Author: Scott R Turner

Now that social media is so supremely essential in brand messaging, there are a lot of layers underneath what makes a successful post, video or tweet. This year, brands tried to utilize the popularity of emerging formats like video, and they kept politics in mind when creating assets while inspiring their fans through acts of…
[Read More …]

Welcome to The Drum’s US Creative Works, in partnership with Workfront. 

This section is dedicated to showing the best creative work in North and South America and gives our readers the chance to decide which work we feature as our ‘Creative Work of the Week.’

For project information, creative credits and more, click on the project to expand to full screen and click on the stars to vote. To submit work for our US Creative Works section, fill out this online form.

To vote for your favorite, click on the project and make sure you click on the stars. The winner will be chosen based on the average rating and the number of votes cast. This is our last US Creative Works before the new year. Thanks to all our readers for continuing to vote and bring attention to the region’s best campaigns. Voting closes on Wednesday, January 3, 2018.

Phenomenon: Flywheel ‘F*’

Agency: Phenomenon

Client: Flywheel

Date: December 2017

Flywheel Sports, a boutique fitness company, partnered with LA-based business transformation agency Phenomenon on an ad campaign titled, ‘F*,’ in tandem with Flywheel’s high-performance at-home-bike and streaming content platform, Fly Anywhere.

The campaign reminds riders to fly beyond the things that are holding them back – be it distractions, shortcuts, Monday mornings, or the perception of their own limitations – in the pursuit of a more full life fueled by a great workout. The 360 campaign includes video and digital components that will run in Flywheel studios and across paid social, pre-roll and digital media. The campaign is rolling out through 2018. 

Phenomenon also played a key role in the Fly Anywhere product design, including early involvement in product and design strategy, features, UX and UI design, and brand experience continuity. 

Credits:
 

 

Agency: Phenomenon

Client: Flywheel

Tags: United States

 

 

 

 

 

Loading…

[Read More …]

The Library of Congress will soon acquire tweets on a selective basis from 2018 having previously held all tweets that were public. 

The Library of Congress revealed in a blog post that its decision to be selective was due to the evolution of the social media landscape, with new platforms, an explosion in use, terms of service and functionality shifting frequently and lessons learned about privacy and other concerns.

The Library further mentioned in its white paper that it will focus its efforts on preserving the Twitter collection for future generations.

It also wrote: “Throughout its history, the Library has seized opportunities to collect snapshots of unique moments in human history and preserve them for future generations.”

In 2010, the Library of Congress announced the acquisition of entire archive of public tweet text beginning with the first tweets of 2006 through 2010, and continuing with all public tweet text going forward. The Library took this step to acquire and preserve a record of knowledge and creativity for Congress and the American people. 

[Read More …]

Predicting the success of videogames is a bit like predicting how movies will fare—much relies on the fickle winds of public taste. How, then, has China’s Tencent—now the world’s largest games company—survived and prospered?
[Read More …]

Never before has the advertising landscape looked so volatile. Advertising is less trusted than ever. Digital media is the solution to many marketers’ growth asks but is simultaneously facing up to its own challenges around quality and transparency. Facebook and Google are eating up any growth and Amazon is looming large on the scene.

The Big Four, namely GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) quartet of frenemies dominate business headlines and there are some common factors in their continued growth: thinking five-10 years out, investing significant amounts back into research and development, and constant experimentation in to adjacent sectors. Meanwhile, closer to home, Accenture has become the fastest growing agency group with impressively deep digital capabilities. Whilst the Big Five consultancies also have deep pockets and are fast evolving their capabilities, arguably they still lack the requisite strengths around understanding consumer behaviour and building brands.

That said, never before has the opportunity been bigger for agencies. As brands all prioritise their own flavour of digital transformation, the opportunity presents itself for agencies to act in a more consultative way to support the shift to a data driven, content-powered future. The regular focus of client and agency conversations today is around connecting audience data sets to inform paid (increasingly addressable), owned and earned media activation and content creation that maps to a customer journey. 

