Month: March 2021

Flexibility will continue to be a must

Throughout 2020, advertisers and agency execs pointed to the need for more flexibility in ad deals, particularly when it comes to TV ad deals. That push for flexibility isn’t likely to go away despite hope for a return to some sense of normalcy as the vaccine rollout ramps up.

“With upfronts, I know a big part of the conversation will be the agility and flexibility of those buys,” said Haley Paas, evp of strategy at Carat U.S., adding that flexibility will be key this year as consumer behavior could change dramatically as vaccinations increase. “It’s a much more strategic conversation [with clients] about how you want to show up when people are behaving differently.”

Contingency plans remain a priority

While contingency planning was a norm, it wasn’t as seriously considered as it has been for the last year. The contingencies companies had in place shifted from nice to have rainy day plans to actual plans that often needed to be ready to go when something went awry. Going forward, along with flexibility, buyers say that having true contingency plans in place that brands and agencies will actually turn to when in need will continue. 

“Contingency plans weren’t as real before,” said Judy Yeh, president and chief client officer at Starcom U.S. “It was something our CFO at my client job would have us put in there, but they were sort of theoretical. This past 2020 has taught us all in personal and professional lives that contingency plans are real and have to be something we’re more than OK going to.” 

Travel budgets aren’t returning — yet 

Since last March, marketers and agency execs have had to conduct business without the usual face-to-face meetings. The ability to continue business without the cost of traveling to an office for meetings has certainly had an impact on chief financial officers who are unlikely to bring back travel budgets in full in the foreseeable future. That being said, some execs do anticipate a return of some travel for client meetings once vaccines reach the majority of the population. 

Rather than returning to the usual industry events and boondoggles, execs expect that the travel that does happen will be focused on fostering the agency/client relationship, explained Adam Simon, UM U.S.’s head of innovation and svp of strategy at IPG Media Lab.

“As an industry, we have proven over the course of the year that traveling is simply not necessary to conduct business,” said Andy Nathan, founder and CEO of Fortnight Collective, a creative agency.

“Zoom has been not only a supplement, but is creating a new way to work,” he said. “Now nothing replaces the face time, walking the halls and even the occasional cocktail meetups, but getting things done is happening despite the travel.” 

Nathan continued: “However, what we need to keep in mind is that folks are craving togetherness. Not just personal, but in the workplace. I do think that travel will return to some degree. It will likely be for more important meetings, rather than the occasional visit.” 

Less formality, hybrid WFH/in-office will be the norm

Marketers and agency execs have found new ways of working together on Zoom throughout the last year. Much of that has dispensed with the formalities of work prior to the pandemic and an acceptance that home life — be that a child or a dog interrupting — can and will creep into work. Execs believe that will continue going forward as many believe a hybrid work from home/work from the office set-up will become a new norm as people slowly return to the office this year. 

“Hybrid work models, done right, will allow organizations to better recruit talent, achieve innovation and create value for all stakeholders,” said Nathan. “By acting boldly now, we can define a future of work that is more flexible and purposeful.” 

Aside from normalizing working from home, execs believe the need to be more agile throughout the last year has led to less formality and believe that will remain.

“The days of writing beautiful 75-page decks mostly goes away,” said Yeh. “We’ve demonstrated we can move really fast without all the information and get clients going with us. Agility is not just for deals, but for ways of working internally as well as with clients. It’s healthy to learn to work in a new way — and if it works, continue it.”

3 Questions with Todd Ballard, CMO of TMRW Life Sciences

What are the challenges you’re currently facing as a CMO and how do you plan to tackle?

It’s becoming increasingly more difficult to stand out as a brand. At a time when data and insights are driving many marketing decisions, it’s easy to lose sight of why you exist and who you are ultimately serving. Don’t become too transactional and complacent in success metrics. Continue to evaluate and re-think what metrics are most important to your business goals. It’s not one-size-fits-all. As platforms and resources improve and become more accessible to businesses big and small, the art of human connection will become increasingly important. Make sure you know who your products are made for, understand who those people are and super-serve them.

What’s top of mind for you as a CMO?

Ensure that we as a company know what our “why” is: what do we stand for and what’s our purpose? And then develop a plan that holds the entire organization accountable for that. Because if you don’t, the customers will. As a marketer, the time you have to gain someone’s attention (and keep it) is rapidly decreasing. Respect the time someone’s giving you by knowing who they are. That builds trust and ultimately a deeper lifetime value.

