Mediastreet
Tag

Agency

Browsing
In News

KPMG Australia steps up the battle of the consultancies with launch of CMO advisory business

No Comments

By Danielle Long

KPMG Australia has become the latest management consultancy to launch a specialist marketing advisory team targeting chief marketing officers.

KPMG has appointed Carmen Bekker as a partner to launch its CMO advisory team, which is part of the firm’s customer, brand & marketing advisory business.

Bekker brings 20 years experience working on leading international brands in the UK, Europe and Australia. Her previous roles include management partner and European marketing director for J Walter Thomson London as well as business director at Saatchi & Saatchi in London and Sydney.

Bekker said her role was to help CMOs and brand leaders to grow their businesses by providing new perspectives and leveraging best international practice, however, she also plans to focus on championing diversity.

“CMOs and brand leaders have a huge responsibility to consistently deliver and innovate for their organisations in today’s rapidly changing environment. They face challenges from global trends as they navigate the new world, including media transparency, marketing spend accountability, and creating meaningful customer engagement.

“I will champion diversity within the wider industry with a focus on female leadership, and also on diversity in the work that brands create when marketing to customers. Australia has all the ingredients to be an innovative leader within the global marketing sector, and I look forward to playing a role in this at KPMG,” she added.

Bekker is the latest senior hire to join KPMG’s customer, brand & marketing advisory business, which launched in June following the firm’s acquisition of research company Acuity Research and Insights.

The division also includes former Google industry leader for mobile and new business development Lisa Bora, ex-Virgin Australia chief customer officer Mark Hassell and former Telstra GM of Business to Business IT Melanie Evans.

Paul Howes, partner in charge of KPMG’s customer, brand & marketing advisory, said the division had experienced “rapid growth” since launching. “Our practice has proven there is increasing demand for new approaches in Australia’s marketing landscape. The launch of a new CMO Advisory practice under Carmen will take our business to the next level as we move into 2018.”

Consultancy companies have been ramping up their marketing divisions across APAC this year. PwC has appointed a host of former advertising executives to its CMO advisory including former Network Ten executive general manager Russel Howcroft who joined as chief creative officer in 2016. It also follows Accenture’s acquisition of creative hotshop The Monkeys earlier this year.

By Danielle Long

Sourced from THEDRUM

Read More
By
In News

It’s all in the name: luxury is about signalling status

No Comments

By Rob Wilson

Brands are the engines of the luxury market. The red-soled Louboutins, the Mulberry tree, the Ferrari horse… without them, would people still buy the products they are emblazoned on? Maybe, but certainly not as many.

Luxury has always been about signalling status. Therefore, as a concept it is always evolving as people’s ideas about what confers status change. From the opulent luxury of most of the 20th century, recent years seem to have shifted to less conspicuous forms of consumption. This presents a challenge to luxury brands. Now they not only have to emphasise their quality, but also demonstrate their credentials in other ways that will appeal to the less conspicuous luxury consumer.

Marketers have often targeted campaigns at people based on broad demographic factors – their age, their gender – but we have found a much more effective way is to connect with people through their passion points. Whether that’s football, food or fashion, if you can connect to people through one of their passions it will create a much stronger connection between them and the brand. Through connecting with these communities of shared interest, you can also have a more effective influencer strategy. Whether you work with more traditional celebrities or social media stars, by targeting a particular community of interest you can ensure your influencers feel truly relevant to your target consumer. When we worked with Breitling to launch its flagship store, we worked with celebrities that were truly relevant to its target audience, whereas when we launched Garnier Moisture Bomb we worked with everyday women as that is who was relevant for its brand and the community it wanted to talk to.

Luxury brands need to appeal to younger audiences or risk falling sales. Luxury brands can often be seen as outdated to younger generations because of product perceptions or the heritage they celebrate. We are working with Johnnie Walker to help it change perceptions of whisky as a drink that isn’t for everyone and open it up to new audiences. Delivering campaigns globally, we are helping it highlight the different ways and different occasions to drink Johnnie Walker, emphasising that it is a drink for everyone and anyone.

To recruit younger audiences, luxury brands need to respond to our changing spending habits. We are living in the experience economy. The latest figures from Barclaycard, which processes around half of all of the UK’s credit and debit transactions, show a rise of 20% in spending in pubs in April this year compared to last year, with restaurants, theatres and cinemas also seeing rises. More than ever, the experience a brand delivers is key to convincing people to part with their cash and when your product has a luxury price tag, people expect a luxury experience.

Through research we conducted for one of our luxury clients, we found that the retail experience is a particularly important part of the buying journey for luxury consumers. Across the range of different people we spoke to, most expressed a desire for a personal experience, where needs could be openly discussed, as well as a rich experience where they could learn about the brand stories and values underpinning a product. If a brand can achieve both these things they are much more likely to convert.

