5 Ways to Get to the Heart of Emotional Marketing
Done right, emotional marketing helps marketers differentiate and compete in this changing environment, and conveys a brand’s values, interests and passion.
Emotional marketing tells a story that connects with an audience in a human or personal way. With consumers increasingly making buying decisions driven by feelings rather than logic, emotional marketing creates meaningful relationships that result in brand fans, replacing the loyalty marketing approach of years past.
The proliferation of new media channels, platforms and devices means consumers have greater access to brand stories, and marketers have more ways to convey their brand’s identity and vision. Done right, emotional marketing helps marketers differentiate and compete in this changing environment, and conveys a brand’s values, interests and passion.
While emotional marketing is a strategy, it must feel authentic and honest in order to work. Marketers need to truly understand both the audience and the brand’s identity to choose the right approach.
Here are five approaches to emotional marketing that can turn casual consumers into brand fans: Inspirational, Aspirational, Love, Milestones and Local.
1. Inspirational
What motivates or encourages your target customers? When people are inspired, they often think or act differently. They may feel a sense of pride when someone they relate to accomplishes an unexpected feat or overcomes an obstacle. Or, they may be swayed by seeing a good deed in action.
The right human interest story or a spokesperson who embodies the brand make the inspirational approach work. Effectively associating your brand with a role model that people can believe in may lead people to believe in your product as well.
Gatorade and Nike have mastered the inspirational approach, using athletes like Serena Williams and Michael Jordan as brand ambassadors who inspire audiences not simply with their looks or fame but with their accomplishments, talents and perseverance.
Building an emotional connection with your customers can be magical and create a halo effect for your brand. Dawn dish soap was hailed as a wildlife rescue hero for cleaning hundreds of birds after the Gulf Coast oil spill in 2010. Consumers viewed the brand with pride for being part of the overall humanitarian response to this ecological disaster.
2. Aspirational
Aspirational campaigns create a brand presence that taps into an audience’s dreams, their desire to reach a lofty goal or enjoy a lifestyle or experience they long for. They may aspire to be financially secure, send a child to college or hit the open road in a status vehicle.
Marketers considering an aspirational approach must understand the need, hope or desire their brand fills for their target customer and how their brand reflects people’s self-image and identity. Then they must build a story that brings the dream to life.
In the luxury category, Hermes conveys the image that its products are for those who are elegant, worldly and appreciate fine craftsmanship. Even if you’ve never traveled the world, owning an Hermes product shows you appreciate worldliness in a way others may not. Those who drive a Tesla do so because they believe in the company’s aspirational mission: “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”
3. Expressing love
A marketing strategy focused on appealing to consumers’ raw and most personal emotions can change a nameless, faceless, perhaps seemingly soulless business into a brand that audiences can relate to and care about. This can even work for businesses that aren’t inherently compelling or deliver a product or service that has little to differentiate it from the competition.
It is also impactful for businesses that specialize in products or services for special occasions.
The most effective way to humanize a company is by demonstrating that the brand makes someone’s life better, easier or brings them joy. Brands such as Pandora (jewelry) and FTD help show someone you care on important occasions. The long-running “Love — it’s what makes a Subaru, a Subaru” campaign is classic, and ADT’s “Always There” campaign promises to protect your home and help your family feel safe. Lysol’s new “Protect Like a Mother” campaign likens mothers to wild animals who instinctively protect their young from anything — even germs.
4. A milestone connection
Milestones can be an opportunity to strengthen your brand’s relationship with your customers. The Big Mac turns 50 this year, Star Wars debuted 40 years ago and the jelly giant J.M. Smucker is 120 years old, and their companies are proudly celebrating these anniversaries. Additionally, a brand can focus on life milestones that are important to its audience and develop a strategy that resonates with them.
Even just creating a story about your brand’s presence in the lives of those experiencing a milestone can be very effective.
5. The local angle
A brand can gain fans by connecting to people’s pride and passion for where they live. Brands with a trendy “buy local” strategy tailor their stories and platforms to the cities in which they do business.
National auto brands, retailers and banks tie into their local markets through campaigns featuring famous local attractions, local schools and colleges, and hometown sports teams. Brands like Bank of America and Target play active roles in local programs and partnerships that make communities better places to live and work.
Location-specific marketing is also a particularly valuable approach for young, smaller businesses or franchises that may have smaller budgets, but can trade on their local presence and connection to the community.
Be real in real-time
While theoretically any of these emotional marketing approaches can apply to all kinds of businesses, one thing remains the same: You must be consistent in your storytelling across all platforms to bring it to life. Ensuring that your story and delivery evoke the same tone and message across multiple platforms builds a credible, meaningful and recognizable brand that will resonate with customers.
While creating this type of marketing strategy may seem like an insurmountable — and cost prohibitive — task, small businesses should not be discouraged. You don’t have to have a giant budget to create brand fans. Understand your audience, tell a believable story, be prepared to work harder and use the platforms your audience uses to give you the most visibility and “bang for your buck.”