What’s worth investing in right now for you as a CMO?

For me, it’s people. Colleagues, employees, partners and ultimately our customers. We are all in the people business so building trust, transparency and community is always at the top for me. Building a community of passionate and knowledgeable brand stewards, both internally and externally, starts from the center. — Kimeko McCoy

By the numbers

The early days of the Covid-19 pandemic cast a dark cloud over audio streaming as the 30-minute morning commute quickly became a matter of rolling out of bed and opening a laptop to work from home. The change meant less time for morning podcasts, music, audio books and more. But according to new research from Pandora, Edison Research and Mindshare, the majority of work from home employees are tuning into audio streaming to stay productive. Here’s the breakdown:

• Audio streaming got a promotion this year: Overall, 7 in 10 workers listen to some form of audio while working.
• Audio ads are working: Many workers feel that they are even more receptive to ads while working — 37% of those who listen to ad-supported audio while working say they pay more attention to streaming audio ads than when they aren’t working. Men, Gen Z, and parents were most likely to agree.

(With that said, looking for a new podcast to keep you productive? Tune into the Digiday Podcast every Tuesday!) —Kimeko McCoy

What we’ve covered

• Senior news editor Seb Joseph dug into what’s driving the latest round of ad tech consolidation.
• Platforms, privacy and data reporter Kate Kaye covered the muted impact of California’s privacy laws.
• Over on Jess Davies’ FoW, remote work has caused an uptick workers setting up shop in hotels.

The move to remote working has made it more difficult to promote company culture. It is harder to remind long-term workers what the organization stands for and why there are certain ways of doing things. It can also be challenging to instil culture into the hearts and minds of new starters. After all, there are no company logos or a corporate livery when people are working from their bedroom or dining room.

Ylva Eriksson, marketing manager at Swedish-based employee engagement experts Benify, said brands and agencies must find new ways to impart their culture into their workforce. People have not changed, but how they relate to the companies they work for has.

“One has to redefine what the core elements of that culture encompasses when working remotely,” said Eriksson. “For instance, at Benify we have the core value ‘Show Love’ as a part of our company culture. Our employees have had to define what that means in their professional life when working remotely.”

She added that companies need a clear employee-value proposition and the management must be strong enough to guide employees in the direction the company wants to go. This means setting clear frameworks and best practices for how things should be done. 

Recruitment strategies may also need to change because many people are being hired via a virtual interview process. They have not stepped inside the physical office where they would breathe in and smell the company culture in all its glory.

“In this era of remote working companies need to raise their employee communication game,” said Eriksson. “Our studies show that staff prefer communication through chat, text and push notifications to a greater extent than employers currently offer. If you want to keep building your culture, make sure you can reach your employees in a more efficient way.”

At beauty brand L’Oréal company culture is incredibly important. It prides itself on having an entrepreneurial, people-centric and values-led culture. The tough part how to ensure this is not lost when the workforce is so fragmented.

Thierry Cheval, managing director U.K. and Ireland, said the best ideas come from spending time together in the workplace, but L’Oréal’s culture is no longer contained to the four walls of an office.

“As a business we have a strong sense of purpose — to create the beauty that moves the world,” he said. “This includes strengthening our commitment to the communities with which we engage. This crisis has provided an opportunity to demonstrate aspects of our sense of purpose and values. For example, our solidarity campaign saw employees across the business support our communities through donations of items, including thousands of hand sanitisers. Our values remain as important as ever.”

Cheval added that it was important that annual activities that are the foundation of the L’Oréal culture did continue. L’Oréal’s annual Volunteering Day and Ethics Day took place virtually, as did the yearly championing of innovation and entrepreneurialism across the business.

It’s harder still for new starters of any company, who are being onboarded virtually, to get a feel for the culture from day one. L’Oréal has tackled this by assigning new employees a six-month programme of meeting colleagues from across the business to hear about the company’s culture first-hand. These “e-learnings” cover key elements such as its ethical principles and diversity, added Cheval.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic only 3% of collaborative platform Slack’s employees worked remotely. Head of U.K. Stu Templeton said the employees that are now home working have needed to understand the importance of company culture.

“It’s paramount to first recognize the norms and cultures of any business and how they came to be,” he said. “You must then actively put them forward in the channels and tools that are being used to facilitate remote working.” 

