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Risk-reward ratio (video)
This and other video posts on this blog were originally shared on LinkedIn to publish different kinds of content. Since they got particular traction or positive feedback, Iโve also decided to publish a selected few of them here. This video, in particular, also connects to the post I published a few months weeks ago about…
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Marketing is like dieting (video)
This and other video posts on this blog were originally shared on LinkedIn to publish different kinds of content. Since they got particular traction or positive feedback, I’ve decided to publish a selected few of them here as well. Here’s the original post copy: Marketing is pretty much like dieting through calorie counting. ๐ ๐จ…
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Balancing Risks: Hedging Bets in Marketing and Corporate Strategy
The other week, I came across this AdWeek article about Nike’s marketing team’s restructuring, which inevitably piqued my interest. The article linked to a post by Massimo Giunco, former Nike Brand Director, who shared his take on how Nike’s CEO, John Donahue, and Nike’s President of Consumer, Product and Brand, Heidi O’Neill, decided to enact…
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Four Ps
Anyone with a Business or Marketing degree has likely heard of the following framework from the illustrious marketing professor Philip Kotler. Marketing is the combination of the 4Ps: Price, Product, Promotion, and Place. While many can agree with it, when we think of Marketing in most companies and business circles, we tend to focus on…
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Controversial Marketing Hot-Take #4
In October of last year, I thought of starting a series of posts on controversial marketing hot-takes. I posted one a day for four days straight. This was the fourth and last one. To make it even more entertaining, I’ve decided to use sports quotes to illustrate my point. “๐๐ฆ๐ฐ๐ฑ๐ญ๐ฆ ๐ธ๐ฉ๐ฐ ๐ณ๐ถ๐ฏ ๐ฃ๐ข๐ญ๐ญ ๐ค๐ญ๐ถ๐ฃ๐ด, ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ๐บ…
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Controversial Marketing Hot-Take #3
In October of last year, I thought of starting a series of posts on ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ถ๐ฎ๐น ๐บ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ธ๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ต๐ผ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ธ๐ฒ๐. I posted one a day for four days straight. This was the third one. โ๐พ๐ง๐๐๐ฉ๐๐ซ๐๐จ ๐๐ง๐ ๐ฉ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐จ๐ฉ ๐ค๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ค๐ง๐ฉ๐ช๐ฃ๐๐ฉ๐ฎ ๐๐ค๐จ๐ฉ ๐๐ฃ ๐๐๐ง๐ ๐๐ฉ๐๐ฃ๐.โ ๐๐ผ๐ป๐๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ถ๐ฎ๐น ๐บ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ธ๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ต๐ผ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ธ๐ฒ #๐ฏ We obsess about optimizing any aspect of our media buys,…
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Controversial Marketing Hot-Take #2
In October of last year, I thought of starting a series of posts on ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ถ๐ฎ๐น ๐บ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ธ๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ต๐ผ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ธ๐ฒ๐. I posted one a day for four days straight. This was the second one. “๐๐ฉ’๐จ ๐ฃ๐ค๐ฉ ๐๐๐ค๐ช๐ฉ ๐ฎ๐ค๐ช๐ง ๐พ๐๐ ๐ฃ๐ค๐ฉ ๐ช๐ฃ๐๐๐ง๐จ๐ฉ๐๐ฃ๐๐๐ฃ๐ ๐๐ค๐ฌ ๐ข๐๐ง๐ ๐๐ฉ๐๐ฃ๐ ๐ฌ๐ค๐ง๐ ๐จ, ๐๐จ ๐๐๐ค๐ช๐ฉ ๐ฎ๐ค๐ช ๐ฃ๐ค๐ฉ ๐ช๐ฃ๐๐๐ง๐จ๐ฉ๐๐ฃ๐๐๐ฃ๐ ๐๐ค๐ฌ ๐พ๐ค๐ง๐ฅ๐ค๐ง๐๐ฉ๐ ๐๐๐ฃ๐๐ฃ๐๐ ๐ฌ๐ค๐ง๐ ๐จ.” ๐๐ผ๐ป๐๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ถ๐ฎ๐น ๐บ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ธ๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ต๐ผ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ธ๐ฒ…
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Controversial Marketing Hot-Take #1
In October last year, I thought of starting a series of posts on ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ถ๐ฎ๐น ๐บ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ธ๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ต๐ผ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ธ๐ฒ๐. I posted one a day for four days straight. This was the first one. “๐๐ ๐ฎ๐ค๐ช๐ง ๐๐๐ข๐ฅ๐๐๐๐ฃ ๐๐ค๐ข๐๐จ, ๐๐จ ๐ก๐๐ ๐๐ก๐ฎ ๐๐๐๐๐ช๐จ๐ ๐ฎ๐ค๐ช๐ง ๐๐ง๐๐๐ ๐จ๐ช๐๐ ๐๐.” Controversial Marketing Hot-Take #1 Here’s how to write a good campaign brief – ๐๐ฒ…
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Incentives and Leverage
โGive me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.โ Archimedes How do you get things done in your professional life? Simple: understand the incentives and find the leverage. In the early part of your career, as an individual contributor, you can exceed expectations and…
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Being Human in the Age of Generative AI
