AdWeek: Procter & Gamble Cut Up to $140 Million in Digital Ad Spending Because of Brand Safety Concerns

In its earnings call, Procter and Gamble announced that they cut their digital ad budget in the U.S. by $140mn, with cuts driven by concerns for safety. In addition, P&G expressed concerns with safety over brand association, something that has been discussed in the media before, given limited regulation on the YouTube videos ads show up for.

The CEO said that cuts came from "largely ineffective" digital advertising channels. In the quarter, revenue still grew 2% in the U.S., though the long-term effects are still yet to be seen.

I can't imagine that P&G is going to ignore digital advertising. The CEO also expressed the importance of social media in the call as well. I do think this is a negotiating chip and message to digital advertisers that they need to do better in terms of measurement and regulation. The digital advertising universe is still relatively nascent, and I believe this is the CEO's way of holding the beneficiaries' collective feet to the fire, and proving out the thesis sooner rather than later.


AdWeek: http://www.adweek.com/digital/procter-gamble-cut-140-million-in-digital-ad-spending-because-of-brand-safety-concerns/

Looking for a new job? See how Google, Snapchat, and LinkedIn can help you!

If you are looking for jobs, the internet has newer ways to help you! While Google rolled out a search engine for jobs this week, Snapchat launched ‘Snaplications’ in the US! LinkedIn, on the other hand, rolled out a new tool that makes it easier to know who is searching for your profile.

It is interesting to see how brands are continuously leveraging technology to reach their target audience and simplify processes via digital platforms!

Google’s new job search is powered by AI and lets users find the perfect job listings for a search query. What’s more? It pulls data from some of the world’s biggest job boards, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Monster, Indeed and Glassdoor to give users a dense set of search results and help simplify the tedious job search process.

With the launch of ‘Snaplication’, snapchat is all set to revolutionize the recruiting game! A world’s first, snaplication allows applicants to initiate the job process via snaps! Given the evolution of technology and the change in audience behavior, snapchat is empowering brands to engage directly with its potential talent, especially, millennials.

As the world’s largest youth employer, McDonald’s for instance is already using Snaplication to hire more than 200,000 workers this summer! Since ~48 percent of Snapchat users are between the ages of 18 and 24, it makes a lot of sense for a brand like McDonald's to leverage snap for recruitment.

 

Lastly, I noticed that LinkedIn rolled out a new feature that lets people see who searched for their profile!
The Search Appearances feature is visible on a user's personal profile page (see image), for both mobile and desktop versions. It lets the user find out how many times they've been discovered. With the roll out of this feature, LinkedIn wants to give its users a sense of how frequently they're appearing in queries and how they can strengthen their profile. It also helps people see the companies and job titles of the people who found them in search to help signal what types of opportunities you may be a fit for!





Links:

http://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/2017/06/13/mcdonalds-accepting-snapchat-snaplications-to-lure-millennial-employees.html
https://futurism.com/google-now-employs-ai-to-help-you-land-a-new-job/
https://www.cnet.com/news/linkedin-wants-you-to-know-whos-job-searching-for-you/

The Age of YOU: the Future of Business Is Personal

Last month, the worldly renowned brand consultancy firm, Interbrand announced their list of the 100 Best Global Brands. With it, the company also declared that the future of business is personal. The Age of You has arrived. See the full article on the website.

On a short 1.5-minute clip, Interbrand's Global CEO Jez Frampton congratulates the top 100 brands and addresses the increasingly complicated nature of building brands in today's minutely transforming society. He says, "It's not just about having a great idea, a great identity, fantastic communications. Nowadays it's about building a tight, seamless experience -- an ecosystem if you'd like."

That is, the Age of You signifies customers' increasing expectations on getting personalized services. Frampton calls this the "mecosystem."

As soon as I saw this, I instantly thought -- digital marketing! Digital marketing strategies actualize the mecosystem in businesses through tactics that target intent-driven searches and activities. But how is this manageable to YOUR business? And how does this affect YOU as a customer?

The New York Times Gets Instagram!

In the face of hyper-digitialization, one could say that the newspapers struggled the most to find ways to survive. It was no exception for the worldly renowned company like the New York Times in its 160-year history. Last year was especially difficult with the executive editor Jill Abramson suddenly fired and leak of an internal report how the paper has been struggling to keep up with digital trends.

Well, it seems like this year has brought a fresh scene of change for the beloved newspaper company. Earlier this week, the Times got -- drumroll please -- Instagram! 

