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Advertising must focus on the consumer reality of the downturn

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By Rob Sellars

The marketing and advertising industry has long had a tendency to focus on the next shiny thing that sits on the fringes, promising virtual revolution. From the advent of social, through the questionable promise of VR or NFTs, to the infinite possibilities of the metaverse, many have made their way from the edge of the tech world to the slides of an agency deck.

This isn’t to dispute their worth, but to reflect on the fact that for every presentation or panel about how to utilize the virtual reality of the metaverse, how many focus on the very real and current reality for consumers. The people who we talk to, track and temp. The people who buy products and services we advertise. And now, the people who are in the midst of the harshest personal finance crisis in a generation.

The reality can’t be underestimated. UK inflation has hit a 40-year high of 9.1%, driven by soaring food and energy prices, exacerbating the fall in ‘real’ incomes (after tax and inflation) Brits have experienced since 2021.

YouGov found half of all Brits say their financial situation has become worse in the last month, with one in five already struggling or unable to make ends meet. 5% are already saying “I cannot afford my costs, and often have to go without essentials like food and heating”, up from just 1% last year.

Efforts from Chancellor Rishi Sunak to tackle the crisis were labelled by the Think Tank Resolution Foundation as a “big but poorly targeted policy package” which ultimately will still “see a further 1.3 million people fall into absolute poverty next year, including 500,000 children – the first time Britain has seen such a rise in poverty outside of recessions.”

So as purveyors of goods and services that we hope these same people will exchange their – increasingly restricted – disposable income for, it’s not a huge leap to say that we should take some responsibility and explore ways we can help.

Even if the human case weren’t enough, it’s worth noting that a third of Brits say they can mostly cover essential costs but don’t often have money for luxuries now. With that picture likely to get worse before it gets better, it’s worth considering how quickly your product or service could become one of those unattainable luxuries. The cost of living emergency is a significant crisis with no single solution. But here are some ways we might all be able to help.

B2B: less about cutting costs and more about adding value

It is crucial to hold fast during the crisis and avoid eroding or undermining your hard fought for brand equity. So where possible avoid price and promo strategies that reframe your product and its value in consumers eyes. When consumer confidence and disposable income rise again, you don’t want to be left behind.

Instead, consider other tactics as a business. Offering benefits or points for loyal customers who have long shopped with you shows that loyalty works both ways. Reducing charges for things such as delivery demonstrates that you understand that every pound counts and your willingness to go the extra mile. Or work with retailers and providers to offer free add-ons or savings with every purchase.

Consumer: less about short term pain and more about long term gain

If your prices go up or your products change (see the reported rise in ‘shrinkflation’) make sure you communicate with your consumers as to why, what it might mean for your business, and what it might mean for them.

If, for example, the issues in European supply chains mean you’ve started sourcing locally and therefore that might push up prices, demonstrate the benefit of that to communities and be honest about the impact – good and bad.

Consider other ways you might be able to help your customers save in the long run. Could you offer your product through a subscription service that ultimately saves them money, but also creates one less thing to deal with day-to-day? Are there small elements of added value you can offer, like gifts or free experiences to collect?

And think about those at the sharpest end of the crisis, who don’t know where their next meal might come from or how they’re going to clothe their families, and consider your scope for offering your help to charities, welfare providers and other partners who can put your products to good use.

Importantly demonstrate empathy with what might be happening, but don’t try to commercialise it or take advantage in any way. Our bullshit detectors are at their most sensitive in times of crisis.

Employer: less about pay and more about care

It might be easy to forget that some individuals within our companies will be feeling the impact of the cost of living crisis too. Those who we’re asking to immerse themselves in the metaverse so we look smart in front of a client, might likewise be worrying about their reality as any pay rises or bonuses are quickly outstripped by rising inflation.

So consider how you might be flexible and ready to work with employees on their needs.

For example some might feel the crunch on their home utility costs meaning they would rather be in the office, while conversely others might be less able to afford transport costs and so would rather work at home.

And consider how the benefits you offer to your teams might be able to help ease costs and pressure in certain aspects of their lives. Pay rises might not always be an immediate option, but there are other ways to ease their cost-of-living.

The future will come, the next marketing revolution will inevitably take hold. But here and now, we must consider the reality for our consumers, and the role our brands can play in tackling a very real crisis.

By Rob Sellars

Sourced from The Drum

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In Advertising, Like Art, a Bigger Canvas Makes a Bigger Impact

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By John Long

To create emotion, you’ll need more than a postage stamp

What do Picasso’s Guernica, Michelangelo’s frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and The Godfather have in common? Enormous scale.

Guernica is 11½ feet tall and over 25 feet wide. The Sistine Chapel covers over 12,000 square feet. The Godfather is three hours long. And a big part of their emotional impact comes from these mammoth dimensions.

Sure, you can pull up a snapshot of these masterpieces on Wikipedia or watch a few clips of The Godfather on your smartphone. But you don’t experience them viscerally—not really—until you see them in their original format. And when you do, you never forget it.

So what does that have to do with advertising?

Too many brands today rely too much on media formats that make it difficult, if not impossible, to connect emotionally with their audience. We spend a lot of time worrying about craft and storytelling, as we should. But we should start paying more attention to the mix of media we’re investing in, because it’s hard to inspire emotion when you’re working on a canvas the size of a postage stamp.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, or that art has to be big to have impact. If you’ve ever seen it in person at the Louvre, you know that the Mona Lisa is surprisingly small. But with apologies to Marshall McLuhan, the media is the message. And some media are better than others at stirring emotion.

Here’s why that matters. Emotion sells. It’s science—decades and decades of data and research prove it. According to Psychology Today, brain scans show that “when evaluating brands, consumers primarily use emotions (personal feelings and experiences), rather than information (brand attributes, features, and facts).” Another study found that the most-shared articles from The New York Times are emotional stories. Still another found that ads with emotional content are twice as effective as purely rational messages. And so on.