Every bit of the brand experience, from in-store to brand communications, online to packaging matters, is an opportunity for a luxury brand to damage its luxury reputation. Whether that’s a bad retail environment or a piece of packaging that doesn’t feel as hand crafted and special as the product it contains, it is very easy for brands to lose their luxury status in the minds of potential buyers.

Delivering a total luxury experience wherever a consumer interacts with your brand is a difficult task, but it is a must for luxury brands. Some luxury brands are embracing the experience economy already – this summer Cartier partnered with the London Design Museum to curate an exhibition called Cartier in Motion, telling the story of their unique approach to watchmaking and the evolution of the modern wristwatch. We will see more luxury brands turning to experiential marketing in the future.

Luxury is a highly emotive concept. It is all about the experience, the touch, the taste, how it makes you feel. And it is all too easy to break the luxury feel at some point in the experience a consumer has of your brand.

By Rob Wilson

Rob Wilson is strategy and creative director at RPM.

This article was originally published in The Drum Network luxury special. You can get your hands on a copy here. To be featured in the next special focused on the charity sector, please contact [email protected].

Sourced from THEDRUM

Read More
By
In News

WPP dismissive of Deloitte and Accenture’s ‘creative’ aspirations

No Comments

By Stephen Lepitak

The world’s largest agency group, WPP, has dismissed the apparent threat from consultancies such as Accenture and Deloitte which have begun to acquire creative shops to grow into the advertising and design sectors to service their clients.

While releasing its latest financial results, the WPP statement addressed the changing nature of the advertising market, highlighting three ways in which the industry is changing. On the rise of tech and search platforms such as Google (understood to now be WPP’s largest partner), Facebook and Amazon, it said that the former two companies had, in recent times, become “friendlier” as they have become key media partners for the network that is an important client to each entity. Another change the report spotlighted was client consolidation by major companies such as Unilever and P&G, probably the most important change taking place at the moment, forcing consolidation within the networks and cost cutting to match the lower budget spend from each FMCG conglomerate.

The third change was with the consultancies moving into the space by acquiring “small agencies” and talent. The report stated that only “two or three” such businesses were currently capable of competing.

It continued: “Most agencies report, including ourselves, that even when they do compete directly with the consultancies on digital projects, the win/loss records are consistently strong, particularly given the continuing importance of the creative dimension for success.”

It then continued to question whether such companies were capable of buying a culture of creativity and claimed that the press had “wildly” overestimated their digital marketing revenue in comparison to the holding companies and agencies.

“Where the consultancies may have made some inroads is their focus not so much on the digital area, but more importantly on client concerns about cost. Very few CEOs will resist the suggestion that they may be overspending and the promise of an audit or review that will only cost a proportion of any cost savings generated or a contingency fee,” the report said. “So, it may well be, that consultant activity is having some impact, not so much in the digital area, but more because of an emphasis on cost containment.”

WPP consultancy graph comparison

WPP reported an increase in revenue of 1.1% at £3.649bn for its third quarter and reported revenue up 8.9% at £11.053bn for the nine month period overall.

By Stephen Lepitak

Sourced from THEDRUM

Read More
By
In News

The future of media agencies

No Comments

By Sam Garrity

Media agencies are facing the greatest level of disruption in our vertical we have ever seen.

I mean bigger than when we decoupled creative agencies from media buying agencies, when we were back in the day when everything was full-service, and bigger than the event of digital advertising and digital media in itself.

That moment when agencies like us were born, with new capabilities that the market did not have. This is bigger than that, because it’s fundamentally about the root-to-branch adoption of digital technology, and changes within the media landscape that affect the entire advertising and publishing supply chain.

How digital adoption effects the advertising and publishing chain

From a media owner perspective – and I’m not just talking publisher here, I’m talking about television, outdoor, radio – there are pressures upon these media owners right now to trade their inventory in a different way. That means changes to their technology, changes to their actual business plan, the way that they run their company.

Advertisers, thinking about them as businesses, they’re the driving force behind these changes that I want to talk about. They are going through transformational changes, which mean that they need a different type of agency today, right now. These pressures, either side of us from businesses, brands, advertisers and on the media/owner side, it’s meaning that a new type of agency needs to evolve right now. At an individual level, that sets a challenge for all of us in terms of the type of marketer we are going to need to become.

Where this is already happening

These are tectonic changes I’m talking about, and if you keep your eyes open, it’s happening right in front of you, in the headlines of our trade press, every single day.

Accenture, in terms of digital, have historically been involved in the big transformational discussions with the C-suite. They have now purchased businesses like The Monkeys and Karmarama. These businesses now, they are big players across the entire advertising supply chain, and within digital transformation. They are in our world. Huge networks, like Dentsu Aegis, have purchased Merkle. The agency landscape is completely changing.

The catalysts behind this movement

Buying people in real time

Firstly, this is about the personalisation of media. It’s about the fact that now, through technology, through digital advertising, we’re interested in buying people in real time for advertisers. We don’t want to buy a huge, expensive television slot with dramatic amounts of wastage. We want to buy people in real time, based upon data that we know about them.

