Tag Archive: brand building

1. Key insights from the ANA Brand Masters 2020

   March 11, 2020 17:29 Comments Off on Key insights from the ANA Brand Masters 2020

   By Victoria Potter, US Business Director at ECI Media Management

   ECI Media Management has just returned from an inspiring and informative few days at the ANA Brand Masters in Phoenix last week, and we took home valuable learnings from the talks and panel discussions. Brand Purpose was a key topic, with many conversations around how brands can earn the trust of consumers.

   Our US Business Director, Victoria Potter, shares her key insights from her time in Arizona.

   Insight 1: Data turns sparks into flames

   Time and time again, brands turn to data to take a small spark and turn it into a flame. Those small sparks could very easily be ignored and extinguished. However, with just a little bit of oxygen, they become blazing fires.

   Boston Beer noticed a spark in the form of spiked seltzer, and just three years later, the hard seltzer category (of which their brand, Truly, has the number two ranking) has achieved a value of $2 billion, an increase of 275%.

   Crocs, suffering from a relevance problem, embraced their individual identity with a boost from Ariana Grande. They revitalized the brand by embracing a ‘Come as you are’ mentality to provide space for free expression.

   Insight 2: A brand without trust is just a product
   

   The digital age in which we live creates a strange dichotomy between the personal and impersonal. Making your brand valuable in a consumer’s eyes goes beyond price. One of my favorite quotes of the week was from Brian McCarter (Ogilvy EMEA), representing Dove: “A brand without trust is just a product”.

   However, Manos Spanos from Danone pointed out another important truth: brand purpose doesn’t have to be about saving the planet. Having a purpose and truth to your brand is important, but not all brands need to be about saving the world. For Danone, that meant recognizing that Oikos, a great source of protein, could help NFL footballers with their “bubble butts”. This brand purpose is no less important from a brand perspective than Honey Nut Cheerios’ ‘Future with Bees’. The key to trust is being true to yourself. As Boston Beer CMO Lesya Lysyj stated in her fourth rule – Play Your Own Game.

   Insight 3: In the age of data and AI, the human element is just as important

   Danone is bringing together humans and AI by creating great content that lives the brands’ truth, but uses AI to determine the efficacy of the creative.

   Boston Beer noticed a small piece of data indicating strong BoDeans sales in Montana and Maine. Humans helped develop that data into a rebrand which helped reinvigorate and relaunch the brand.

   Caterpillar embraces the complementary relationship between humans and machines, championing automation as a way to get more work done remotely, keep workers safer, and for longer periods of time.

   Insight 4: If at first you don’t succeed…

   One of the ‘four rules of marketing’ that Boston Beer shared was ‘Get it out fast, even if it’s wrong’. It sounds counterintuitive, but they pivoted a five-state launch into a national launch in just seven days, in the knowledge that they might not have it all right. However, three years later, the success of the brand speaks for itself. Admittedly, plenty of mistakes were made, but they stuck with it to get great results.

   One of the key insights from OK Cupid’s CMO was that ‘this may not work, but the win is in the insight’. Sometimes trying something and not getting it right is just the information you need to get it right next time.

    

   If you’d like to discuss anything you have read here, please don’t hesitate to get in touch: value@ecimm.com

   Image: Sean Pavone/Shutterstock

2. Will the demise of the cookie lead to better brand building opportunities online?

   March 3, 2020 11:55 Comments Off on Will the demise of the cookie lead to better brand building opportunities online?

   By Victoria Potter, US Business Director at ECI Media Management

   Google announced in January that it would be phasing out the cookie in its Chrome browser over the next two years. Apple’s Safari and Firefox have already killed off the cookie in their browsers, but Chrome is by far the most popular browser in the world with 64.1% of global market share in January 2020, so Google’s decision will lead to a major industry shift.

   A pivotal year for digital advertising

   2020, then, is a pivotal year for digital advertising. But exactly how it will change is as yet unclear: how will tech companies, agencies and advertisers react? Will the digital landscape change dramatically or imperceptibly? Will that change be positive or negative?

   An opportunity to refocus on brand building
   

   For a very long time, advertisers have been able to follow consumers from page to page across the internet, understanding their consumption patterns and using that insight for targeting. Focus has turned away from more difficult to measure brand building activity. It’s always easier to value what you can measure over what you can’t. But now that the cookie is on its way out, advertisers and agencies will need to re-evaluate what they use digital advertising for. Could brand building, traditionally the realm of TV and OOH, be one of its new uses?

   Harnessing digital to build relationships with consumers

   Before the advent of the cookie in particular, and digital advertising in general, building brands was always at the heart of advertising: trusted brands are fundamentally important in helping consumers make choices. In this new era of digital advertising, can we harness its strengths to make this the new way to build relationships with consumers and earn their trust, rather than just trying to push them to click and buy? This will be particularly important for brands who do not have access to high-quality first-party data, for example FMCG companies.

   Context-based media buying will become a key tool

   A key tool will be context-based media buying, with advertisers seeking out environments where their broader target audiences congregate. Ben Plomion of tech company GumGum advises that marketers should “use the insights they generate from their current cookie data to inform their future contextual strategies”. Technological advances and the growth of AI are making contextual advertising an increasingly powerful tool: they can be used to understand web page sentiment, understand linguistic nuances, verify the content and tone of images and video, and automatically configure ad creative so that it complements the context.

   Premium publishers are able to offer brands superior contextual advertising opportunities thanks to their high-quality inventory and relatively low ad loads, creating a better experience for the user. This means they can help advertisers obtain meaningful reach and build trust and connection – all valuable assets for a brand building campaign.

   Plan to build relationships with humans, not to reach consumers

   At the heart of these approaches is planning with humans – not ‘consumers’ – in mind. Without the targeting and measuring abilities associated with cookies, refocusing on enriching people’s lives through advertising will become critical for success – and that is why we believe the demise of the cookie should, on balance, be a good thing for advertisers.

   Walled gardens could increase the dominance of the tech giants

   There are some pitfalls to look out for. Of course, Google and Facebook’s walled gardens will be largely unaffected by the decline of the cookie (indeed, some believe that Google decided to kill the cookie so that it wouldn’t have to share its data with anyone else). Advertisers will still be able to leverage the first-party cookie within these walled gardens, which will further strengthen the tech giants’ position and even allow them to raise their prices, if advertisers don’t push for content strategies to find their target groups in the digital space.

   In the face of Google and Facebook’s strengthened position, publishers might be tempted to increase ad loads in order to avoid declining revenues; with advertisers struggling to drop their reliance on last click performance metrics, this could lead to an increase in irrelevant ads, which would in turn lead to a rise in ad blocking.

   It’s time to revisit priorities and foster deeper connections

   The decline of the cookie is a seminal moment in the history of online advertising. While it could undoubtedly spell trouble for those unwilling or unable to adapt, in our view advertisers should see it as an opportunity to reappraise and revisit priorities, and to create brand-building campaigns that foster deeper connections with human beings for greater trust.

   What’s your opinion?

   We would love to hear from brands, agencies and tech firms about how they envisage a cookie-less future. What do you think will happen? Do you think the decline of the cookie will usher in a golden era of advertising, or is your forecast less optimistic? Comment on our LinkedIn post, or email us at value@ecimm.com.

   Image: Kim Reinick/Shutterstock