The bottom line is, we’re all focused on media formats designed for scrolling and browsing and swiping. But brands should also be investing in media that are more conducive to emotional impact.

Here are five:

Out-of-home

It’s hard to imagine Wieden+Kennedy’s Kaepernick campaign without the billboards. Almost all the media I saw about the campaign were actually photos of the out-of-home. W+K could’ve simply posted the image in social—and they did. But a massive billboard in the right place immediately says: “This is important. Stop and look.” And people did. The big canvas mattered.

Longer ad formats

Take a minute to watch this spot for Virgin from Lucky Generals. It’s worth your time and it makes a key point.

It makes you feel something, doesn’t it? And that feeling wouldn’t be the same if it were a :05 or even a :15. I’m sure the talented creatives at Lucky Generals have a :30 in the hopper, and as good as it will be, it won’t be quite as good as this. Every year, the Super Bowl spots that stand out are the ones that are a minute or longer. So if you’re going to take the time to craft filmed advertising, go long.

Long-form films

Branded entertainment is another good vehicle for connecting emotionally with an audience. At LG’s in-house agency, rather than rely solely on short-form ads, we’ve produced a six-part documentary series about some of the most intense—but less well-known—rivalries in college sports. It’s a lot more work to make half a dozen 20-30 minute films than a 30-second spot. But you can tell richer, deeper, more impactful stories when you’ve got more time.

LG Presents: The Rivalries “Melee On The Bay” – Episode #3 :60 Trailer

Immersive or bespoke digital ads

Digital publishers are getting better at incorporating ads into the flow of content. Here’s an example unit from The New York Times app. Rather than cram the ad between paragraphs, it exploits the entire screen—just like a full-page ad in a magazine.

Podcasts

I’m not sure what it is exactly about this medium, but podcasts have proven remarkably effective for brands. Maybe it’s the intimacy of audio, or perhaps it’s because they’re tailored to people’s interests. But this nascent media is creatively coming into its own and presents another way for brands to forge emotional connections with an audience.

By John Long

John Long has held creative leadership positions at Ogilvy, The Economist Group and Huge. He is currently executive creative director at LG’s in-house agency, HS Ad.
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Facebook ads have a problem. It’s called digital redlining.

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By Christianna Silva

In 2021, a Facebook user filed a lawsuit because they didn’t think they were getting a fair shot at viewing advertisements. Wanting to see ads might seem absurd — if you’re anything like me, you want ads off your social media experience at all costs. Still, to a 55-year-old prospective tenant in the Washington, D.C. area, it was about more than a simple publicity blurb on Facebook. It, the plaintiff argued, had grave real-life consequences.

So Neuhtah Opiotennione filed a class-action lawsuit against nine companies that manage various apartment buildings in the D.C. area, alleging that they engaged in “digital housing discrimination” by excluding older people — like her — from viewing advertisements on Facebook. She alleges that because the defendants deliberately excluded people over the age of 50 from viewing their ads — something you could once do on Facebook — she was denied the opportunity to receive certain housing advertisements targeted to younger potential tenants.

“In creating a targeted Facebook advertisement, advertisers can determine who sees their advertisements based on such characteristics as age, gender, location, and preferences,” the lawsuit reads. The plaintiff alleged that rental companies used Facebook’s targeting function to exclude people like her because of her age, instead directing the ads to younger prospective tenants.

David Brody, counsel and senior fellow for privacy and technology at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which filed a brief in favor of the plaintiff, said in a press release that “Facebook is not giving the user what the user wants – Facebook is giving the user what it thinks a demographic stereotype wants. Redlining is discriminatory and unjust whether it takes place online or offline, and we must not allow corporations to blame technology for harmful decisions made by CEOs.”

The case was ultimately dismissed because the judge felt that online targeting of advertisements causes no injury to consumers. However, Ballard Spahr LLP, a law firm that focuses on litigation, securities and regulatory enforcement, business and finance, intellectual property, public finance, and real estate matters, said that the ruling could have a significant impact on how we view discrimination online.

“It seems likely to make it more difficult for private parties to attempt to bring lawsuits related to online ad targeting on social media networks or through methods like paid search,” the firm said. “But, secondarily, we wonder whether it will serve as a barrier to regulatory actions as well.”

Opiotennione v. Bozzuto Mgmt. is just one of many lawsuits against Facebook alleging discrimination. We already know how nefarious these ads can be, from spying on us to collecting our data and creating a world with further devastating partisan divides. But there’s something else harmful going on with ads online, particularly on one of the largest ad platforms ever, Facebook. According to Facebook‘s parent company, Meta, the platform has a total advertising audience of more than two billion people. Any one of them could be missing out on ads — for housing, credit opportunities, and other important issues that impact the wealth gap — due to digital redlining. Here’s why that’s important.

Wait, what is digital redlining?

Traditional redlining is when people and companies purposefully withhold loans and other resources from people who live in specific neighbourhoods. This tends to land along racial and financial divides, and it works to deepen those divides. It can happen online, too.

Digital redlining refers to any use of technology to perpetuate discrimination. It’s how The Greenlining Institute, a California-based organization that works to fix digital redlining, describes the practice of internet companies failing to provide infrastructures for service — such as broadband internet — to lower-income communities, as it’s seen as less profitable to do so.

That kind of digital redlining results in lower-income people having to turn to prepaid plans and other more expensive options for internet while also having to deal with slower speeds than those in wealthier — and often whiter — communities, which have a digital infrastructure. The Greenlining Institute isn’t the only organization working to fix this kind of digital redlining. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is also forming an agency task force focused on combating digital discrimination and promoting equal broadband access nationwide.