It’s one integrated conversation yet on the brand side can involve more than a handful of departments, and agency engagements across planning and activation can easily enter double figures.  

Few CMO’s would claim they are fully ready for this brave new world, so the agencies’ task is to lead, to outline the blueprint. This demands different skills and starts with solutions that either unlock growth or address business problems. Account management evolves into a more T-shaped, strategic marketing skillset, tasked with knitting together squads of specialists, technologies and partners and orchestrating multiple stakeholders. Sound familiar at all? 

The closest analogy I can think of is that of a Managing Partner in a consultancy who oversees C-Level stakeholder management whist orchestrating their many different disciplines to deliver multi-faceted recommendations. Where a consultancy comes unstuck is they over-index on infrastructure and organisational design but lack the human, or customer, angle. Importantly most rarely go as far as execution, so they are unable to close the loop in a way that agencies can; that advantage is however not leveraged anywhere near as much as it could be by agencies. 

We find ourselves at a fascinating tipping point; most businesses now recognise “what” they need to do to transform their business for a digital world, but are grappling with the “how”. 

In the main, brands lack the necessary skills and resources internally or find it challenging to retain this talent. When looking for support from the outside, there is arguably no single partner today able to provide both the answers and the specialist deployment skills. Consultancies excel in creating digital experiences and deploying cloud and mobile led solutions. Agency groups are rich with an eclectic mix of planners and specialists, but more must be done to better orchestrate and integrate that talent to align with higher level business priorities.   

The agency community must also admit that there remains a skills gap in adland for this brave new world. There are just not enough T-shaped strategic client leaders that get digital, data, content and tech. These will only be created if agencies invest both in developing the leaders of tomorrow from within, whilst also bringing in hybrids from non-agency backgrounds. 

To come out on top, agencies must also borrow from the wider business (and consulting) world. Agencies need to be closer to the board table more frequently, which means spending less time obsessing around big ideas and social media and more talking the language of business, commerce and transformation. Elevating the conversations back to a place where marketing investment is seen as a proven driver of growth is business critical. This demands a laser focus on effectiveness in business terms, not through the self-fulfilling lens of its own industry awards. 

The consulting firms are well schooled in focusing on business outcomes and in the intersection of business and technology. They are however, yet to master the art of long-term brand building. For me, the nirvana lives in the intersection of brands mastering technology to better serve people’s needs and deliver hyper-relevant services. 

To navigate these current stormy waters, agencies must act more like businesses themselves. Fame is oft chased with no roadmap for converting that engagement into fortune. Often for good reasons, agencies allow an unreasonable client or new business prospect to take them off course. If the media industry, in particular, continues the current race to the bottom on price, rather than focusing on business value, it will forever be a commodity. Agencies are superb at staying close to the developments in their own industry but at worst could be judged as being overly insular. To compete with the likes of Accenture or Deloitte, agencies must invest in deepening their knowledge of the industry verticals their clients operate in. At all levels, agencies need team leaders to operate more like business owners and apply these skills as portfolio managers and growth architects to the advertisers they serve. 

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating that the ad industry should aspire to being accountants or even management consultants; the industry’s strengths must be retained but never has evolution been more urgent. As I mentioned in part one of this essay , I believe this is not an “either/or” conundrum, but about combining business acumen “and” creativity. Creativity is one of the 21st century’s most critical business skills but it is more potent when it can be measured, replicated and scaled systematically. Technology, data collection and consistent process make that much more achievable today. In my humble opinion, to counter trust issues and competition, the agency community must pivot rapidly to become more consultative, business-focused and accountable. It must do this whilst protecting its unique culture of human understanding and flair for storytelling and brand building. 

Doomsayers may argue that destroys the essence of what our industry is about, but over the last decade the landscape has already dramatically changed and the future of advertising looks very different. 

