Tag: content
Whilst the idea of personalised communication isn’t exactly new news, we in Create think this will grow to pretty epic proportions.
Not sure about personalised marketing? What if we told you content featuring a targeted call-to-action performed 178% better than a generic call-to-action. Not only do these personalised messages deliver better performance, they are also preferred by customers. 50% of U.S. consumers say they prefer receiving personalised marketing messages and 91% are more likely to shop with brands who send personalised offers.
As the volume of branded content across platforms continues to grow, so too does user ‘blindness’ to content that doesn’t immediately resonate. This increasingly competitive environment for consumer attention will force brands to invest more time, resource and money in to content that is crafted to meet the preferences and behaviours of specific groups of consumers. The ability to deliver this content is driven by both user preference, but also more sophisticated targeting technology.
How?
Firstly, via data collection: Using data to better understand your consumers provides the stimulus for a content strategy that more accurately caters to their actual desires.
Alternatively, a technology solution: For example, dynamic creative optimisation (DCO) is a set of technologies that massively simplifies the process of tailoring content experiences for consumers in real-time. With this capability, advertisers can reach target audiences with potentially infinite unique creative variations that cater to the specific user being served the ad, without the legwork you’d expect.
What’s more, the emerging ability to use DCO in native advertising campaigns brings a powerful tactic, enabling brands to tailor each component of the content their audience is exposed to. Marketing is hopefully about to become far more relevant, and therefore hopefully both more effective and worth your audience’s time.
For several years, consumers’ feelings of uncertainty and anxiety for the future have been compounded by fears for the effects of human behaviour on the environment. This feeling of uncertainty, which has, in fact, become quite normal and is referred to as the ‘’#neveralnormal’’, is reflected in consumers’ lack of trust in established institutions and brands. As we all have seen in the newspapers, familiar brands are experiencing difficulties, with many household names going into administration, and a downturn in Europe’s share of the Top 250 global retailer’s revenues since 2006.
Economic uncertainty, political tension, environmental change and the 4th industrial revolution have been the main forces of dramatic change. The Gilets Jaunes/French Yellow Vests protests in France, the arrival of a populist government in Italy and Brexit in the UK all reflect deep-seated political and economic discontent.
With further political upheaval expected in 2019, consumers’ crisis of trust is deepening, and leading to greater emotional involvement and action.
This brings us to a set of marketing “commandments” to meet the new consumer’s expectations.
COMMANDMENT 1: CONTENT, CONTEXT AND CONTACTS
To retain consumer trust, brands must be mindful of the context for their adverts. If they are placed next to unethical content, they stand the risk of being accused of being linked too or even funding that content, and consumer trust will inevitably be affected.
Content-wise, brands have been accused of condoning “fake” news by running their adverts next to it and inadvertently financing it at the same time. It has been argued that advertisers are unaware of what content their adverts in fact support, but Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, suggests that this is a weak excuse, calling it, in fact, a “moral failure”:
The third element “contacts” shows that the number of times an advert is run also impacts trust. In 2017, Forbes showed that the average consumer is exposed to up to 10,000 brand messages a day.
OMD Latvia conducted an online bespoke quantitative study to illustrate this point at the Mi:t&Links. Conference FALSE THINKING conference in Riga, March the 8th.
63% of 18-75 years old living in Latvia claim seeing the ad too many times reduces Trust in Advertising
COMMANDMENT 2: BE CLEAR AND DELIVER ON YOUR PROMISE
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect in May 2018, underlines the importance of consumer trust, giving consumers more control over their data at the same time as offering reassurance that these are in safe hands. In 2018, IBM ran a study, which showed that 73% of people were concerned about their privacy on internet sites and 65% did not trust social media companies to handle personal data responsibly. GDPR could be regarded as a simple compliance issue, but it could also be seen as a catalyst for businesses to implement new business models with consumer trust at their core.