But digital redlining also refers to unfair ad-targeting practices. According to the ACLU, online ad-targeting can replicate existing disparities in society, which can exclude people who belong to historically marginalized groups from opportunities for housing, jobs, and credit.

“In today’s digital world, digital redlining has become the new frontier of discrimination, as social media platforms like Facebook and online advertisers have increasingly used personal data to target ads based on race, gender, and other protected traits,” the ACLU said in a press release from January. “This type of online discrimination is harmful and disproportionately impacts people of colour, women, and other marginalized groups, yet courts have held that platforms like Facebook and online advertisers can’t be held accountable for withholding ads for jobs, housing, and credit from certain users. Despite agreements to make sweeping changes to its ad platform, digital redlining still persists on Facebook.”

It’s not that digital redlining is more harmful on Facebook than it is on other online platforms, but, as Galen Sherwin, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, told Mashable, it’s “more prevalent in that Facebook is an industry leader and has such a huge market share here in this space.” Facebook says its algorithm treats everyone equally and the fault lies with its advertisers — advertisers that pay Facebook, and where the majority of its money is made.

“The fact that Facebook has offered these tools that not just permit, but invite advertisers to exclude users based on certain characteristics, including their membership and protected classes is tremendously harmful,” Sherwin said. “And even though there have been some steps to mitigate those harms and to remove the worst or most blatant of the ways in which the platform can operate that way in the housing, employment and credit space, there’s still a really long way to go before that’s eradicated truly from the space.”

Many activists agree that while Facebook has made moves to resolve its ad discrimination problems since a 2016 report from ProPublica, not enough has been done.

How does digital redlining work?

Let’s say a realtor group wants to only share ads for their homes with wealthy, upper-class people who live in upper-class neighbourhoods and exist within upper-class communities, or a restaurant wants to only share ads for an upcoming job opening to specific candidates. When that company chooses a platform like Google or Facebook to push out those ads, it will look for ways to siphon its ad coverage to those specifically targeted groups. Targeting tools on those platforms allow companies to choose who can and cannot see their ads. On Facebook, users can take two general approaches to creating a target audience: specific and broad. Specific targeting can lead to a potential audience that’s smaller, like parents living in Tucson, Arizona, while broad targeting includes categories like gender and age.

After many court-based struggles (we’ll get to that shortly), housing, employment, and credit have been deemed special ad categories. That means they have restricted targeting options in their ads manager. A company looking to place ads for housing, employment, or credit can still target an advertisement to a specific audience instead of just sending it out widely. Still, they can’t do it based on protected characteristics, such as age, gender, and where the potential consumers live. At least, that’s the goal.

Facebook wrote in 2019 that “these ads will not allow targeting by age, gender, zip code, multicultural affinity, or any detailed options describing or appearing to relate to protected characteristics,” like race, sex, religion, national origin, physical disability, or sexual orientation and gender identity. Advertisers for these protected classes can also not use lookalike audiences, a way to reach new people likely to be interested in a business because they are similar to that businesses’ existing customers.

But is that enough?

Morgan Williams, the general counsel of the National Fair Housing Alliance, told Mashable that there are other aspects of Facebook’s platform that cause scrutiny and concern, despite the work Facebook has done. Research from October 2021 pulled from public voting records in North Carolina analysed the impacts of Facebook’s advertisements and found that it has discriminatory outcomes.

“This was true for both the Lookalike Audience tool and the Special Ad Audience tool that Facebook designed to explicitly not use sensitive demographic attributes when finding similar users,” the report read.

“If you were to provide Facebook with a set of names of contacts, [like] your client list, it would then target ads to Facebook users that were of a similar profile as your client list. And in engaging in that targeting, there were certain interest metrics that were specifically concerning, and that, from our perspective, would have segregated targeting of those ads,” Williams said. “In our settlement, we agreed to remove a number of those interest factors and simply allow Facebook to proceed with targeting on the basis of [things like] internet usage, but we still have concerns about this.”

Advertisers on Facebook trying to reach audiences in the U.S. with housing, employment, or credit ads can’t use the lookalike feature, but they can create a special ad audience. That’s an audience based on online behaviour similarities that doesn’t consider things like age, gender, or zip code. But activists argue there might be some shady ways untrustworthy users can target protected traits within a special ad audience, too. For example, you can create a custom audience target by using sources like customer lists, website or app traffic, or engagement on Facebook.

Special ad audiences allow advertisers to give Facebook a seed audience, and then Facebook selects other Facebook users who look like that seed audience. So, advertisers aren’t saying “show this ad to 27 year old queer people who live in Brooklyn,” they’re saying “show this to people like Christianna Silva” — and Christianna Silva happens to be a 27-year-old queer person living in Brooklyn.

Obviously, if your seed audience reflect a certain demographic, the matching audience will also reflect that demographic.

“Obviously, if your seed audience reflect a certain demographic, the matching audience will also reflect that demographic,” Sherwin said. “And while Facebook made some changes to that tool, it did not make significant enough changes and there have been studies since then that demonstrate that, essentially, the patterns of discriminatory output are unchanged.”

Facebook’s ad-delivery algorithm then chooses which users matching those criteria will actually see the ads based on predictions relying on a bunch of user data about who they are, where they live, what they like or post, and what groups they join. While this may seem harmless, it can lead to discrimination because data about who we are, where we live, what we live and post, and what groups we join are indicative of our protected traits.

Is this legal?

To be clear, targeting ads based on protected traits is illegal. Despite this, a 2021 study of discrimination in job ad delivery on Facebook and LinkedIn conducted by independent researchers at the University of Southern California found that Facebook’s ad-delivery system showed different employment ads to women and men, even though the jobs require the same qualifications and the targeting parameters chosen by the advertiser included all genders. This is illegal, but there’s confusion about how Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which is designed to shield platforms from liability for content that users post, and other civil rights laws apply to online ad targeting.

