Extra 20% off! Factory sale! Last chance! You may have seen these offers while shopping. But are they actually good deals?
To find out, Life Kit spoke with Brian Vines, a reporter at Consumer Reports, and Lindsay Weekes, editor-in-chief of Brad’s Deals, a site that curates promotions from online retailers. They share common marketing techniques that companies use to entice shoppers to buy more — and tips on how to make smarter purchases.
Technique 1: Creating a sense of urgency
When you see words like “buy now” or “flash deal,” while shopping, take caution, say our experts. Retailers use a sense of urgency to push consumers to make quicker shopping decisions, Vines says. They don’t want you to think too hard about the purchase.
This strategy also relies on shoppers’ fear of missing out, Weekes says. It makes people think, “if I don’t purchase this right now, I’ll never get this deal again.”
The next time you encounter an offer like this, take a beat. Remember, companies are constantly making products, Vines says. “You will not miss the boat.”
You may realize that you only wanted to buy something because it felt urgent. Or you might find a better deal, especially if you wait to shop for something at the end of the season, Weekes says.
Technique 2: Calling out the “original price”
When you see a price tag that displays an item’s “original price,” say $200, next to the current price, say $75, that’s called price anchoring.
“It makes people fixate on that [higher] price versus the sale price,” Weekes says. It can also make the product appear higher-value, making you want it more.
A lot of the time, that “original price” was never the original price — or hasn’t been that price for a long time, Weekes says.
Outsmart the gimmick by focusing on the actual price of the item, our experts say. If the tag says it’s $75, then assess for yourself whether you think that’s a good deal, regardless of that original price.
Technique 3: Inflating the base price
Another pricing strategy retailers use is to raise the base price of an item just before the busy season, then offer a steep and enticing percentage discount, like 40% or 50%. But since the base price is higher, the item might cost the same as it did last week, or maybe more. This tactic is called “high-low pricing.”
To get around this gimmick, do a price comparison, say our experts. Look for historical pricing data online, or how much the retailer has charged for this product over time.
You can also see if a product is cheaper at another retailer or a second hand website. That’s a great option for clothing — you can even find the same pair of jeans, new with tags still on, for a fraction of the price when you buy second hand.
If you’re shopping at a store, go online to see if you can find a better price at another store across town, Vines says. Then talk to a sales associate and ask them if they can match that competitor’s price. You can also add an item to your online cart and check on the price over a few days or weeks to see if it changes.
Technique 4: Building a fantasy
Marketers sell you a fantasy: the idea of that picture-perfect holiday dinner where everyone’s connecting and nobody’s fighting. Or the vision of you as your sexiest, most confident self.
“These all play to our aspirational, I’ve-got-my-stuff-together side, based on the amount of things we’re able to gather and put in our carts,” Vines says.
So if you find yourself typing in your credit card information while fantasizing about some idealized version of yourself or your family, pause, say our experts.
That doesn’t mean you don’t get your family any gifts for the holidays. But when you consider a purchase, remember that you don’t have to buy this particular item.
You can also get creative. Bake them their favourite cookies. Plan a group dinner or a family hike. Find a treasure they’ll love at a second hand store. These gifts can be just as meaningful as something you buy from a store.
Feature image credit: Mininyx Doodle/Getty Images
By Marielle Segarra,
Marielle Segarra is a reporter and the host of NPR’s Life Kit, the award-winning podcast and radio show that shares trustworthy, non-judgmental tips that help listeners navigate their lives.
Malaka Gharib is the deputy editor and digital strategist on NPR’s global health and development team. She covers topics such as the refugee crisis, gender equality and women’s health. Her work as part of NPR’s reporting teams has been recognized with two Gracie Awards: in 2019 for How To Raise A Human, a series on global parenting, and in 2015 for #15Girls, a series that profiled teen girls around the world.
Research published in Information Systems Research finds that social media marketing (SMM) does little to help high-quality firms stand apart from competitors. Instead, it often pushes companies of all quality levels toward similar spending and pricing strategies, blurring the very signals firms hope will differentiate them in digital marketplaces.
The INFORMS study, “Signalling Quality to Consumers: The Role of Social Media Marketing,” was authored by Qinquan Cui and Kenan Arifoğlu of University College London and Dongyuan Zhan of the University of Science and Technology of China.
Social media platforms have transformed the way consumers learn about products. Unlike traditional advertising, where firms broadcast one-way messages to increase awareness, SMM allows consumers themselves to generate and share information such as reviews, ratings, comments, and peer recommendations, all of which influence perceived product quality.
As a result, firms increasingly rely on SMM both to expand their customer base and to influence the external information consumers receive.
“Firms often believe that spending more on social media marketing helps signal superior product quality,” said Cui. “However, when we modelled this environment using a game-theoretic approach, we found that high-quality firms cannot reliably use SMM spending to separate themselves from mid- or low-quality competitors.”
Game-theoretic approach is a way of analysing situations where multiple decision-makers (players) interact, and the outcome for each depends not only on their own choices but also on the choices of others. Game theory provides a formal mathematical framework to predict behaviour, identify optimal strategies, and understand incentives in competitive or cooperative environments.
To analyse the strategic interactions in their study, the researchers studied two scenarios: a benchmark case, where SMM only increases product awareness; and an information-revelation case, where SMM also improves the precision of online reviews and other external factors.
In the benchmark case, the researchers found that firms cannot credibly signal their product quality simply through different SMM spending levels. What they found was that two things can happen: first, there can be something called “partial pooling,” where low- and mid-quality firms choose the same level of SMM spending, while at the same time, high-quality firms separate by spending less; second, there can be “full pooling,” where all firms spend the same amount.
“We discovered that higher-quality firms actually limit their SMM spending to maintain a smaller but more profitable customer base,” said Arifoğlu. “Spending more would invite lower-quality firms to mimic them, making separation impossible.”
That said, when SMM does play a specific information-revelation role, meaning it makes online signals like reviews more accurate, the challenge intensifies. The study found that only full pooling or a limited form of partial pooling can occur, and that high-quality firms find it even harder to distinguish themselves from lower-quality firms.
In a sense, when all firms spend at the same level on SMM, a commoditization of messaging and branding can happen.
“In situations where SMM enhances the precision of online reviews, mid- and low-quality firms actually lose some of their incentives to pool with high-quality firms,” Zhan said.
“But high-quality firms also cannot set themselves apart. In the end, the information glut created by SMM spending by mid- to low-quality firms makes it more of a challenge for high-quality firms to differentiate.”
The authors conclude that SMM may not be the most effective quality-signalling tool for firms in competitive environments. Rather, high-quality firms may benefit from moderating their SMM spending rather than increasing it, and being more focused and innovative in their marketing to their highest-value market segments.
