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Well folks, the second day of presentations at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference is in the books and today’s content was inspirational, informative, and incredibly engaging (do you have the meats?). While day one called on the need to be a disruptor, today’s presentations from the likes of Arby’s, Audi, and GE all had a clear message: in order to disrupt, one must challenge. Usually, the idea of being a challenger is seen as something negative. But the presenters offered a new point of view on the traditional challenger.
“I don’t think advertising’s dead. I think advertising is just craving courage.” -- Arby's CMO Rob Lynch at #ANAMasters
— Ad Age (@adage) October 16, 2015
@Arby's put their money where their tweet was (@Pharrell) #ANAMasters pic.twitter.com/g3eUD4dQAi
— mark a. chaves (@MarkAChaves) October 16, 2015
@Mildenhall: Marketing that matters, that pushes the human race forward, is the great differentiator.#ANAMasters
— ANAmarketers (@ANAmarketers) October 16, 2015
What's so striking about all creative & programs @lindaboff shared is how tightly they're linked to brand purpose #ANAMasters
— Kelly Wenzel (@kellywenzel) October 16, 2015
"Do what is authentic to you. Have the courage to make choices Don't be afraid to upset people" Arby's CMO Rob Lynch crushes it #ANAMasters
— Christopher Cox (@christophercox1) October 16, 2015
Be bold in your engagement. Don't be afraid to listen to your customers, they will tell you how they feel. -Rob Lynch @Arbys #ANAMasters
— YA (@YAEngage) October 16, 2015
The most significant thing that a 21st century brand must do is stand for something. - @Airbnb CMO @Mildenhall #ANAMasters
— Leo Burnett (@LeoBurnett) October 16, 2015
After the stellar line-up of speakers today, it’s clear that we, as marketers, must dare to be bold and dare to be challengers. For when we challenge, we shed the fear of failure. Let’s take a stand for something. Let’s challenge the status quo.
Alice Cooper and Donald Trump are not the same type of person. Are you shocked? If you were using demographic data, you probably would be surprised. Your data would show them both to be older Caucasian males who belong to a high income bracket and who live in a high income neighborhood.
As you accumulate more data on both these fellows, you’ll notice the difference and will realize that you may not want put them both in the same audience segment – or maybe you would if you’re running a wacky golf-related campaign.
Advertisers who want to improve the performance of campaigns have to start with a deep understanding of the consumer. While demographic data has a lot of value in targeting audiences via TV and print media, digital media enables a more personalized way of advertising based on deeper insights marketers can gather on consumers.
Now, with many large advertisers, the majority of the budget is earmarked for TV, where there is the easy temptation to just use demo data about age, gender and household income for targeting. This is how marketers have done it for years and years. However, recent studies from both Comscore vCE and Nielsen OCR show that most ads don’t hit their target audience. Comscore recently revealed that 57% of display ads didn’t hit their intended demographic target. Remember my reference to Alice Cooper and Donald Trump? For the uninitiated, Alice Cooper is a rock/metal singer, and Trump is, well, The Donald. If I were to use simple demo data to reach a TV audience of men, ages 65+, nationwide, I would reach VERY different people – both Alice and Donald. Yes, both are the same demo, but that’s where the similarities end. Marketers need to redefine how and who they target.
With the advent of people-based targeting, marketers have the opportunity to reach real people and not just phantom faces within a demographic. Marketers are now equipped with data to target people based on their actual online (and offline) purchase behavior and interests. This affords the opportunity to tailor ad experiences with appropriate messages to individuals vs. groups. If marketers can layer in purchase-based or CRM data to discern between existing customers and prospects, it pays tremendous dividends. This type of data helps personalize creative, and studies have shown that providing the right message in an ad contributes to a marketing conversion 4-5 times more than customary demographic based targeting of media. With people-based targeting, marketers can use first-party data to understand their highest value customers, and then layer in third-party data and other info to create a richer profile of customers to better target ad messages.
At our company, we regularly run new acquisition campaigns using additional behavior and intent data, and in some cases, this yields 7 to 10 times more acquisitions than demo-based consumer targeting. Here’s one scenario of how a brand with more customer insights can achieve this type of success. A marketer could have data on individual men in the 35 to 44 age range. Other data that can be layered on top of this could be career (perhaps he works in IT, medicine, education), lifestyle (married and no kids, married w/kids, single parent), interests (travel and political motivations), and intent (needs for his business/work, new SUV, shopping at high-end retailers). Having this information gives advertisers a more robust view of current customers, plus the ability and precision to reach those exact customers and the ones who look like them.