Sherwin, the senior staff attorney with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, told Mashable that Facebook has been hiding behind Section 230 in its litigation. And while the ACLU mostly supports Section 230 and the protections it allows platforms, their position here is that “it doesn’t protect Facebook from this conduct because Facebook itself was the architect of the targeting tools.”

Changes have been made

To its credit, Facebook has made sweeping changes to its ad-delivery system.

A spokesperson for Meta told Mashable that Facebook has made “significant investments” to help prevent discrimination on their ad platforms. The spokesperson’s example was that its terms and advertising policies have “long emphasized” that advertisers cannot use their platform to engage in wrongful discrimination. That feels like a pretty weak point, considering that many may not read the terms and conditions. And, of course, it’s not so much a question of if the user reads the terms as it is whether or not Facebook is policing the rules in it own terms. Facebook says it is, but the platform is famously terrible at policing its own rules — just consider the way misinformation continues to spread on the platform.

Advertisers also can’t use interests, demographics, or behaviours for exclusion targeting. Since advertisers self-report on whether they’re posting ads about jobs and housing and the like, (obviously not a fool proof system), Facebook also uses human reviewers and machine-learning algorithms to identify the ads in case they are incorrectly identified. Meta hasn’t disclosed how well this actually works.

In the U.S., Canada, and the EU, people running housing, employment, or credit ads have to use special advertisement categories with restricted targeting options, including that they aren’t allowed to target by gender, age, or zip code, and must instead target a minimum 15-mile radius from a specific location, the Meta spokesperson said. But Facebook still gives housing providers the ability to target potential renters or homeowners by a radius of a certain place — which, according to the ACLU, is “a clear proxy for race in our still-segregated country.”

Are those changes enough?

The courts have forced Facebook to make plenty of changes. But many activists argue that the steps they’ve taken so far have been far too incremental.

In March 2019, Facebook disabled a feature for housing, credit, and job ads after settling several lawsuits, but algorithms still showed ads to statistically distinct demographic groups even following the move. For instance, one 2021 study showed that a Domino’s pizza ad was shown to more men than women, while an ad for the grocery delivery and pick-up service Instacart was shown to more women than men. The same audit also found that employment advertisements for sales associates for cars on Facebook were shown to more men than women, while more women than men were shown ads for sales associates for jewelry on Facebook.

In one lawsuit, which was dismissed, prospective tenants alleged that Facebook’s advertising platform excluded them from receiving housing advertisements because of their protected characteristics.

“While ad classification will never be perfect, we’re always improving our systems to improve our detection and enforcement over time,” the Meta spokesperson said.

In January 2022, Facebook began removing more targeting options related to topics people may perceive as sensitive, such as options referencing causes, organizations, or public figures that relate to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, or sexual orientation. That’s because you can make some assumptions about protected classes based upon which political affiliation, religion, or sexual orientation topics they “like” on Facebook. This is for all types of ads, according to the Meta spokesperson. Facebook also built a section of its Ad Library that allows users in the U.S. and Canada to search for all active housing, employment, and credit opportunity ads by advertisers and the location they’re targeted to, regardless of whether they’re in the advertiser’s intended audience.

Until Facebook’s appetite changes, much of the work lands upon the shoulders of activists and lawmakers.

“I think making the housing and employment opportunities searchable through the marketplace was one step forward,” Sherwin said. “That takes it out of the advertiser’s hands and puts some control in the hands of the user to affirmatively seek out opportunities rather than relying passively on the Facebook feed.”

Sherwin said it’s an “important step,” but acknowledged that Facebook hasn’t shown “any real appetite to crack the ad delivery algorithm.” After all, advertising income is the bulk of Facebook’s revenue. In 2021, the company made $29 billion through ad sales in the three months ending in June.

Until Facebook’s appetite changes, much of the work lands upon the shoulders of activists and lawmakers. But, hey, we can always delete our profiles.

Feature Image Credit: Mashable / Bob Al-Greene

By Christianna Silva

Sourced from Mashable

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Social Media Has Become Saturated With Ads. How Did We Get Here?

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Sourced from NEWSY

Social media platforms are making much of their revenue off of advertising. So is there anything you can do to avoid seeing these ads?

If you go on social media these days, the second you get to scrolling you’re bombarded with ads. Then when you go to another site, you see the same ones.

Survey Monkey found that even though ads perform well on social platforms — with nearly half of social media users buying something from those ads — 74% of people think there are just too many.

But, that wasn’t always the case.

The first digital ad was an AT&T banner on hotwired.com, now known as Wired, which made its debut in 1994. For over four months, a whopping 44% of people clicked on it, which is definitely not something we’d see today. It was part of AT&T’s larger “You Will” campaign.

It featured futuristic commercials, where people were doing things like using a GPS or video calling, and their predictions actually came true.

It was something that hadn’t been seen before. People were even sharing the link to the ad with friends.

Facebook, now Meta, got its start in 2004, but it didn’t make its first ad deal until 2006 in a partnership with JP Morgan Chase to advertise credit cards. YouTube soon followed, launching ads on their platform in 2007. They first used transparent ads that covered the bottom of the video.

In 2010, Twitter introduced ads. By then, it was already a lot more common to see ads on social media. Instagram and Pinterest would do the same in 2013 and Snapchat in 2014.

Today, digital ads are nearly impossible to avoid.

According to a 2020 study, Facebook and Instagram show more ads on average than any other major social media platform.

For both apps, more than 20% of the posts users see on their feed each time are ads. For Instagram, that roughly breaks down to an ad every four posts or so.

So, is there anything you can do to stop seeing this influx of ads every time you open up your social media?

Reporting them is definitely not the way to go — one study found users who report ads see about 5% more ads than users who don’t.

But cutting down on some of the time you spend on these apps could help a bit. Instagram actually shows more ads to people who spend more time on their app.