CMO’s are no longer seeking just brilliant comms; they seek more than advice, namely tangible support in experimenting with and executing new models. Agencies enjoy two major advantages here; they have both the ear of the CMO and the resources to deploy and deliver change, not just theorise about it. Agencies are experts in helping brands transform their image and refresh their consumer offering. Isn’t it about time they turned these skills on themselves? With today’s perfect storm and a brave new world in front, agencies must reflect and take some time to think more about the long-term. 

What will marketing look like in 2020, when 70% of media spend is digital, predominantly delivered programmatically and consumed on a small screen? Now is the time to re-imagine the model. Agencies still have time to define the stretch role that they can play to retain their position as trusted advisor to the CMO and grow beyond it to influence the wider board. Adland today looks down its nose at management consultants as if they are from Mars, but in the future, they may well be co-inhabiting the same atmosphere. The next 18 months is going to be just fascinating.

Paul Frampton, was chief executive of UK and Ireland at Havas Media Group

[Read More …]

Amazon, Walmart and Kroger are no longer just mass retailers. They’re becoming media owners, too, offering their brand suppliers point of sale advertising opportunities. An increasing number of companies like Procter & Gamble and GSK are adapting their merchandising and marketing in response.

George Manas, president of Omnicom-owned Resolution Media, manages more than $3.4 billion in ad spending and focuses on integrating search, social, programmatic and commerce into media planning and buying with other Omnicom shops like PHD and Hearts & Science. We talked with Manas about the rise of this so-called retail media, why paid search is king and still rules and why he’s bullish on digital subscription services. Below are excerpts of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

What’s the most interesting change in retail media you’ve seen this year?
All the major digital players like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Snapchat and Instagram have developed ad offerings that start to bridge the gap between retail and media, in the form of shoppable ads or swipe-up-to-purchase type of ads, for instance. On the opposite side, the likes of Amazon and Walmart are acting like media owners. Amazon is really making inroads into advertising, renovating its search and programmatic products. So more and more, media is being wired for retail, and at the same time, more and more retail is wired for media. It’s an interesting convergence on both sides.

What is Amazon’s role in the rise of retail media?
Amazon, in particular, is in a privileged position because it has many content and commerce properties, and Amazon has shoppers’ login identity that is the key facet for it to become an advertising platform. Facebook has built an ad empire off of its identity graph with over billions of user logins. Amazon is starting to leverage the same model. Amazon is building its own identify graph through Amazon Prime to truly understand the consumer behavior, be it a shopping experience or a video-viewing experience. Now, with the Whole Foods acquisition, Amazon is able to bring offline consumer behavior into its identity graph.

When brand suppliers use retailers’ point-of-purchase ad opportunities, where does the media budget come from?
Historically, much [ad spend on mass retailers] came from a brand’s shopper team, retail team, cooperative advertising team or whatever team that was responsible for leading the brand’s retail partnerships. We continue to see the growth of ad investments in shopper marketing in general, which includes cooperative advertising. But now, we are starting to see the convergence of a brand’s traditional marketing investment and retail ad investment. Ad dollars are moving across the two with more fluidity. The traditional marketing model is deflated, and the marketplace is forcing brands to have a new kind of conversation that is more inclusive of brand marketing and retail marketing together.

Which ad formats drive the best results?
Paid search remains critical to win in retail media. On Amazon alone, for example, paid search drives the highest return on investment across the board for the vast majority of our clients. Winning in search and content is the foundation of marketing on Amazon and Walmart. Once brands gain the visibility organically, they need to use targeted paid search to win the lowest-hanging fruit, where consumers have the highest purchase intent that is relevant to the brand within those retail platforms.

But search marketing on the likes of Amazon, Walmart and Kroger isn’t just buying keywords.
Totally. In retail, search becomes more complex because clients need a search strategy that blurs the line between traditional keyword search, their back-end inventory strategy, logistics considerations and nuanced price-point considerations. Brands just can’t decouple their search strategy with their product strategy and inventory strategy. Clients now realize that they not only need a Google search strategy, but also an Amazon search strategy and a Walmart search strategy.