He added: “Part of this process is deciding whether the goal really is to preserve a company’s culture in a distributed work world. Or should we re-imagine it to get the best from a hybrid workforce?”

“Technologies are controlled by a handful of companies that have amassed unprecedented power,” said Klobuchar during her Jan. 29 State of the Net Conference keynote. Tech giants have control of “gateways over our personal data, power over what ads we see and what news we watch and monopoly power in key digital markets.”

Klobuchar has signaled support for a breakup of Facebook and Instagram, a dismantling of Google’s dominant ad infrastructure and regulatory inspection of data-hungry moves like Google’s FitBit acquisition. The senator took advantage of a spotlight moment for her antitrust crusade during this Monday’s Senate confirmation hearing of Merrick Garland, President Joseph Biden’s nominee to head up the U.S. Justice Department, one of the two federal agencies overseeing antitrust matters Klobuchar wants to empower with more money and resources.

“I suggest you look at Mark Zuckerberg’s email where he talked about purchasing nascent competitors, and I think the answer to that has got to come from the Justice Department. The answer, the reply to that email that this kind of exclusionary conduct is not the way capitalism works in America,” Klobuchar told Garland, alluding to emails sent in 2012 by the Facebook CEO that indicate the firm’s aim to buy Instagram as a way to ensure market dominance.

The Federal Trade Commission in December launched its investigation into Facebook, alleging the company has maintained its monopoly on the social media industry by acquiring emerging rival Instagram in 2012 and mobile messaging app WhatsApp in 2014.

Memories of a telco monopoly and her journalist father
To understand why reining in the big platforms seems like a particularly personal mission for Klobuchar, it helps to consider her background. She makes a point of reminding people that her father was a journalist – a Minnesota Vikings beat writer for the Minneapolis Star and later a columnist for what would become the Star Tribune.

To Klobuchar, anti-competitive behavior by the giants of tech has been fueled by a voracious appetite for personal data, which she argues helps fund disinformation and disadvantages the sorts of publishers her dad once worked for.

She evoked the memory of her dad during a September 2020 Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights hearing, claiming that Google’s dominance over the buy and sell sides of the ad tech ecosystem harms publishers. “Who are those publishers? They’re content producers, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, to me, given that my dad was a journalist, to me this is one of the key elements here because if you have unfairness in how that ad ecosystem is going, you’re depriving these news organizations at a time when the first amendment is already under assault of the revenue that they need to keep going.”

Klobuchar has also been known to harken back to her earlier days as a private-sector lawyer representing telecom company MCI (later acquired by Verizon) when talking antitrust and did so in an email exchange with Digiday. “As a young law firm lawyer, I saw my client MCI being held back by local monopoly carriers,” she said. “MCI, along with government enforcers, took on Ma Bell, leading to the breakup of that monopoly and fostering competition that lowered long distance rates and revolutionized the telecom industry.”

A complex collaborator
During her failed run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Klobuchar grabbed headlines for being a mean boss to her Senate staff. A 2018 report from LegiStorm pegged her annual staff turnover rate at 36 percent, the highest in the Senate.

But her campaign played up her midwestern charms and commitment to unity, encouraging supporters to host Hot Dish House Parties, which unintentionally sparked a casserole vs. hot dish debate in Iowa. “Hot dish is a great unifier — just like Amy,” said a Facebook event invite.

Klobuchar has emphasized bipartisanship and collaboration in her Senate career. GovTrack reported that 50 of her 79 bills and resolutions in 2019 had cosponsors from across the aisle. One legislative staffer whose office has worked with Klobuchar and spoke anonymously with Digiday said they “had nothing bad to say about her.”

“She’s a smart, serious person, and I think she’ll have a lot of native authority to act in strong ways on the issues she cares about,” said Cathy Gellis, an independent San Francisco-based internet lawyer who expressed concerns over a Section 230 reform bill that Klobuchar recently co-sponsored which would make platforms like Facebook and Twitter liable when paid content posted on their sites is used to target vulnerable people.

In the previous Congress, Klobuchar co-sponsored the bipartisan Honest Ads Act, intended to bring transparency and accountability to digital political ads, and the bipartisan Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2019, a bill championed by news publishers that would provide a four-year safe harbor period during which newspaper companies can negotiate compensation terms as a collective with the big digital platforms.

