Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

Are you looking to improve your brand and win more customers? Then you should give more thought to the way you use colors. Humans are visual beings. The brain processes pictorial information 60,000 times faster than it processes text. In addition, 90 percent of the information sent to our brains is visual. And an important…
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For management consultancies trying to be agencies, 2018 is the year they’ll have to prove they can do it.

“Next year is the year we’re focusing strongly on organic growth that is in part seeded by some of the acquisitions we’ve made around the globe,” said Brian Whipple, CEO of Accenture Interactive, which snapped up 14 agencies globally in the past five years.

Management consultants have been creeping in on agency turf for a while now, spending a lot on acquisitions. The biggest player is Accenture Interactive, but others aren’t far behind. Deloitte Digital acquired creative agency Heat in 2016, while IBM’s acquisition of Resource/Ammirati has now resulted in a 36-studio holding agency called IBM iX.

In 2017, consulting firms started a sometimes painful process of integrating those agencies into their existing operations. Next year, the pressure will be on to prove the integrations panned out.

“When we buy a company, their destination is [Accenture Interactive],” Whipple said. “They might keep a brand identity for a transition, but the management team is emotionally and work-wise strategically signed up. If they wanted a founders’ culture, they can go to a holding company. Our mission is never to grow that business as standalone.”

Meanwhile, for agencies like Hill Holliday and Ogilvy, which have moved in on consulting companies’ turf, next year is the time to prove they can fight back.

Now, consultants are adding design, user experience and customer experience projects to their existing offerings. Traditionally, UX or creative projects were the domain of agencies, while consultancies used to do supply-chain management, information technology or tech-related work.

There have been indications that the pitch is working. Deloitte connected its win of LG’s work to its purchase of Heat; Accenture has won duties for Maserati. Deloitte also won pizza brand Papa Murphy’s, which needed to figure out back-end development that Deloitte Digital could handle, while Heat could take care of creative.

The one area consultancies still haven’t cracked is media planning and buying. There have been some moves in this direction. Deloitte does media-mix modeling, planning and budgeting with a group of media-buying agencies that set aside inventory for that company’s use. Accenture and PwC help clients with business-related changes, including bringing programmatic in-house. There is room, especially as traditional media buying companies wrestle with transparency issues.

The big change will come once consulting companies move in on the bread-and-butter of media buying. There are some indications that will happen next year. Joy Bhattacharya, Accenture Interactive’s U.K. and Ireland managing director, said at a breakfast briefing earlier this year that he’s had lots of discussions with clients to help them set up in-house digital media-buying operations. Some of that is fallout from this year’s transparency and fraud issues with media that have clients asking if they can do this buying themselves. At PwC, there is a marked move to try and increase auditing capabilities as a response to the rash of questions being asked about rebates.

However, Whipple said he doesn’t see Accenture moving aggressively into media buying because it’s highly competitive and relatively low margin. More likely, Accenture will get more involved with retail media or commerce that combines experience and advertising. “In that context, if media is going to be part of something, we might be in that,” he said.

At IBM iX, global leader for strategy and design Robert Schwartz said programmatic will be a big driver for 2018. While he doesn’t want to get into traditional media buying, IBM iX has clients asking about help with media — and he wants to put in tech like blockchain next year to help them, especially with problems like fraud and transparency.

“How do you connect media buying with technology?” is the question Louise Clements, who heads ICF Olson, a consultancy-agency hybrid with more than eight acquisitions under its belt in 2017, is trying to answer. “I don’t see that happening yet,” she said. “That is a big opportunity to connect opportunities for the market so you can do that and do it cost-effectively.”

Image courtesy of Accenture Interactive

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“Comcast has both the incentive and ability to withhold programming from distribution rivals,” Public Knowledge says in a new letter to the Justice Department.

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Determining the top story in the TV business this year was a simple exercise: It was sex harassment.