Regardless of the strategy you choose, remember that the key to creating a successful emotional marketing campaign is authenticity. If you truly understand the promise your brand is making to its audience and speak from the heart, your brand will connect at a whole new level and transform customers into friends.
This article first appeared here.
Dettol’s TikTok hand-wash challenge gets nearly 11 billion views in 5 days
The TikTok challenge aims to get more people in India to wash their hands. Dettol created a unique song that pairs with the hashtag #HandWashChallenge.
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak havoc around the world, health agencies, governments and even brands are relaying messages of social distancing and reminders to wash hands.
Dettol, which sells disinfectant sprays and wipes, and hand sanitizers, has launched a TikTok challenge aimed at getting more people in India to wash their hands, where the virus has 153 confirmed cases, but where testing has remained low.
The challenge has quickly become a success, garnering 11 billion views in just five days.
The Reckitt Benckiser brand created a unique song that pairs with the hashtag #HandWashChallenge. The hashtag filter has a branded Dettol strip across the top with the hashtag and names the steps to wash hands. The user can dance out the steps to the challenge and share it with their friends.
“Join hands with Dettol and take the #HandWashChallenge to spread awareness on how to wash hands!” reads the challenge on the platform.
Dettol launched the campaign with several India-based TikTok influencers who have millions of followers on the platform. Actor Riyaz Aly (31.9 million followers), actress Avneet Kaur (19.9 million followers), Nisha Guragain (22.5 million followers), Suraj Pal Singh (14 million followers) and actress Urvashi Rautela (5.2 million followers) are among the influencers who began participating in the challenge four days ago.
So far, the brand has posted the videos of 17 influencers to its Indian TikTok account @dettol_india, where it has 18,400 followers.
Generating nearly 8.7 billion views for one challenge is high for the platform. That far surpasses the 1.7 billion views e.l.f. Cosmetics saw in one week when it was one of the first brand’s to create its own song for a challenge on TikTok last October. Other branded challenges that have also done well on the platform have brought in millions, or hundreds of millions, of views in the same time period.
TikTok has considerably more users in India then in the U.S. The platform has roughly 81 million monthly active users in India, compared to 26.5 million monthly active users in the U.S.
Although Dettol’s products have not yet been scientifically proven as effective against the virus, Dettol is one brand that is not suffering as much as the overall market. People have been stockpiling cleaning products, along with groceries and accessories like toilet paper. Online, the company says its products have proven effective for disinfecting strains of the flu from the same family as coronavirus, and expects them to be as successful against COVID-19.
Dettol did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
There are a number of other hand-washing challenges on the platform, including TikTok’s own pro-bono partnership with the World Health Organization that challenges people to share videos of themselves washing their hands for 40 seconds with the hashtag #safehands. The hashtag has generated 816.2 million views.
This article first appeared here.
6 considerations when choosing a media monitoring platform
What are the features and services that differentiate the different products? Here are some things you should think about.
Technology continues to change, organizations communicate differently and we all consume media and information. Here are some top takeaways when searching for the right social media monitoring platform:
Breadth of coverage
While many platform providers claim to have the broadest coverage, the only way to see whether or not they monitor the outlets you’re interested in is to prepare a list and ask a sales rep to manually check and see if those outlets are included.
Some services do have broader coverage in some areas, but for the most part, everyone’s accessing the same source feeds. Though it’s certainly important to check and make sure any critical outlets you need are covered, breadth is much less important than it should be. If everyone has access to the same source feeds, then the more important thing is how easy it is to find relevant articles and stories.
Ease-of-use
The single biggest cost of implementing a new media monitoring service is learning to use it. This is why ease-of-use is such a critical factor. A well thought out, intuitive interface that protects you from over- or under-filtering, and from making rookie mistakes by activating conflicting features is hugely important.
If you can figure out how to use most of the features by yourself without any training, that’s a good interface. But if features or settings are unclear, and you need a lot of instruction to figure them out, think twice about adopting that platform, no matter how many exciting bells and whistles it may offer.
Look beyond the AI hype
These are still early days for artificial intelligence. Today, AI can spot patterns and correlations in data, but it still can’t perform intellectual tasks as well as we can. Tracking message pass-through based on concepts and ideas rather than brand names and keywords requires natural language understanding, and this is beyond what AI can do today.
Artificial intelligence provides tremendous promise, but it’s still much better at processing insurance claims than analyzing Op-Eds and social media posts, which are further complicated by slang, emotion and sarcasm. I’m excited by its potential—but on a weighted scale of features, I’d assign a lower value to this capability at this point in time.
Training & Support
Media monitoring providers are in the software-as-a-service business and their key performance indicator is monthly recurring revenue. How long customers stay with a media monitoring service provider is perhaps the best measure for the quality of their service.
Unfortunately, churn rates aren’t publicly available, so spend time with the customer success people behind the product before you buy and hop onto Glassdoor and see if their employees are happy, or if there’s a lot of turnover. If it’s a great place to work, chances are you’ll get great support. But if the CEO’s approval and their star ratings are low, you’d be smart to worry about whether or not you’re going to get the level of support you need.