Bipartisanship to tackle tech platforms on multiple fronts
On Feb. 2, Klobuchar introduced a bipartisan bill with Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski. The Protecting Personal Health Data Act aims to strengthen health data privacy protections and asks the Secretary of Health and Human Services to create regulations for new health technologies such as health apps, wearables and genetic testing kits.

Klobuchar’s concerns regarding health data use aligned with her request two weeks prior for the Department of Justice to inspect Google’s Fitbit acquisition. “Google’s decision to close its acquisition of Fitbit while the transaction is under review is yet another sign of the company’s disregard for antitrust laws,” Klobuchar tweeted on Jan. 15. “I urge the DOJ to seek remedies to protect competition and consumers from anticompetitive effects caused by the transaction.”

The DOJ, several states and even a publisher group have filed antitrust lawsuits against Google, arguing that aspects of its search, digital ad business and decisions about third-party cookies are anti-competitive.

A perch for tougher antitrust enforcement
Klobuchar pointed to her bipartisan approach to work inside the Senate antitrust subcommittee in her 2015 memoir, “The Senator Next Door.” “Mike Lee and I have teamed up to co-chair the Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee and nearly every letter and announcement we’ve produced on that important subcommittee has been the result of collaboration,” she wrote regarding Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, currently the ranking member of that body.

Klobuchar’s antitrust reform legislation seems to get much of her attention. She’s currently writing a book on that topic, slated to publish in April.

Antitrust lawyers say her place heading that subcommittee, along with her seat on the Senate Commerce Committee – which will decide on commissioners and a permanent chairman for the FTC, the other agency overseeing antitrust alongside the DOJ – give her a powerful platform to push her Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act.

“Today, consolidation and anti-competitive behavior disadvantage consumers and small businesses across our economy – from agriculture to pharmaceuticals,” Klobuchar told Digiday. “I introduced the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act to overhaul enforcement, modernize our laws, and build an economy that can compete globally and thrive in the twenty-first century.”

“She’s going to have the chair of the committee. I think her bill will be a jumping off point for a lot of dialog about what antitrust legislation might look like,” said Haidee Schwartz, a former FTC acting deputy director of the bureau of competition and a partner in the antitrust group at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld.

The bill would give the DOJ and FTC a cash infusion and create a new Market Analysis Division that could help the FTC understand the intricacies of how acquisitions and mergers affect sometimes opaque and complex industry sectors in tech and beyond.

“I think she’s well-respected and she tends to be a person who can put bipartisan coalitions together,” said Barry Pupkin, a senior partner focused on antitrust at law firm Squire Patton Boggs. “She’s got as good a chance as any to get something like this through.”

Harper’s Bazaar is a 153-year-old legacy magazine using social media platforms to help it become a modern, digital fashion authority.

The brand’s digital presence not only helps amplify its print stories, but diversify revenue through e-commerce and advertising — turning fans of the magazine into digital consumers of luxury fashion and beauty.

And three months ago, Nikki Ogunnaike rejoined the magazine as the brand’s new digital director to help strategize ways it can grow and monetize its audience, including staying on top of digital trends.

“Now is this weird, sort of wild, wild west time” of new social media platforms that Harper’s has to consider in its digital strategy, including Clubhouse and Twitch, said Ogunnaike on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

Excerpts of the conversation have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Keeping video franchises alive during a pandemic

Video is still incredibly important to us in social media so I think everyone knows that we still have to do it. We’re still trying to figure out how we keep our really key franchises going and working with the subjects to do so. So you have something like, “Go To Bed With Me,” which is a key video franchise that we have on YouTube, and we’ve had celebrities now shoot themselves. We’re using this sort of user-generated content that we probably wouldn’t have necessarily used or thought of using in the past, because we could have sent a crew there to do it. We’re adapting and we’re really finding success with that as well.

On working with celebrities during a pandemic

I’ve seen a real evolution in working with celebrities on both the print and digital sides. Celebs now are being more thoughtful about their press opportunities, but they’re being a little less precious about it as well, if that makes sense. So they will have their assistant do a shoot for them or they’ll do a Zoom shoot and it’ll be fine. I think right now everyone’s just trying to roll with the punches and sort of adapt to what the current situation is.