With the advent of AI and fast developing technology, like 5G, transparency has become particularly important owing to the potential misuse of an increasing amount of new data that are intended to provide a more personal approach, as well as delivering the ultimate in modern living standards in our homes. If data is handled badly, consumer trust will inevitably be lost. The downside of GDPR, however, is that data protection is couched in legal terms that laymen find difficult to understand, highlighting a need for simplification.
COMMANDMENT 3: AUTHENTICITY IS THE KEY TO SUCCESSFUL COLLABORATION
One example of a lack of authenticity took place in September 2018 when renowned social media influencer Scarlett Dixon was paid to promote Listerine on her Instagram page. Whilst she highlighted that the post was an ad, she was highly criticised for the content being completely staged. After all, who wakes up with perfect make up and hair, balloons next to their bed and Listerine on their bedside table?
Instead of relying on celebrities to bump up their sales, brands are now turning to nano-influencers: everyday consumers who tell small communities of friends about their favourite products, thus creating trusted content for brands. Kate Edwards, the COO of the social marketing technology startup, Heartbeat, explains how it works, “Brands have always known that word-of-mouth marketing works well, but it hasn’t been until now that we’ve had the technology to activate this channel in a scalable, cost-effective way. That’s why brands are moving away from influencers and celebrities, and more toward recognising the voices of everyday consumers.” In addition, CGI avatars are beginning to replace human influencers. Examples include the virtual models, Lil Miquela and Shudu, who engage with their fans just like any human influencer would, maintaining transparency and building trust.
COMMANDMENT 4: ACT AS A GOOD CITIZEN WOULD
Brands should see themselves as individuals with moral values. For instance, in October 2017, Corona came out in support of its native country, Mexico, following a devastating earthquake. It re-branded three million beer cans as “Mexico Extra” and donated the proceeds to reconstruction projects. It also encouraged involvement with relief projects through its website mexicoextra.com.
COMMANDMENT 5: STAND OUT FOR A POINT OF VIEW
As social media gives louder voices to extreme views, brands are asked more and more to standout for a point of view.
Taking inspiration from the Me Too Movement, in January 2019 the shaving brand Gillette launched a new ad campaign which features a nearly 2-minute-long video drawing inspiration from the Me Too movement by tackling issues like sexual harassment, bullying and toxic masculinity. Reactions on social media have been mixed. There are many people praising the video for encouraging all men to do the right thing. However, it also has many people threatening to boycott the company, accusing them of lumping men into one group, painting a bad picture for men all over the world.
Another example of a brand assuming a moral stance was when Nike chose Kaepernick to front their 30th anniversary poster. The well-known footballer had brought attention to police brutality against African-Americans by kneeling down during the national anthem and refusing to “show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of colour”. Nike came out in support of his decision to stand up for his personal beliefs.
COMMANDMENT 6: DEVELOP GREATER EMPATHETIC UNDERSTANDING
As we all know, marketing is moving from “mass to me”. At OMD, we believe that every interaction a consumer has with a brand represents an opportunity to create a valuable relationship, with “empathy”, the backbone of trust, being key.
As planners who design end-to-end consumer experience to create valued relationships between brands and their consumers, we at OMD try to anticipate consumer needs through a deep understanding of our audiences, their untapped needs and desires, exploring ways in which a brand can use communications and media to fulfil them.
OMD PREDICTS
OMD predicts that in the future we will increasingly see engineered empathy as a key driver of success. As consumers are feeling more comfortable with AI and robots, they will be expecting emotional interactions from brands through AI. Empathetic services that help deliver human-like interactions in all contexts, by adapting to the customer’s real time emotional state, will be always welcomed by consumers.
But until then…get the principles right: Be credible, transparent, reliable and consumer first seem to be some of the main key drivers of consumers’ trust. And then…be aware of the trust corrode-rs that advertising is in control of and follow, if appropriate, the above suggested commandments.
Bricks and mortar stores are shutting at pace. What does it mean for eCommerce in the UK, and how is branded content a part of the mix? We have already seen the effects of consumers tightening their spending, resulting in the downfall of major names on the high street. Can social save the shops?