The necessity of digital transformation

Digital, and specifically technological changes, is placing a transformational necessity upon companies globally. It’s about the experience they provide to consumers. Think about it; where do you set the bar?

How should we execute media buying in the future?

Let’s have a quick look at how we might execute media buying looking forwards. To some extent, this is in play right now. From a data perspective, you have things like analytics, CRM, first- and third-party data, all being fed into something like a data management platform, where we segment an audience based upon their propensity to do business with an advertiser, which we then feed into our ad tech, and we purchase media.

I’m talking about buying people in real time. We can now buy TV. We, as a business, as an agency, we’ve purchased radio, using data. These doors are opening for us, as an agency, and for advertisers. And this is what it’s going to look like. We’ll be trading across the entire piece, in real time. This is a data-activated, omni-channel buying machine. It’s about an experience. You want to be plumbing in personalised creative into all this. This is about a digital experience, that we would execute on behalf of an advertiser.

What type of marketers do we need to be?

This new world that we’re talking about, where transformation is taking place, and where there is a need for a new type of media and creative agency, it’s causing debate at the minute within our industry, about what type of marketer do we need to be?

Some people are saying, we need to be left-brained. Left-brained, think probably historically Accenture, mathematics.

Some people believe we need to be right-brained, which is creative. It’s the realm of traditional marketing. That is intuition, right-brain, but I’m with my counterpart at Accenture Interactive, who believes we need to be whole-brained marketers. The whole-brained marketer needs to exist within a framework like this, where analytics, CRM, media buying and creative augment a central pillar of activity, which is based around the transformational element, the strategy and, obviously comms. It has data at its core, and it also concerns itself perpetually with every single output around customer experience. That must sit at the very core of any organisational structure.

What my message is really about, and what I want to kind of get home to you all is that we will not be digital marketing agencies in the very near future. I don’t believe we’ll even be a marketing or a media agency in the very near future. I think we are now in the business of providing a customer experience. The quicker our industry orientates itself around that central theme, I think the quicker we’re going to mirror the type of value that our clients so desperately need, as they themselves transform

By Sam Garrity

Sam Garrity is managing director at RocketMill.

Sourced from THEDRUM

Read More
By
In News

Facebook exec says focus on mobile helps soften the impact of FMCG giant’s reduced digital spend

No Comments

By Shawn Lim.

As the world’s biggest advertisers like Unilever and Proctor & Gamble continue to operate on lower advertising budgets and spend less on media buys in 2017, Facebook believes that putting its faith in mobile advertising will help it ride the storm going into the next year.

Ever since P&G’s top marketer Marc Pritchard announced that the Ariel and Pampers advertiser will review all of its agency contracts and called for more transparency in the media supply chain at the start of year, the advertising industry has seen some major shakeups.

Unilever dropped half of its creative agencies under its employment and reduced spend to $200m, while P&G reduced up to $140m of its ad spend and stopped investing in areas where it was unsafe for its brands, on top of its move to stop targeted ads on Facebook in 2016.

The cutbacks by the FMCG giants were necessary to clean up the supply chain and remove fraudulent inventory, acknowledges William Platt-Higgins, vice president, global client partnerships at Facebook in an interview with The Drum in Singapore, and notes that it is in everybody’s interest that fraud be eliminated from the ecosystem.

“We have seen various marketers and agencies taking a hard stance on this publicly and some clients very surgically try and cut out as much of that as possible. They have done so without any negative impact on their business because the inventory that they are weeding out is actually not good inventory to begin with,” explains Platt-Higgins.

“It won’t be eliminated completely, but I think all the clients that we work with in all regions of the world are focused on reducing fraud as much as they can and getting transparency into the supply chain by using third party verification.”

While Facebook has previously come under fire for reporting miscalculated metrics and for a lack of transparency because of its closed marketplace around its user data, brands and agencies still trust the social media giant, according to Platt-Higgins, which is why all Facebook verticals are growing, including FMCG.

He also accuses critics of being green-eyed about Facebook’s strong, growing partnership with P&G and other big FMCGs, claiming that it is being brought earlier into the creative and strategy planning stages.

“They (Unilever and P&G) are very focused on maximising value for their investments and cleaning up as much of their supply as they can. They are looking to hold all media choices, not just digital media choices accountable,’ says Platt-Higgins.

“One of the things we are starting to hear is the advantage of any digital investment is it is more measurable than traditional offline investments. Digital channels, because they are measurable, the amount of data available on their efficacy and attribution to sales is large.

“What we are seeing from these conversations is ‘It is great that I am holding all my digital investments super accountable, because that is the right thing to do and I want to hold all my other investments as accountable as well’. What you will see increasingly is that investments will flow to media channels that are providing the higher returns of investment and the higher value, and they will recede from those that aren’t.

He also repeats a well-trotted out company line about its closed marketplace, as he says that the Facebook ecosystem does not qualify it as a ‘walled garden’. He explains that people are jealous of the quality of its data and its desire to protect its data, which comes as a result of its commitment to user privacy.