Luxury shopping is in full swing but the products have shifted

[Our editors started doing] a round-up of our favorite things that we’re coveting or buying in the e-commerce space and our beauty director Jenna Rosenstein did a before and after testimonial on an OPTE beauty device and the devices are $600, but we sold almost $27,000 worth of product on the site. Our reader will shop and buy big ticket items. And so one would think that during these times people aren’t necessarily shopping as much, but the Bazaar woman is and so we’re still creating that content for her. The shopping is different, but we’re finding that our commerce revenue has been up 121% year over year.

One publisher said its Facebook News referral traffic has been increasing for five consecutive months. A source at a second publisher said the share of referral traffic coming from Facebook News is 30% higher in 2021 than it was on Election Day. A third said Facebook News now accounts for 50% of its Facebook referral traffic.

Many of these growth stats come from a small base — the first two sources said Facebook News still accounts for less than 10% of their Facebook referral traffic; the third source said Facebook, as a whole, accounts for less than 10% of their traffic overall. But the pace of the growth, especially after a topsy turvy 2020, signals to some that Facebook News might, at the very least, not be a dud. Facebook initially did not have any way to differentiate Facebook News’s referral traffic; it worked out a solution in 2020 and began to roll it out slowly over the second half of the year.

“I would anticipate we’ll see that Facebook News percentage increase and potentially lift overall referral traffic at some point,” said a source at a fourth publisher, which currently gets close to 20% of its Facebook referral traffic from Facebook News. “Assuming Facebook prioritizes responsible news producers in the months ahead.”

Facebook News’s growth comes at a moment when Facebook is trying to minimize the presence of news and politics in the newsfeed. 

Last fall, Facebook began telling publishers, if not in so many words, that there would be less political, news-y content in its newsfeed (in October, a Facebook executive told several TV networks’ digital executives that an effort to “make Facebook fun again” was underway); on Feb. 10, Facebook formally announced that users would see fewer political items in their newsfeeds.

That continued a trend that several publishers had begun to feel dating back to the fall, when the feverish end of the presidential election season crowded out lots of non-Trump, non-pandemic content. 

That crowding out was especially pronounced among local news publishers. An executive at one local news publisher participating in Facebook News said that Facebook referral traffic overall plunged close to 50% in the second half of 2020. That source is bracing for another few months of significant year over year declines, as their monthly referral totals will be compared against what the enormous spikes in traffic most publishers got in the early days of the pandemic. 

“I’ve got some really worried people [asking what’s going on],” that source said. “And every time I ask [Facebook] what’s going on, they’re just not forthcoming.”

To be sure, looking at Facebook News’s share of referral traffic overall obscures the reality that, for some publishers, Facebook represents a declining source of referral traffic overall. The fourth executive cited in this story noted that referral traffic from Facebook overall has been in decline since the end of the 2020 U.S. election.

“I put Facebook in the category of, ‘This doesn’t really matter,’” said a senior executive at one publisher Facebook is paying to participate in Facebook News. “They’re not how we’re building our business.

“Our Facebook referrals have been going down for two years,” that source added. “They’re throwing this money around now, but you look at the P&L and go, ‘That’s probably not going to be there next year.’”

Publisher skepticism aside, Facebook continues to expand Facebook News. The platform announced on March 1 that it would launch in Germany in May, with more than 100 publishers already committed to participating. Back in December, Facebook announced it would launch News in the U.K. 

For most of its first year, it was difficult for publishers to care much about Facebook News because it was impossible to detect how much referral traffic it was driving.

Given the traction that publishers are beginning to see, many expressed hope that they might one day be able to think about the Facebook News audience as a stable, distinct bloc that could be approached differently from the rest of the platform’s users.

But after years of surprises, pivots and changes in focus, those same sources all stressed that it was too early to change their strategies based on Facebook News. Other sources — Digiday spoke to sources at eight different publishers participating in Facebook News for this story — added that it was too early to start thinking of the Facebook News audience as a distinct cohort that could be approached on its own.

One even expressed skepticism that Facebook would have enough people in it.

“Who the hell wants a Facebook news user as a subscriber?” a sixth source said. “The people who gets their news from Facebook are the same people who think the pandemic is a hoax and think the Holocaust didn’t happen.”

Digiday reporter Kate Kaye contributed reporting.

More strategic-minded marketers might talk about the other three P’s as well: their role in product development, pricing and the places, channels or locations through which their products are distributed. These are the levers that they have been taught to pull to drive growth for their businesses.