[Featured image by Andy Kelly on Unsplash] Discussions about generative AI are everywhere right now, and I feel compelled to add my take to the mix. However, Iโm hoping to bring you something a little different. Rather than focus on the endless world of possibilities generative AI will create or the jobs it will destroy,…
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Interesting Things You May Not Know About Super Bowl Advertising
(written in February 2023, updated February 2024) Advertising during the Super Bowl is a privilege for any advertising professional, not only because of the one hundred million people tuning in every year โ making it the most watched program in the US โ but also because of the incredible amount of resources it takes to…
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Adjust And Double-down:
A Marketing Investment Roadmap For Uncertain Times
โWe are navigating uncertain times.โ How often have you heard some variation of this phrase in the last three years? Itโs been used to explain everything from layoffs to schedule changes to service disruptions, and โ while it may be true โ itโs getting exhausting. I think itโs fair to say that weโre all looking for…
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The Critical Importance of Optimizing for Human Attention in Advertising
Attention is the most valuable resource in the advertising industry. It is a prerequisite for message reception, encoding, and ultimately, the ability to change perception and drive behavior. As advertising legend Bill Bernbach said, โIf your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.โ While the idea of measuring and optimizing for human attention to improve…
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The privacy conversation we should be having in the advertising industry
When Apple rolled out new privacy changes in iOS 14 that gave the option to block apps from doing any kind of tracking on their device, an estimated 94% of users decided to opt-in, rendering impossible almost any type of targeting on nearly 60% of smartphones in the US. While this comes across as a…
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What the virus has shown me
We are facing a pandemic to a degree weโve never seen in modern times, and there is a whole range of emotions in trying to deal with this new reality. We canโt avoid being afraid. However, part of me canโt help but see the current events as a force for good.ย All around the world,…
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4 predictions for TV advertising in 2020 and what it means for advertisers
Inspired by the 2019 State of Digital Marketing report by Luma Partners, I’ve decided to combine what they have shared with some of the data points I’ve been collecting over the past few months and come up with my 4 predictions for the TV and video industry in 2020 and related trends over the next…
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The idiosyncrasies of the TV advertising industry and what needs to happen
It has been a long hiatus. A new role at ABI has kept me busy in the past six months. During that time, I wrote a couple of pieces for AdExchanger that took me away from this blog, but I have had an itch to write a new opinion post. As a digital marketer who…
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The raise of digital commerce: a massive opportunity for brands and how to capture it
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Adapt or Become Extinct: The Marketing Status Quo Will Soon Be Irrelevant
For the past ten years working in digital marketing, the world has been divided into Branding and Performance Marketing. Branding is full of large budgets and not much accountability for their results. Performance Marketing (or Direct Response) has ugly creatives but gets beautiful, carefully documented returns. Advertising has not always been like this. At the…
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Delivering Better Brand Experiences: Why Itโs So Hard and What to Do About It
Great marketing is about making consumers enjoy the experience they have with your brand. Every consumer touchpoint should be a delightful brand experience, even when carrying a commercial message. This is how you positively impact everyday customer behavior and purchasing decisions. If we want people to change how they behave, we have to change their…
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The Hidden Threat for CPG Companies
Last week I was invited to a roundtable with other CPG industry experts, and we were asked if we thought the competition for CPG companies was going to intensify or decrease over the next 12 to 24 months. My answer was similar to the other expertsโ, but I gave different reasons than many of them.…
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Why you shouldn’t use CLTV/CAC