“We certainly hear it (walled gardens) and I don’t think that we would agree with that,” he adds, adding that the requests tend to boil down to various people or entities wanting more data on individuals, which breaches Facebook’s terms of service and the trust that people give when they join.

“That is something that we will and must protect. So that’s our stance on it,” asserts Platt-Higgins.

Quoting a book called ‘How Brands Grow’ by professor Byron Sharp at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Platt-Higgins says Sharp’s words inspired Facebook to shift its focus to mobile advertising to cope with the FMCG giants’ lower ad spend and media buys. Sharp wrote that in order for brands to grow they need to bring new users into the franchise, and that consumers are not uniquely loyal to brands and instead tend to shop on a ‘consumer regiment’ of products because of mental and physical availability.

He claims that this approach by Facebook has seen it reach 500,000 households in the Philippines for Nestle’s all-purpose cream product campaign using Facebook and Instagram. While in the UK, 37 FMCG campaigns that made use of its tools drove a 3.7% increase in sales, and of those people buying those products 60% were non-brand buyers. In the US, 200 campaigns on Facebook and Instagram drove an increase in household penetration, bringing new users in 72% of the time.

“Over the last number of years, as people shifted to mobile devices, the concept of both mental and physical availability has changed. If you are in the business of growing your brand, what you need to master is mobile marketing,” says Platt-Higgins.

“This is where we have been spending most of our time. Not only is Facebook and Instagram driving sales, but they are disproportionately driving household penetration and bringing new users in because of mobile.

“In Indonesia or India, where there might be power outages from television, the opportunity to reach people with mobile and bring top-of-mind awareness and mental availability is huge.”

However, Platt-Higgins admits that simply porting assets from television onto mobile does not necessarily work and Facebook is constantly reminding itself that the way people consume content is different. He adds that if a brand is not building for the mobile environment intentionally and with craft, care, seniority, thoughtfulness and senior stakeholder-management stewardship, as well as optimising for mobile, then it is a missed opportunity.

“Brands need to optimise in three areas. One is the reach, where often what we find is that clients have gone too narrow with their reach and that can be a drag on their results. We see that the frequency is not optimised and not reaching people enough or too often. The most important thing is how the creative is being optimised for mobile,” explains Platt-Higgins.

“We spend a lot of time trying to audit and show whether or not the work has been optimised for mobile and if it has, how we can make it even better.

“If we can get those three things right, we find that we can disproportionately drive sales and Facebook has a direct attribution to sales. That is the only equation that people are interested in.”

Platt-Higgins’ advice on mobile certainly carry weight, as a report by eMarketer found that FMCG brands are expected to invest 28% more in mobile advertising in 2017 in the UK.

By Shawn Lim

Sourced from THEDRUM

Read More
By
In News

Will marketing agencies always be nothing but sweatshops?

No Comments

By Samuel Scott.

There are so many slaves in the marketing industry that we should create an underground railroad beneath all our office buildings.

Following the recent news that the Japanese advertising firm Dentsu has been charged in the suicide of an illegally overworked employee, I collected stories from my own personal experiences, what I have read in the press, and what others have told me or posted online. Identifying specifics and situations have been removed. The anecdotes are from several countries.

But first, I will present data that compares agency and in-house salaries in the PR, advertising, and digital worlds in the UK, US, and Canada. (For those who want more information, the UK recruitment agency Major Players partnered with The Drum to release this 2017 salary report as well.)

The salaries

Public relations

The Works PR and communications recruitment agency in the UK conducts a salary survey every year. Here is part of the 2016 findings:

For the US, I pulled data from PayScale. The chart in the top left corner shows the median nationwide salaries for various job titles at PR agencies. The other boxes are in-house salary details of some of those listed agency jobs:

For Canada, I used the latest data from The Creative Group:

Advertising

For the UK, I could not find side-by-side comparisons of agency and in-house salaries. But I did find the following two data sets for agency positions in the Major Players 2017 salary report:

Here is the corresponding US data from PayScale. The chart in the top left corner shows the median nationwide salaries for various job titles at ad agencies. The other boxes are in-house salary details of some of those listed agency jobs:

A comparison for Canada:

Digital

For the UK, I used a report from The Candidate staffing firm:

US and Canada:

I could not find such side-by-side salary comparisons for digital agencies and in-house jobs in the United States and Canada, but I did find this 2016 agency survey conducted by Moz cofounder Rand Fishkin that includes both countries:

What it means

For most positions in all three countries, the salaries at marketing agencies are moderately to significantly lower than those for in-house positions – especially at the inexperienced end of the spectrum. The ‘gap between the rich and poor’ also seems to be larger within agencies.

However, I can attest from personal experience and stories from others that many agencies effectively give even less than these figures – and that they do it with a straight face.