In campaigns, gathering knowledge about audiences is often overlooked or over-simplified. Because audience data is a vital pillar for a well-performing campaign, it pays off to think beyond simple demographics and explore a wide myriad of data sources available for the marketer.
Since Centro’s inception, we’ve had one goal: to improve the lives of the people behind the campaigns. That’s why we created media management software to help people reach their business goals better, faster and more efficiently than ever before. In an industry of rapid growth, it’s imperative to have the best people tackling the toughest challenges and developing better solutions.
Interested in joining the Centro team? Check out our hottest tech openings of the week and apply today!
Software Engineer, Backend – Toronto, Canada
This role will be responsible for building out new products, while updating and expanding our existing offerings. The core functions include developing on and improving Centro’s highly scalable real-time bidding platform, which processes 30B+ auctions, each within milliseconds, every day. You will actively participate on our team and help drive innovation for new products and services. Our software engineers enjoy rolling up their sleeves and writing code!
VP of Software Engineering – Chicago, IL
We are looking for a software engineering leader to head our Chicago development group and take responsibility for a group of directors, managers and engineers to build our flagship product, Centro Direct. This is a senior leadership role focused on scaling the organization, practices and delivery of best-in-class functionality and usability. The group includes teams that are responsible for both front-end and backend components for our 24x7 SaaS service and partners closely with product management.
Director of Technical Support – Chicago, IL
As the Director of technical support for Centro Platform, you will be responsible for providing solutions to our customers through your understanding of the platform, your ability to research and find answers to customer’s questions and also communicate with the internal engineering and product management teams. This role will primarily focus on Centro Direct and Centro DSP products. Our ideal candidate will start with solving technical support challenges for these above mentioned products and building the teams that will concentrate on providing technical support for each.
The twitter sphere was abuzz with conversation throughout the first day of the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference. As usual, heartwarming, tear-jerking ads captured the limelight, along with a wild karaoke jam session to kick-off the day. Who knew Wilson Phillips could get over 2,000 people on their feet so quickly? But, if there is any one thing to take away from the first day, it is the need for companies to take risks, be relevant, and push the boundaries of creativity in order to spark industry disruption.
Embracing controversy means you’re connecting with people + creating sides. Controversy generates relevance. #ANAMasters @calvinklein
— Melisa Goldie (@melisagoldie) October 15, 2015
To drive disruption, educate external and internal allies. — @Kirasw of @lyft #ANAMasters — ANAmarketers (@ANAmarketers) October 15, 2015
“If you don’t disrupt you’re wasting your money" - @jeffcharney to #AnaMasters — David Rosen (@dreverybody) October 15, 2015
Big budgets make marketers lazy @BradJakeman#ANAMasters — Kelly Wenzel (@kellywenzel) October 15, 2015
But what's the underlying message? Sure, creativity is important and essential in reaching consumers. But without powerful creative and unique messaging, your brand will join the clutter and fall by the wayside. What's needed is unity. Unity in teams, between teams, and the unity of everyone within an organization as a whole. Togetherness will yield greater and faster innovation, ultimately leading towards increased brand success. Such consensus builds confidence, which leads to a greater willingness to seize opportunity.
“Innovation and disruption does not come from homogenous groups of people.” — @bradjakeman of @PepsiCo #ANAMasters — ANAmarketers (@ANAmarketers) October 15, 2015
"I would like you to think about the power of generosity as an incredible advantage at your own company.” — @DanaAnderson, @MDLZ #ANAMasters — ANAmarketers (@ANAmarketers) October 15, 2015
Purpose and people driven companies drive business success @Kirasw #ANAMasters @Starbucks @ChipotleTweets @ANAmarketers — Centro (@Centro) October 15, 2015
We'll be live-tweeting Day 2 of the ANA Masters, so be sure to follow @Centro and stay tuned for more insights and wisdom!
Mobile has created over one million hours of potential reach in the U.S. every day.
One million.
That’s no Austin Powers reference, that’s a very real and incredible fact – one that’s still hard to wrap our heads around as marketers.
There’s no doubt that mobile has changed the game and upped the ante. But, it’s still just one device and one channel of many. We’re living in a hyper-connected world filled with over 7 billion people, with a staggering number of whom are collectively researching, shopping, DIY-ing, sharing, and connecting across a multitude of devices and channels at every moment of any given day. In fact, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2015, 4.9 billion connected things will be in use, and by 2020? 25 billion.
