Tag: Audience
Hello and welcome to your weekly FWD! This week we say goodbye to summer and hello to a new harvest of autumnal updates from the tech world. With a new season comes a new wardrobe and this year you could not only get your hands on the Nike x NBA Connected Jersey that connects wearers to exclusive content, but it’s also rumoured Amazon is working on Alexa-powered smart glasses. Still feeling end-of-Summer blues? Sing them away with the now most streamed song on Spotify!
HEADLINES
- What does $1.1bn allow you to buy? Enter Google, who have purchased HTC’s Pixel mobile division
- OK, well what does $16bn get you? Enter Intel, who have acquired a computer vision software (for autonomous driving purposes)
- Slightly smaller yet no less significant, Apple have changed the Siri IOS browser from Bing to Google
INSIGHTS
COOL
DEEP READS
As usual, please share anything you find interesting using the hashtag #OMDFWD
In a rather classy venue, ironically nestled under a railway bridge close to London’s Borough market, during Social Media Week (Sept 11-15), I went along to discover how major brands, publishers and agencies are working to reinvent storytelling and how they plan to deal with ever-changing modern consumption habits.
A diverse panel helped jumpstart discussions. Luisa Mauro from LADbible-owned site, Pretty 52, sat alongside Charles Ubaghs from Global, and OMD UK’s XMP digital manager Charles McNeill, armed with a media perspective and case studies from arguably the greatest storyteller of all, Walt Disney himself.
I went to quite a few talks this year at SMW (to the dislike of my liver but the benefit of my brain) and above all else retained two clear points. which were echoed by nearly all of those presenting; that of personalized experiences and ensuring your audiences was the right ones. Unsurprisingly, these two points formed the backbone of the talk and some of the guiding principles that kept coming up during the week.
Don’t talk to the masses – get up close and personal.
Millennials and Gen-Zers came up in conversation – as these buzzword age groups always seem to – and highlighted the need to address the boom in mobile consumption and the many mediums that younger audiences use. The new screen is the mobile screen and it’s key for brands to stop employing old TVC habits of marketing and embrace mobile-ready content campaigns. It’s by using new social media and tech platforms in creative and out of the box ways to deliver content, says Ubaghs, that will help keep storytelling at the heart of digital content and maintain that coveted essence of authenticity that brands seem to all want.
We’ve been hearing this from Facebook too: best practice recommendations suggest that the effectiveness and resonance of content is largely dependent on whether the content is optimized for social media or not. Largely, brands that are still opening up to being more present on social media need to ensure that they don’t simply slap a traditional, long format TVC on their social channels and instead re-edit and re-cut content to suit the social platform they are deploying their content on.
McNeill also says that it’s essential that content is digested by the right audiences, and that different KPIs are associated with each group – this seems to be particularly valuable to the Walt Disney Company. At the heart of his talk was the importance of custom campaigns for each audience, thereby allowing the story to flow as naturally as possible.
Storytelling is an integral part of the work that we at OMD Create, a specialist social and content arm, undertake for The Walt Disney Company. Leading on social analytics across 26 markets with more than 17-million combined fans, we have huge volumes of content we report on and help develop in conjunction with Disney. Moreover, we operate within the vast Kid’s Entertainment space which this year to date has generated more than 15-billion views alone. What we find across multiple content themes is that telling a story is as every bit relevant to an unboxing video as it is to a song compilation; this is how we captivate our audiences and ensure they always come back for more.
Talk with your audience, not to them.
As marketers, we sometimes get too focused on driving results and forget about the consumers we’re trying to impact. a human audience that’s not focused on CPC metric but about how a brand makes them feel and what a brand can do for them. McNeill adds that we need to ensure we know what content has already been served to our custom audiences – have they previously re-engaged with our stories and if so, to what extent does this dampen their opinion of us? We strive at OMD Create to do exactly this, by keeping our partners such as Facebook close to us when working on the optimization of campaigns to keep our metrics close, and our audiences closer.
What all panelists did solidly agree on was on the primary way of measuring how successful their storytelling has been. Their golden metric as described by the moderator was shares. Why? In the eyes of the panelists, people sharing content was synonymous to putting their name on it, to regarding it as something worthy of their own friends and audience and something that has generated enough interest to spark conversation.
So what about the future? It’s a space that marketers can win in if agencies are able to help their clients tell stories while using insights to help guide content. Also if they are able to ensure that this content is customized to suit the audiences they are trying to reach while at the same time embracing ever-changing technology. The only limitations lie within ourselves, whether we dare experiment with the tools and process we have in place.
We’re not always going to win, but we won’t lose by keeping on our toes.