Public relations

In the PR world, many agencies consist of a few well-paid strategic executives and an army of low-level, underpaid publicists who make countless phone calls and write untold numbers of emails to get as much news coverage as possible. Most are salaried but work so much overtime that they are effectively paid only a couple of pounds, dollars, or euros per hour. Many are students or recent university graduates who are officially – and often illegally – unpaid “interns” who are there only to “learn” and not work.

It’s a huge problem that no one is acknowledging – because the old have always taken advantage of the young.

Agency stress is also higher. Companies take weeks or months to hire and fire in-house staff, but many clients feel that they can change agencies within days. As a result, agency staff are under constant pressure to respond at all hours to multiple ‘bosses’. The young are on the first line of communication from clients and bear the brunt of the workload.

In a case that rattled the entertainment industry and beyond, the US studio Fox Searchlight settled a lawsuit last year from an unpaid intern who argued that he had learned nothing from his work on the film Black Swan and was essentially free labour. (For those in America who think that their rights have been violated, the Huffington Post published a list of tips on how unfairly unpaid interns can get their due wages. Here are the US Department of Labor’s specific rules.)

When any agency advertises openings for interns, the business goal is almost always to get cheap labour. No agency makes money by altruistically devoting time to teaching something to someone who will leave in six months.

Still, the problem does not stop with interns.

Advertising

Take a look at this archived Reddit thread from 2015 on “Why agency people are so unhappy.” Two of the comments summarise the problem well:

“The money just doesn’t make sense to me at this point for the amount of time you have to work sometimes… Most of my peers look at it as more of a long-term game. Low pay up front, but bust your ass long enough, and with a little luck, you’ll never have to worry about money again. That’s a little unrealistic for most of us, but the few optimists I know look at it that way.”

Here is more:

  • An anonymous advertising industry blogger simply called agencies “white collar sweatshops”.
  • MGH Advertising itself once placed an ad in The Wall Street Journal claiming that the ad industry was full of sweatshops (see main image).
  • “Goodvertising” author Thomas Kolster wrote in a column for The Drum that the industry needs to stop the overworking culture and make it fun and worthwhile instead.

The Twitter satire account Adweak, which is as funny as it is truthful, put it perfectly:

Digital

On the digital side of things, the situation is a little different. Online marketers should not be surprised at the low salaries at agencies. People who routinely proclaim that they know multitudes of quick and easy ‘hacks’ have only themselves to blame when their retainers and salaries are hacked down as well. Why should anyone pay a lot of money for someone to do hacks?

Instead of creating long-term, integrated campaigns, digital marketers all too often suffer from short-termism and think about numbers of social media followers, blog spam, and rankings of keywords – and those activities occur with high turnover rates that lead to lower retainers. Of course, the good agencies know that true SEO is a complicated, long-term process – but the constant promotion of ‘hacks’ by hacks is not doing anyone any favours.

So, between ad agencies and digital ones, guess which ones are paid more? Companies often choose to go with digital agencies when they need something done quickly and cheaply.

I do not want to name names, but I know the owner of a digital agency in a certain country with global, well-known clients. I respected the person greatly – until I found out that the owner was paying gross salaries of $18,000 per year to young employees in the agency’s large, metropolitan and expensive city.

A friend of mine who once worked at a ‘content agency’ in a certain country told me this:

“At my content agency, they defended the rights of the client at the expense of the employee. We had very stringent goals on a monthly basis which were impossible to meet. At one point, I had almost 30 blog articles I had to write in one month, many of which were extremely technical and required 2,000 words.

“Days off were allowed, but it was known that they give a really hard time and try to make you work on vacation days. I took off in April to be home with my family. I took one week off after being there almost a year and never even taking a sick day.

“About a week before the vacation, I get called in for a meeting: ‘Congratulations! You have a new client! They only require 12 more articles a month – starting now.’ I was furious. I had told them about my vacation and they never even took it into consideration.

“This is the situation in many agencies. More work is more money and employees are expected to go to all lengths to to get the work done without being included in the conversation in the first place and saying whether or not it’s possible to even accomplish.”

Sweatshops kill agencies

Among my circle of friends in marketing, most of us agree that agencies are places to learn early in one’s career – but that everyone should leave as quickly as possible. Those with talent and ability eventually end up in-house. (Many of us have also sworn never to work for agencies again following the bad experiences.) It’s why sweatshop conditions lead to short-term gain but long-term pain for owners – everyone ends up leaving.

And the agencies have no one but themselves to blame.

In 2016, Farmer & Company chief executive Michael Farmer, a 25-year advertising veteran, published ‘Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profit-Hungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies‘, a book that Keenan Beasley summarises in Forbes with this question: “How did America’s darling Mad Men go from rolling in it to barely holding on?”

The answer, according to Farmer, is a combination of outdated compensation models, an inability to measure results, and the pressure to spread themselves too thin. In the Forbes interview, he also says:

“Executives at these large agencies somehow continue to eke out profits through these sweatshop conditions, and they get huge bonuses for doing so. They’re all just praying they retire before the whole system blows up.”