Now is your chance to take action. Fortify your strategy with a performance plan that places channel choice as a pivotal stake in upholding your brand story.
As the second pillar in our performance plan model, channel is a critical nuance. Take time to understand the difference between brand channels and engagement channels, as well as what ones serve which purpose for your brand. Study how your consumers behave across these channels and sites. Discern the path they take and where your message fits best.
With so many choices and opportunities to connect with your consumers, remember that while you may be looking to capitalize on many of those million hours of opportunity, it all boils down to one single, amazingly powerful moment.
Tune back in over the course of the next few weeks to learn in detail what exactly each pillar includes and what you can do to get started. You can also review Pillar 1: Audiences, here. Questions on this approach? Give us a shout – we’re ready to support your every digital need.
Fall is officially here! And that means we’re one day closer to what is arguably one of our favorite events of the year – The ANA Masters of Marketing Conference in Orlando, Florida. From October 14th to 17th, the nation’s leading chief marketing officers and leaders from the agency and media worlds will meet to learn and engage with some of the top marketers and brands from around the world. Building brands, leveraging expanding arrays of media, making marketing more accountable, and improving the quality of marketing organizations are all topics up for discussion. Will you be attending the conference this year? If so, we’ve picked out some great panels, presentations and workshops that we think will provide you with some excellent insight. Check them out below. In the meantime, if you’d like additional details on where we will be at ANA or if you would like to set up a meeting at our on-site booth (booth #5), feel free to email us at [email protected]. We’d love to chat!
What: Insights into Action: Best Practices in Content Marketing
When & Where: October 15th @ 7:00AM in the Palms Ballroom
Who’s Speaking: Christian Kugel, VP of Consumer Analytics at AOL
What’s It About: Most marketers agree that content marketing is a priority for brands today. There is less agreement, however, on exactly how to create content that is memorable, sharable, and measurable. Join Christian Kugel, AOL's VP of Consumer Analytics and Research, as he shares the culmination of three years of research into what drives successful content marketing programs. Learn techniques and tools for creating programs that emotionally resonate with audiences, understand why people use and engage with content, and uncover how content marketing can create a new depth of consumer engagement.
What: Micro-Moments: The New Battleground for Brands
When & Where: October 15th @ 12:15PM in the Cyprus Ballroom Foyer
Who’s Speaking: Matt Lawson, Director of Performance Marketing at Google
What’s It About: Mobile has fragmented the consumer journey into many short bursts of interaction – some transactional, some educational, and some of everything in-between. The nature (and the number!) of these digital moments require marketers to fundamentally re-think how they understand, reach and meaningfully engage people on their journeys – moment after moment. Join Matt Lawson, Director of Performance Ads Marketing at Google, as he shares consumer insights about the "micro-moments" shaping today's consumer journey and examples of customers who've had success catering to this new behavior.
What: Behind the Rise of a Super Brand
When & Where: October 16th @ 9:00AM in the Cypress Ballroom
Who’s Speaking: Jonathan Mildenhall, CMO at Airbnb, Inc
What’s It About: In just seven years Airbnb has grown from three Airbeds in an apartment in San Francisco to one of the world's most valuable private companies. With more than one million homes and 40 million guests in 191 countries across 32,000 cities, Airbnb is without doubt a 21st century company. Chief Marketing Officer, Jonathan Mildenhall, will share strategic and creative insights on how Airbnb's marketing agenda has helped propel the company to the status of the world's first community-driven super brand.
What: The Power of Data-Driven Insights
When & Where: October 16th @ 12:15PM in the Palms Ballroom
Who’s Speaking: Marc de Swann Arons, CMO at @ MB Vermeer; Lisa Donohue, CEO at Starcom USA; Deborah Wahl, CMO at McDonald’s Corp.
What’s It About: Marketers have never before had so much access to data. Data has great potential to improve marketing and ROI. But the risk of data overload is very real and confusion abounds on how best to leverage and manage data. This session will provide a deep-dive on the power of data-driven insights and cover issues that include developing business building ideas from data, managing data internally, data protection/ownership, working with partners for optimizing the use of data, and more.