For more information regarding OMD EMEA or anything you’ve read here please contact us at [email protected]
In a rather classy venue, ironically nestled under a railway bridge close to London’s Borough market, during Social Media Week (Sept 11-15), I went along to discover how major brands, publishers and agencies are working to reinvent storytelling and how they plan to deal with ever-changing modern consumption habits.
A diverse panel helped jumpstart discussions. Luisa Mauro from LADbible-owned site, Pretty 52, sat alongside Charles Ubaghs from Global, and OMD UK’s XMP digital manager Charles McNeill, armed with a media perspective and case studies from arguably the greatest storyteller of all, Walt Disney himself.
I went to quite a few talks this year at SMW (to the dislike of my liver but the benefit of my brain) and above all else retained two clear points. which were echoed by nearly all of those presenting; that of personalized experiences and ensuring your audiences was the right ones. Unsurprisingly, these two points formed the backbone of the talk and some of the guiding principles that kept coming up during the week.
Don’t talk to the masses – get up close and personal.
Millennials and Gen-Zers came up in conversation – as these buzzword age groups always seem to – and highlighted the need to address the boom in mobile consumption and the many mediums that younger audiences use. The new screen is the mobile screen and it’s key for brands to stop employing old TVC habits of marketing and embrace mobile-ready content campaigns. It’s by using new social media and tech platforms in creative and out of the box ways to deliver content, says Ubaghs, that will help keep storytelling at the heart of digital content and maintain that coveted essence of authenticity that brands seem to all want.
We’ve been hearing this from Facebook too: best practice recommendations suggest that the effectiveness and resonance of content is largely dependent on whether the content is optimized for social media or not. Largely, brands that are still opening up to being more present on social media need to ensure that they don’t simply slap a traditional, long format TVC on their social channels and instead re-edit and re-cut content to suit the social platform they are deploying their content on.
McNeill also says that it’s essential that content is digested by the right audiences, and that different KPIs are associated with each group – this seems to be particularly valuable to the Walt Disney Company. At the heart of his talk was the importance of custom campaigns for each audience, thereby allowing the story to flow as naturally as possible.
Storytelling is an integral part of the work that we at OMD Create, a specialist social and content arm, undertake for The Walt Disney Company. Leading on social analytics across 26 markets with more than 17-million combined fans, we have huge volumes of content we report on and help develop in conjunction with Disney. Moreover, we operate within the vast Kid’s Entertainment space which this year to date has generated more than 15-billion views alone. What we find across multiple content themes is that telling a story is as every bit relevant to an unboxing video as it is to a song compilation; this is how we captivate our audiences and ensure they always come back for more.
Talk with your audience, not to them.
As marketers, we sometimes get too focused on driving results and forget about the consumers we’re trying to impact. a human audience that’s not focused on CPC metric but about how a brand makes them feel and what a brand can do for them. McNeill adds that we need to ensure we know what content has already been served to our custom audiences – have they previously re-engaged with our stories and if so, to what extent does this dampen their opinion of us? We strive at OMD Create to do exactly this, by keeping our partners such as Facebook close to us when working on the optimization of campaigns to keep our metrics close, and our audiences closer.
What all panelists did solidly agree on was on the primary way of measuring how successful their storytelling has been. Their golden metric as described by the moderator was shares. Why? In the eyes of the panelists, people sharing content was synonymous to putting their name on it, to regarding it as something worthy of their own friends and audience and something that has generated enough interest to spark conversation.
So what about the future? It’s a space that marketers can win in if agencies are able to help their clients tell stories while using insights to help guide content. Also if they are able to ensure that this content is customized to suit the audiences they are trying to reach while at the same time embracing ever-changing technology. The only limitations lie within ourselves, whether we dare experiment with the tools and process we have in place.
We’re not always going to win, but we won’t lose by keeping on our toes.
For more information regarding OMD EMEA or anything you’ve read here please contact us at [email protected]
Hello and welcome to your weekly OMD FWD bringing you the latest tech news to warm up on this chilly Autumn day. We start this edition with Tinder’s hot ranking as the top grossing iOS app as a result of charging people to see who has liked their profile. Next up, the Amazon and Apple rivalry sparks up as they join major Hollywood players in a bid to win distribution rights for James Bond, while eBay launches the specialised Entertainment Shop.
Brands can now target their user-base on third-party sites through LinkedIn’s new Audience Network. Comparatively, Whatsapp will offer a free app to small-to-medium size businesses, but will charge the larger ones, as it tests a chat button on Facebook that opens a conversation directly with business.
HEADLINES
- Tinder has become the top grossing iOS app as a result of charging people to see who has liked their profile.
- LinkedIn’s new Audience Network allows brands to reach their audiences through their native ad formats which can run across third party sites.
- Amazon and Apple join the major Hollywood players in a bid to win distribution rights for James Bond, as EBay launches The Entertainment Shop, selling films, music, books, and video games.