On demand, self-paced video training and a good knowledge base are certainly valuable, but you also need access to people with experience using the platform or you could wind up getting hamstrung on all sorts of tasks.
‘Full stack’ vs. ‘best-of-breed’
At a minimum, full stack providers bundle media monitoring, a news journalist database, email distribution, a newswire and an online newsroom management service in an all-in-one solution. The benefit of this approach is that everything’s integrated. So, rather than cut and paste a link to a story you want to post on your website, you click a button and publish directly from the news media monitoring service to the online newsroom.
In exchange for the increased productivity, you might not have access to all the different features that best-of-breed providers offer. From an users’ standpoint, the promise of added productivity through feature integration is nothing to sneeze at. On the other hand, if you’re looking for feature depth that will take you from media monitoring to media intelligence, you might be willing to sacrifice integration for added functionality. That’s the trade-off.
Strategic insights
Traditional and social media monitoring technology is advancing at a breakneck pace. Gone are the days when media monitoring was about collecting your placements and mentions for a clip report.
The ability to monitor social media, import third-party data and run comparisons is where strategic insights are, at the intersection of multiple data sets. By running comparisons between media coverage and internal metrics (like sales, pipeline revenue and conversion rates) it is possible to chart the relationship between public relations and bottom-line metrics and earn your seat in the boardroom.
This article first appeared here.
At Agencies, Furloughs Are The New Layoffs
As agencies look for ways to survive amid the economic downturn and uncertainty ahead due to the coronavirus, they are now among the companies currently exploring whether to layoff or furlough employees.
Furloughs can be a little more attractive for agencies, as it allows them to retain staff while reducing overhead and save cash. With agencies being a people business, keeping talent on staff while mitigating balance sheet risk is much more attractive than losing that talent altogether with a layoff.
“A lot of clients are postponing projects, not canceling them, so furloughs help agencies navigate this fallow period whilst also setting everyone up for work again on the other side of this,” said one agency CEO who requested anonymity. “Agencies imagine that they’ll need those employees again when this is all over.”
There is no one-size-fits-all. The definition of a furlough varies by state, as labor laws are different from California to New York to Washington and so forth, but generally a furlough is a leave of absence of some kind. For some, a furlough could mean their agency has asked them to use their paid leave now. For others, it could be that they’re on unpaid leave but they’re able to retain medical benefits.
How agencies employ a furlough will differ based on the agency and state laws but industry experts say that with a furlough it’s likely agencies are more optimistic about the ability to have that employee return to full-time work in the near future. One agency exec shared that he’s been in conversation with other agency heads who are exploring the possibility of staff furloughs for that very reason.
“Agencies are trying to be as people first as they possibly can,” said Nancy Hill, founder of Media Sherpas and former 4A’s president. “We already had a war for talent going on before all this started. The last thing you want to do is lose really good people that you recruited and to never be able to get them back. You want to do everything you can to retain that top talent during this crisis.”
To deal with the tough months ahead, agencies are exploring all their options including asking employees to take paid time off now or to do shortened workweeks (i.e. a four-day work week and 80% of their salary). With paid time off in particular, agencies exploring that option say they believe that when the coronavirus crisis is over it will likely be too busy to have staff take time off so it makes sense to have staff use that time now rather than lose it or lay them off. The hope is that by making these temporary changes via some version of a furlough agencies can retain their talent until normal work levels resume later in the year.
The anticipation of a return to some kind of normalcy later in the year is part of what makes this crisis is different from previous crises. Depending on how the country responds, the outbreak could potentially come to an end in two months as it nearly has in China where people are starting to return to work. Should that be the case, agencies will then be able to bring back the staff they had and get to back to work quickly for clients.
The furlough could also be a better option for some employees who worry about joining the thousands of unemployed Americans waiting for unemployment to kick in. On Thursday, the Department of Labor released the latest unemployment numbers, reporting that 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment last week. Those that are laid off will likely have a difficult time finding work as agencies are put hiring freezes in place and reduce the amount of freelancers they work with, according to experts. That said, there could be work at in-house agencies as brands recognize the ability to scoop up top talent that’s suddenly available, said Jay Pattisall, principal analyst at Forrester.
Agencies that opt for layoffs are less optimistic about the work they’ve lost coming back anytime soon. That doesn’t mean agency employees who are laid off won’t be brought back by those agencies but it’s less certain than a furlough. Some agency specialties are more likely to see layoffs than others.
“There’s a part of workforce decimated by this,” said Hill. “The work for experiential agencies is probably not going to come back soon.” Giant Spoon, an agency known for its experiential work, recently laid of 20% of its workforce.
Experiential agencies aren’t alone in feeling the squeeze. Media and creative agencies are also grappling with a pause in clients’ advertising spending now. While the talent within agencies are one of the biggest assets, they are also one of the biggest costs. Earlier this month, Anomaly laid off 22 employees and reduced pay for some of its staff, citing the coronavirus as the cause. Holding companies like IPG and Publicis Groupe are also exploring cost reduction methods.