Every week, Yanko Design’s podcast Design Mindset powered by KeyShot brings you conversations with design leaders who are shaping how products, brands, and experiences connect with people around the world. Hosted by Radhika, the show explores the intersection of design thinking, strategic communication, and the human stories behind successful brands. Whether you’re a designer, entrepreneur, or simply curious about how intentional design shapes our world, this weekly series offers insights you won’t find anywhere else.
In episode 12, Radhika sits down with Chris Pereira, founder and CEO of iMpact, a China-Western communications and go-to-market firm based in Shenzhen. With nearly two decades in China, fluency in Mandarin, and a notable stint as a Huawei PR leader, Chris brings a rare perspective to the table. Named one of Forbes India’s Top 30 Globalization Innovators, he’s spent his career helping brands navigate the treacherous waters between cultural intention and reception. What emerges from this conversation is a masterclass in how design decisions carry meaning, whether you intend them to or not.
Chris opens with a stark reality check: “Design isn’t neutral, especially across cultures. A font, a color, a slogan that wins in New York can really backfire in Nanshan in Shenzhen, China.” The challenge isn’t just about translation in the linguistic sense, it’s about making intention travel across borders intact. Every design choice tells a story about your values, and Chris emphasizes this with a striking insight: “The question isn’t if your design will tell a story, but what story you’re telling. So it’s whether you’ll own that narrative or let it own you.”
When brands think they’re “on brand” with a global strategy, that’s often exactly when things break down in local markets. Chris shares a personal anecdote that illustrates the stakes: “I had a friend a few years ago in China and he always liked to wear a green hat… But in China, there’s a specific phrase. If you’re wearing a green hat, it means your partner is cheating on you in the relationship.” What’s an innocuous fashion choice elsewhere becomes a cultural faux pas in China. For brands, this translates directly to sales, green hats simply don’t sell in Chinese markets, regardless of how well they perform globally.
Why Respect Can Look Like Disrespect (and Vice Versa)
Cultural landmines extend far beyond colour choices. Chris recounts a dinner meeting where cultural respect signals completely misfired: “The Chinese host used chopsticks and before he ate he put food onto my client’s plate… But my business partner, my client, he got very angry all of a sudden. He said, I know how to use chopsticks. I’m not a kid.” The Chinese host was showing respect; the Western guest felt insulted. Both sides wanted to build trust, but the trust was actually eroded by the interaction.
These seemingly small details matter enormously for visual communication too. Sticking chopsticks upright in rice is a cultural taboo in China associated with funeral rites, an advertising image showing this would be deeply inappropriate, yet a Western creative team might not know to avoid it. Chris’s firm uses a systematic 10-item pre-mortem checklist that expands into roughly 100 specific considerations, covering everything from brand names and colour schemes to who appears in imagery and what scenarios are shown. The goal should be consistent across markets, Chris explains, but the methods must adapt: “The result or what we want to convey in every country is the same. We care about the local community… How we get there is very different.”
Stop Saying You’re Great (Get Someone Else to Say It)
Perhaps the most critical insight Chris offers is about trust-building through third-party endorsement. “If I sit here and tell you, Radhika, I’m really great. I’m amazing… Honestly, that’s not a good way to convince the other person. The better way is to say, this professor has given me a letter of introduction. I was on TV last week on that media.” From a brand perspective, advertising says “I’m great,” while third-party endorsement says “he’s great” or “she’s really trustworthy.” Chris’s advice is direct: “If you don’t have the third-party endorsement, you shouldn’t do advertising.”
He encourages brands to “stand on the shoulders of giants,” pointing to the “Intel Inside” label on laptops as a perfect example. Industry awards, professional association endorsements (like dental associations for toothpaste), and partnerships with established entities all build the trust foundation necessary before spending on advertising. For product launches, Chris advocates showcasing customer success stories: “Maybe we can donate some of our products while we’re doing our announcement. And they can come and say how much that means to them for their community.” This provides powerful, authentic validation that no amount of paid advertising can replicate.
What Huawei’s Crisis Taught About Winning Together
Chris’s time at Huawei during one of the most challenging periods in the company’s history taught him invaluable lessons about resilience and messaging. When he joined in 2016, the message was all about dominance: “We’re number one in this industry. We’re number two in this industry. We have a huge end to end supply chain.” That message made employees proud but scared competitors. “If you’re in the United States at your Apple or Google, you’re like, oh, crap, this is kind of scary. Right. And they’re going to take our business,” Chris recalls.
The lesson? “The importance of win win or finding ways to work together in a way that’s good for everyone in the community is important.” Huawei eventually shifted its messaging toward building an open ecosystem, helping everyone in the supply chain succeed together. Chris also learned about the long-term mindset necessary for trust-building. When the Meng Wanzhou crisis hit in 2018-2019, many questioned whether Huawei would survive. Yet the company had a record year recently, expanding into new sectors like automotive. This taught Chris the importance of resilience and “thick skin” for both brands and individuals, and that trust requires time and consistency to build properly.
Redefining Speed: Why “Shenzhen Speed” Isn’t What You Think
The concept of “Shenzhen Speed” came up multiple times, but Chris is careful to define it properly. It’s not about rushing business relationships or pushing for quick deals. Rather, “when we say Shenzhen speed, we’re not talking about the speed of your business development… the speed is response. So if you send me a message and I respond quickly, we close the loop quickly.” Trust, conversely, needs time.
As Chris puts it, quoting a German friend: “Going in the wrong direction very quickly is not efficient. So in other words, if you’re going in the right direction slowly, that’s actually maybe better than going super fast and going in circles.” This is especially true for Chinese companies going overseas. Chris identifies cross-cultural communication as the primary challenge: “They all have great products, but they still lack a ability to communicate in a cross-cultural setting.” And crucially, human connection matters more than technology: “Get on an airplane and be on site at a trade event, visit your clients in person, have coffee with them. So none of that can be done by AI, interestingly.”
The Three Non-Negotiables Every Brand Needs
When asked about his non-negotiables, Chris identifies three foundational principles. First, compliance, “You need to follow the law anywhere you go,” he states simply. Second, authenticity: “If you’re not authentic, you will lose the trust of the local market.” Chris shares what he calls the 20-60-20 rule: 20% of people will always love you, 60% don’t really care either way, and 20% will actively dislike you. “When we’re doing our design work and business work, it’s important to bring your true self to the table because then you’ll attract the consumers, your customers, your partners, your friends who are like minded.”
Third, purpose beyond profit. “We’re not just doing business and doing design work and doing PR for money. I think we want to make the world a better place,” Chris reflects. For him, this is personal: “I have a nine year old son who’s half Chinese. So what we’re doing is helping Chinese companies and helping China tell their story in a more effective way overseas and building more trust and friendship.” In the rapid-fire segment, Chris crystallizes several key insights. His quickest litmus test for international success? “The team, the team behind the product.” The most underused asset in cross-border launches? “The actual relationships… in the local market.” And what beats beautiful design every time? “A brand mission. So a mission, a worthwhile cause to do something.”