One of the primary reasons that many high street brands are struggling is due to a failure for bricks-and-mortar retail to keep up with digital expectations. Drab web design and questionable user experiences turned consumers off, and on to other more developed ecommerce propositions, such as Amazon. It’s, sometimes, about more than just price – it’s also about immediacy, seamlessness and simplicity.
So as users increasingly turn to the digital to make purchases of physical items, how can retailers adapt to survive? It’s increasingly less about your core website and more about being present at the perfect purchase moment. In 2019 Instagram will become a shopping platform in itself, with the introduction of a native credit card payment system. Browsing #ootd just became so much more dangerous.
Facebook will be implementing new AR ads, allowing users to virtually try out new products (such as makeup and sunglasses).
And WhatsApp is creating a business platform which will enable brands to respond to customers within 24-hours. In some countries, WhatsApp is already a common form of communication between retailers and consumers.
What does this mean for a waning high street? Brands can learn from the likes of IKEA, Amazon and Alibaba, which have transcended from online to offline experiential stores, designed not to aggressively push sales and stack up products, but to allow people to get hands on and experiment with the brands’ products. This experience encourages consumers to make their purchases online. The tactile high street shop may not quite be dead yet, resuscitated by evolving digital experiences.
Bricks and mortar stores are shutting at pace. What does it mean for eCommerce in the UK, and how is branded content a part of the mix? We have already seen the effects of consumers tightening their spending, resulting in the downfall of major names on the high street. Can social save the shops?
One of the primary reasons that many high street brands are struggling is due to a failure for bricks-and-mortar retail to keep up with digital expectations. Drab web design and questionable user experiences turned consumers off, and on to other more developed ecommerce propositions, such as Amazon. It’s, sometimes, about more than just price – it’s also about immediacy, seamlessness and simplicity.
So as users increasingly turn to the digital to make purchases of physical items, how can retailers adapt to survive? It’s increasingly less about your core website and more about being present at the perfect purchase moment. In 2019 Instagram will become a shopping platform in itself, with the introduction of a native credit card payment system. Browsing #ootd just became so much more dangerous.
Facebook will be implementing new AR ads, allowing users to virtually try out new products (such as makeup and sunglasses).
And WhatsApp is creating a business platform which will enable brands to respond to customers within 24-hours. In some countries, WhatsApp is already a common form of communication between retailers and consumers.
What does this mean for a waning high street? Brands can learn from the likes of IKEA, Amazon and Alibaba, which have transcended from online to offline experiential stores, designed not to aggressively push sales and stack up products, but to allow people to get hands on and experiment with the brands’ products. This experience encourages consumers to make their purchases online. The tactile high street shop may not quite be dead yet, resuscitated by evolving digital experiences.
Voice search is on the rise with more and more brands adapting their marketing strategies to incorporate voice functionality across Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Home and more.
With voice devices and services such as Google Home and Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri skyrocketing in use across 2018, consumers are increasingly comfortable with voice-driven, two-way dialogue with brands at unplanned times, often away from a mobile or computer; It’s a different kind of brand engagement, with a starting point that is usually a question (think ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘why’) and responses more instantaneous and organic than ever. ComScore predicts that, by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice searches.
Voice search changes the nature of search, increasing the importance of questions and simplicity of responses. This, in turn, increases the need to ensure your brand is front of mind when the question is asked, and positioned as the top informer. It’s a creatively challenging format with potential for big results, especially for brands naturally attuned to answering the most-asked questions.
For example, many breakfast food brands are keen to position themselves as breakfast-time problem solvers. Should they not be vying to answer a likely voice-driven query of ‘How can I make breakfast more exciting?’
Ignoring the nascent new way of searching is a dangerous thing to do. Now is the time for brands to invest time and money into their voice search offering. This will involve many test and learn situations, a new breed of SEO specialist and a commitment to simplified UX, all in the name of further removing barriers to authentic audience connection.