Unfortunately, you can’t just turn them off; a lot of these social media sites rely on ad dollars to keep their business running.

In 2020, 97% of Facebook’s global revenue came from advertising.

A lot of companies prefer advertising on these platforms because it’s cheaper, and it works for them.

In a recent report, market research company Million Insights found the global social media advertising market was valued at $103 billion in 2020 and is expected to see an annual growth rate of 12.4% between 2021 and 2028.

Sourced from NEWSY

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It’s Time for Brands to Find Their Voice Again

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By John Long

Three ways to rediscover a critical brand asset

So many brands today sound exactly the same. And that’s because the advertising industry has mostly abandoned one of the most powerful assets a brand can have: a distinctive brand voice. Pick up almost any brand style guide, turn to the tone voice section, and I bet you’ll find some variation of these attributes:

FRIENDLY
OPTIMISTIC
CLEAR
HELPFUL
GENUINE

All that’s missing from this insipid list is “useless.” Who would intentionally craft a brand that’s rude, pessimistic and phony?

Another “tone of voice” steer that pops up a lot in brand guidelines is this classic:

“We’re like that trusted, smart friend who always gives you great advice.”

Sorry, that’s not a brand voice—that’s a content strategy.

Everyone speaking in the same CLEAR and OPTIMISTIC tone giving HELPFUL, FRIENDLY ADVICE is making the work less effective. As Amy Kean observed, to their detriment, brands are all parroting the same vapid marketing speak. And this mind-numbing sea of sameness is obviously the opposite of what strong brands do. Because how a brand sounds is just as important as how it looks.

But there are a few brands that still understand how effective a tool brand voice is. And they’re getting noticed for it. Take Oatly.

It's Time for Brands to Find Their Voice Again
It's Time for Brands to Find Their Voice Again
It's Time for Brands to Find Their Voice Again
It's Time for Brands to Find Their Voice Again

Oatly is milk made from oats—it’s a bit of an oddball product. So they leaned into that weirdness and struck an irreverent, playful, somewhat sarcastic tone. And it’s worked. Whether it’s your cup of tea or not, it certainly stands out. And it’s pretty hard to argue with these results.

Now I’ll toot my own horn a bit—or I should say, David Abbott’s.

When I was leading creative at The Economist Group, I was determined to bring back AMV’s great “white out of red” campaign in social and digital. I couldn’t think of a reason why the iconic brand voice Abbott created for the brand—distinctly British, witty, and confident—wouldn’t work just as well as Instagram posts or banner ads. And sure enough, it did.

So how does one avoid the robotic pablum that’s taken over the industry and create a fresh brand voice? Here are three things to try.

  • A former ECD of mine, Cameron Day, had a particularly ingenious method. To create a brand voice, he combined two familiar, but distinct, personalities. A good example of this is the brand Cam came up with for a gourmet grocery store: “Dr. Seuss meets Dr. Frasier Crane.” So imagine a person who is deeply knowledgeable about fine foods—but delivers it with a dash of whimsy. Here’s what that sounded like. Delicious, yes?
  • Let’s go back to that helpful friend, the one always giving you good advice. To give that imaginary confidant a real voice, you have to ask yourself questions such as:

    Is your friend a man or a woman?
    Is she from New York or New Orleans?
    How old is she?
    Does she have a sense of humour? And is it the smart kind or a bit juvenile?

    In other words, you have to imagine an actual person. Brands are like people, and what makes people memorable and likable works for brands, too.

  • Replace that milquetoast tone of voice list with attributes that will give the voice some real character. And keep the list to two or three, not five. Doesn’t a brand that strives to be “irreverent, playful, and sarcastic” immediately seem more impactful than a brand that’s just “clear, friendly, and genuine”? Of course, you can’t just force random attributes on a brand. You have to unearth something about it that makes the voice seem inevitable. This is harder for some brands, to be sure—especially in certain categories—but it’s worth the effort.

Finally, I’d argue that brand voice is especially important in an era in which the business is more and more reliant on stock photography. If everyone is using the same pool of imagery, one way to stand apart from the pack is to give your brand a unique voice. Don’t settle for FRIENDLY.

By John Long of HS Ad

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5 Things Service-Driven Businesses Can Do To Impress Clients

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By Serenity Gibbons

In today’s world, it’s not enough to just have great products. To stand out, businesses need to find ways to impress customers so they won’t just be willing to buy their products again, but will also be eager to bring their friends along with them next time.

Keeping things simple and effective is essential with any strategy to remain optimally productive. Whether you are just starting or trying to inject new life into your business, it’s always a good idea to have some principles and techniques you can rely on at any given moment.

After all, what we do today determines where we’ll be tomorrow.

1. Change up your ad game.

Advertising is an essential component of almost all business growth strategies. But even though the industry has been around for a long time, the practices companies use rarely keep up with the latest cultural and psychosocial developments. What worked in advertising five years ago may work half as well today. And yet, many companies still aren’t adapting their methods …

As former Google policy director and book author, Tim Hwang, told TechCrunch in 2020, marketers are being fooled by programmatic advertising and misleading measurement systems, high costs and blatant advertising fraud created by fake clicks. He even goes as far as stating that the online ad industry is in need of a “controlled demolition.”

Matt Wasserlauf is the CEO of MyBlockboard, an ad distribution and management platform that eliminates fraudulent views. During a recent conversation, Wasserlauf spoke about two effective strategies to boost the reach of ads that still work in 2022.

“First, original video production is king these days. In a world of social media and thousands of new channels to drive content, good video is lacking. Quality, original production – coupled with effective distribution – is a great way to increase reach and effectiveness,” he said.

“Most importantly, you should find an effective distribution platform. While Google Ads and many other big ad distributors are getting swamped with billions of fake views (at least 25%), there are also providers that only enable real human viewers and thus can save you a lot of money. Choosing the right partner and platform is essential.”