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Every year, a number of things die in media and marketing. This year, we thought we’d switch up the year-end prediction tradition, and ask people in those industries to tell us what they think will kick the bucket in the coming year. We granted sources anonymity so they could speak freely. Here are their responses.

Referral traffic: “In the short term, Facebook will be a worse partner before they’re a better partner. They’re confused right now. They had a shitty year. When you’re confused and scared, you go back to your comfort zone, and that’s peer to peer. I think they’re going to go, ‘This news thing is harder than it looks.’ But fundamentally, Facebook is a way less interesting place without premium content.” — Digital publisher

The 30-second digital video ad: “We’ll see ad length decrease to meet the demands of short-form video viewers. Six- to 15-second ads will dominate by the end of 2018.” — Video platform vendor

Facebook Watch: “Facebook will abandon the Watch strategy and reinvent a digital product yet again. They’ve literally abandoned every single video strategy in the past three years. None of the Watch shows are making money. People asked to produce content for Watch are not going to see enough ROI for it, and this mid-roll experiment is going to be a massive failure because users aren’t going to engage with mid-roll advertising. Getting people to consume video is the easy part. Getting people to stick around when you’re jamming in a mid-roll ad isn’t.” — Digital publishing exec

Fake influencers: “Bullshit poseurs who have built up their followers by buying them and baiting them, and then rip off the brands who pay them for influencer campaigns that don’t generate any results. The brands are getting too smart for this shit.” — Influencer marketer

BuzzFeed’s commitment to news: “BuzzFeed will divest one of its business to a legacy media company, most likely BuzzFeed News. Running a news organization is expensive and they have always struggled with monetizing it versus their lighter content, and the recent layoffs have refocused the company into building fast, efficient businesses like Tasty. BuzzFeed News would be a bounty to a legacy organization looking to jump-start their journalistic footprint against younger audiences. The most likely buyer will be NBCU because of the existing relationships, but what about the soon-to-be-merged Disney/Fox or even the eventually merged AT&T?” — Publishing sales exec

The independent media company: “That can’t last. Everyone will figure out a way to partner up with someone to get through the tough times, or bigger companies will snap them them up. Maybe NowThis picks up Mic. All these digital media companies raised so much money, they have amazing cost structures. It’s a downside to all the VCs and people who get laid off, but it’s necessary for the vitality of the space.” — Digital media operator

The cold war between Facebook and Google: “In the way Facebook came after YouTube, YouTube will hit back, along with Google, with things like better products, better monetization for publishers. Publishers had 45 percent referral traffic from Facebook and 34 percent from Google, and now that’s reversed. Google is the friend to publishers, and Google is going to keep on it and hit back. Zuck is in for a bit of a fight.” — Platform partnerships exec

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“Any single state’s attempt to limit worldwide access to public information represents an existential threat to journalistic freedom,” a coalition of news organizations says.

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Christmas is not an official holiday in Japan, nor a widely observed religious holiday, but it is celebrated nonetheless in its own unique way. Here’s some data that highlights Christmas in Japan.
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It is a simple grassroots message paid for by local citizens, expressing their concern about the Presidency. That’s what the citizens of a neighborhood in Youngstown, Ohio, say about the ad they
kicked in to buy on a local billboard. The content is a one-word message: “IMPEACH.”

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Ivo Totev, CMO of SAP’s ERP solution, S/4HANA, discusses the challenges of delivering omnichannel digital advertising while still optimizing every channel.
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<p>This year, they will spend more than half of their media day watching TV Adults in India will average 3 hours, 52 minutes per day consuming major media in 2017, [&#8230;]</p><p>The post <a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.emarketer.com/newsroom/index.php/adults-india-spend-3-hours-52-minutes-day-consuming-media/”>Adults in India Spend 3 Hours, 52 Minutes a Day Consuming Media</a> appeared first on <a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.emarketer.com/newsroom”>eMarketer Newsroom</a>.</p>
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