“We have multiple cost levers to align expenses with changes in revenue and our operators are executing as appropriate on both the revenue and expense sides,” said Michael Roth, chairman and CEO of IPG in the company’s public statement on the impact of coronavirus to its business. Publicis Groupe also released a statement that the company was “rigorously managing operating costs, including the postponement of some expenses in order to get through the current situation.”
Even as some agencies opt for furloughs, layoffs are expected. “When agencies encounter recessionary marketing conditions they tend to use layoffs as a mechanism to offset revenue losses,” said Pattisall. “It will likely be no different during this downturn because agencies tend to allow quarter-by-quarter financial considerations dictate operational decisions.” Pattisall added that a furlough could be a difficult option for agencies to use amid the uncertainty of the financial markets and the inability to determine when staff could return.
When asked, agency execs said they are currently focused on retaining talent as best they can looking to avoid layoffs or furloughs.
“It’s a very challenging time for talent working in the marketing communications sector, both full time teammates, marketers, brand managers and all the thousands of freelancers whose livelihoods have depended on this industry,” said Scott Goodson, founder and CEO of StrawberryFrog. “We all need to do what we can to secure these positions and our teammates.”
“People are very concerned about their staff,” said Hill. “They are doing the best they can to preserve workforce, staff and culture in the midst of all this.”
This article first appeared here.
How to Make Sound Decisions With Limited Data During the Coronavirus Pandemic
Marketing professor Oded Netzer explains the challenges of data-driven decision-making during the COVID-19 crisis.
Coronavirus presents an unprecedented predicament: Everyday, leaders must make momentous decisions with life or death consequences for many—but there is a dearth of data. Oded Netzer is a Columbia Business School professor and Data Science Institute affiliate who builds statistical and econometric models to measure consumer behavior that help business leaders make data-driven decisions. Here, he discusses how leaders from all fields can make sound decisions with scarce data to guide them.
How can leaders, regulators, and businesses make informed decisions with scant data on COVID-19?
For those of us with an expertise in data science, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a humbling experience. In the past few years, we have been promoting the notion of data-driven decisions and encouraging decision makers to use the wealth of data typically available to them to make better and more informed decisions. We have been encouraging leaders to use rich historical or comparable data to estimate a sound model and identify repeated patterns, and then apply these techniques to guide their decision making.
How has the coronavirus upended that conventional thinking?
Unprecedented realities, such as the one we are facing now with the COVID-19 pandemic, provide a challenge to this traditional practice of data science. In such situations, we have very limited historical or benchmark data to base our decisions on. Hence, we need to combine the limited data we observe, which are often far from perfect, with a good amount of intuition and domain specific acumen. In a course I teach at Columbia Business School with colleagues Christopher Frank and Paul Magnone, we talk often about quantitative intuition—a combination of data science coupled with a leader’s sound judgment and acumen.
What about using comparative coronavirus data from other countries or previous epidemics?
When evaluating the expected pattern of COVID-19 diffusion in the U.S., we often use data from other countries that may be at more advanced stages of the pandemic diffusion (e.g., China, South Korea, or Italy). Similarly, we use data from related epidemics such as SARS, MERS, and even from the Spanish Flu of 1918.
Obviously, none of these related data sources can be directly applied to the current U.S. epidemic. Using data from other countries is difficult because countries differ with respect to their political regimes, population-age distribution, health care systems, etc. Differences such as population-age distribution can be fairly easily handled in a model, but adjusting for aspects such as political regimes and privacy concerns is much more difficult. Similarly, given the limited information we have on the COVID-19 virus, it is difficult to assess how similar or different this virus is to previous epidemics.
These challenges of using the limited data we have doesn’t mean that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and ignore these possibly useful data altogether. We cannot expect a model to directly tell us how to adapt previous data to the current situation. This is where we need to pour in some researcher/human judgment and domain acumen.
Are the comparative data similarly challenging in the field of business?
Yes, in terms of business and economics, the question arises how much can we learn from previous financial crises to predict the financial implication of the current pandemic and our ability to recover from it. Clearly, one cannot directly use the same data or model from 2008 and apply it to our current financial predicament, but at the same time there is a lot we can learn from the past.
So how can data scientists and leaders make good decisions during this crisis?
- Use judgment and acumen of experts. Judgment and expertise may be used to adapt models and data from other domains to the current situation. Machine learning, statistics, and econometrics are useful to derive information from existing data and predict the future as long as the environment is similar to the environment used in the data analysis. Human judgment and theory can guide us in deciding which factors are similar or different across datasets or situations, and how one can adapt or combine different sources of data to the current situation. Humans are good at pattern recognition; computers are good at data processing. At times like these, when data are limited, we need to combine both.
- Use worst, base, and best-case scenarios. We have seen many scientists use worst, base, and best-case scenarios when presenting predictions for the COVID-19 pandemic. When uncertainty is high, it is useful to present alternative scenarios to allow decision makers to appreciate the uncertainty involved in the situation. Presenting alternative scenarios is also useful to plan for the worst case (rather than base) scenario (e.g., number of ICU beds and ventilators needed). When building the scenarios, the benchmark data, even if not fully comparable to the current situation, can be used to define worst or best case scenarios (e.g., taking Singapore or Japan epidemic curves as proxies for best-case scenarios).