- WhatsApp has introduced a free Business app for small-medium businesses (it will charge larger ones), as it tests a chat button on Facebook which opens a conversation directly with businesses.
INSIGHTS
- Learn what’s really on the nation’s minds with a list of the most searched for ‘how to’ questions in Google.
- A look at back to school shopping habits reveals 43% of shoppers will use their smartphones to do research, as retailers take advantage of ASMR.
- Find out what the fastest growing programming language is.
COOL
- Users across Facebook can help design Citroën’s latest TV ad, as they select their favourite scenes.
- Grolsch has used neuro headsets which have taken brain-waves stimulated by music and turned them into art.
- A new smartphone app could help diagnose Heart disease, potentially avoiding a 45-minute hospital procedure.
DEEP READS
- Google reveals a number of improvements to their Assistant features coming soon.
- Teens are spending more time on screen than ever, rather than socialising or exercising, which leads to greater risk of depression.
- There are over a million people helping to train AI, as one day it will be embedded into our everyday lives.
As usual, please share anything you find interesting using the hashtag #OMDFWD
Neil Hurman, Chief Planning Officer at OMD EMEA, talks to LinkedIn about the future of marketing at Cannes Lions.
https://youtu.be/VGS0VSiOqzY
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In a world where the customer is increasingly in control, what do you think about the changing role for companies like OMD?
Previously when I started in the business, we were able to take our audiences for granted. We were able to broadcast and publicise our point of views and our clients’ point of views quite easily – we had a guaranteed audience. We cannot take audiences for granted anymore. We have to earn the right. We have to avoid ad blocking. We have to avoid the distraction of choice that we never had. In fact, even the words ‘audience,’ ‘target audience,’ ‘our audience,’ ‘our customers’ speaks of a world where we’ve learnt to take too many things for granted and I think that is the big change that I have seen.
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We’re interested to hear from you on how the role of media has evolved over recent years and what the future of effective media planning looks like, within both OMD and across the broader Industry?
Media planning was how much TV you could afford and in the last five to ten years it has changed beyond all recognition. I think it has become a story less about media planning and channel planning because what we really meant was what audience is more or less likely on the margins to consume various types of mass media. It sounds a little bit like a cliché, but I think we are moving from media planning to content distribution, from media planning to the sharing of stories. I think that requires much less emphasis on channels and much more of an emphasis on how you promote sharing, how you make your stories more attractive. I think it’s that difference between the age we left behind, which is about targeting, and the age we’re moving into, which is about attraction, it is probably the single biggest dynamic.
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How do you think the skills required to be successful in media and marketing have changed, and what do the successful professionals of tomorrow look like versus those of yesterday?
So, I think at the moment it helps to be something of a polymath, there is almost too much we need to know. Our business is full of experts and needs to be full of specialist experts as the scope and scale of what we do broadens from content to technology, managing data, statistics modelling, all the way through to our digital services and, of course, we still have the age-old skills of being able to listen to clients.
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Similarly, when you think about how the conversations you have with your clients are changing, what are the key things they are most concerned with and how do you drive best in class discussions with your client base? How do you see these discussions continuing to evolve in the future?
Conversations for clients are always about value and value delivery. The nature of that value delivery changes and has changed significantly. The value we deliver is less about not paying too much for your media and more about the value return of building brands and the value return on growing a company’s revenue, not just in the short-term but in the longer term too. Historically, I think there has tended to be a focus on the short-term, what we used to call the short-term, versus the long-term. The short-term sales versus the longer term health and brand building. You can’t have an either or conversation anymore: it has to be ‘and’. You have to win in the today and you have to be winning for tomorrow as well. You have to do both at the same time and I think that is something that has become absolutely clear in the last few years.
I think the way we do that, and the way we are trying to do it more within OMD, is to productise what we do a little bit more by taking what we do and working out a way of how we systemise it, how we make sure we can deliver a more consistent problem-solving product with sharper insights, smarter ideas and stronger results for every client, every brief, every time. We are exploring platform-led ways of integrating our entire global team together to ensure standard ways of delivery and standard ways of quality controlling outputs from our teams. I think that it is quite new and different, and a much better way of problem-solving going forward.
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What are you most excited about for Cannes 2016?
I think for me the thing I enjoy most is catching up with colleagues, friends and people you haven’t seen for a while. And of course, there are a lot of important client meetings, of course, there is a lot of partner meetings and there are some really great conversations that you can have here because it is one of the few times in the year that everyone is in the same place. It sounds like a very self-serving justification for everyone being here, but you can get an enormous amount done in a relatively short period of time because everyone is here.