Already with 27.9k followers in four days, they have been posting photographs and snippets from their articles on the theme of "Beginnings" as exemplified by their first post on Insta:

On the company's new presence in social media, the new executive editor, Alexandra MacCallum said, "It's raising our profile with a different set of people than we're used to reaching, and I think that's a really important thing for the Times going forward." (source: Mashable article) 

So what does this mean for the Times and social media in the long run? People have increasingly been using social media as a source of their news feed (literally), and does the Times' Instagram acknowledge that? Is it simply a way to reach out to and engage more variety of audience for them? Or, is this a new way for the people get the real news fed into their minds while spending infinite hours on Instagram? How will the stories be curated anyways?

So many questions aside, many are responding with warm welcoming into their Insta world, instead of raising their eyebrows. I have a gut feeling that we could be witnessing a milestone moment in the history of news and journalism. 

Pinterest to Let Brands Target Their Existing Customers With Ads

Following the successes of Facebook's and Twitter's sophisticated advertising businesses, Pinterest is gaining ground on developing its own advertising products.  Pinterest is developing a method for companies to advertise to their customers on their email list with ads on the Pinterest platform catered to the specific target consumer.  The social scrapbooking service is also building a conversion tracking and audience targeting measurement tool so that marketers can track and analyze their ads on Pinterest with the purchases that customers make on the company’s own e-commerce site.

The customer-database targeting option on Pinterest is similar to Facebook’s Custom Audience tool which allows a marketer to upload to email addresses and phone numbers of its customers to the social network’s platform.  Facebook then uses “hashing”, an encryption process, to anonymize the company’s list to match them to Facebook’s own database of users.  Subsequently, these matched customers are then shown the advertisers’ native ads on Facebook.

Pinterest is undergoing the same advertising strategy from Facebook with its own conversion tracking tool.  A marketer will drop a “pixel”, or a tracking tool, on its own website that will track the activity of the customers on its website.  The pixel will then show the Promoted Pins on Pinterest to the same customer after the customer logs into the social website.  This tracking tool will be limited to measuring and attributing ad performance to online sales.  

Source: http://adage.com/article/digital/pinterest-advertisers-target-existing-customers/295094/ 

UK Digital trends for 2014 (by eMarketer)

1) The Digital Audience: Multidevices change the Game

Smartphones and tables are now part of everyone's life. Smartphone penetration in the UK surpassed the 50% barrier, and tablet is already close to 40%.

Time spent in digital media is expected to surpass the time spent on TV during 2014, mainly driven by time on mobile devices.

UK kids are already using many devices to go online, so this trend is expected to become more and more important.

  

2) Ecommerce Pushes the Limits with Mobile

Customer journey has become more complex with mobile.

Trigger, research and purchase are now part of a complex journey through multiple touch-points and devices.

Mobile shopping and spending is increasing rapidly, but the device sales are mainly in big screens, such as laptops, desktops or, in a smaller scale, tablets.

3) Big Data—Much Talk, Little Action?

Although Big Data initiatives are increasing, the progress is estimated to be still slow in the next years.

The main reasons pointed out for the slow pace related with data integration and data crunching, namely:

• 47% cited lack of resources / time

• 46% had data in disparate systems / locations, or too much data

• 36% lacked useful data

• 30% had no suitable analytical systems

4) Real time advertising and content creation: Top agenda items for brands

The graph below shows that 20% of UK content marketers spent at least 50% of their budget on content marketing in 2013.

Social media was a major focus for content marketers, with Twitter and LinkedIn surprisingly surpassing Facebook in terms of usage.

Closing remarks
By all these interesting results, some quick ideas come to my mind

• Big Data seems to be a clear opportunity for new businesses - if companies have struggling with analysing their data why not outsource it?
• eCommerce is getting big, but mobile still presents some challenges. Are companies doing enough? Who will win this marathon?
• Content creation is the focus of marketers, how far can our imagination go?

Main sources:
http://vimeo.com/97252912
http://www.emarketer.com/Webinar/UK-Key-Digital-Trends-2014/4000085
http://www.emarketer.com/Article/UK-Key-Trends-2014-Ecommerce-Pushes-Limits-with-Mobile/1010762
http://www.emarketer.com/Article/UK-Key-Trends-2014-Big-DatamdashMuch-Talk-Little-Action/1010768
http://www.emarketer.com/Article/UK-Key-Trends-2014-Content-Creation-Top-Agenda-Item-Brands/1010773

Viral Digital Marketing Campaigns

Some brands are just light years ahead of their contemporaries in terms of their digital marketing campaigns which directly (and positively) impact their brand image. Here are 5 favorites that I find

A) Innovative

B) Funny

C) Heartwarming 

D) Or all of the above.