Making Intention Travel
What emerges from this conversation is a fundamental truth: design is never neutral. Every choice, from fonts to colours to the people you feature in your imagery, communicates values. The challenge is ensuring those values translate as intended across cultural boundaries. Chris’s approach is both systematic and deeply human: use checklists and structured processes, but never forget that trust is built person to person, through authentic relationships and genuine commitment to local communities.
For designers and brand strategists working in an increasingly global marketplace, the message is clear: you can’t afford to be culturally naïve. What “works” in your home market may actively harm you elsewhere. But with the right approach, thoughtful localization, authentic partnership, and patience, brands can successfully make their intention travel across borders. Chris Pereira can be found on LinkedIn, and Design Mindset releases new episodes every week, bringing you more conversations with leaders who understand that great design isn’t just beautiful, it’s meaningful.
Marketing proficiency is the foundation of every successful entrepreneurial venture.
Without effective marketing, even great products and services go unnoticed.
Entrepreneurs must master marketing before focusing on other business skills.
Several key attributes contribute to being a successful entrepreneur. For an entrepreneur to succeed, they must have multi-faceted skills in various areas.
Knowing how to structure a business administratively is a vital skill for an entrepreneur. For example, having well-defined structures and procedures for business management is critical. Effective business management skills are essential. Obviously, the larger the company, the more challenging this can become.
Figuring out how to have a successful financial plan within your business is also essential. Any business needs to have a workable budget and financial plan. It is also crucial to be able to create accurate and realistic forecasts for the future. Without such financial data, most businesses will quickly get into trouble.
Understanding the best strategies for recruiting and retaining talent is crucial. For any business to succeed, hiring the best legal talent available is essential for driving business growth. To do so, companies need to understand where and how to post jobs that align with their business needs. They will also need to know how to pursue the best talent actively.
Furthermore, making clients and customers happy is also essential for a sustainable business. There is no way any business can succeed if most of its customers and clients are not satisfied with the goods or services it offers. If customers and clients are not happy, the word can spread. A business also ends up with negative online reviews, which makes it harder for the company to succeed.
However, knowing how to create a successful marketing plan is a crucial skill for an entrepreneur. For any business to get off the ground, an entrepreneur must know how to attract customers or clients to the company. Many entrepreneurs are skilled in other areas, but they often lack a comprehensive understanding of the best practices for marketing their business. Until they become proficient in understanding marketing, any entrepreneurial efforts will likely not be successful.
Why is marketing the most important skill of an entrepreneur?
The Know-how to advertise successfully is complex and cumbersome. Many businesses engage a marketing company to develop and implement a marketing plan. Such an approach can be hit or miss for many businesses, as some marketing companies may or may not do a great job. Many marketing companies may not understand the specific niche of your line of business.
Understanding how business marketing works, from top to bottom, is key for businesses that succeed or fail. In this day and age, digital advertising probably makes the most sense for many businesses because you can better target those in need of your company’s services through search engine optimization and online advertisements that target those in need of your company’s goods or services.
Having a web page with lots of content is crucial for most businesses. Advertising through the major search engines can also make sense, in addition to engaging in search engine optimization, so that the website appears organically and through artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT. Pay-per-click advertising can also make a lot of sense for many businesses, as advertisements appear when individuals are searching for companies in a particular area.
Another option to consider includes paid advertising through social networking sites. Social networking sites can result in more visibility than radio and television at a more palatable cost. Most people think of Facebook and X, but there are many other options available, including Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn, Snapchat, TikTok and other social media platforms.
Some businesses, however, still like to brand through television, radio, billboards and other conventional means. Such an approach can be cost-prohibitive for many companies, leading to overspending. Branding also does not necessarily result in leads.
Other businesses may resort to word-of-mouth marketing. They may become active in the community through referral groups, civic or community activities, door-to-door soliciting and other means. However, these techniques may not deliver the boost that most businesses need.
Before you launch, analyse your marketing prowess
Any entrepreneur must carefully consider their marketing strategy before launching a new venture. Many entrepreneurs need to enhance their knowledge and skills in marketing before they take the plunge. Otherwise, they will lack sufficient customers or clients to sustain and grow the business. Even if the products or services are top of the line, if the marketing efforts are not well thought out, most in the community will not even be aware of them.
It might mean reading some marketing books and literature. For others, they may need to take some marketing classes. For those who are self-taught, they might conduct research online through search engines and artificial intelligence tools. It can also mean meeting various marketing professionals to get their ideas and input.
However, until marketing knowledge and plans are where they need to be, many should understand that marketing is the first skill any entrepreneur needs to learn. Without marketing proficiency, there will not be enough business coming through the door to sustain the business. Yes, once a company gets off the ground, the other skills are equally important. However, if you are considering the chicken or the egg question, it’s marketing.
Kirk C. Stange is a Founding President and Attorney at Stange Law Firm. Mr. Stange built Stange Law Firm from the ground up, starting in 2007. Stange Law Firm now has offices in nine states, continues to expand, and is the second-largest family law firm in the country, with thirty offices.
While marketing industry buzz tells us to expect more automation, so far, the rate of adoption has not reflected expectations. Is this because Machine has not yet reached the perfection that we demand (despite our ample room for human error)? What is it that we fear when we read about the newest automation tech on the block? Realistically, you’re not going to be replaced. Truthfully, all to be feared is that we’ll have more time on our hands to do what we’d prefer to be doing. And yet, the reluctance to automate is strong.
Looking back over the last decade, it’s clear that the introduction of new technology has created greater possibilities and more roles for marketers. It’s inevitable automation and technologies will be playing an even more integral role in the future of marketing. The good news is that it’s OK to take baby steps with automation at first. All automation technologies exist to simplify work processes, however, they come on a scale of complexity. Smaller-scale marketing technologies are designed to relieve you of the more repetitive, mundane tasks. These are the technologies we can hopefully agree are best to start with and therefore more realistic to adopt first. You’re not going to buy a Ferrari when you just passed your test.
Feed automation
You may or may not already be using data feeds in your daily work. If you’re not, a data feed is merely a file that contains information such as inventory. The possibilities a data feed can unlock in marketing have steadily grown. They are mostly used when a marketing channel (e.g. Google, Facebook, AWIN, Amazon) requests your inventory in order to create ads or listings. Relying on the IT department to adapt the data can cause a huge delay and friction in making dynamic and responsive ad campaigns online. This is where a feed automation tool, such as Channable’s feed manager, simplifies the work process. A feed automation tool can automate the creation of feeds for retargeting, social ads, display and many more. Look out for a technology with a good UI and UX because you’re hoping to steer clear from overcomplicating processes.