Long-Term Business Sustainability Depends on the Right Measures A metric commonly used to measure the performance of high-growth businesses is Customer Lifetime Value over Customer Acquisition Cost, or more simplyย CLTV/CAC. It is a much better metric to provide an objective to marketing teams than many others we have seen in the past, but it has…
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How to Plan a Marketing Campaign: from Strategy to Tactics โ Part 2
Once you have a clear sense of your business objective and your target audience (topics we discussed in Part 1 of this series), itโs time to take those actionable steps you identified and put them to work for ongoing results. Making a strong plan for your marketing strategy allows you to build on your knowledge,…
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How to Plan a Marketing Campaign: from Strategy to Tactics – Part 1
Developing a marketing campaign requires a unique combination of creative, big-picture thinking and focused, detail-oriented implementation. It can be challenging to figure out how to piece all the different elements together, but breaking down the process into tangible steps can help ensure that your vision will translate into effective tactics to reach your business objective…
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Thinking About Onboarding a Customer Data Platform? Make This Hire First
You already know that you need to break down organizational silos to change the way teams work together. Knowing this, you may be thinking about investing in the hot new technology of a Customer Data Platform (CDP). These marketer-managed data repositories allow you to create a single customer profile that can then be used by…
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Flashier Isnโt Better: Choosing The Marketing Tech Youโll Actually Use
Letโs say youโve got a loose stair thatโs been driving you crazy because it springs up every time you step on it. Youโve decided to take care of it but donโt have a hammer. When you get to the store to pick one up, you see that your options are a standard hammer or one…
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How to Manage Your Creative Agency for Great Digital Campaigns
Thanksย to my job and my employees’ deep pockets, I’ve had the privilegeย of working with some of the best creative shops in the world (by the measure of the number ofย Cannes Lions awards won or the fee that they get paid). The best-known agencies employ great talent, and I’m often amazed by the clever and…
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We should treat marketers like doctors
In spite of what your boss wants you to believe – keeping you in the office at 8 pm on a Friday before of a long weekend – marketers don’t save lives. In spite of that, they could probably benefit from a similar rigor to the one put in place when pursuing the medical career.…
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Late-stage startups should part ways with their growth hacker
Before I even get into the details of what I want to write about, let me set the record straight: growth hackers can often be instrumental in the success of an early-stage startup, and their skill set is undeniably valuable. Finding a great growth hacker for your new business could be the key to make…
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The Advertising value-exchange
When talking about the advertising value-exchange, people often think about the commercial relationship between the advertisers, publishers, vendors, and the many players in the marketing and media space. But what often gets overlooked in this equation is the most critical player of all: the consumer. The mostย significant exchange in the advertising world happens between the…
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Surviving Innovation
Throughout my professional career, innovation has always been the focus of the environment around me. Although it can often be an abused term, this proximity to groups aspiring to be innovative taught me a lot about this elusive concept. Recently, I started reflecting on some commonalities that I encountered when dealing with innovative companies, products,…
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How to plan effective digital marketing campaigns
With the constant proliferation of newย media channels and technologies, content consumption patterns have radically changed. Each channelย offers a different interaction model with the users, and as a result, we live in a (media)ย worldย where a givenย metric takesย a different meaningย depending on the publisher. Let’s take for example video views:ย Facebook counts a view when at least one pixel…
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Don’t call it Performance Marketing
“Performance marketing” vs. “Brand marketing” There is this weird distinction in the advertising industry between “performance marketing” and “brand marketing”, where the former usually refers to the highly-trackable, data-driven spend, where the other is awareness-creation, emotions-driving, hard-to-measure-impact kind of spend: the most obvious example of the two are SEM and TV advertising.