2. Welcome (and respond to) criticism.

As a business scales, it will inevitably have customers who find faults with its products and service. Such criticism might sting, but it’s actually a great sign and opportunity for your business to grow and gain confidence in itself. Politely respond about why the choice was made and you’ll be one step further along to finding your core customer base.

Whether it’s on your website’s review section or social media posts, don’t ignore critical reviews. Instead, use them as a chance to clarify your choices. Be especially mindful of tone while doing this, but when done successfully, you not only diffuse negatively but give deeper insights into your brand’s values.

You can’t please everyone. In fact, attempting to do so might send an overgeneralized and muddled message. Accept that you don’t need everyone on your side — just the right ones.

3. Be transparent.

Transparency about sourcing, design features and deliverability timelines aren’t just nice add-ons in the business world — they have become standard expectations. Business leaders like Elon Musk have made everything from patents to long-term plans open and transparent to the public.

“We believe that applying the open-source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard,” Musk said in a 2014 Tesla blog post. “My money isn’t on the ideas, it’s on the execution.”

This kind of confidence attracts attention and new customers, as it gives the public an unfiltered vision of the brand’s present standing and future path. With the world supply chain still struggling to get fully back on its feet, delays have become incredibly common for virtually all industries. Don’t promise things you know you can’t realistically 100% know to meet.

Be upfront and transparent about where your business is at, and let your customers see behind the curtains a bit. Customers appreciate this kind of candour now more than ever.

4. Be proud of your price point.

If your product and services are quality, then their price will reflect this.

Rather than shy away from the discussion, attempt to downplay the pricing or promise discounts, defend your decision regarding price point proudly. No matter what your industry is, in a digital-first economy people note and appreciate confidence like this. It automatically associates your brand with quality.

If you keep adjusting the price, it’s obvious that it isn’t set in stone and customers will notice. This isn’t a good look, so find a price that prioritizes keeping your business afloat.

5. Don’t be afraid to shake things up.

It’s human nature to fall into a steady rhythm, whether in social media strategy or event schedules. This is all fine and well sometimes, but once a month or so, fly in the face of your normal conventions.

Do something that snaps both your team and customers out of any lull they might have fallen under. Shake up the content type, do an impromptu event or seminar — anything out of the ordinary.

Be silly, be bold and be not only whatever your business is but what it can be. Let the customers who support your brand know that real, breathing humans are behind the wheel. They’ll appreciate this and you’ll learn from their reactions.

Brand authority isn’t built in a day, but it is the culmination of successful strategies applied each day. If you want a future with new and excited customers, then turn your attention to impressing those whose attention you have today.

Feature Image Credit: Keeping things simple and effective is essential with any strategy to remain optimally productive. Getty

By Serenity Gibbons

Check out my website.

Serenity Gibbons is a former assistant editor at The Wall Street Journal. The local unit lead for the NAACP in Northern California and a consultant helping to build diverse workforces, Serenity enjoys gathering insights from people who are creating better workplaces and making a difference in the business world.

Sourced from Forbes

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‘Reading your mind’: How eyes, pupils and heart rate could be used to target ads in the metaverse

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By Aisling Ní Chúláin

If we’ve learned anything about new means of communication over the last century, it’s that where technology attracts people’s eyes and ears, advertisers won’t be long chasing after them.

It’s been the case with radio, cinema, TV, the Internet and social media, so it seems almost impossible that it won’t be the case in the so-called metaverse – the new fully realised, shared universe that companies like Meta are proposing to build.

In perhaps a sign of things to come, a host of brands have already dipped their toes into gaming metaverses, hosting virtual fashion shows and dropping exclusive collections in game.

Luxury fashion houses like Louis Vuitton, Valentino and Marc Jacobs have all designed digital items for the social simulation game Animal Crossing – and Balenciaga has collaborated with Fortnite on an exclusive drop of wearable skins for in-game characters, to name but a few.

‘Think about it as placement in the product instead of product placement’

But now that Meta, a targeted advertising powerhouse, has staked its claim to the metaverse, some experts are raising the alarm about the specific implications immersive advertising will have for user privacy, safety and consent.

“When you think about advertising in XR, you should think about it as placement in the product instead of product placement,” Brittan Heller, counsel with American law firm Foley Hoag and an expert in privacy and safety in immersive environments, told Euronews Next.

“The way that advertising works in these contexts is a little different because you seek out the experiences. You like the experiences,” she explained.

We’re rapidly moving into a space where your intentions and your thoughts are substantial data sets that have technological importance in a way that they didn’t before.

Brittan Heller
Human Rights Counsel – Foley Hoag LLP

“An ad in virtual reality may look like buying a designer jacket for your digital avatar [but] that’s an ad for a clothing company that you are wearing on your body”.

“It may look like buying a game that puts you into Jurassic Park – [but] what better way to advertise the movie franchise than to actually put you in the experience of being in Jurassic Park?”

What is biometric psychography?

The problem here, according to Heller, is that in the metaverse, the capability for harvesting biometric data and using that sensitive data to target ads tailored to you, goes far beyond the considerable amount of data Facebook already uses to build our consumer profiles.

If the technology that Meta is promising comes to fruition, the possibility exists that a form of targeted advertising which tracks involuntary biological responses could be proliferated.

The risk that I think we’ve learnt from Cambridge Analytica is that privacy risks come into play when you have the combination of unanticipated data sets, especially when you’re looking at emerging technology.

Brittan Heller
Human Rights Counsel – Foley Hoag LLP

For VR headsets to work in this environment, Heller says, they will have to be able to track your pupils and your eyes.

This means advertisements could be tailored according to what attracts or holds your visual attention and how you physically respond to it.

Heller has coined a term for this combination of one’s biometric information with targeted advertising: biometric psychography.