- Use simulations. For complex situations, where actual data is limited, one can use a simulation to simulate alternative scenarios. Rather than predicting a specific number, as is often done in many machine learning models, simulations allow the researcher to explore the impact of different parameter values, which the researcher may only know with uncertainty, on the expected outcome. For example, one can simulate the spread of the epidemic under different assumptions of how many people a COVID-19 positive patient infects.
- Synthesize information. Whereas each of the benchmark datasets may be incomplete and inadequate to the current situation, synthesizing the information across datasets may be useful in getting a clearer picture of the situation as a whole. Again, the task of synthesizing information is best done by humans rather than machines and calls for quantitative intuition.
Are you optimistic?
As more data become available in the U.S. and around the world, and as we learn more about this unique pandemic, our confidence in the models and data-driven decision making will increase, and with it our ability to manage this pandemic. Thus, by “flattening the curve” we are not only buying time to avoid overburdening our health system and finding a treatment for this dangerous virus, but we are also acquiring more and better data that will allow us to make better data-driven decisions in fighting and managing this unprecedented pandemic.
You’ve said the Data Science Institute at Columbia is a definitive example of an interdisciplinary hub for researchers to conduct data-driven research. How will such an entity be helpful during this pandemic?
Absolutely, the Data Science Institute is a great example of a true interdisciplinary center that brings together great minds from across Columbia University, and the Institute also prides itself on using “data for good.” The COVID-19 pandemic has affected almost every aspect of our lives from medicine, to public health, to social well being, to economics and business. Addressing this major shock to the world requires an interdisciplinary effort. At the heart of quantitative intuition is synthesizing the limited data we have with expertise, intuition, and judgment. Particularly at the early stages when data about the pandemic and its effects are sparse, interdisciplinary teams such as the ones at the Data Science Institute can offer expertise, intuition, and sound judgment to complement the limited data we have and make the most of it.
This article first appeared here.
Bridging the TV-digital divide from an engineer’s perspective
Advertisers, agencies and publishers have believed for years that digital and TV are converging.
But how does this truly become a reality? Where do you start, and what do you build first, to make practical progress towards a long-standing vision that benefits the industry? Years of engineering investment, significant integration work and a consideration of emerging video experiences are all part of the equation.
Kelly Liyakasa, director of communications & content for Xandr, spoke with Eric Hoffert, the company’s svp of video technology, to get an engineer’s perspective on the inner workings of the overhaul required to bring a digital-TV integration to life.
KL: Eric, can you fill us in on what you’ve been doing recently on the technical side to build the foundation for digital and TV convergence?
EH: I joined AppNexus just under five years ago and spent the first three and a half years working intensely with our product and engineering teams to put in place a foundation for a premium video advertising platform, where efforts had previously been focused primarily on display and mobile.
Since 2017, CTV and OTT have been a key focus of ours. In parallel, when we became Xandr, we really started to turn our attention to traditional television because we were seeing growing interest from buyers to reach audiences on OTT, broadcast TV, or via both formats, using a single audience segment.
How can brands reach these audiences now?
They can do it with a full-fledged TV platform that supports buyers, agencies, holding companies and advertisers. The attributes of planning, negotiation, execution, reporting, and measurement for TV are quite different, so any such solution has to properly support TV requirements, and it must also ensure that both TV and video buying/selling have a common user experience (look and feel, navigation, web design) in order to make it easy and intuitive to work with either content format. In terms of a next phase, advertisers are going to need the ability to converge TV and video advertising in one platform.
For your team, what was the biggest takeaway you had doing that — integrating a predominantly digitally focused system with the world of legacy TV?
There was a lot of rapid immersion and learning by doing, which happened in three stages. There was the AppNexus stage where we needed to really dive deep and immerse ourselves in television. And we did that by building prototypes, making code that worked to show the use cases come to life with clients.
Stage two, when the acquisition was completed, was bringing the wealth of TV knowledge and expertise that came from AT&T Advertising and Analytics as part of the value prop behind the acquisition itself. And that allowed us to quickly gain a great deal of additional expertise and capability in both addressable TV and data-driven linear to complement the work we had already been doing around digital video and OTT.
And then thirdly, when we welcomed clypd into the Xandr family, we were able to bring their seven years of experience working on the sell side with TV programmers and combine it with our capabilities that we had been investing in heavily on the buy side to be able to build this joint solution. As a result, I believe we’re well-equipped to deliver on what, so far, has largely been promise and potential in the marketplace.
In what ways have you seen B2B and B2C use cases in video converge?
When we built the digital video and OTT digital marketplace at AppNexus, we had a very strong focus around superior user experience. In particular, we were very focused on lowering latency for viewing video content with advertising. Now, especially as we move to a streaming world, even with what’s going on currently in terms of the Internet starting to accommodate huge volumes of video bandwidth unexpectedly, these kinds of techniques and technologies to reduce latency, whether it’s for video advertising that’s delivered in the form of pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll, or fully integrated into adaptive streams on the Internet are increasingly important.