Online ad automation
If you’ve ever had to write or implement ad copy for PPC ads, you can probably agree it’s fairly cumbersome. There are automation systems on the web that can help you generate hundreds of highly relevant copy for ads, sitelinks and keywords. You do this by building a template using dynamic fields. The system will be directly liked to your ads account, so after you’ve built the ad structure, it’ll only take a click of a button and potentially hundreds of ads are in your account. This then frees up time to focus on optimizing campaigns or bidding. Bidding is also something that you can now automate. AI technology will analyse the optimal time and budget for your keywords. Channable’s PPC tool is an automation tool that can generate the ad copy straight to your account, but there are others that include bidding and advanced targeting possibilities.
Social media automation
Social media has become the best online place to reach your target market. Posting regularly allows you to communicate directly with your audience, helps build a brand image as well as many other things. Social media automation tools allow you to schedule posts so you can prep them in advance and get on with other tasks in the meantime. Tools include Hootsuite and Buffer for scheduling social media posts. There are also tools that can provide you with insights for social media content based on influencers and your competition, such as BuzzSumo. If you’re interested in automating product ads for social media channels, you would actually need a feed manager because the channel will require your inventory in their specific feed format.
Marketplace listing automation
If you or your client is a retailer that sells via the giant online marketplaces, such as eBay or Amazon, marketplace automation can help list products, add new listings, and make easy modifications to existing listings. This is really a plug and play technology as once the connection is made everything is real-time. Check out Channable’s marketplaces integrator to upload to multiple marketplaces from one place or see the possibilities offered by each marketplace.
Email marketing automation
Sending emails to existing clients, reminding old ones that they can still use you, or reaching out to prospective customers are all activities that can be automated. Low-level email automation purely enables you to send a group a certain email at a scheduled time. Mailchimp and Dotmailer are popular choices for email automation. But you can do so much more such as creating different segments, which will allow for specifying the message of the email to the audience you want to read it. Or setting up a sequence, so that a reader will receive follow up emails that you only had to set up once. This is easily created if you’re using a CRM such as Hubspot.
If you’ve gotten to the end of this list and realised you’ve either implemented some or all of the above levels of automation, give yourself a clap on the back. You’re already more adapted to the technological future than you thought. It’s not something to fear and is easier to implement than it appears. If you haven’t implemented them all, remember how much better your life is with one of them and the possibilities the others could open up for you. Automation technologies will be more commonplace in our future and it’s best to start now. It’s all about enabling you to spend your time more wisely. Read Channable’s guide on how to choose a feed manager for the next step in adopting marketing technologies.
For any business to get off the ground, an entrepreneur must know how to attract customers or clients to the company.
Key Takeaways
Marketing proficiency is the foundation of every successful entrepreneurial venture.
Without effective marketing, even great products and services go unnoticed.
Entrepreneurs must master marketing before focusing on other business skills.
Several key attributes contribute to being a successful entrepreneur. For an entrepreneur to succeed, they must have multi-faceted skills in various areas.
Knowing how to structure a business administratively is a vital skill for an entrepreneur. For example, having well-defined structures and procedures for business management is critical. Effective business management skills are essential. Obviously, the larger the company, the more challenging this can become.
Figuring out how to have a successful financial plan within your business is also essential. Any business needs to have a workable budget and financial plan. It is also crucial to be able to create accurate and realistic forecasts for the future. Without such financial data, most businesses will quickly get into trouble.
Understanding the best strategies for recruiting and retaining talent is crucial. For any business to succeed, hiring the best legal talent available is essential for driving business growth. To do so, companies need to understand where and how to post jobs that align with their business needs. They will also need to know how to pursue the best talent actively.
Furthermore, making clients and customers happy is also essential for a sustainable business. There is no way any business can succeed if most of its customers and clients are not satisfied with the goods or services it offers. If customers and clients are not happy, the word can spread. A business also ends up with negative online reviews, which makes it harder for the company to succeed.
However, knowing how to create a successful marketing plan is a crucial skill for an entrepreneur. For any business to get off the ground, an entrepreneur must know how to attract customers or clients to the company. Many entrepreneurs are skilled in other areas, but they often lack a comprehensive understanding of the best practices for marketing their business. Until they become proficient in understanding marketing, any entrepreneurial efforts will likely not be successful.
Why is marketing the most important skill of an entrepreneur?
The Know-how to advertise successfully is complex and cumbersome. Many businesses engage a marketing company to develop and implement a marketing plan. Such an approach can be hit or miss for many businesses, as some marketing companies may or may not do a great job. Many marketing companies may not understand the specific niche of your line of business.
Understanding how business marketing works, from top to bottom, is key for businesses that succeed or fail. In this day and age, digital advertising probably makes the most sense for many businesses because you can better target those in need of your company’s services through search engine optimization and online advertisements that target those in need of your company’s goods or services.
Having a web page with lots of content is crucial for most businesses. Advertising through the major search engines can also make sense, in addition to engaging in search engine optimization, so that the website appears organically and through artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT. Pay-per-click advertising can also make a lot of sense for many businesses, as advertisements appear when individuals are searching for companies in a particular area.
Another option to consider includes paid advertising through social networking sites. Social networking sites can result in more visibility than radio and television at a more palatable cost. Most people think of Facebook and X, but there are many other options available, including Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn, Snapchat, TikTok and other social media platforms.
Some businesses, however, still like to brand through television, radio, billboards and other conventional means. Such an approach can be cost-prohibitive for many companies, leading to overspending. Branding also does not necessarily result in leads.
Other businesses may resort to word-of-mouth marketing. They may become active in the community through referral groups, civic or community activities, door-to-door soliciting and other means. However, these techniques may not deliver the boost that most businesses need.
Before you launch, analyse your marketing prowess
Any entrepreneur must carefully consider their marketing strategy before launching a new venture. Many entrepreneurs need to enhance their knowledge and skills in marketing before they take the plunge. Otherwise, they will lack sufficient customers or clients to sustain and grow the business. Even if the products or services are top of the line, if the marketing efforts are not well thought out, most in the community will not even be aware of them.
It might mean reading some marketing books and literature. For others, they may need to take some marketing classes. For those who are self-taught, they might conduct research online through search engines and artificial intelligence tools. It can also mean meeting various marketing professionals to get their ideas and input.
However, until marketing knowledge and plans are where they need to be, many should understand that marketing is the first skill any entrepreneur needs to learn. Without marketing proficiency, there will not be enough business coming through the door to sustain the business. Yes, once a company gets off the ground, the other skills are equally important. However, if you are considering the chicken or the egg question, it’s marketing.
Kirk C. Stange is a Founding President and Attorney at Stange Law Firm. Mr. Stange built Stange Law Firm from the ground up, starting in 2007. Stange Law Firm now has offices in nine states, continues to expand, and is the second-largest family law firm in the country, with thirty offices.
AI has stripped the cost and complexity out of video production. The result? An endless stream of content where attention, not output, becomes the true competition.
Key Takeaways
AI video allows anyone to produce polished content on demand. What once required crews, budgets and weeks of production can now be generated in minutes.
With an avalanche of professional-looking content, companies must pivot from competing on production quality to competing on authentic insight, genuine expertise and human connection.