If an entity had access to biometric data such as pupil dilation, skin moistness, EKG or heart rate – bodily indicators that happen involuntarily in response to stimuli – and combined it with existing targeted advertising datasets, it would be “akin to reading your mind,” Heller said.

“The type of information you can get from somebody’s pupil dilation, for example – that can tell you whether or not somebody is telling the truth. It can tell you whether or not somebody is sexually attracted to the person that they’re seeing,” she explained.

“We’re rapidly moving into a space where your intentions and your thoughts are substantial data sets that have technological importance in a way that they didn’t before”.

“The risk that I think we’ve learnt from Cambridge Analytica is that privacy risks come into play when you have the combination of unanticipated data sets, especially when you’re looking at emerging technology”.

Regulating the metaverse

Heller believes that biometric laws in the United States are insufficient in protecting users from use or misuse of this kind of data because “biometrics laws in the States are defined by protecting your identity, not protecting your thoughts or your impulses”.

With the metaverse, the risk remains that the pace of development of the technology will outstrip the ability of institutions to regulate them effectively as has arguably been the case with social media platforms.

In light of the fact that companies hoping to build the metaverse are multinational and operate across borders, Heller believes the most effective way to deal with these issues of user protection is a “human rights based approach”.

“There are many stakeholders in this, there’s civil society, there are public groups, there are governments and then there are intergovernmental organisations as well,” she explained.

“A human rights approach has been the way that we’ve been able to bring all of these players and their concerns together and make sure that everybody is heard”.

But what can companies do to protect people in the metaverse?

If tech organisations are serious about guaranteeing users’ digital rights in immersive environments, it will depend on them being open about the technology they are developing.

“I would want companies to be more transparent with the functionality of their technologies, not just their intentions and their business plans, but how this will work,” Heller said.

“That will help lawmakers ask the questions that they need to protect the public and to cooperate with each other for trans border technology”.

By Aisling Ní Chúláin

Sourced from euronews.next

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Why The Ad Industry Needs More Of A Collective Consciousness

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By now, it is little surprise that the programmatic advertising marketplace underwrites lots of nefarious activities, including various forms of ad fraud, organized crime and a variety of publishers of misinformation. But who knew it was all being funded by legitimate advertisers? Apparently, NewsGuard did.

To put some dimension around the role legitimate advertisers play in supporting illegitimate information publishers, NewsGuard teamed with Comcscore to conduct a unique analysis correlating NewsGuard’s database of bad actors with Comscore’s estimates for digital advertising value. The result: advertisers are sending $2.6 billion annually to misinformation sites.

While the report does not make a case that many — if any — advertisers are doing that wilfully, it sheds light on the unintended consequences Madison Avenue plays in disrupting the world’s knowledge by placing programmatic media buys to reach the right audience, but in the wrong places.

“The data underscore the scale at which online misinformation and disinformation is unintentionally bought and paid for by major advertisers, who place their ads on thousands of websites using programmatic advertising, a byzantine, computerized process — leaving brands with little idea where their ads are appearing and what messages they are financing,” NewsGuard states in the report, adding an even more ironic implication: that much of that spending is coming at the expense of authentic publishers of information: newspaper websites.

According to NewsGuard’s analysis of data from eMarketer and the Pew Research Centre, “for every $2.16 in digital advertising sent to legitimate newspapers, U.S. advertisers are sending $1 to misinformation sites.”

Now, after covering media planning and buying for more than 40 years, I know as well as anyone that when it comes to such things, Madison Avenue doesn’t have a collective consciousness — or a conscience — and that the results of this unintended underwriting of bad actors is at worst, simple negligence driven by ignorance, marketplace pragmatism, or most ironic of all, misinformation.

But maybe it’s time for advertisers and agencies to develop more of a collective approach to solving this problem. We are already seeing some signs of that in both individual agency (some of the biggest have already signed up to NewsGuard’s data to create whitelists and blacklists for filtering misinformation sites from their media buys) and industry initiatives like the World Federation of Advertisers GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media).

Those efforts aren’t just good corporate citizenry, but also good business practice. For a variety of reasons, including economics and especially in regard to one of the ad industry’s favourite Holy Grail acronyms: ROAS (return on advertising spending).

How do I know this, because I was also sent an analysis conducted by audience research lab MediaScience, which found that ad spending on legitimate news outlets outperforms ad spending places on illegitimate ones.

The analysis measured 5,350 participants and ran across 42 newspaper print runs and 252 websites for a total of 6,037 unique brand exposures, comparing a variety of brand exposure and lift metrics for ads placed on news publishers vs. ads placed on Facebook and YouTube.

The results:

  • Newspaper ads outperform Facebook ads of all types by up to four times.
  • Combined news formats are twice as effective as combined Facebook formats.
  • Ads in news are as good as (or better than) ads on YouTube.
  • News offers a stronger ROI than social media.

Sourced from MediaPost

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Embarrassing Coca-Cola design fail bemuses the internet

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By ,

Corporate Pride strikes again.

One inevitability of Pride month is what’s (un)affectionately known as Corporate Pride – which, as the name suggests, involves all manner of brands paying lip service to the cause with rainbow logos and the like. One of the slightly more creative efforts this year came from Coca-Cola – but it appears to have backfired spectacularly.

The company’s new custom bottle creator lets users personalise a rainbow-coloured Coca-Cola bottle sticker by entering a word, name or phrase of their choice. But the list of banned phrases, as well as some that are allowed, has proven somewhat questionable. (Check out our best print ads for some bold advertising that actually works.)

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola’s custom bottle creator (Image credit: Coca-Cola)

If the user attempts to create a bottle with one of Coca-Cola’s prohibited words or phrases, they’ll receive the message: “Oops! Looks like the name you requested is not an approved one. Names may not be approved if they’re potentially offensive to other people, trademarked, or celebrity names. We’ve worked hard to get this list right, but sometimes we mess up. If you think this is an error, please contact our Customer Care team. Otherwise, please try again, keep it fun and in the spirit of sharing!”

