggled with profitability, and while the profitability prospects in CTV are much stronger, it is hard to know how industry dynamics will evolve going forward.

Magnite also competes against giants such as Amazon (AMZN). Magnite’s big advantage over Amazon is being independent, while Amazon is also a content creator, which can produce some conflicts of interest. Nevertheless, the competitive risk is an important factor to watch going forward.

But the upside potential in Magnite stock could be worth the risks over the long term. The company has a market capitalization value of $830 million, and it operates in an industry with massive potential for growth, so it has a lot of room for revalorization going forward.

Magnite stock is currently trading at a price-to-sales ratio of 3.4 times revenue estimates for 2021, and revenues are expected to increase by 19% in 2021 versus 2020. If the bullish thesis plays out well, Magnite could offer huge gains from current valuation levels.

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Performance as of August 16, 2020

By Andres Cardenal, CFA

Sourced from Seeking Alpha

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Marketing Stories: reinventing roads with users and commerce in mind

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Sourced from The Drum

In the future, road infrastructure will give real-time incentives to commuters to diversify their choices. Roads will be the centre of a data-driven ecosystem for transportation and advertising.

That’s what we delve into in this episode of the Marketing Stories podcast, written by The Drum’s APAC publisher Charlotte McEleny and narrated by our chief executive Diane Young, examining why roads will need to evolve along with the cars we drive on them.

Marketing Stories can be found on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or by searching for ‘Marketing Stories with Diane Young’ on your favourite podcast app.

The feature shared in this podcast was published exclusively in The Drum magazine. If you like what you hear, you can get the full magazine each month at thedrum.com/subscribe.

Sourced from The Drum

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3 Proven Strategies for Rapid Customer Acquisition on Social

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By Carol Sankar.

Although social media is a powerful way to get your products or services to stand out from the competition, all campaigns are not the same.

Social media can be a powerful tool for getting your products or services to stand out from the competition. But not all campaigns are created equal. While some do a great job of acquiring customers, others seem to fly entirely under the radar.

So what makes the difference? A major factor simply comes from the way account managers set up their social media campaigns. As important as witty copy and engaging images can be, they will only be as effective as your strategy allows them to be.

1. Build up your organic engagement.

Paid campaigns have become increasingly important in light of declining organic reach across Facebook and other social media platforms. But this doesn’t mean you should ignore ways to expand your reach with organic posts. While paid campaigns may help your target audience discover your brand, your organic posts are essential for keeping them engaged in the long run.

Case in point: Instagram Stories have become one of the most popular types of social media posts, particularly among Millennials and Gen Z-ers. In fact, studies have found that one-fourth of these users use Instagram Stories to discover new products and services. This organic posting method could be key in helping your brand gain new customers.

Research from Buffer indicates that brands can post twice per day on Facebook, and up to three times a day on Twitter before audience engagement starts to decrease. Rather than overwhelming your audience with a large number of posts, the key is to create highly engaging content and post it at the right times.

For best results, use your audience insights to get a clear idea of which types of posts most resonate with your customers. Digging into profile data specific to your audience will help you identify which content to prioritize for the future.

2. Reduce the number of campaigns you are actively running.

More campaigns aren’t necessarily a good thing on social media — especially if you are operating on a tight budget. Some campaigns end up targeting the same individuals over and over again, resulting in ad fatigue that reduces their effectiveness.

Research from KlientBoost has determined that most brands should run a maximum of three or four campaigns, with each campaign focused on groups in different parts of the sales funnel. In its case study, the single action of taking a client from six campaigns with 24 ad sets to four campaigns with nine ad sets led to a 40 percent increase in revenue and 20 percent more ad clicks.

Too many ad sets will spread your social media spending too thin to have a meaningful impact. Reducing your campaigns and ad sets allocates more of your budget to each campaign so they can achieve a wider reach with the intended audience.

Fewer campaigns will require less time to track, making it easier to identify whether they are performing as expected.

3. Increase the power of retargeting campaigns with Automatic Advanced Matching and Dynamic Ads.

A Little Data study of more than 1,100 e-commerce stores found that the average conversion rate sat at a mere 1.4 percent. This low conversion rate relates to a fundamental marketing truth: Customers will rarely make a purchase the first time they engage with your brand.

Because of this, your ability to successful retarget customers through your social media campaigns can serve as a powerful reminding tool that guides them through the rest of the sales funnel.

Facebook’s Automatic Advanced Matching links with its pixel tool to collect additional information from form fields on your website — even email signups or landing page forms. It leverages this information to create bigger and more accurate custom audiences, while also helping you improve campaign conversion rates.

