editor, Author at Mediastreet

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Four arguments why B2B marketers should spend more on brand building

December 5, 2019 No Comments

B2B marketers can be very focused on the short term, and who can blame them? Sales are putting on the pressure for a constant stream of leads and business leaders have quarterly targets to hit to keep the shareholders at bay.

It’s this short term thinking that means the majority of activity produced by B2B marketing teams is below the line, bottom of the funnel, sales ‘activation’ activity (call it the boring stuff) and not the bigger, fame and brand building advertising activity that the majority of B2C brands seem focus on (the glamorous stuff).

Now, couple this with the fact that the average tenure of a CMO is now just 43 months (and that new incumbent wants to shake things up and make their mark on the business), and it’ll come as no surprise that only 4% of B2B marketing teams measure impact beyond six months.

But a new report from the B2B Institute and LinkedIn, packed with research from Advertising Effectiveness stalwarts Les Binet and Peter Field, says this short-sightedness is damaging the growth potential of B2B brands.

According to ‘The 5 principles of growth in B2B Marketing’, in order to grow, B2B marketers need to start shifting efforts (and budgets) towards a 50/50 split between short term activation activity and long term brand building (the stuff that makes you famous).

However, it’s pretty clear we are starting on the back foot. B2B marketers are incredibly sceptical about the value of brand building and many have a misconstrued view of the effect brand building has on the business.

Just 30% of B2B marketers, for example, believe advertising has an effect on pricing power and only 50% believe reach is a strong predictor of success. It’s pretty clear businesses need to start thinking differently about longer term brand building. But as with any shift, there has to be a strong reason to do so.

So, we have distilled the findings from the report into four arguments you can take to your board/sceptical CMO to convince them to put more budget into longer term brand building, B2B advertising and fame defining campaigns and activities.

Argument one: “Look! You can’t argue with the facts – brand building will build our market share and our bottom line.”

Let’s start with a fundamental rule. The share of voice rule. A rule that has been known and stayed consistent for the last 50 years. The rule goes thus: brands that set their share of voice (share of all category advertising expenditure) above their share of market, will tend to grow.

This has been well known in B2C, but Binet and Field have shown the trend is true in B2B – a 10% extra share of voice, for example, will lead to a rise in market share of 0.7% per year.

Put simply: shout louder than the competition in a way that gets you noticed and you will expand. That alone is worth the investment.

Argument two: “We can kill two birds with one stone with this! Not only will brand building attract new customers, but it’s a great way to reassure our current customers they have made the right choice and feel proud about being our partner.”

Put simply, brands grow in two ways, either by gaining more customers, or by selling more to current customers. In B2B, the focus is often put on the latter thanks to new customer acquisition costs being high. But this piece of research shows us that actually the best way to achieve real growth is to acquire new customers, meaning more has to be put into activity to attract them.

But shifting budgets to attract new customers doesn’t have to come at the cost of current customers – putting money into brand campaigns also helps reassure existing customers they have made the right choice (and means they can show off to their mates in the pub about working with a cool, well known brand.)

Argument three: “Don’t trust me, trust Danny Khaneman! We need to be the brand that is the easiest to choose when a potential customer is shopping around.”

While everyone seems to think B2B buyers are purely rational beings, the truth is just like anyone else, many of the decisions they make are not made on purely rational thoughts or processes but on brands, products and services that are the most ‘mentally available’. As the economist Daniel Kahneman says, “the brain is largely a machine for jumping to conclusions”.

This is due to the Availability Heuristic – a rule that says given the choice between several options, people prefer the one that comes to mind most easily. It’s the reason that when you are shopping you are most likely to pick up Fairy washing up liquid and Kelloggs cornflakes, rather than unknown brands.

Maximising mental availability, or being the easiest brand to choose to buy, is just as important in B2B as in B2C and the best way to do this is to build fame through brand building campaigns.

Argument four: “A suit isn’t a shield for emotions! After all, Business people are people too, they just happen to be at work. So we need to use the power of emotion to ensure people engage with our brand. And guess what? The best way to do that is long term advertising campaigns.”

As a marketer, one of your key aims should be to make people feel positively towards your brand, even if they can’t say why. That comes from creating emotions and feelings around your brand and positioning yourself in a way that becomes more firmly embedded in a buyer’s memory than functional product messages.

This will translate into real business results, thanks to the fact that if we like a brand (or feel a positive emotion towards it) we are more likely to hold positive beliefs about its benefits. And it shows in the results – emotion based, fame building campaigns outperform rational ones by a margin of 10x. Even the tightest CFO can’t say no to that.

B2B marketers need to need to take off those short term blinkers and start thinking about how we build brands that grow, become famous and build the business over the long term. While the short term activation activity is still key, we need to start readdressing the balance and we hope this starts today.