And, naturally, users have been testing the limits of what Coca-Cola considers “fun and in the spirit of sharing”. In one of many eyebrow-raising examples, ‘White Lives Matter’ = fine, whereas ‘Black Lives Matter’ = not fine.

“We’re continuously refining and improving our Share A Coke personalisation tool to ensure it is used only for its intended purpose,” a Coca-Cola spokesperson told CNN Business. “Actual bottles are not made with words that are inconsistent with the program’s intent. We have clarified in the tool’s preview mode that proposed language may require further review.”

While we appreciate the company’s desire to filter out offensive phrases, one can’t help but wonder whether Coca-Cola’s half-hearted censorship mechanism is actually better than no mechanism at all. Like McDonald’s tasteless coronavirus-themed logo, Coke has ended up, no matter how well-intentioned, with a bonafide marketing fail on its hands. Still, at least it’s in good company this year – who can forget Burger King’s abysmal attempt at humour on International Women’s Day a few months back?

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Sourced from CREATIVE BLOQ

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If You Believe Advertising Works Then Don’t Argue Against the UK HFSS Ad Ban

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By Amelia Torode,

Presenter Vanessa Feltz’s BBC Radio London researcher messaged me last week asking whether I’d be happy to give an industry insider response on-air to the news that, in an effort to curb childhood obesity, the British government had enacted a new watershed TV and online ban on high fat, sugar and salt (HFSS) food advertising.

I’d seen the official industry response, and it had made me uneasy.

The Advertising Association declared themselves to be “dismayed” by the news. The Food and Drink Federation said that they were “disappointed …the proposals would make it difficult to advertise many products that have been carefully reformulated or created in smaller packaging. … Many food and drink companies won’t be able to advertise new product innovations … and larger food-on-the-go, pub and restaurant chains may not be able to tell their customers about their menus.”

Elsewhere, the IAB wrote that the ban “will create untold damage to the advertising industry” and that banning ads online will achieve “next to nothing in terms of reversing children’s obesity rates.” The News Media Association declared the ban “draconian.”

I am aware that I am in a position of privilege in so much as I work as an independent strategy consultant, so I’m not beholden to a global agency network and can consequentially give my opinion and not have toe the party line. But there comes a point when we all have to be honest about what we’re hearing and feeling.

At a fundamental level, we have to make a choice: either we believe advertising works or we don’t.

The moral issue

If we think advertising does work, then we probably shouldn’t be getting to upset about a pre-9 p.m. junk food advertising ban aimed at children. If, however, we believe that advertising doesn’t work then we’re probably in the wrong business.

When I posted about the HFSS ban on Twitter, the strategy community seemed divided and conflicted. I was warned about culture wars, told that “no government should be allowed to tell me what I can eat or drink,” that obesity has nothing to do with advertising. I had Jeremy Bullmore, author and former chairman of JWT London, quoted at me as saying, “Advertising’s role is to provide the best advice to clients to meet their business objectives. It has no remit to take a stance on issues.”

Really? I felt so sure this quote was not something Bullmore would actually say. So I emailed him, and he said the quote is fake.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve never written anything along those lines. It’s meaningless anyway since a company’s known stance on issues can help or impede the meeting of its business objectives,” he responded.

I have also heard a lot of anger at the perceived hypocrisy of our industry. Anger at (unnamed) IPA Effectiveness winners declaring at an ISBA conference that HFSS advertising had no significant effect on consumption.

HFSS food pun intended, our industry wants to have our delicious cake and eat it.

During Cannes Lions, when our industry is heartily patting each other on the back for the brilliance of our social purpose advertising campaigns that have apparently changed hearts and minds around the world, it just seems funny how advertising doesn’t do anything when it comes to HFSS.

Thank you for smoking

There’s a brilliant dark comedy Thank You for Smoking in which Aaron Eckhart, the lobbyist for Big Tobacco, tries to remain a role model for his 12-year-old son while simultaneously doing his job standing up for the cigarette industry. Spoiler alert: He fails.

The language that our industry is using around HFSS and children seems to be remarkably similar to the language the self-titled MOD (Merchants of Death) Squad tobacco, firearms and alcohol lobbyists use in this damning satire. It got me thinking about whether we use the same language back in 2003 when cigarette advertisements were finally banned.

Trying to understand from a client that was grappling with the new implications and impact of the ban, I spoke to Ross Farquhar, CMO of cult mochi ice cream brand Little Moons.

Ross and the Little Moons team worry this ban is devastating. “For a company like McDonald’s, Dominos or Unilever, they can side-step the ban because they can still run brand adverting that doesn’t show product. Our brand isn’t that widely known yet so we can’t do that.”

One of the loopholes would be that a company like McDonalds, so long as they didn’t show hamburgers, would be fine. In fact, they can actually advertise chicken nuggets as those fall within the acceptable HFSS range.

Farquhar’s point was that for a company like Little Moons that has yet to break into the mass mainstream and doesn’t have the brand awareness has to talk about product, especially when it’s a Japanese product that is not very well known. Now they’ve lost that opportunity on television.

There are a number of other loopholes and exceptions. OOH advertising is still permitted; small- and mid-sized businesses with less than 250 employees will not be impacted by the ban. However, Little Moons produces all their ice cream in the U.K., so while they are a small company, their headcount takes them above the magical 249 number and they’re therefore applicable to the new ruling.

My overarching view remains the same. We have the most overweight children in all of Europe. It’s a health time bomb of epic proportions, and we need an honest approach to tackling it, of which advertising is a part. For our industry to deny that advertising can shape desire and prompt purchase is simply mealy-mouthed.

By Amelia Torode

Amelia Torode is a co-founder of The Fawnbrake Collective.

Sourced from ADWEEK

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