Where does customer experience fit into all this? In the minds of most marketers, it doesn’t — at least if they’re being honest. They might throw “CX” into a few keynotes or panel conversations. But actually designing, shaping and taking responsibility for what happens when somebody interacts with the business? That is a complex remit that they have been happy to leave to customer-facing teams.

Suddenly, this is changing. Customer experience is rapidly becoming more designable, more accessible and more creative. It is also impossible to ignore its importance to marketing. Experiences are what people buy, what people remember and what people talk about. They are fundamental to the product and the way it is promoted. They build brands.

Nobody understands this better than small businesses, so it is no coincidence they are driving a new experience-led approach to marketing. These organizations have an instinctive feel for consistently delighting customers, making the experience itself a reason to come back and a reason to recommend to others. What has changed is that they now have the tools to design and deliver experiences like this at scale. 

How SMBs are redefining digital customer experience

As a result of the COVID-19, many SMBs have had to find ways to do more with less, and one result is they have embraced automation. However, they have not done so through the big, legacy tech stacks that have dominated automated customer experiences in the past. Instead, they are using a new generation of nimble, accessible plug-and-play automation tools that are inherently flexible and easy to express themselves through.

Over the past year, people have come to expect businesses to remove as much friction as possible from the experience of visiting them. Rather than just dropping by a local nail salon or a hardware store, customers can get in touch via any number of channels (such as Facebook Messenger or live chat on a website), make a private appointment for a specific time or order a product they can pick up in a socially distanced way. Customers feel more confident and comfortable and, crucially, more engaged.

In the past, often when dealing with larger organizations, people have been forced to put up with automated customer experiences. They were a barrier that customers desperately tried to figure a way around when trying to speak to an actual person. But when designed and delivered by smaller businesses, automation is making it easier to connect, person to person, especially in times of change like the past year. Over the last year, this has shifted expectations about automated customer experiences. No longer an unwelcome downside to dealing with a few, large organizations, they have made it easier and more accessible to deal with a range of smaller ones.

New types of challengers and new approaches to customer experience

According to recent reports, customer experience has clearly been a focus for companies during the pandemic and quarantine. So much so that 60% of polled consumers said they’ve seen a positive shift to more robust CX during COVID-19. 

For smaller businesses digitizing operations for the first time, what will be essential to getting CX right is creating environments in which researching, ordering and customer support are seamless experiences. Customer experience helps small businesses build brands and scale, providing the freedom to grow while being run profitably, sustainably and in a way that puts customers first. This will help create new kinds of challenger brands across different categories. Marketers at larger businesses need to be ready to respond. In the following ways, they can take control of customer experience and steer clear of several old assumptions along the way.

• It’s not a cost-cutting exercise. If marketers see automation primarily as a means of cutting costs and reducing the burden on customer facing teams, they are missing opportunities to create new experiences on new channels rather than replacing experiences customers want to have,such as talking to a human being when they have a problem. The goal is to design experiences that customers actually seek out. 

• Automation supports personalization. Too many businesses assume that they should deliver personalization by automating every aspect of the customer journey. No technology, no matter how sophisticated, can personalize an experience for customers the way a well-informed human being can. Marketers should use automation to capture information, build up a profile of their customer’s journey and make sure sales and support teams know what the next best step should be.

• Use technology as a creative canvas. The real potential of automation and digital customer experiences is to give creative-minded people access to more moments in their customers’ lives. This enables marketers to apply creativity to new areas: reaching out after a customer purchases, marking special occasions such as birthdays and anniversaries and following up and checking in after they have visited the help pages of the company’s site. As a marketer, treating these moments as individualized media opportunities and focusing attention on what the brand should say (and how it should say it) during each of them is the benefit of a dynamic automated approach.

• Plan to amplify advocacy. Many marketers talk enthusiastically about customer advocacy, but far fewer develop plans for capturing and scaling it. Automation is changing this through ways that include inviting satisfied customers to join online communities and following up on Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to generate case studies, reviews and referrals.

Marketers that aspire to create positive, memorable customer experiences know the impact these have on brand reputation, loyalty and revenues. However, they have mostly sought to influence them through indirect means, which is no longer enough. Marketers have an opportunity to take a direct role in designing the customer experiences that reflect and amplify their brand. If they do not rise to it, they will be left behind by those that do.