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Some thoughts on the ‘hot topics’ in digital advertising – January 2016
I just came back from the AdExchanger Industry Preview conference here in New York City, and while many of the presentations are still fresh in my mind, I’ve decided to write a few notes and personal considerations on theย “hot topics” in the digital advertising industry as of January 2016. Programmatic TV Cross-device targeting, tracking, and…
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Direct Response Marketing shows what is needed for Programmatic Brand Advertising
Over the past eight years, working in Digital Marketing, I saw the industry obsessing over many different metrics when talking about performance campaigns: CPM, CPC, CTR, and then finally focusing on more meaningful metrics such as CPA, ROAS, and profitability. The reason why DR online marketing is a no-brainer nowadays is that, after years of…
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The SEM branding problem (that current technology can’t solve)
Search Engine Market (SEM) has a branding problem, actually two, and big ones I may add. The first one is that companies don’t spend the significant amount of money in SEM for branding purposes.ย Even though everyone can agree on the fundamental principle that users go through a “search funnel” when makingย a purchase (i.e. broad generic…
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What You Need to Know for a Successful SEM Campaign
What I’ll discuss in this post should be hard-coded in every SEM-expert’s DNA, but since I found that a lot of people out there struggle in approaching Search Engine Advertising with a true holistic view, I thought it was worth spending a few words on it. The content of this post originally comes from a…
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What would you like to see here?
When I created this blog I immediately created the About section, but I always struggled to fill it in. I’m not exactly sure what I should have published here. Starting looking at the Analytics data though, I soon found out that rouughly 1/3 of the people that was reading one of my posts, was then…
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Planning an Online Advertising Campaign: if the Theory is so Simple, Why No One Executes Properly?
This week Iโve been in London to present to a group of Product Marketing Managers how to use online advertising to promote their products, and in particular, what are the metrics that they should be looking at to take data-driven decisions and shape the success of their campaigns. The tricky part in all this…
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Mobile First: What to Consider for Your Business of Tomorrow
“Mobile first” is a slogan often used to stress the importance of having a solid mobile strategy for today’s business, in order to be prepared for tomorrow’s competitive environment. But saying “Mobile first”, goes beyond the mere consideration of a mobile approach in the overall planning of a business, it makes it a priority in…
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Facebook fan page: the true value of the social interaction
Nowadays two very common ways of social affiliation with a brand are the Facebook fan page and the Twitter followers. Even if these two ways of affiliations are often considered similar, brands should be very careful in using them in order to channel marketing communications. As shown in a recentย eMarketer report, a study conducted byย ExactTarget…
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Viral campaigns don’t exist: there’s only a “viral factor”!
When online advertising experts are asked what is the biggest shortcome of viral campaigns, no one will struggle to identify the problem of the difficulty to measure the returns on investments of such campaigns, due to the difficult quantification of the value of a parameter called “brand interaction“. This is not a new problem since…
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Web Analytics itโs Just a Tool (a.k.a. The ability to take informed decisions based on data)
Nowadays web analytics is a โmouthfulโ that everyone is tossing around just to have the feeling that they know what they are doing online. Some people may get very technical about it and start rumble about third parties cookies, conversion funnels, shinystat data without even understanding what the topic of discussion is. I believe that…
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Global Economic Crisis: Just another ParetoEfficiency
As often happens when you want to get out of an undesired situation, you have to struggle for it. As explain by a brilliant editorial fromย last weekโs Economist, in this troubled economic times, the trade-off doesnโt changes. Economies of western countries have relied heavilyย on debt to finance their growth. ย While some countries, like the US,…
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Shaun White’s Private Halfpipe Could Make me a Philanthropist
The corporate world of big companies, with big money and big budgets, has allowed the pros in any sport to advance to a level where all the previous achievements and records are broken so easily that there is almost nothing special about them anymore. Think about the Moto GP, F1, Running, Swimming, Basketball, Sailing and…
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Website Back Online After Web Host Disruption
Hello world, the site is back online after being torn down by the host disruption that has caused the loss of the database containing the website. I know these are the risks of going with low-cost hosting like Top Host, but still it is the worst customer experience ever! In any case, here is what…
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