When paired with Dynamic Ads, this tool can be even more powerful. Perfect for e-commerce sellers, these ads deliver personalized content based on the products a customer was looking at while browsing your site. This serves as a helpful reminder of the products they’ve looked at, or it can highlight similar products that they are likely to be interested in.

As just one example, a 2019 Aeropostale campaign using dynamic ads helped the company double its conversion rate and achieve 3.7 times as much revenue as the prior holiday season.

While these tactics can streamline your social media efforts, this doesn’t mean you can let social become a “set it and forget it” part of your marketing. By continuing to analyze your outcomes, introduce new campaigns, and make adjustments based on your audience’s engagement levels, you can continue fine-tuning your social media marketing to grow even more.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Carol Sankar

Carol Sankar is a high-level business consultant and the founder of The Confidence Factor for Women in Leadership–a global executive leadership firm focused on diversity and inclusion initiatives for high-achieving women. Sankar has been featured in TEDx, the Steve Harvey show, the Inc. Women’s Summit, the Society for Human Resource Management, and more.

Soured from Inc.

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How One Swiss Guy Built The World’s Most Popular Cannabis Community On Social Media

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By Javier Hasse

Racking up more than 20 million followers on social media is no easy feat. In fact, it’s one reserved for only the most popular of celebrities and the most viral of meme accounts. However, reaching millions is particularly hard when dealing with cannabis, as limitations around promotion and marketing are especially harsh.

So, how did one guy do this from the comfort of his home in Switzerland?

A Lawyer Turned ‘WeedMan’

Fed up with the entry-level legal job in Switzerland, Marco Cadisch launched a Facebook page and a website to share the interesting, informative, weird, offbeat, and comical aspects of the cannabis world. He started targeting readers in his native Switzerland, but over time shifted his focus to the U.S. market, considerably more advanced than the Swiss market when it came to weed, and substantially more inclined to interacting with cannabis content on social media.

Within three years, Marco’s various social media channels had racked up more than 20 million followers.

Nowadays, Marco is the CEO of this ecosystem, dubbed Highlife Media. The company now specializes in social media marketing and management, influencer marketing, and content creation.

Ever since this project started in 2014, Marco says, his pages have shared more than 100,000 posts. “We know exactly what kind of content works and what [kind does] not,” he explains. “Further, we have ongoing connections with a lot of different websites, big social media pages as well as influencers. Nobody has such a good overview of the online cannabis market like we have.”

An Interesting Business Model

Marco says most agencies in the cannabis industry have to outsource their reach. However, Highlife Media owns 80% of the channels it advertises on. This means the compay can offer better pricing, transparency and flexibility.

But don’t let these words fool you: Highlife’s margins are really good.

“When you look at the established players, 90% or more of them are unable to grow their channels,” he says. “They simply lack the know-how to achieve constant growth. On the other hand, we grow our network a couple 100k followers a month and you will see a big difference when you advertise with us.”

Marco monetizes the traffic in many ways.

“We monetize the traffic on our websites, we do a lot of affiliate marketing, apart from that we promote a lot of different clients in the cannabis industry. For some clients we also fully manage their online marketing activities or we manage some of their social media accounts. We also produce a lot of content and we expand our reach with a lot of influencers in the cannabis industry. We basically upsell their options. Last but not least, I also offer consulting.”

Know The Law

As one might imagine, having a legal background came in handy when navigating the complexities of the cannabis industry.

“If you study law and work in the legal field, you are confronted with a lot of things that are essential to running a business, like setting it up, handling the account, being responsible for taxes, contracts and all that kind of stuff,” Marco says. “I set up the company myself and apart from the accounting, which I outsource, I handle everything myself.”

But formal knowledge is not enough, he adds, explaining he had been a cannabis consumer for more than 10 years before starting his business. “I know how the people in this field operate and how they tick. Even though, as the market progresses it gets more and more professional, the market is unlike any other. I’m sure that if you want to make it to the top you need to live what you preach and that’s what I always do.”

Feature Image Credit: Marco Cadisch, COURTESY PHOTO

By Javier Hasse

Sourced from Forbes

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Not Your Mother’s Marketing: 5 Ways Social Media Changed Marketing Forever

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By Molly Townley.

The marketing landscape has been in a constant state of change for decades – from print ads and billboards to radio, television, and then moving online to digital marketing. It seemed like all there was to say had already been said, and then – social media popped up on the scene.

It didn’t take long for marketers to realize its huge potential. These platforms reached millions, and connected everyone to…well, everyone. Anything you had to say was visible, available, accessible, and sharable to everyone else in a matter of seconds. Then came the true marketing revolution.