Voice search is on the rise with more and more brands adapting their marketing strategies to incorporate voice functionality across Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Home and more.
With voice devices and services such as Google Home and Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri skyrocketing in use across 2018, consumers are increasingly comfortable with voice-driven, two-way dialogue with brands at unplanned times, often away from a mobile or computer; It’s a different kind of brand engagement, with a starting point that is usually a question (think ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘why’) and responses more instantaneous and organic than ever. ComScore predicts that, by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice searches.
Voice search changes the nature of search, increasing the importance of questions and simplicity of responses. This, in turn, increases the need to ensure your brand is front of mind when the question is asked, and positioned as the top informer. It’s a creatively challenging format with potential for big results, especially for brands naturally attuned to answering the most-asked questions.
For example, many breakfast food brands are keen to position themselves as breakfast-time problem solvers. Should they not be vying to answer a likely voice-driven query of ‘How can I make breakfast more exciting?’
Ignoring the nascent new way of searching is a dangerous thing to do. Now is the time for brands to invest time and money into their voice search offering. This will involve many test and learn situations, a new breed of SEO specialist and a commitment to simplified UX, all in the name of further removing barriers to authentic audience connection.
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! This week Disney breaks up with Netflix to launch their own streaming service, YouTube enables in-app direct messaging and sharing features, and Facebook dives deeper into the broadcaster space. The social media giant is also armouring up to combat cloaking and ‘fat-finger’ ad clicks to protect users from unwanted content, while Google launches an initiative to help reduce annoying advertisements online.
Facing the future, the next billion mobile users could mean the end of typing. Accordingly, ASOS ‘photo searches’ lets iOS app users upload photos of outfits they like to shop for similar designs. Meanwhile, the music industry uses social data to predict new hits and Toyota launches a road safety app.
HEADLINES
INSIGHTS
COOL
- ASOS ‘photo searches’ lets iOS app users upload photos of outfits they’ve seen and shop for them
- Toyota launches its ‘Safe and Sound’ ad to embarrass teenagers into becoming safer drivers
- Lonely Planet launches an Instagram-like Trips app, where you can search for categories like “Adventure” or “Wildlife and Nature.”
DEEP READS
- The next billion users will explore through videos not search, swiping rather than typing and use voice search instead of keypads, which will mark the end of typing
- Amazon is in talks to offer event ticketing in the U.S. according to Reuters
- With the popularity of Amazon’s Alexa and the democratisation of technology, AI continues to dominate the present and future, here are some handy tips
If anything catches your eye, please share using #OMDFWD
Hello and welcome to your weekly OMD FWD! This week Disney breaks up with Netflix to launch their own streaming service, YouTube enables in-app direct messaging and sharing features, and Facebook dives deeper into the broadcaster space. The social media giant is also armouring up to combat cloaking and ‘fat-finger’ ad clicks to protect users from unwanted content, while Google launches an initiative to help reduce annoying advertisements online.
Facing the future, the next billion mobile users could mean the end of typing. Accordingly, ASOS ‘photo searches’ lets iOS app users upload photos of outfits they like to shop for similar designs. Meanwhile, the music industry uses social data to predict new hits and Toyota launches a road safety app.
HEADLINES
INSIGHTS
COOL
- ASOS ‘photo searches’ lets iOS app users upload photos of outfits they’ve seen and shop for them
- Toyota launches its ‘Safe and Sound’ ad to embarrass teenagers into becoming safer drivers
- Lonely Planet launches an Instagram-like Trips app, where you can search for categories like “Adventure” or “Wildlife and Nature.”
DEEP READS
- The next billion users will explore through videos not search, swiping rather than typing and use voice search instead of keypads, which will mark the end of typing
- Amazon is in talks to offer event ticketing in the U.S. according to Reuters
- With the popularity of Amazon’s Alexa and the democratisation of technology, AI continues to dominate the present and future, here are some handy tips
If anything catches your eye, please share using #OMDFWD