Brands must use AI as a tool to amplify human creativity and understand that having something meaningful to say matters more than saying it beautifully.
AI video tools have crossed a threshold. What used to require crews, budgets and weeks of post-production can now happen in minutes. Text-to-video generators can create actual clips that replace live-action filming — no cameras, no sets, no talent needed. Every brand, startup and side hustle can flood social feeds with polished content that would have cost thousands just a year ago.
The result is an avalanche of video content most marketers aren’t ready for. And when everyone has access to infinite content creation, the bottleneck shifts to something much scarcer: human attention.
The great video inflation of 2025
Think about what happened when desktop publishing killed the printing industry’s pricing power. Suddenly, every business could create professional-looking brochures and flyers on demand. The market got flooded with mediocre design, but the cost advantages were too compelling to ignore. Printing companies that survived had to find new ways to add value beyond just putting ink on paper.
AI video is that moment for content marketing. When every solopreneur can generate Hollywood-quality product demos and every startup can create testimonial footage without actual customers, the video landscape inflates, and we’re not talking about a gradual shift. This is a supply shock.
The number of professional-looking videos published daily is already increasing by orders of magnitude. Marketing teams that were previously constrained by video budgets suddenly have access to unlimited content creation. The creative brief that once became one hero video now becomes 50 variations optimized for every platform, demographic and use case.
For marketers, this feels like winning the lottery. Unlimited content at near-zero marginal cost? What’s not to love?
But there’s a catch. When everyone has the same superpower, no one has an advantage.
Why this time is different
Previous waves of content democratization (think YouTube, smartphones or social media) expanded the pool of creators but didn’t eliminate production friction entirely. You still needed some combination of equipment, skill or time to create compelling video content. That friction acted as a natural quality filter.
AI video removes that filter in many ways. The barrier between having an idea and having a polished video is getting smaller and smaller. A text prompt becomes footage. A description becomes a testimonial. A concept becomes a commercial.
This creates what economists call a “lemons market” — when quality becomes indistinguishable at first glance, markets get flooded with mediocre products. Your audience will face an unprecedented signal-to-noise problem. Professional-looking content will be everywhere, but most of it will have nothing meaningful to say.
The brands that understand this dynamic — and position themselves accordingly — will have a massive advantage over those caught off guard.
The coming brand extinction event
Here’s what most marketers aren’t seeing: AI video doesn’t just make content creation cheaper — it makes content forgettable. When every video looks professionally produced, none of them stand out visually. When everyone can create testimonials and product demos, the format itself loses credibility.
We’re heading toward a content landscape where production value becomes almost meaningless as a differentiator. The slick graphics, perfect lighting and smooth transitions that used to signal “professional brand” will be table stakes. Worse, they might even signal “generated content” to increasingly savvy audiences.
This shift will be brutal for brands that have built their entire content strategy around looking polished rather than saying something meaningful.
How to survive the content inflation
The companies that survive will be the ones that pivot from competing on production quality to competing on authentic insight, genuine expertise and genuine human connection. The production quality will be a given, so it’s the content strategy that will stand out.
This means treating AI video tools like what they actually are: incredibly powerful production assistants that still need direction, strategy and human judgment to create anything worth watching. The technology can generate and optimize the footage, but it can’t generate the insight that makes someone care.
Smart brands are already preparing for this shift. They’re investing more heavily in understanding their audiences, developing unique points of view and building authentic relationships that can’t be automated. They’re using AI to amplify their human creativity, not replace it.
Most importantly, they’re preparing for a world where having something meaningful to say matters more than saying it beautifully. Because when everyone can make beautiful content, the only competitive advantage left is having something worth saying.
The content inflation crisis isn’t coming — it’s already here. Early adopters are already flooding feeds with AI-generated content, and the volume is only going to increase. The brands that recognize this as an existential shift, not just a new tool to experiment with, will be the ones that survive.
Importantly, this conversation isn’t about whether AI video is good or bad. It’s about understanding that when production costs get lower, everything else about marketing changes. The rules, the strategies, the competitive advantages you’ve gotten used to — all of it gets rewritten.
Your choice is simple: Adapt to the new rules now, or get swept away by the brands that do.
Hope Horner is a serial entrepreneur who built Lemonlight from her bedroom. She’s been named Inc.’s Top Female Founder (twice), landed on the Inc. 5000 list (seven times), and won 30+ awards. She writes about entrepreneurship with clarity, candor, and bite.
New ads for ChatGPT scored low on fluency—and even lower on branding basics
OpenAI’s recent ads for ChatGPT were everywhere—NFL Primetime, streaming platforms, outdoor, and beyond. Press coverage hailed the AI company’s biggest marketing push yet as a new chapter of AI brand building.
But few pointed out just how incredibly poor the ads were.
Set aside the irony of an AI company relying on traditional media to promote its product. Focus instead on the dire creative quality of the two TV spots, Pull-Up and Dish.
Research firm System1 tested both ads with a representative panel of U.S. consumers. The results confirm that while AI tech bros continue to kill it with product development, they’re lightyears behind on the rest of the marketing challenge.
Both ranked in the lowest quintile for long-term growth and short-term sales impact. That’s incredibly bad, even for the tech category, which always underperforms.
Worse, both scored dismally on fluency—System1’s measure of whether consumers actually know which brand is being advertised to them.
Source: System1 FluencyTrace real time testing of “Pull-Up”
The Pull-Up ad managed a fantastically bad fluency score of 59. That means only 59% of viewers–who were being paid to watch the ad with their full attention–knew what was being advertised. In System1’s real-time assessment above, you can see a black ocean of ignorance engulfing the audience. A disappointingly small hump of pink recognition kicks in two seconds before the end, when ChatGPT’s logo appears.
This is the definition of bad advertising, standing in rude contrast to the sea of pink when KFC or Apple or Mars ads are tested.
Source: System1 FluencyTrace real time testing of Twix “Two Bears” Ad
And that’s just real-time fluency, not the tougher and more important metric of branded recall among unpaid, inattentive audiences with a memory-shredding delay before being quizzed. Most studies conclude that just around half of all advertising achieves branded recall.
Now back to the killer ratio: half of the ads aired in America can’t even communicate what product they are selling.
There’s a simple explanation: Most marketers are too involved in their product. Most agencies are too interested in their storytelling. Both miss market orientation.
They don’t realize that consumers don’t care about their product, don’t focus on advertising, and have a bazillion more important things to think about. This total lack of involvement contrasts directly with professionals spending eight hours a day fixated on one brand and a thirty-second masterpiece. We make ads in exact inversion to how they’re consumed.
Bad advertisers assume a single whiff of a logo at the end is enough—like a Hitchcock movie revealing its triumphant conclusion in the final frames. Brands with a more advanced grasp of effectiveness know better. They use distinctive assets from the outset to ensure immediate recognition at the start, throughout, and after. They squeeze value from every pixel they paid for.
