[This post was first published as a LinkedIn article on my profile for distribution. Re-posting it here for record keeping]
People say AI is going to kill marketing.
Honestly? Some days, it kind of feels like it might.
Scroll through your newsfeed, and you'll see the headlines: Mark Zuckerberg envisions a world where you hand Meta your pr…
Tag: brand marketing
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 a series of changes between August 2020 through March 2021 to eliminate all categories from the organization, focus entirely on D2C (direct-to-consumer) divesting from wholesale, and shift the marketing model to prioritize digital content generation over brand narrative. According to Giunco, going all-in on this strategy led to record-low performance over the last few quarters, and now that the market cap is at its lowest since 2018, the company is reversing its approach.
While it’s somehow evident that Massimo Giunco has personal issues with Nike’s leadership, his narrative allows us to draw a parallel with the question we often grapple with: how can we invest in something that may yield long-term value like brand building but doesn’t offer good short-term measurability or certainty for success?
Continue readingFour 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 a subset of one P: Promotion.
If you reacted to the previous sentence by thinking, “Yeah, that’s kind of true,” you may be interested in taking a few minutes to think if your Marketing team is doing everything it’s supposed to do in your company.
Continue readingControversial 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.
"ππ¦π°π±ππ¦ πΈπ©π° π³πΆπ― π£π’ππ π€…
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 β making it the most watched program in the US β but also because of the incredible amount of resources it takes to buy a spot, develop an ad, and execute a campaign correctly.
Between 2018 and 2022, Iβve had the privilege of leading Paid Media for Anheuser Busch, the biggest in-game advertiser. Since this is the first year in a while I donβt have to worry about putting out fires and negotiating last-minute requests related to running 4-8 ads in the Super Bowl, I thought it would be fun sharing some of what Iβve learned.
Here are ten lesser-known things about Super Bowl advertising and some of my tips from experience.Β
Continue reading