The timer might already be ticking. Two years ago, marketing consultant Mark W. Schaefer cited reports from the Association of National Advertisers and the Society of Digital Agencies to show in the Harvard Business Review that companies are bringing more and more marketing in-house. In the first half of 2017, an increasing number of brands purchased agencies themselves.

Gerry Moira, the retired chairman and UK director of creativity at Havas London, put it more bluntly:

“If I were starting out now, I’d much rather be client-side. It’s the future… Agencies have had their day. They are sweatshops whose output has become so much more prosaic because of social media.”

So, what’s the answer?

Of course, not every agency is like the underground work camp in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Most bosses are not going to rip out hearts and wheel people down into lakes of lava – unless perhaps you work for Meryl Streep’s Anna Wintour-inspired character in The Devil Wears Prada.

But far too many agencies are, in fact, sweatshops.

Agencies typically compete with other agencies and in-house alternatives with either their expertises or their pricing. In other words, they market themselves by saying that they are either better or cheaper. Those that compete based on price are usually sweatshops that deserve to implode more quickly than Lindsey Lohan’s acting career.

Once the sweatshops close, the marketing agencies that remain will deserve to remain and will be those that focus on the one thing that differentiates them: creativity. Agencies need to reassert the value of creativity to get higher fees, and agency employees need to do the same to justify higher salaries.

Creative people get bored easily. It’s why agencies have typically delivered the best ad campaigns. (Just remember that the doomed Kendall Jenner Pepsi spot was created by an in-house ‘content creation arm’, a fact that reveals the results when marketers who do not know advertising are the ones creating the ads.) People who work on a single brand will eventually run out of ideas. The ability to work on multiple accounts keeps the creative juices flowing.

As I discuss as a frequent marketing speaker, the problem is that creativity is being increasingly devalued in the marketing world today. Marketers think more and more about data, automation, and analytics – and, therefore, what typically results in direct-response campaigns.

Just read this eye-rolling column from Jesse Williams of Mindbox Studios:

“Marketing is no longer design, it’s no longer messaging, it’s no longer SEO, or social, or branding. It’s data –  and the rock stars of modern marketing are the ones who can find and interpret that data.”

Unfortunately, this pile of malarkey is what drives a lot of discussion today. Too many people think that they can merely press a couple buttons, insert a few keywords into website metadata, target and track the best individuals, spread blogspam, or write a social media post in a certain way and then the sales will start pouring in.

In response to such drivel, creative staff need to communicate that direct response campaigns are only one tool of many and that a lot of the data is completely wrong anyway.

Creativity can save agencies

Creativity is something that the tech world will never replace – and that creativity is what builds brands and can be used in areas ranging from television to print to social media to email. Creativity is the only advantage that premium agencies can offer because all of the others compete on price and therefore offer a value proposition that is not viable over the long term.

But I guarantee you that some martech person somewhere will soon develop something he will call ‘AI-powered content marketing’. It will purport to use artificial intelligence and real-time analysis of one thing or another to create instant blog posts designed for goals such as ranking in Google search results or maximising conversion rates.

And the posts will be loads of tosh because they will be more boring than Daft Punk’s autotuned-to-death song One More Time. They will do nothing to build brands. Creatives need to remind people that at the end of the day, the brand is the most important thing. It’s the only way that agencies – and the people who work for them – will survive.

Creative agencies of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your existence. Come together to advocate for brand advertising and against the hacks the dominate modern marketing. Show the world the benefits of creativity. Demand higher fees, not lower ones. Pay your workers more, not less.

But will all of this work? I admit that I’m skeptical. As conditions will either remain the same or worsen, I think that we will instead see more unionising along the lines of what boutique consultancy Modern Craft co-founder Randy Siu recently saw in Canada:

Unless agencies can raise their fees to cover the higher salaries that workers deserve, such unionising will merely slow down the approaching agency extinction rather than prevent it.

So, in the meantime, will marketing agencies really ever stop being sweatshops by another name? Sadly, it’s as likely as a bloke building a time machine, going back to the year 2000, and dating all three members of Atomic Kitten at the same time.

But please prove me wrong.

The Promotion Fix is an exclusive biweekly column for The Drum contributed by Samuel Scott, a global marketing speaker who is a former journalist, newspaper editor, and director of marketing and communications in the high-tech industry. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Scott is based out of Tel Aviv, Israel.

By Samuel Scott

The Promotion Fix is a​n ​exclusive biweekly column for The Drum from Samuel Scott, a global keynote marketing speaker who is a former journalist, newspaper editor, and director of marketing and communications in the high-tech industry. Follow him @samueljscott.

Sourced from THEDRUM

Read More
By
In News

Six things you need to stop doing right now with your mobile strategy

No Comments

By Michael Hewitt.

he mobile search landscape has changed immensely in recent years, transforming how consumers engage with brands and discover new products. But the change of pace has left some brands struggling to keep up, wondering just how hard mobile is working for them, and whether their brand proposition is really translating to the small screen.