A big thanks to The B2B Institute, LinkedIn, as well as Les Binet and Peter Field, for their excellent research on which this whole article is based. You can download the full research report here.

Feature Image Credit: Building B2B brands

By James Wood

James Wood, head of Earnest Labs, the innovation arm of Earnest

Sourced from The Drum

In News

It’s shockingly difficult to escape the web’s most pervasive dark patterns

December 5, 2019 No Comments

By Hana Habib and Lorrie Cranor

Two Carnegie Mellon researchers write that opting out of online tracking remains incredibly confusing.

You’ve probably encountered a pair of shoes that won’t stop following you around the internet, appearing in advertisements on different sites for weeks.

Today, the vast majority of advertising is targeted—that is, you see an ad because an advertiser thinks that you, specifically, might be interested in what they have to offer. You may have visited a store page for a pair of shoes, or maybe there’s something in your internet browsing history that places you in their target demographic.

While many websites offer a way to opt out of targeted advertisements or unwanted emails, we discovered in our recent research that exercising privacy choices isn’t always easy. But that helped us formulate some simple solutions that could make things easier for users around the web.

Anything but standardized

Our team of research collaborators examined the privacy choices available on 150 English language websites. On each site, we searched for three common types of privacy choices: requests to be removed from—that is, opt out of—email marketing, opt-outs for targeted advertising, and data deletion choices. For each privacy choice, we noted where on the website it was located and the steps required to exercise the choice.

The good news is that most websites do offer relevant opt-outs or data deletion options. Eighty-nine percent of sites with email marketing or targeted advertising offered opt-outs for those practices, and 74% had a way for users to request their data be deleted.

More good news: Nearly all websites had a privacy policy link on their homepage, and many of these policies included privacy choices.

The bad news is that the privacy policies we surveyed were long—on average 3,951 words. They were difficult to read, with only one-third including a table of contents. These policies were written well above the eighth-grade reading level considered appropriate for the general public. Worse, the sections containing privacy choices were even harder to read and understand than the rest of the policy, requiring university-level reading ability.

Key terms aren’t standardized across privacy policies on different sites. When we examined privacy policy section headings, we looked for phrases that appeared in multiple policies, such as “your choices” and “opt out.” Unfortunately, we did not find much consistency.

That makes it difficult for users to scan or search for key words or phrases that might help them understand their options. Users would benefit from standardized language across all websites that describes their privacy choices.

Even when a user manages to find a site’s privacy choices, it may not be clear how to use them.

We learned that some opt-out links, instead of leading to an opt-out tool, went to the homepage of an advertising industry association that hosts an opt-out tool, but elsewhere on the site. Other links were broken. Some policies contained multiple links to various advertising opt-outs, but the sites didn’t explain the differences between the links or whether a user would need to visit one or all of them.

One particular website we encountered, Salesforce, linked to six different advertising opt-out tools. In our view, users should not have to parse a website’s complicated third-party relationships; the websites themselves should make it easy for users to opt out of targeted advertising, no matter who is serving it.

Uncertain effects

Once someone does manage to opt out, it’s not always clear what will happen.

Most websites we visited did not tell users exactly what they could opt out of. Some websites let users request not to be tracked for advertising, while others allow users to opt out of targeted advertising but not the tracking. In this case, a hypothetical shoe ad wouldn’t appear on the site, but the company advertising the shoes may learn that you visited the site.

Only about half of the websites that offered opt-outs for targeted advertising explained whether opting out of seeing targeted ads also meant that users would not be tracked. Users might believe they are protecting themselves from tracking when in fact they are not.

Even when the choices are clear, the pages are not always easy to use.

For example, to opt out of all of Amazon’s email communications, we had to scroll past a list of 79 options before seeing the option to “opt out of all marketing.”

At the New York Times, deleting the data they’d gathered on us required completing 38 different actions, including finding and reading the privacy policy, following a link to the data deletion request form, selecting a request type, selecting up to 22 checkboxes, filling in eight form fields, selecting four additional confirmation boxes, and completing an “I am not a robot” test.

Even if these design decisions are unintentional, companies are effectively deterring their users from exercising privacy choices.

Consistency is key

When it comes to digital privacy, we think consistency is key.

Websites need to provide choices that are easy to find, understand, and use. They should simplify things by offering one-click opt-out options that consolidate multiple links and dozens of options.

It should go without saying that the opt-out links need to actually work.

If websites offer users the ability to make fine-grained choices, it would be helpful to put them all in one place and adopt consistent terminology.

Furthermore, websites need to clarify what opt-out options do.

And perhaps most important, regulators should hold companies accountable not only for offering choices, but for choices that are specific and that consumers can actually use.