Andrew Tindall’s “Rule of 7” is instructive here. His analysis of a giant Effie database suggests a brand needs seven distinctive assets in a thirty-second ad to achieve 100% branded recall. Not seven different assets—just seven repetitions of the colours, shapes, and other elements in your asset palette. And no, that doesn’t limit creativity. It challenges it to work harder toward its true purpose: advertising effect and sales.
Achieving branded recall and maintaining distinctiveness is crucial for all brands. But it’s especially critical for AI brands like ChatGPT, which are incredibly generic. They all look the same, operate the same, work off each other, launch innumerable product iterations, and fall blandly into a big, grey AI bucket.
While AI awareness is near-universal among Americans, most people don’t see any difference between AI providers. Menlo Ventures found that “most people don’t distinguish between older assistants like Alexa and Siri and newer large language models like ChatGPT and Claude. It’s all the same.” I don’t know which AI models I’m currently subscribed to. Do you?
Distinctiveness will be crucial in the next chapter of AI. There are too many competing brands. The two or three that survive won’t necessarily carve a differentiated position, but they’ll come to mind first by standing out. The route to that escape starts with making ads that don’t score a 59 for fluency.
Perhaps the geniuses at OpenAI should have asked their own chatbot for advice. When I did exactly that yesterday, ChatGPT—unlike the company behind it—played it perfectly:
Prompt: Assess the new Pull-Up ad from ChatGPT against the laws of advertising effectiveness and score it out of 10.
ChatGPT-5: Pull-Up is strategically on-brief and nicely made, but it underweights distinctive assets and mid-ad branding, so it risks becoming a likeable, generic “AI-helped me” story rather than a memorable ChatGPT ad that builds future sales.
Score: 5/10
Mark Ritson is a former marketing professor, brand consultant and award winning columnist. He is the founder of the MiniMBA in Marketing, which teaches all the many laws of advertising effectiveness as part of its outstanding syllabus.
Mark Ritson has a PhD in Marketing and spent 25 years working as a marketing professor, and has also worked as both a global brand consultant and as the in-house brand consultant for LVMH. His articles have appeared in the Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Advertising and the Journal of Consumer Research.
What do the worst marketing misfires have in common? An absolute failure to read the room.
The Gist
AI authenticity crisis. The rush to adopt artificial intelligence has created a new category of marketing failures where technology replaces human connection, leaving audiences feeling manipulated rather than engaged.
Heritage vs. evolution paradox. From luxury automakers to beloved restaurant chains, brands attempting radical transformations learned that evolution requires honouring your DNA while building toward the future.
Crisis management meltdown.In our hyperconnected age, how brands respond to controversy matters as much as the initial campaign—wavering values and murky messaging amplify damage rather than contain it.
The marketing landscape has seen its successes and failures with advertising. The interesting fact is that people are becoming more vocal about what they like and don’t like.
Even Reddit has become a constant source of ad lessons, hosting distinct threads where people comment on bad ads. There is a dedicated channel called CommercialHate that displays ads and commentary.
These ads are more than poorly executed commercials. The responses are examples of sentiment analysis. They are case studies in what happens when brands misread cultural moments, abandon their heritage or let technology override authenticity.
Each failure offers lessons for marketing leaders navigating an increasingly complex digital ecosystem where every campaign faces instant, global scrutiny. In this post, we will look at the most notable brand examples of messaging missteps that have occurred in the last few years, and what lessons marketers can learn:
1. Google Gemini’s Olympic Heartbreak: AI Replacing Human Expression (2024)
Google’s 2024 Olympics ad featured a parent suggesting their child use Gemini AI to write a letter to her favourite athlete. The intent was to showcase AI capabilities.
Critics argued the commercial suggested that even heartfelt messages of admiration—the kind that define Olympic spirit—should be outsourced to artificial intelligence. In a celebration of human achievement, suggesting AI mediate a genuine connection felt tone-deaf. CNBC reported that Google had tested the ad before launching it.
The Lesson: AI Must Enhance Humanity, Not Replace It
AI in marketing faces a delicate balance between demonstrating innovation and preserving human authenticity. Technology works best when it enhances human capabilities rather than replacing human expression. Marketing leaders must recognize when automation crosses from helpful to harmful, particularly in emotionally charged contexts.
2. Levi’s AI-Generated Models: Diversity Without Investment (2023)
In 2023, Levi’s partnered with lalaland.ai to showcase AI-generated models for diversity representation. The backlash was immediate and brutal: critics called it lazy, problematic and racist. If Levi’s genuinely cared about diversity, why not hire real models from diverse backgrounds?
The fundamental error was treating diversity as a visual checkbox rather than a genuine commitment. Using synthetic humans to represent real human diversity struck audiences as fundamentally dishonest—particularly from a heritage brand built on authenticity.
The Lesson: Representation Requires Real Investment
When brands demonstrate support for DEI, customers expect real actions, not just visual presentations. In an AI-sceptical marketplace, automating human representation feels like avoiding the investment that genuine diversity requires. Authenticity demands substance over surface-level aesthetics.
3. Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas: Technology Destroying Nostalgia (2024)
Coca-Cola attempted to use AI to recreate its beloved “Holidays are coming” campaign in 2024. Despite similar festive imagery—sparkling lights, red trucks, joyous families—audiences couldn’t emotionally connect with the AI-generated version, according to CNBC.
The technology’s limitations became painfully apparent when tasked with recreating something fundamentally about human emotion and tradition. Critics described it as cold and impersonal, lacking the warmth that made the original iconic.
The Lesson: Innovation Should Not Erase Emotional Equity
Not everything should be automated, especially content where emotional resonance is the entire point. Brands sitting on cultural touchstones built over decades should recognize that innovation for innovation’s sake can destroy value rather than create it. Coca-Cola’s Christmas advertising carries enormous brand equity—using AI to replicate that heritage without understanding what made it special resulted in a hollow imitation.
4. Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light Crisis: The Art of the Non-Apology (2023)
This partnership became one of the most financially devastating marketing decisions in recent memory, resulting in a $27 billion loss in market value and a 30% sales drop. But as I explored in my analysis ofwhat Anheuser-Busch got wrong, the initial partnership wasn’t the biggest mistake—it was the crisis response.
CEO Brendan Whitworth’s open letter, “Our Responsibility to America,” exemplified everything wrong with corporate crisis management. The statement tried to appeal to everyone while committing to nothing: “We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”
As Sara McCord, CEO of McCord Communications, noted in my piece: “Marketing to everyone is marketing to no one. … The statement fails to support anyone who would’ve felt targeted in recent days: those who support trans rights see that when the brand was attacked by conservatives it abandoned them, and those who do not support trans rights see no clear commitment to their agenda.”