It has led to many making what are, in 2017, some fundamental mistakes with mobile strategy. Here are six of the biggest:

The ‘m-dot’ site

When the ‘mobilegeddon’ update first reared its head in 2015, it unsurprisingly caused panic in the digital ecommerce sector. This was an update that threatened to dramatically harm the web visibility of those brands that weren’t delivering a mobile-friendly experience, and it was an update that would kick-in not very long after it was first announced – certainly not long enough to align all of the necessary stakeholders and plan, build, test and launch a completely new site.

Many brands responded by launching what became known as m-dot websites – essentially copies of a desktop website that were tweaked for mobile and appear on an m.website.com or mobile.website.com sub-domain. It was a quick-fix solution, allowing brands to meet the criteria that would see them becoming a ‘mobilegeddon’ victim, but avoided the need to go through a lengthy web redesign and build.

But now Google is warning brands that it wants to see the end of the m-dot, claiming that the mobile-first index may not index m-dot sites effectively. Throw in the increased risk of broken redirects and duplicate content that come with an m-dot, and the time really has come for you call in the designers and go responsive.

Being deaf to voice search

In June 2017, a Think with Google survey found that 57% of people would use voice search more if it recognised more complex commands, and 58% of respondents said they would like more detailed results when using search.

Think about how you can make your existing keyword strategy more conversational, to reflect the way in which your audiences are going to interact verbally with their mobile or smart devices – particularly if your site features a lot of ‘how to’ content on its site. A desktop search for ‘flights to London’ could very easily become ‘when is the next flight to London?’ or ‘what is the cheapest way to get to London tomorrow morning’. Could your current content answer that query?

Not thinking about your long-term app strategy

A survey by Localytics found that 60% of people who download an application become inactive within 30 days, whilst data from Quattra shows that the daily active user rate drops 77% the first three days after an app is installed on a device.

Mobile apps are not, in themselves, a flawed marketing channel but if you are going to invest in developing and maintaining one, think carefully about how you are going to avoid the graveyard of unused apps that lies on practically every smartphone in existence.

Is your app simply an extension of your mobile site? If so, then think about why you actually need one. What does your app offer that your users can’t get or would find more difficult to get elsewhere?

Think about how you would use your app to re-engage and reconnect with your audiences throughout the customer journey, using your data to provide personalised messages and push notifications that will resonate with them. Just remember not to over-use tactics like push notifications as they can get irritating (particularly if you are just pushing offers and sales messages).

Bombarding users with ads

Speaking of things that are irritating, ads on mobile. Obtrusive adverts are annoying on any platform, but on the small screen of mobile, they are even more of a user experience faux-pas.

If you are advertising to consumers on mobile, make sure that it isn’t your brand that is frustrating what should be a seamless and enjoyable user experience with an intrusive and impossible to dismiss pop-up or interstitial. Not only does it frustrate users and harm the brand, it can also harm your organic search visibility.

Ignoring your audiences’ neighbourhood

So-called ‘near me’ searches are growing at a rate of 130% per year, and 88% of these searches are made using a mobile device, claims Google.

This trend is being driven by the way in which the customer journey is becoming much more integrated between desktop, mobile and offline. Consumers are turning to their devices for ‘quick reference’ queries – local shops and restaurants for example – and then making purchasing decisions across any number of channels based on that information.

It means that brands, particularly those with an offline presence, need to really think about how they are optimising their online presence for ‘near me’ searches, and thinking about the content that they serve to these audiences that works on a localised level, and could drive an in-store visit.

Consider the importance of implicit search variables, such as location, time, device, transport and previous search history, and ensure that you have content that can serve as many combinations of those searches as possible.

Failing to close the loop

Cross-device tracking remains one of the biggest challenges for marketers, as multiple devices and multiple communications channels converge to create a much more complicated customer journey.

Google is working hard to close this loop as much as possible, with Google Attribution rolling out to provide much better integration between AdWords and Analytics, and it is continuing to use user data and search history to ‘join up the dots’ as much as possible.

Different organisations will have different approaches and different models to understand how different devices and channels contribute to the overall buying journey, and the model that you adopt will ultimately depend on your brand objectives for your mobile strategy. However, if you are using a last click model of attribution, then it is highly likely that you are either under or over-estimating the value of mobile, depending on the nature of the brand and the product.

By Michael Hewitt

Michael Hewitt is a content marketing manager at Stickyeyes, and is behind the agency’s guide to mastering your mobile strategy.

Sourced from THEDRUM

Read More
By
In News

When I returned to advertising after 10 years I assumed it would have changed – I was wrong

No Comments

By Brian Millar.

When I last worked in the ad industry, George W. Bush was president, tweets were something you heard in the park and Yahoo was – actually, Yahoo was the same in 2007 as well.

I left the business and went off to work in new product development, occasionally sitting in the same meeting rooms as my client’s ad agencies, and generally not paying a lot of attention to their presentations. Sorry.

