Thanks to my job and my employees’ deep pockets, I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the best creative shops in the world (by the measure of the number of 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 creative ideas they bring to the table. But the truth is that creative agencies are best at telling stories, while a key factor in digital creative performance is the ability to effectively get a message across to drive a behavior change. For this reason, the best work of these highly-awarded and highly-paid creative agencies comes across a 60″ TV spot, or through an execution that requires a summary showreel to make it all come together, while the digital creatives of an integrated plan are often less than impressive. Continue reading
Category: Advertising
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 it to Round A.
Also, marketing is not advertising. Advertising is placing a paid message on a media channel, marketing is the discipline of making your product, service, or company something that your target audience cannot live without. Marketing nowadays lives in the center of the Venn-diagram intersection between art and science, data and creativity.
Now that that’s out of the way, we can focus on what I want to talk about: although “growth hacker” is the hottest title in the startup world nowadays, it’s important to understand why this role is only relevant during the early life of a business, and late-stage startups need a Growth Team made of subject matter experts, that include a seasoned Marketing professional.
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 most significant exchange in the advertising world happens between the advertiser that promotes an ad and the user that consumes that content.The most significant exchange in the advertising world happens between the advertiser that promotes an ad and the user that consumes that content. I’ve already written about ways to get the right message, in front of the right consumers, at the right time, but in this post, I want to discuss the reason why the consumer should pay attention to the message in the first place.
How to plan effective digital marketing campaigns
With the constant proliferation of new media channels and technologies, content consumption patterns have radically changed. Each channel offers a different interaction model with the users, and as a result, we live in a (media) world where a given metric takes a different meaning depending on the publisher. Let’s take for example video views: Facebook counts a view when at least one pixel is visible for 3 seconds (without sound), YouTube after 30 seconds of play time, Snapchat 1 second, and many publishers still could count a view when a video is playing below the fold. Continue reading
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. Continue reading