Having a user experience with instantaneous video playback over the internet and a seamless server-side integration of content and advertising is really critical. For traditional broadcast TV, age and gender has been a common way of targeting audiences on traditional broadcast television for almost 50 years, and we’re doing the best that we can to play a leadership role to move the industry to audience-based buying.
So looking at those two examples – one, creating a low latency experience for streaming video that supports monetisation across channels, and two, bringing that advanced audience targeting methodology to traditional TV to improve relevance – it’s ultimately about improving and enhancing consumer experience, where advertising is an integral part of what makes delivering the content to viewers viable in the first place.
What, in your view, is most groundbreaking about bringing data and advanced technology to bear in linear TV?
When you can empower a buyer to be able to access inventory across multiple programmers, across effectively what are private marketplaces, but with one audience segment, that brings a great deal of capability, improves efficiencies for buyers and also it makes this much more of a digitally-centric audience based platform with flexibility around data you’re able to activate.
From a technology perspective, because we’ve plugged clypd into our solution on the sell side with many years of work on their side integrating into enterprise legacy systems of premium broadcasters, it is feasible to access inventory in a uniform and powerful way within a web-based platform. We are enabling companies moving increasingly into digital video and OTT while still supporting major businesses on traditional broadcast. This approach allows us to provide a foundation to deliver reach and audience, brings unique value for buyers, supports controls for sellers and powers a more relevant advertising experience for consumers.
This article first appeared here.
Brand planning in the time of COVID-19
No one knows what the next few months will bring. Right now, much of what we once took for granted seems uncertain.
But whatever happens in the months ahead, there will come a time of improved stability and recovery to a new normal. And because brands are built over the long-term, marketers will need to plan for when people can once again travel, shop and congregate without fear.
In the USA, as in many countries, the need to limit the spread of COVID-19 has resulted in an unprecedented contraction of day-to-day life: restaurants and bars are shut, airline schedules are decimated, and ski slopes empty of people. The economic ramifications will be significant, with the shock traveling out from the immediately affected industries to influence others as people are forced to curtail spending.
But people still want to eat out, they still want to travel, and they will still want to go skiing (well, some of them anyway). The question is;
Will an enforced absence mean that their behaviour and brand allegiances change? Will they eat out more or less? Will they miss the casual dining chain that went bust and which one will they want to choose instead?
Even if not impacted more dramatically, many brands will have curtailed spending on media, but now is not the time to ignore what your customers are thinking, feeling and doing. Rather, it is time to assess what is changing and think about how to position your brand for a swift recovery.
Tough times force consumers to reappraise their purchasing priorities and brand choices. Do they really need to buy a new car, eat out or take the plane? Do they really believe they are getting value from that premium brand, or would a cheaper one do just as well? Just because disposable income is constrained does not mean that people automatically opt for the cheap brand, most people will still want to be assured that they are getting good value for money.
This was actually the problem facing the hard discounter Aldi during the Great Recession.
In 2008, Aldi had a small share in the UK grocery market and lacked meaning for many UK shoppers. Aldi had to convince UK shoppers that low prices did not mean poor quality and needed to build its emotional appeal. The brand’s “Like Brands. Only Cheaper.” sought to make a direct comparison with big name brands in a direct but humorous way. The campaign is still running and perceptions that Aldi is worth more than it costs are now higher than for Tesco.
While the impact differs by category (as noted, some have benefited from tough times), consumers typically employ four strategies to stretch their dollars: reduce, stop, defer and trade down. Understanding the interaction between consumer mindset and likely behaviour will be important to regaining brand growth when things recover. Marketers need to know the answers to these three questions:
- How many people have really adopted a more frugal mindset and decided to do without?
- What proportion of people who were forced to trade down were unhappy with their new choice?
- What percentage can be won back?
At the very least, marketers need to think about how they can maintain confidence in the brand, why is it worth more than the competition? Many consumers will either stop buying the category or will trade down to a different brand with whom they are not happy. Rather than wait, a smart move is to remind those people that that your brand is still the best solution to their needs.
In 2008 dish-washing brand Fairy Liquid in the UK had not grown for 10 years, and had a 52 percent value market share, a price premium of 66 percent compared to store brands and was already bought by 60 percent of UK households. Rather than go on the defensive, the brand focused in on what made Fairy meaningfully different. The combination of past messaging from advertising, a focus on value not price and the brand’s long heritage were distilled into the phrase “enduring care”. Increased media spend behind the new campaign and content that evoked the brand’s strong heritage helped increase average annual sales value as measured by Kantar Worldpanel grew by 40 percent.
When the world is in turmoil and uncertainty rules, making hasty or ill-judged decisions about why people buy can be detrimental. Knowing what your potential customers think, feel and do will help inform the right decisions to help your brand, if not thrive, then recover as quickly as possible. Cutting marketing and media spend might seem like the obvious choice, but many brands might actually do better to change strategy and invest for the future.
This article first appeared here.