Last year I started to get interested in ad land again, as I read more and more about programmatic advertising. In the NPD game, we’d been using clever algorithms to predict consumer behaviour for years. Wow, I thought. Now you can crunch all that data in real time on the viewer of any ad, you could do some truly amazing things. Agencies must be all over it.

My own online experience told me that maybe agencies weren’t. The same ad for a Garmin watch had been following me for a week. The same ad, whether I was on Facebook where I chat with friends, on Wired where I read about technology, or on Twitter, where I scream into the abyss. All that data about who I was, what I was doing or what platform I was on: clearly, none of it was affecting the ad.

I started to talk to friends who worked in programmatic. Most ad agencies, it seemed, were not interested in the data. Instead, they were just tossing stills from print and TV campaigns over the fence and asking the media companies to make them work online.

Why, I asked. Dunno, said the programmatic dudes, we can tell them 5,000 things about a single page view, but they don’t use any of it.

Five thousand things! I doubt I know 5,000 things about myself. My 10 years geeking out on vast amounts of data has taught me that 5,000 results are as good as none. Two are too few. Four to six – those I can work with. I wondered how my old friends who’d stuck it out in ad planning were doing. I asked a few of them, from global ad agencies to a couple of hot shops, to send me a blank briefing form from their agencies.

What is the brand’s tone of voice? What is the single most compelling message we can tell them? What supports this? I had to rush up to a few people as if I were Dr Who. I grabbed them by the lapels. What year is it? I asked in rising panic. It felt like I was back in the early 90s, when there were five TV stations in the UK and a bunch of poster sites at roundabouts.

Back then, when you had two campaigns a year at News at Ten and some slots in the Sunday supps, it was completely fine to bang away at being the ‘ultimate driving machine’ in the same Teutonic tone. Nobody got too tired of it. But when I wake up to your brand on Facebook, and scroll past it on Twitter, and see it on Instagram… it just comes across as repetitive.

Yet there are brands that are thriving online, both big and small. They’ve realised that it’s more important to be multifaceted than monotonous, to be surprising rather than consistent. Take Taco Bell, a chain that’s gone from being dubbed ‘Taco Hell’ five years ago to Gen Z’s default hangout. Its social media takes a lot of credit for this: it’s beautiful on Instagram, bitchy on Twitter, inspiring on its website, and its $40,000 TacoBot has already taken $10m in orders on Slack.

Movember has become a global movement online, rising from two Aussies in a pub to a phenomenon that’s raised over $300m. Their messages cover prostate cancer, male suicide and facial hair grooming tips. Their Facebook posts are funny, tear-jerking, surreal, handy, thrilling and heartwarming. Clearly nobody ever showed them an ad agency brief.

Nike, Rude Health Cereals, Victoria’s Secret even Victoria Beckham all seem to have discovered a way to thrive online, one that’s a million miles away from the USP or ‘brutal simplicity of thought’. They’re all multifaceted personalities, and they adapt their tone of voice to their audiences’ moods. Data allows you to do that, if you use it intelligently.

Last year, I teamed up with Torie Chilcott, one of the gods of programmatic advertising, to systematise the process. We started crunching data on what people loved online – not advertising, just… everything, from kittens to TED talks. This led us to a startling conclusion. There are dozens of kinds of content that people love, but they have four broad types. (Remember how I said you can work with four to six data points? Here they come…)

Great online content is either funny, useful, beautiful or inspiring. Great online brands do all four of those things. Victoria’s Secret is hilarious on Instagram. Rude Health is angry and ranty on YouTube. They bring surprise instead of consistency, and match their tone to the platform, rather than expect their audience to change emotional gear.

Data can help you broaden a brand’s emotional appeal. Our data shows that young women in London tend to find grandiose things beautiful, laugh hardest at dark humour and value authoritative opinion. BMW drivers aren’t inspired by social good or anything heartwarming. (Don’t you love it when the facts confirm your prejudices?) Data can also tell you where they’ll be most receptive to each of those tones of voice. To become a multifaceted brand, you’ll need to start thinking in a new way, at that 90s ad brief really isn’t going to help you.

Here’s the questions we think your brief should be asking.

If you can’t answer them, you can’t expect to sync with your audience’s emotions online.

We need 4 executions, not one.

We need to find our brand’s funny, useful, beautiful and inspiring.

Funny

What makes our target audience laugh?

How does that humour connect to our brand personality?

Inspiring

What kind of voice does our audience stand up and follow?

What in our brand could create that kind of rallying cry?

Useful

Where do our target audience go to learn?

What makes them lean forward and how can we learn from that?

Beautiful

What aesthetics turn our audience on and off?

What would our brand look like in that style?

By Brian Millar

Brian Millar is co-founder of the Emotional Intelligence Agency, a communications planning company that maps consumers’ emotional lives online. Follow him on Twitter @arthurascii

Sourced from The Drum

Read More
By