Here are 5 ways social media changed marketing forever.

  1. A wider reach than ever before

There are 3.8 billion users on social media, according to recent statistics. That means 3.8 billion people that one can potentially reach through social media marketing.

Never before have brands been able to capture an audience this size, or their audience’s attention for as long as they can now. Marketing used to be limited to opportunities for it – ads in a magazine, on a billboard, on TV, in-person sales pitches – and the limited amount of customers were exposed to it sporadically, only under certain circumstances.

Nowadays, social media practically allows for non-stop marketing, all day, all the time. According to statistics, people spend, on average, just over 2 hours on social media every single day. That’s 2 full hours that marketers have a user’s attention throughout the day. Imagine how many TV ads a viewer would have to watch to achieve the same kind of impact.

The marketing never stops because it’s always there, with every use, and regardless of platform. Whether it’s a post on Facebook, an image on Instagram, or video ads on YouTube, marketers can reach their huge audience at any point, and on any platform.

  1. Unique opportunities for engagement

The most effective way to get someone’s attention and create an emotional response to your brand is to engage with your audience. Since the advent of social media, it’s easier than ever before to connect with customers and followers.

The more you engage with your audience, the more you can grow user engagement on your page. That is going to achieve a couple of things. First, it establishes a degree of relatability that people enjoy in a brand. It allows them to form an emotional connection to a company and its marketing, which in turn, creates brand loyalty.

Second, it helps tremendously with “shareability” – i.e. how likely people are to share your content with others. When you’re responsive, insightful, witty, creative – that gets people’s interest, they appreciate it, and they share it. That increases your audience and your reach.

  1. The ability to target specific audiences

In the past, targeting audiences was still possible, but more limiting. Ad placement during certain TV programs and movies was – and still is – common, to capture the attention of certain audiences. Say, running ads for beer during the Superbowl, or pantyhose during daytime soaps.

Social media helps make this type of specific targeting easier, more precise, and more sophisticated. It’s possible to target specific demographics according to the platform they’re active on, the groups they’re part of or even the hashtags they post in.

A company will know that if they are targeting Boomers, they need to place on Facebook, if they want Millennials, they go to Instagram, and they use Snapchat or TikTok to capture the attention of Gen Z. They can even access interest-specific groups, like wedding groups on Facebook, in order to address users directly.

  1. Seamless marketing

And speaking of non-stop, very precise marketing, marketing on social media also enables one to do so in a very seamless way.

  • Ads

Traditional ads are still present on social media, but they’re integrated into the user interface in such a manner that they look like regular posts. You can pay for actual ads, but there are other, more subtle ways to market, as well.

  • Posts

You can also make your own social media posts marketing your product or service. The bigger your audience and your reach are, the more users will be exposed to your messaging.

  • Influencer posts

Otherwise, you can take advantage of so-called “influencers”. Over the last decade or so, marketing has transformed thanks to the rise of influencers.

They are an exceptional marketing opportunity because the content they produce is not an overt ad. It’s framed as a review or opinion coming from real people that used the products or services and are offering their genuine opinions and experiences.

To gain exposure, a brand may send PR samples for consideration. Or they may pay for a sponsorship. Influencers have large followings of loyal, trusting users, so exposure on a platform like this can be very valuable and lucrative.

  1. More effective tracking

Marketing online and via social media also has invaluable advantages when it comes to tracking and measuring effectiveness. You are likely to see the effects in real-time, by taking a look at the interest and engagement you get on a post, as well as receiving and listening to customer feedback.

You can also track what is being said about your brand specifically, to gain awareness of audience opinions and interests. Following and tracking data this way is called social listening, and it enables you to pay attention to what audiences – and competitors! – are saying and incorporate it into your marketing to increase effectiveness.

In addition, you can plan posts according to what is likely to get maximum engagement and conversions, based on the data you’ve been able to collect, either actively or passively.

Tracking clicks, conversions, and revenue on social media is much easier than with traditional marketing avenues, such as billboards or print ads. You can use tracking software for a detailed breakdown of who is exposed to your marketing, for how long, or how effective your campaign is, and adjust your marketing efforts accordingly.

Final thoughts

Social media took the world by storm in a million ways and changed the way we socialize, and the way we market. Marketing has been made easier, quicker, more effective, more precise – and its full potential has not yet been reached.

Both social media and marketing are constantly changing. Every new platform or feature brings innovation and new opportunities for marketers to leverage and create clever, inspiring, effective campaigns. You have to keep up to stay relevant and retain the valuable attention of your audience.

By Molly Townley.

(email: [email protected])

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