Pokémon Go temporarily won’t make you leave the house due to coronavirus
Monster collecting will be slightly easier now.
As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads across the world, entire businesses and industries are shifting to accommodate increased social distancing. In the case of Pokémon Go, a game that typically requires you to go out into the real world and congregate around points of interest, Niantic will temporarily change various mechanics to help increase the safety of its players.
In a statement to Polygon, a Niantic representative said that the studio is currently “prioritizing updates to Pokémon GO features and experiences that can be enjoyed in individual settings.” Notably, the game will be increasing habitats so that trainers can see more monsters nearby while playing closer to home.
Incense packs, which increase monster spawns, are also going on 99% discount — and when they’re active, they will now last an hour.
Incubators, which ask players to accrue a certain number of steps before hatching eggs containing Pokémon, will now be more effective. “Trainers can hatch Eggs twice as fast,” Niantic said.
Finally, PokéStops are dropping Gifts with more frequency. All of these changes are in effect immediately, and will continue until “further notice,” Niantic told Polygon.
In addition to these tweaks, Niantic has already postponed its previously-planned Abra Community Day, along with some other real-world events. Existing events, such as the first season of the game’s Battle League, will allow players to compete with one another without being in the same place, while the upcoming Special Research adventure that will debut Genesect will require tasks that can be “completed by individuals,” Niantic says.
“While we’ve made these updates based on the current global health situation, we also encourage players to make decisions on where to go and what to do that are in the best interest of their health and the health of their communities,” Niantic said.
This article first appeared here.
ONE Championship Moves To Closed-Door, Audience-Free Events
Will immediately move to closed door, audience free events until at least 29 May 2020.
The largest global sports media property in Asian history, ONE
Championship™ (ONE), today announces that it will immediately move to closed-door, audience-free events. All scheduled events with live audiences for ONE Championship will be suspended until at least May 29, 2020 due to the extraordinary COVID-19 global situation.
Global broadcast shows behind closed doors will commence in Singapore with an initial schedule of April 17, April 24, May 1, and May 8. Bout cards will be announced shortly, and additional dates will be added in the near future. Also, ONE Infinity Series, the world apex of martial arts events, is now slated to kick off on May 29, 2020 in Manila, Philippines with ONE INFINITY 1 at the Mall of Asia Arena.
In addition to the announced event schedule revisions above, the ONE Esports Dota 2 Jakarta Invitational on April 18-19 will now be moved and combined with the recently announced ONE Esports Dota 2 Indonesia Invitational on November 23-29. Additionally, the ONE Esports Dota 2 Regional Qualifier in Jakarta on March 14-15 will be moved to a studio-only, streamed event across various platforms. Streaming details can be found here: https://www.oneesports.gg/watchIDQ
Chatri Sityodtong, Chairman and CEO of ONE Championship, stated: “Bar none, the safety of our fans, athletes, staff, partners, and the public is the highest priority for ONE Championship.
We are operating in truly extraordinary times, but my team and I remain committed to providing the best sports and entertainment action available anywhere on global broadcast today.
For the millions of fans at home around the world, the show will go on from the comfort and safety of your living room. ONE Championship will continue to thrill you with the greatest martial artists on the planet and inspire you with their incredible stories.”
ONE Championship looks forward to resuming events with live audiences once the global health and safety situation improves.
The 14 coolest toys the New York Toy Fair
A look at the latest hot toy trends.
New York City’s annual Toy Fair is basically a childhood fever dream. Life-sized Care Bears, Trolls, and Minions made out of Lego greet you from beneath a set of enormous vinyl signs advertising the newest Beanie Babies.
To your left, people dressed as Crayola crayons wave with unending enthusiasm. To your right, men in suits play NBA Jam on a 12-foot tall arcade game. The sprawling convention center houses over 6,000 brands from all over the world.
To get a sense of 2020’s biggest toys and trends, we spoke to Kristin Morency Goldman, spokesperson for the Toy Association (the company that puts on the Toy Fair), and spent a few hours walking the aisles.
A majority of what’s on view were prototypes and won’t be available to buy until this summer or fall, but we still found a ton of cool stuff you can buy right now (or, in the case of Baby Yoda, at least order right now). Here are our 14 favorites:
Baby Yoda
The breakout infant star of The Mandalorian before, including a particularly adorable plush doll that won’t ship until April. Unfortunately, of all the iterations of Baby Yoda at the toy fair, none will ship sooner than that. But we did at least find two excellent Baby Yoda toys that you can preorder now.
One of them, from Hasbro, is an animatronic figure that made waves for its lifelike coos, wagging ears, and blinking eyes. The other, a figurine from Funko Pop!, is significantly cheaper and would make a great cubicle accessory. Both will ship this spring.
L.O.L. Surprise! O.M.G. Lights Doll
Morency Goldman says that the unboxing trend, which was originally inspired by YouTube influencer videos, is still a big deal in 2020.
Early on, unboxing or blind box toys came in opaque packaging that kept you from knowing exactly what you got until you opened them up. But now the term includes any toy designed with some sort of surprise reveal — and the reveals have only gotten more and more creative.