What: Building Strong Brands Through Digital Technology, Not Digital Advertising
When & Where: October 17th @ 10:00AM in the Cypress Ballroom
Who’s Speaking: Robert Tas, CMO at Pegasystems, Inc
What’s Going On: In today's era of digital Darwinism, it's not the brands with the biggest advertising budgets that will win over those with smaller ones — it's the brands that are faster and better at adapting to rapidly changing customers and consumers. Robert Tas will outline a new model for building strong brands based on his experience as the CMO of Pegasystems, as well as his work with clients including American Express, RBS, and Sprint.
Audience: A classification of a user group that has some common characteristics or attributes such as demographic data, habits, interests, behaviors or more. These segments are used to target individuals when delivering online advertising campaigns.
Branding Channel: Also known as ‘Branding Tactics.’ A channel that is used primarily for branding and visibility. Branding channels vary per marketer.
Channel: An advertising channel is any application on a digital device (e.g. web browser, gaming app, email, social, video player, and more) on which companies market products and services. The amount of channels available to marketers has grown enormously with the advancement of digital devices to embellish traditional media advertising.
Engagement channel: A channel that is effective for generating various types of responses from users, such as a click, form-fill, purchase, a search, and more.
Execution: The act of creating and serving an ad. It can refer to the ad itself or the campaign as a whole.
Exposure: The concept of showing a user an ad.
First-party data: First-party data is generated when a cookie is placed on a website by the owner (publisher) so that the owner can recognize return visitors to the website. This can also include other data owned by a brand/client, which can come from onboarding first-party information on the brand/client’s CRM database. (Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada)
KPI: Stands for ‘Key Performance Indicator.’ Each KPI is a set of quantifiable measures that a company or industry uses to gauge or compare performance in terms of meeting their strategic and operational goals. (Investopedia)
Offline data: Offline data refers to data used for data-driven marketing on digital marketing channels and which originates from offline sources. Offline data can be the owner’s data - from CRM data files - or data bought from offline data vendors. Offline data offered by vendors can be retail transactions from credit card networks, aggregated offline catalog transactions, syndicated loyalty-card data and more. Regardless of where offline data comes from, the onboarding process removes personally identifiable information, leaving the population that is targetable as a group, but anonymous. (The Digital Marketing Glossary)
Response: An action taken by a user based on the exposure to an ad.
Third-party data: Third-party data is generated when a cookie is placed on a website by a third-party, such as an ad server or data provider. Information from these cookies is collected and can be used to place users in one or more segments, based on their online activity. These cookies are used to target advertisements and segment audiences (Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada).
Viewability: Viewability is an online advertising metric that tracks the opportunity for an impression to be seen by viewers. The Media Ratings Council’s standard for a viewable desktop display impression is a minimum of 50% of pixels (of the digital ad) in view (within the browser) for a minimum of one second. For example, if an ad is loaded at the bottom of a webpage but a user doesn’t scroll down far enough to see it, that impression is not considered viewable. (Digiday, 2014)
There’s a quote, “The man who stops advertising to save money is the man who stops the clock to save time.” Some say Thomas Jefferson coined the phrase while others say it was Henry Ford. Either way, we get the point. Advertising, marketing, digital – they’re all essential to success.
The concept is simple. Yet, I think if you took a quick poll of your colleagues, most of them would say digital advertising today is far from easy nor is it common sense. For many, it’s a chaotic approach that feels more like a digital Armageddon than anything else. Will our campaigns (and our sanity) survive the battle?
On the positive side, the explosion of digital media presents us with new opportunities around every corner, at every moment of the day (and night). But if you’re late to the party, digital no longer means throwing out a few good ads across every channel and waiting for the automatic deposits to roll in. That was so 2012.
Today, whether you’re a media buyer trying to build an innovative plan or a CMO trying to create business impact – boosting the bottom line and showing performance, is, well, the bottom line.
The best approach? A sound performance plan to support your initiatives – a variety of metrics and measurements to determine the outcome of your efforts.
A great place to start are the 5 Pillars of Performance: Audience, Channel, Execution, Exposure, and Response. Placing these strategies as the cornerstones of your campaigns will help you build a brand that stands the test of time.
Tune back in over the course of the next few weeks to learn in detail about what exactly each pillar entails and what you can do to get started. Questions on this approach? Give us a shout – we’re ready to support your every digital need.
"Today, Centro is a digital advertising platform that boasts more than 700 employees and more than 2,500 customers. Through all of the sleepless nights and uncertainties, Riegsecker says, he kept one thing in mind — the people behind the profit."