Feature Image Credit: [Photo: Deagreez/iStock; AzFree/IStock]

By Hana Habib and Lorrie Cranor

Hana Habib is a graduate research assistant at Carnegie Mellon’s Institute for Software Research. Lorrie Cranor is a professor of computer science and of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. This article is republished from The Conversation.

Sourced from Fast Company

In News

Unilever and Kraft Heinz criticized by lawmaker over porn site advertising

December 4, 2019 No Comments

By Lucy Handley

Consumer goods giants Kraft Heinz and Unilever have been criticized for advertising products on Pornhub, a site where users can upload and watch pornographic video content.

According to a report by British newspaper The Sunday Times, advertising for the Unilever-owned Dollar Shave Club ran on the site earlier this year, with one ad stating: “If you use our bathroom products you won’t have to visit this site as much.” A campaign for Kraft Heinz frozen food brand Devour ran on Pornhub in January, stating “Hot food porn. Never just eat, devour,” according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Pornhub does not permit videos of under-18s or those that show violence and says it removes any such content, but The Sunday Times found clips of school girls that were secretly filmed, and men performing sex acts in front of teenagers on buses.

In an email to CNBC, a Unilever spokesperson said the company does not support advertising on porn websites and is “extremely concerned” about the reported ads from Dollar Shave Club, adding that the company retains operational independence since being acquired by Unilever in 2016. The spokesperson confirmed that Dollar Shave Club ran a short campaign on Pornhub earlier this year, but said Unilever was not aware of it at the time, or of the specific ad mentioned.

Kraft Heinz took over Pornhub’s homepage with its “food porn” campaign for one day in January, as part of its wider Super Bowl ad activity, which it described at the time as an “unconventional and provocative advertising campaign,” in an online release. A spokesperson for Kraft Heinz confirmed to CNBC via email it had run advertising for Devour on the Pornhub site for one day earlier this year.

“Kraft Heinz has pledged not to advertise or promote any of its brands on this site or other similar sites,” the spokesperson added. “The brand was explicitly talking about #Foodporn, which has become a cultural phenomenon on Instagram.”

Labour party politician Yvette Cooper, chair of the home affairs committee, a cross-party organization that monitors Britain’s interior ministry, said the findings were “horrendous” and called for a police investigation. “This material is illegal and dangerous. There is no excuse for complacency or claiming ignorance when children are being put at risk by the proliferation of this poison,” she told The Sunday Times.

A spokesperson for Pornhub said the site has a team of reviewers who monitor videos and report illegal content to the authorities, in an email to CNBC. “Child sex abuse material is horrific, disgusting and illegal content that must be eradicated by any means necessary,” the spokesperson added.

The spokesperson said that videos described as “hidden camera footage” are often legal, consensual and professionally produced to cater to particular tastes.

Brands are very particular about where their ads appear, with Disney, AT&T and Nestle withdrawing campaigns from YouTube in February for fear of appearing next to inappropriate content, and removing ads from Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” after the host’s comments on immigration last December.

Meanwhile, Unilever is a member of the “Unstereotype Alliance,” a body of advertisers and the United Nations that formed in 2017 to “eradicate outdated stereotypes in advertising.”

Pornhub claims to average 100 billion video views a year, with 100 million daily visits. It also operates the YouPorn and Redtube adult content sites.

The Unilever spokesperson added: “This type of content is deeply troubling, and we will ensure that none of our brands advertise on Pornhub again, or on any other porn websites. Dollar Shave Club has also confirmed that they will not advertise with Pornhub again, or on any other porn websites.”

Feature Image Credit: A still from an ad campaign for Devour, a food brand owned by Kraft Heinz. The company has been criticized for running adverts on a porn site in January 2019. Kraft Heinz

By Lucy Handley

Sourced from CNBC

In News

New Google Data Shows What Matters Most to Online Shoppers

December 4, 2019 No Comments

By Peter Roesler.

Google surveyed consumers around the world to find out which factors drive people to make an online purchase.

It’s November, and the official start of the holiday season is right around the corner. In fact, some consumers began their holiday shopping back in October. However, the biggest shopping days of the season are still ahead of us, and business owners need to think about the best ways to create effective online marketing campaigns. To help business owners and marketers achieve their goals for the 2019 holiday season, Google has released some data about consumer behavior and how to create online campaigns that move people to action.

Google conducted a study in four international markets to help identify the things that matter most to consumers in that region. The data provides insight into shopper motivations in the U.S., U.K., India, and Brazil.

Contrary to what many people think, social media isn’t the grand motivator that some marketers think that it is. Social media content can increase awareness about a product. However, simply having something on Facebook or having an Instagram influencer promote the product isn’t enough to sway hearts and minds. After years of being bombarded with products and images on social media, many consumers in the U.S. are looking for more when they make online purchases.