For instance, this new line of ’90s-inspired collectible fashion dolls from L.O.L. Surprise now comes with a blacklight. When you shine it on your doll, the glowing light reveals surprises to her hair, outfit, and makeup. The brand has a bunch of other innovations coming, including a promise to replace their signature egg-shaped packaging with biodegradable plastic balls by beginning 2021.
Blume Dolls Series 2 – Fun In The Sun
Skyrocket Blume dolls were the runaway hit of the 2019 holiday season. Their innovative design uses water to reveal a surprise collectible doll that grows out of a mini flowerpot when you water it. Blume Series 2 works the same way, but now the dolls’ squishy foam hair also changes color in the sun.
Blume Baby Pop
Instead of a single doll in a single round flowerpot, Baby Pop gives you five secret reveals. Pop the five sprouts out of the planter to discover babies or accessories in each one. (The best part of this whole process is the satisfying pop each sprout makes when you pull it out.) The planter transforms into a nursery (with one of five secret themes), the lid turns into a swimming pool with a slide for baby pool parties, and lots of other little surprises hide within.
Theo The Therapy Dog
Another trend Morency Goldman has seen at the fair is around nurturing toys, specifically pets, which teach empathy and encourage kids to enjoy caring for their pets. But we saw one toy at the fair that does the nurturing itself. Theo the Therapy Dog is a weighted stuffed animal designed to provide comfort and a sense of security to children with sensory input needs.
But it would make a great gift for any kid. At two and a half pounds, holding him in our arms provided a similar soothing feeling to what you get when curling up under a weighted blanket. And it’s cuter. In addition to being weighted, Theo has an inner pouch of ceramic beads that emit a gentle lavender scent when heated in the microwave or chilled in the refrigerator.
Shore Buddies
We saw a big push from multiple brands toward either green manufacturing or environmental education, but Shore Buddies is one of the few brands that checks both boxes. Their adorable plush sea animals, which play animal sounds recorded by marine biologists, are made with recycled plastic water bottles, and the company also offers ecologically focused picture books to teach children about ocean habitats and recycling.
Each stuffed animal is shipped in plastic-free biodegradable packaging, and, for every product sold, Shore Buddies donates $1 to nonprofits that share their mission.
Little Tikes Go Green, Playhouse
Children can role-play sorting paper and plastic with the clubhouse’s recycling bins, learn about conserving water with the sink that relies on rainwater, plant grass on the living roof, and harness the power of the sun with real working solar panels and lights.
Gravitrax Starter Set Marble Run
According to Morency Goldman, STEM and STEAM toys have been steadily growing in popularity for years now. They have a big presence at the fair, as do toys that encourage kids to be creative through open play.
“Of course parents want their kids to have fun,” she says. “But they want them to learn while they’re playing as well.”
Of all of the educational toys at the fair, what truly mesmerized us, along with a crowd of onlookers, was this gravity-powered marble run. The design is completely modular so you can create your own complex track, guiding your marbles through whatever assortment of jumps, twists, and flips you want.
The starter kit comes with 122 pieces and a patterned board to help you lay out your designs, and specialty pieces like gravity canons and cable cars are available in expansion kits.
LEGO Technic Catamaran Building Kit
Like a lot of kit toys, this realistic Lego sailboat helps kids develop spatial and engineering skills. Plus this catamaran-style sailboat can actually sail and navigate through water with working sails and rudders, so you can experience firsthand how a sailboat operates. For even more fun, you can get a Lego motor that works with the catamaran to give your boat some extra pep across your neighborhood pond or backyard pool.
Primo Scooter
Although ride-on toys have been a popular standard for hundreds of years, there’s been a real surge in interest lately with ride-on ponies and unicorns. This design-y Italian scooter pushes that trend into the automotive world. It’s kid-powered and not made of plastic.
Halftoys Magnetic Animals
HalfToys created a lot of buzz at the fair thanks to their simple magnetic animal toys that pull apart to reveal a skeleton within.
Each collectible animal comes with its own diorama that you can connect to others to create a thriving savannah.
Tiny Baking Set
As with the unboxing trend, a lot of toy designers now take their inspiration from viral videos, including miniature food videos. This portable kit allows you to make your own miniature pies and cookies at home. It comes with tiny tools including a rolling pin, baking sheet, and finger-sized oven mitts, plus a book of 45 recipes for very small sweet and savory baked goods.
Of all the toys at the fair, this tiny baking set is what we would be most excited to buy for ourselves.
Jaws Board Game
Though the idea is not new, Morency Goldman says she has seen a ton of family toys and games that encourage cooperation and inter-generational play. (We saw this trend in reporting on the best board games, too.)
This beautifully designed Jaws game disrupts the every-player-for-themselves model better than any we’ve seen before. One player gets to be the bloodthirsty shark and the rest of the players have to work together to survive.
It’s a great game for tweens and teens to play with their parents, and because it’s based on a well-known Hollywood movie, you’ll probably have an easier time convincing non-gamers to join in the fun.
This article first on Polygon.