The Lesson: Crisis Management Requires Clarity, Not Neutrality
Crisis response often evolves into ongoing campaigns when controversy persists. Brands attempting to maintain neutrality while prominent featuring their product strike an inappropriate tone—it feels like covert advertising masquerading as genuine dialogue. Moreover, transforming a brand image necessitates consistent, ongoing communication. Reacting with management changes doesn’t convey this consistency.
As I noted in my original analysis, if established brands are adapting to meet evolving expectations around inclusive marketing—and they should be—then executives need to exhibit more patience with results and be prepared for challenges. Making too abrupt changes can lead to poor partnership experiences and irreparable harm.
5. Jaguar’s ‘Copy Nothing’ Gambit: Selling Identity Without Product (2024)
Jaguar’s 2024 rebrand generated massive controversy with its fashion-forward video featuring no cars, diverse models and the tagline “Copy Nothing.” As I detailed in my analysis ofwhether CMOs can sell luxury without a product, the campaign represented a high-stakes bet on brand messaging over product.
The campaign aimed to reposition Jaguar as an ultra-luxury brand competing with Bentley and Ferrari, but it faced criticism for generic logos and unclear messaging. Most notably, trolls attacked the diversity of models as “too woke,” though these critics were unlikely to ever be Jaguar customers.
The real challenge? Jaguar discontinued most of its lineup and won’t launch its new electric Type 00 until 2026. The brand is literally selling an identity rather than a product—a two-year gap in automotive marketing terms.
The Lesson: Brand Reinvention Needs Proof, Patience and Precision
As I emphasized in my original analysis, marketers must pick metrics and KPIs that measure public campaign response. Brand awareness metrics like share of voice in luxury discussions, sentiment analysis of keywords and brand recognition ensure rebranding creates clear competitive separation.
Equally important: know the right stakeholders for valid campaign criticism. Carefully consider how rebranding messages will be received by different audience segments on each digital channel. Trolls are never your customers and should not dictate brand direction.
The gamble remains unresolved until 2026, but the journey offers lessons: sometimes the brand itself must be the product, but the messaging must clearly demonstrate how 100 years of history brings value to aspirational luxury plans.
6. Zara’s ‘The Jacket’ Campaign: Missing the Room Entirely (2023)
In December 2023, Zara launched “The Jacket” campaign featuring mannequins with missing limbs wrapped in white sheets amid rubble and broken plaster. The timing couldn’t have been worse — the campaign was launched during the Israel-Gaza conflict, and the imagery immediately drew comparisons to disturbing scenes from Gaza, including corpses wrapped in white burial shrouds.
Social media commentary was swift, according to NPR. The hashtag #BoycottZara trended quickly on X (formerly Twitter), and Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority received over 110 complaints. CNN Business reported that Zara pulled the campaign after the backlash, with parent company Inditex claiming the photos were taken in September, before the conflict began.
But as The Drum’s analysis revealed, the real failure was in crisis preparedness. Giselle Elsom, client services director at Truffle Social, noted: “It should then be checked before it goes live, especially during times like these.” Lucy Robertson, head of brand marketing at Seen Connects, emphasized that “brands need to be more sensitive to how customers are behaving and it’s really about reading the room.”
The Lesson: Cultural Context Must Be a Core Part of QA
Scheduled content requires final approval processes that account for current events. As The Drum’s experts emphasized, brands must be able to “switch direction quickly—this is the new normal.” World events can derail campaigns prepared months in advance, so marketing teams need “brave, bold decisions” to pull content that won’t land well with audiences. Cultural sensitivity isn’t just about the creative—it’s about knowing when to hit pause.
7. Bumble’s ‘Celibacy is Not the Answer’: Missing Cultural Movements (2024)
Bumble’s 2024 billboard campaign stating “Celibacy is not the answer” landed during growing conversations about women’s autonomy, dating culture burnout and the “4B movement,” in which some women choose celibacy as empowerment.
The campaign felt dismissive of legitimate concerns about modern dating dynamics, suggesting the app knew better than women making conscious choices about their bodies and relationships.
The Lesson: Know Your Audience’s Reality Before Challenging It
Focus groups made up of your actual target demographic would have flagged this messaging as insensitive before public rollout. Understanding your audience means listening to their current concerns and cultural movements, not dictating what their “answers” should be. When your product depends on people dating, telling them celibacy is wrong feels self-serving rather than supportive.
8. American Eagle’s ‘Great Jeans’: When Wordplay Backfires (2025)
American Eagle’s 2025 campaign paired Sydney Sweeney with the tagline “Great Jeans”—a pun on genes that some interpreted as body-coded, exclusionary and uncomfortably close to eugenics rhetoric. What was meant as playful wordplay quickly became a widely criticized example of tone-deaf marketing.
The Lesson: Clever Wordplay Cannot Come at the Expense of Inclusion
Pre-testing with diverse audiences catches these problems before launch. What seems clever in a conference room can read entirely differently in the marketplace. In our hyperconnected age, every message faces examination through multiple cultural lenses. Clarity and inclusivity beat cleverness when they conflict.
The fix was simple: test the tagline across subcultures and choose language that can’t be misinterpreted.
9. H&M’s ‘Coolest Monkey in the Jungle’: Implicit Bias on Display (2018)
In January 2018, H&M faced global outrage for featuring a Black child modelling a hoodie with the slogan “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle” on its UK website. Social media erupted immediately, with celebrities including The Weeknd, G-Eazy, Questlove and LeBron James condemning the ad. CNN Business reported that both The Weeknd and G-Eazy severed business ties with H&M over the incident.
The controversy intensified when observers noted that other hoodies from the same line—featuring phrases like “survival expert”—were modelled by white children. Billboard noted that the incident was “yet another sad reminder of how much more work needs to be done when it comes to understanding the implications that can arise behind certain images and messaging.”
H&M’s initial apology fell flat, forcing the company to issue a more detailed statement acknowledging that “even if unintentional, passive or casual racism needs to be eradicated wherever it exists.” NBC News reported that H&M responded by appointing Annie Wu as Global Leader for Diversity and Inclusiveness, though critics argued the damage was already done.
The Lesson: Diversity in the Room Prevents Harm in the World
As Billboard’s analysis emphasized: “This H&M incident again lets you know that no one of color is involved in these creative teams.” Diversity isn’t just about the final product—it’s about who’s in the room making decisions. The campaign revealed how implicit bias operates when homogeneous teams create content for diverse audiences. Multiple perspectives at every approval level aren’t optional—they’re essential for identifying racist implications before campaigns reach the public. H&M’s stock plummeted, and the brand lost major celebrity partnerships, demonstrating the financial and reputational cost of diversity failures.
10. PureGym’s ’12 Years A Slave’ Workout: Comparing Exercise to Enslavement (2020)
In 2020, PureGym Luton and Dunstable named a workout challenge “12 Years of Slave” and claimed “slavery was hard, and so is this.” The comparison of a voluntary fitness challenge to the historical enslavement of African Americans drew immediate, severe criticism.