1) Who doesn't love Oreos? With campaigns like these - you can’t help but like them even more!

Check out how Oreo celebrated it’s 100th birthday! - Oreo video

2) I’d probably never heard of West Jet before this video but it definitely made me want to fly them if I ever go across to Canada! The company was hoping for 800,000 views - till date this video has 36M! Warms my heart every time I see this - West Jet Christmas Miracle

For more information check out this link.

3) How do you make Water interesting? Well, the marketing team at Smart Water solved the conundrum by putting all the elements of a viral video (at that time) in one video. Watch Jennifer Aniston for Smart Water. They followed it up recently with another.

4) I was working for P&G during the 2012 Olympics and when they showed this video to the employees there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. The Thank you Mom campaign has thus grown from strength to strength with it’s own dedicated Twitter page.

5) Finally - this P&G campaign was what a digital marketer’s dreams are made of! The man you’re man could smell like was a simple concept with a clever tag line. But it was executed so brilliantly that it became an instant hit. With 45 million views to date and many follow up videos (by the brand and others) this definitely deserved all the awards it won. Check out the behind the scenes which itself has 1.69M views and the Sesame Street Parody with 10M Views! Now that’s powerful :)

Please do share videos that you have found interesting.

Holiday Shopping in the Digital Age.

It’s hard to even remember the time before “Cyber Monday”- the time when “Black Friday” was the only game in town and you had to bundle up to brave the cold, November temperatures to score the latest digital gadget or hottest new toy.  But now, we can comfortably sit in our pajamas, waiting for the digital channel to go live. 

Marketers are taking an aggressive approach to expanding the convenience associated with online shopping by allowing customers to purchase online and pick-up in the store.  This way customer can avoid the crowds, but still have access to their purchase without having to wait for delivery.  Target has rolled out this service to all of its retail outlets (where previously it had only been available in half). 

Target is also entering into the competitive TV advertising space to publicize the promotions available for Cyber Monday.  Target has produced over 20 commercials inspired by the hashtag #mykindofholiday to highlight the various ways in which people celebrate.  The campaign is fully integrated with the social media strategy to create a true omni-channel experience to the customer.  For example, Target will highlight 100 products in its stores that have been trending well on Pinterest and will allow people to pin images/videos from its online catalogs to a digital pinboard. 

While marketers have been emphasizing just this type of integrated, omni-channel experience, it will be interesting to see how marketers measure the success of such programs.  Is having a Pinterest driven approach to product selection a strategy that demonstrates measurable returns to the business? Surely savvy companies like Target, Walmart, and Amazon will quickly figure out what the value is and others will follow suit. 

http://cmo.com/content/cmo-com/home/articles/2013/10/26/target_steps_up_onli.frame.html

Japan to introduce "fasting camps" to ease "internet addiction" rates in children

I came across an interesting article in the Daily Telegraph about the rise of “internet addiction”.  We often hear from older generations about how being a kid today is so different than it was in a time past.  Kids have mobile digital devices wherever they go and some seem to think that screen time has supplanted the critical physical and social development skills that playing outside with the neighborhood kids used to provide.  Others argue that digital devices have opened a world of possibilities in education, access and reach.  The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. 

In the meantime, to combat the rise in increased screen time, Japan’s Ministry of Education is introducing “fasting camps” to help “children overcome their addiction to the online world”.  The Ministry estimates that 500,000 of Japanese children (Ages 12-18) are addicted to the internet and to reduce this figure, children will attend the camps to re-learn the basics of outdoor activities and team sports.  The camp will also provide psychotherapists to help ease the emotional burden of disconnecting. 

While the “fasting camps” may marginally reduce “addiction” rates, is it really possible to turn back the clock on the digital revolution?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/10267303/Japan-to-introduce-internet-fasting-camps-for-addicted-kids.html

Omnicom & Publicis Merger

Yesterday, Omnicom and Publicis announced their merger to create the largest advertising company in the world- worth up to $35B. Many cried foul as this news broke since the deal would surely create anti-competitive environment for advertising. However, this announcement goes to prove that the web and social advertising has become such a big force that the more traditional advertising firms must adjust their strategy and respond.

It was interesting to read about how quickly in the last few decades, advertising shifted from being creative and artistic to data mining. (As a Mad Men fan, I'm sad to see this change...) Sites such as Google, Facebook, and Yahoo are able to gather and store so much information each consumer and target advertising based on each person's profile and preferences in a much more effective way. I guess we will see if Omnicom and Publicis joining forces can help them ride the wave into the new ad age.

To read more:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/28/us-publicis-omnicom-idUSBRE96Q01F20130728