In a week that political resignations, leadership battles and market turmoil dominated news headlines, a certain monster-hunting mobile game was busy making waves online. While Twitter remains a firm favourite for political chatter, Pokémon Go now has more daily users on Android phones than the social media giant. Not only is it the most popular game in US history, but it is also breaking records when it comes to retention of users. According to Survey Monkey Pokémon Go is seeing retention rates at more than double the industry average, pulling in revenues at twice the average rate for casual gamers. It therefore wasn’t long before Pokémon Go explored paid for placement from brands, especially as retailers are already paying to set Pokéstop “lures” to draw players in. With Duane Reade pharmacies in the US and Vodafone in Germany already chomping on the bit to be sponsored “portals” the game looks to set to build on its current momentum. But brands do need to be careful to not put players off with big sponsorship deals as well as draw mobs of users to various locations. With brands getting in on the action it will be interesting to see how their involvement affects retention rates, and whether Pokémon Go is here to stay, or just another fad. As ever, please share anything you spot with #OMDFWD
HEADLINES
INSIGHTS
COOL
- Netflix introduces Flixtape, a TV ‘mix tape’ to share your viewing loves
- It’s not all clever tech in FWD. The residents of the Faroe Islands have taken a retro approach to get themselves onto Google Streetview
- Staying on the retro theme, Nintendo is releasing a mini nes in time for Christmas
DEEP READS
After the last award was handed out, the last inspiring words uttered, the last connections made and the final party wound down, the sun finally set on an intense week for the marketing world. As this was my second year running to attend, it got me thinking about how the event has become a great beacon of inspiration for an ever-changing marketing world. A pilgrimage of sorts for marketers yearning to reignite that love for what they do, get inspired from the world class list of speakers and meet some of the most forward thinkers in our industry.
Heading back home, here’s what stood out for me:
Don’t interrupt, entertain!
In an ad bloackable and skippable world, there is a new expectation for brands to constantly entertain. We have come a long way from pushing messages to people just because they have no choice but to hear what we want to tell them. The power has completely shifted and it’s time for us marketers to focus our efforts in making sure that entertainment is at the core of every brand. Every brand must find its platform and think, act and behave like an entertainment brand, producing work that makes people react. Makes them feel something. And ultimately makes them want to associate with your brand and share with their network.
It’s a quality game, not a quantity game
To us marketers the digital world has given us a whole new array of platforms and tools to better reach our potential business audiences and engage with them in ways we had never seen before. We as an industry have taken this as an invitation to include ourselves into conversations that we were never truly invited to, creating the overused buzzword: “real time marketing” and pushing a quantity game versus a quality game. There are too many brands that are aimlessly wanting to produce more, forgetting the power of an actionable insight that holds their “big idea” campaign together. Every single case that was shortlisted into the Cannes Lions had one thing in common; they were rooted in an insights that transcended platforms and connected the brand to their business potential target seamlessly and in an entertaining manner.
If you can’t beat the big 2, adapt to them
Ever since Facebook and Google began their invasion of the media and marketing world, it started a love/hate relationship with agencies and brands. At the rate that things have been progressing, the big 2 have already started capturing the lion’s share of marketing budgets; which is expected as that’s where people are these days. The forecast is for them to get even stronger and more dominant over the next couple of years as they diversify their offering and analytics. Now this mainly impacts agencies, as both companies offer brands a self-serve system cutting out the middle men, which has put pressure on the big marketing conglomerates’ profitability. To be better prepared for the future the only way to survive is to accept this new status quo and adapt agency offering around what the big 2 are capable of delivering as opposed to fending them off.
AI, the next step change in humanity
It took a little over a decade for us to see how the development of the smartphone changed our lives forever. We are now witnessing the same with artificial intelligence. As the technology develops, we are seeing many companies invest in AI as it becomes smarter, faster and easier for people to use. Whether be it IBM’s Watson, Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana they have all become so powerful that they currently have learning capabilities and are able to perform redundant tasks in seconds that used to take people several hours and days. In the coming 10 years this will highly impact the jobs that people do and how they live their lives running errands, ordering food, playing music and even driving their cars. The next step would be to see how brands interact with AI, when it’s them calling the shots on what products to recommend and purchase.
Partnership, not client/agency relationship
Procter & Gamble’s Chief Brand Officer had the stand out talk for me. He came out on stage with nothing more than wanting the industry to get its act together and get back to getting great work done. The client/agency relationship has gone through so much strain and blame over the past couple of years as agencies continued to get their hands around the complexities of the changing landscape. One thing he made clear is that the client/agency relationship must transform into a partnership and that note alone is refreshing to hear from one of the world’s most active advertisers. Agencies must restructure their teams to become an extension of their clients’ marketing functions and aim for the same business objectives.
There is no doubt in my mind that the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity is the best place for any marketer to fall in love with the industry once again. Especially when the entire focus of the event in recent history is all about getting great work done around powerful insights, leveraging analytics and technology, to drive business growth for brands.