What does retail media’s future look like?
The Amazon effect is truly real, and we will continue to see retail media being algorithmically driven. On the flip side, the retail space needs more human touch, which is enabled by augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Those tech advancements open a whole new world of brand marketing, product marketing and creative experience on the retail shelf. Meanwhile, more brands will turn to subscription-based solutions. Dollar Shave Club is a prime example of what is possible in digital subscriptions. Some high-end beauty and grocery companies are also embracing this model.

Who will win in the convergence of retail and media: platforms like Google, Facebook and Snapchat, or mass retailers like Amazon, Walmart and Kroger? 
I’m tempted to look to China for some possible indication, but even there, in such an advanced online retail market, WeChat and Alibaba are neck and neck. I think we are going to be without a clear winner for some time.

[Read More …]

This year, Facebook faced a backlash over enabling fake news and racist ads, got hauled in front of Congress for spreading Russian propaganda and found itself under the attack from European regulators. And that’s not to say anything of advertisers and publishers standing up to the tech giant over its measurement screw-ups and dominance of their content distribution. Here are five things we learned from Facebook’s annus horribilis:

Tech has too much faith in tech
A deeply seated belief running through Silicon Valley is the idea that tech will make the world a better place. Facebook may help people stay in touch with loved ones, spread democratic movements and help the marginalized find community, but the now-unavoidable truth is, humans can use tech for ill just as much as they can for good, as Facebook’s past year made abundantly clear. This belief caught Facebook flat-footed when it realized how much its platform was being abused.

Facebook’s strength is also a liability
Facebook’s stated goal has been to connect the world. But the scale that made Facebook an advertising powerhouse also works against it. Russian propagandists, racists and fake-news peddlers wouldn’t use it if it weren’t reaching nearly 1.4 billion daily active users to begin with. With that kind of scale, policing all the garbage that runs through the platform is unwieldy (or at least runs counter to profits). Facebook’s decision to reward sharing on the platform inadvertently fed the spread of fake news as well. Its size also makes it a bigger target for criticism. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Fake news underscores Facebook’s role as a news source
The fake-news problem made us aware that more people are getting their news from Facebook and other social media platforms. Sixty-seven percent of Americans get at least some of their news from social media, up from 62 percent a year earlier, according to Pew Research Center. Facebook is the biggest pathway to news, with 45 percent saying they get news there, followed by 18 percent saying they get news on YouTube and 11 percent on Twitter. And people’s confidence about their ability to spot fake news is misplaced. The more they use Facebook, the more they’re likely to get fooled by fake news on the social network, according to BuzzFeed.

Facebook’s PR efforts haven’t been matched by the results
Facebook has been on a PR offensive this year, allowing users to flag fake news and hiring fact-checkers from organizations including ABC News and The Associated Press to verify suspected false stories. But whatever goodwill that won it with journalists was short-lived. A year in, some of those fact-checkers complain that Facebook exploits them for its own PR and that a lack of transparency on Facebook’s part hinders their work, the Guardian found. Meanwhile, fake news is still being shared on the platform.

Fake news isn’t just political propaganda
A lot of the attention on Facebook was understandably focused on Russian-sourced ads that attempted to influence the U.S. election and cause havoc all around the globe, but there were plenty of other efforts to exploit Facebook’s size to spread falsehoods. As The New York Times reported, anti-abortion site LifeNews.com, with 1 million followers on Facebook, has been one of the more prolific spreaders of fake news and misinformation. Facebook’s definition of fake news and its approach of going after the profit motive don’t necessarily work in the case of sites like this that don’t conform to other fake-news sites and are not motivated by profits but ideology, the Times reported.

[Read More …]

Radoslaw Dobrolecki, US business development director at RTB House, discusses how artificial intelligence can help predict customer behavior at scale.
[Read More …]

Uber is selling its U.S. subprime auto-leasing business to startup-car marketplace Fair.com, ending a bid to attract drivers who lack regular access to vehicles.
[Read More …]

Uber is selling its U.S. subprime auto-leasing business to startup-car marketplace Fair.com, ending a bid to attract drivers who lack regular access to vehicles.
[Read More …]