The post was taken down, and PureGym apologized, stating they did not approve the post before it was made—revealing another layer of failure in brand oversight.
The Lesson: Some Topics Are Not Creative Raw Material
Some comparisons should never be made, regardless of the “creative” intent. Historical trauma, particularly relating to slavery and racism, cannot be co-opted for workout marketing. That should be a fundamental understanding by marketing teams at brands.
Robust approval processes ensure local franchises or branches cannot publish content that destroys brand reputation. Cultural sensitivity training should emphasize what’s absolutely off-limits, not just what’s questionable.
Conclusion: What Can Marketing Leaders Expect in 2026?
So, we don’t want to just dance on marketing graves here. What can we truly learn and expect in 2026? Start doubling down on customer experience.
Rishi Rana, CEO of Cyara, said in 2026, CMOs will stop measuring marketing success by impressions, clicks and campaigns and start measuring it by experience quality. As AI takes over more of the customer journey, from personalized offers to service conversations, the brand experience no longer ends at conversion, according to Rana. It lives and breathes in every automated touchpoint, he added.
“That’s why marketing leaders will begin reporting a new KPI at the board level: the Experience Quality Index (EQI),” Rana said. “EQI will blend accuracy, speed, and sentiment across human and AI interactions, creating a single measure of how every brand moment performs in the real world. In the AI era, marketing’s job isn’t just to attract customers, it’s to assure the quality of every promise a brand makes.”
Pierre DeBois is the founder and CEO of Zimana, an analytics services firm that helps organizations achieve improvements in marketing, website development, and business operations. Zimana has provided analysis services using Google Analytics, R Programming, Python, JavaScript and other technologies where data and metrics abide.
The demise of third-party cookies and an election year team up to present marketers with both challenges and opportunities.
A once-in-a-lifetime perfect storm of technological disruption and cultural flashpoint is about to descend on the digital marketing landscape, resulting in both short-term challenges and long-term change. Few marketers seem prepared for either.
Here’s what’s on the horizon.
Storm 1: Third-party tracking cookies are going away… even if that day is now further than expected. That means the days of simply buying data on customers and retargeting them based on the information purchased are limited.
Storm 2: The 2024 election cycle, and all the down-ballot issues that come with a presidential election year, are going to eat up nearly all available ad inventory, driving up costs and driving down ROI.
Taken together, it’s going to be extremely difficult for brands to cut through the noise and target the right audience while trying to maintain efficiency.
But there is a way to weather these headwinds and come out the other side a winner. Spoiler alert, it all points to a strategic investment in first-party data, owned channels, and partnering with companies that have the data to help you execute a winning plan.
First, let’s examine more closely the magnitude of the storms upon us.
Cookie depreciation
Yes, Google keeps delaying its promise to end the use of third-party cookie on Chrome browsers. But what’s interesting is that one of the reasons behind this delay is a lack of industry readiness for a world without cookies.
We’ve seen the headaches that over-reliance on tech solutions can have on brands. Remember when Apple killed Identifier for Advertisers (which matched ads to unique individuals on iOS devices)? Brands advertising heavily on Facebook were hit particularly hard – it took nearly two years to normalize reach and metrics closer to what brands were used to seeing before that iOS update.
Up to 80% of advertisers still rely on third-party cookies today.
70% of marketers raise concerns that digital advertising will take a step backward following the death of the third-party cookie.
69% of advertisers think the death of third-party cookies will have a bigger impact than both GDPR and CCPA.
In a worst-case scenario, according to ad sales company Raptive, a 30% deprecation could easily translate to a 30% drop in revenue for brands relying heavily on cookies.
What’s more, the “Privacy Sandbox” APIs Google is creating for advertisers who remain heavily reliant on cookies is hardly a solution. Google itself says it’s “not intended to be direct, one-to-one replacements for all third-party cookie-based use cases,” according to the company’s blog. Regardless, the required innovation and building of new ad tools on top of Privacy Sandbox will require significant new costs and an entire shift in the development of these tools.
All in all, this is uncharted territory. But it seems clear the financial costs to rebuild an ecosystem will be large. There are lots of unknowns, but the biggest is how will these changes affect revenue, and what’s the new normal for an ROI model with paid ads.
Regardless of the source of traffic, if an unknown device hits your site, you need to be prepared to capitalize on that activity.
Can you offer up the right value exchange that convinces the customer to opt-in for more information?
Are you using identity partners that may have a profile on that device and recognize its potential as a high-value customer?
This is critical information that allows you to engage potential new customers the moment they visit your site. Rather than offering new visitors a generic discount code, you’ll be able to make a more specific, personalized offer that has a far higher chance of converting into an opt in. Or offer a pop up touting a loyalty perk rather than a discount code.
Getting that unknown visitor to convert to an owned channel will then allow you to learn even more about these visitors and refine your offers to them even more, resulting in offers more likely to convert to sales, and ultimately a more long-term loyal customer.
If you can convert 30% of your unknown paid traffic to known contacts, your advertising spend will become far more meaningful.
The election
While the presidential race will get the headlines and no shortage of advertising funds to spend, a large majority of ad dollars will come from congressional and local races. This is where political ad machines will be targeting people based on behaviour and other data.
All those dollars will be spent chasing the same people. They call them voters. You call them customers. Either way, political ads will be chasing the same people on the same platforms, vying for the same inventory. So what does that mean?
Consider this: political ad spend is expected to shatter the previous record of $10 billion that was set during the previous election cycle. Predictions for 2024 election ad spend range from $10bn to $15.9bn. And while the majority of political advertising spend in the US goes to local broadcast TV, an increasing amount is moving toward digital channels.
Digital advertising company Jump saw Meta’s CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) rise from a total of $8 to as high as $15.50 during election week 2020, an overall increase of 94%. This is what’s ahead of us and what marketers need to prepare for.
This isn’t a financial discussion either. Brand safety is always a concern during elections. Political ads from so-called “dark money” groups can be highly inflammatory, and you neer know what kind of ad will show up next to yours.
All the more reason why owned channels are much safer. Be in control of where your message lands by seeking one-to-one communication in the personal and private space of the inbox or as a text message.
3 things you can do
1. Focus on identity
Work with partners who can match unknown site visitors against a database of millions of known devices to identify which are your target customers worth engaging with. Get them opted in as early as possible so you can use owned channels to engage.
2. Leverage owned channels
Once you can identify existing opted-in contacts and convert new site visitors, use triggered email and SMS channels to personalize offers based on their web activity and interest in your products or services. This is far more effective (and far lower cost) than remarketing with paid ads.
3. Provide value
Increase your knowledge of each new customer by offering value in return for zero-party data that allows you to make more personalized offers and recommendations in your one-to-many outbound messaging campaigns.
Source: System1 FluencyTrace real time testing of “Pull-Up”
Source: System1 FluencyTrace real time testing of Twix “Two Bears” Ad