Most Americans consider getting a good price on a high-quality item is more important than other factors. When ranking the factors that matter most to them, Google’s survey respondents noted that getting the lowest price for an item, free shipping, as well as deals and discounts are what motivate Americans the most when it comes to shopping online.

In the report, Google suggests, “When you can beat the competition, make sure you show it. And keep an eye on the market to get a sense of what specific products might be worth undercutting.” The report also notes, “Consumers in the U.S. are much more interested in fast shipping times than in-store pickup.”

The responses from the survey participants also showed how popular online shopping is with consumers in the U.S. For example, the average user bought more than four items of hard goods (i.e., not digital purchases) every month Similarly, the average person spent more than $150 on recent online shopping trips. The survey was conducted in October, so the rate purchase and the amount spent is likely to increase in months like November and December.

Marketers may be surprised by which things mattered to consumers. For example, having the ingredients listed for a product is more important than popularity on social media and even more important than recommendations from family and friends or loyalty rewards program.

For the most part, consumers in the U.K. were motivated by the same things that North American’s found enticing. However, because of the different tax systems in Europe, and the international shipping needed for many online transactions, U.K shoppers need to pay attention to other factors that could raise the price beyond what the person is willing to pay.

As Google stated in the report, “U.K. shoppers may pay more attention to customs, taxes, and shipping times in the near future, which might affect the rank and order of their values.”

Marketers should look at this recent report from Google to figure out what matters most for their target audience and for the goods they sell. The document breaks up the results for hard goods, soft goods, and everyday essentials. Using this data can help marketers create more compelling online campaigns.

For more information about tools that marketers can use to create better campaigns this holiday season, read this article on new ad options from Google.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Peter Roesler

Sourced from Inc.

In News

Ex-Facebook head says company ‘profits partly by amplifying lies’

December 3, 2019 No Comments

By Matt Binder.

Facebook’s former head of Global Elections Integrity Ops left after six months on the job — and now she’s speaking out about the problems she faced when trying to fix the company’s political ad problems.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post on Monday, Yaël Eisenstat, who joined Facebook after working with the CIA and the White House, says she tried to sound the alarm at the company leading up to the 2016 election. Recently, Facebook said it would let politicians lie in ads in the name of “free expression.”

“I didn’t think I was going to change the company,” wrote Eisenstat. “But I wanted to help Facebook think through the very challenging questions of what role it plays in politics, in the United States and around the world, and the best way to ensure that it is not harming democracy.”

Eisenstat explained that while employed at Facebook, she saw firsthand how ad tools and features were misunderstood by users and how the company pushed back on any suggested moves to fix the problem.

She said that she believes that when the company approves political advertisers, and provides them with a checkmark and a “paid for” label, it adds credibility to the posts. In reality, Facebook and its partners don’t fact-check any of this content.

“The real problem is that Facebook profits partly by amplifying lies and selling dangerous targeting tools…” “The real problem is that Facebook profits partly by amplifying lies and selling dangerous targeting tools that allow political operatives to engage in a new level of information warfare. Its business model exploits our data to let advertisers custom-target people, show us each a different version of the truth and manipulate us with hyper-customized ads — ads that, as of two weeks ago, can contain blatantly false and debunked information if they’re run by a political campaign,” she continued. “As long as Facebook prioritizes profit over healthy discourse, they can’t avoid damaging democracies.”

According to Eisenstat, many of her Facebook colleagues agreed with her push to fix some of these political advertising issues. They still do, according to a recent letter signed by hundreds of Facebook employees.

Facebook’s leadership, however, did not agree.

“Ultimately, I was not empowered to do the job I was hired to do, and I left within six months,” she says.

In addition to sharing her own experience at the company, Eisenstat makes the case as to why Facebook’s ad transparency tools don’t cut it.

“True transparency would include information about the tools that differentiate advertising on Facebook from traditional print and television, and in fact make it more dangerous: Can I see if a political advertiser used the custom audience tool, and if so, if my email address was uploaded? Can I see what look-alike audience advertisers are seeking? Can I see a true, verified name of the advertiser in the disclaimer? Can I see if and how your algorithms amplified the ad?” she writes. “If not, the claim that Facebook is simply providing a level playing field for free expression is a myth.”

Eisenstat doesn’t believe in an outright ban on political advertising, as companies like Twitter have instituted. However, she believes the time for the government to step in and regulate the social media platform is well overdue.

Feature Image Credit:Facebook’s former head of Global Elections Integrity Ops is speaking out about her time at the company. Image: chesnot / Getty Images

By Matt Binder

Sourced from Mashable

In News

Four arguments why B2B marketers should spend more on brand building

December 3, 2019 No Comments