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, ๐๐…
Tag: marketing
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 buy a spot, develop an ad, and execute a campaign correctly.
Between 2018 and 2022, Iโve 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 donโt 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 Iโve learned.
Here are ten lesser-known things about Super Bowl advertising and some of my tips from experience.ย
Continue readingAdjust 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 more โcertain times.โ
Perhaps more certainty and predictability lie in the future, but they remain to be seen. Right now, everyone (especially those in marketing) needs to focus on navigating uncertainty.
Adjust Investment Strategies for Uncertain Times
In the past year, we have seen the tide shift from a general policy of โgrow at all costsโ to โshow profitability.โ This means that companies’ investment strategy needs to focus on protecting the bottom line, and if the correction is not done gradually over time, the marketing budget is the most exposed to cuts and pullbacks.
This is usually because of two reasons:
- A structural adjustment like laying off part of your staff comes with expensive severance packages and therefore requires time to show an impact on the bottom line.
- Because companies that need to prioritize revenue and profits in the short term are often willing to forgo a medium to long-term impact for immediate relief, favoring sales costs that can bring immediate revenue vs. marketing expenditures that bring both short, medium, and long-term benefits.
This is the reason why companies that are seeing a softening demand (i.e., topline decline) or are anticipating a market contraction, tend to cut media and marketing budgets before reducing sales costs.
The problem is that if this pullback is done too abruptly, inbound demand will soften to the point where your sales efforts become less effective and will therefore worsen the company’s need to cut costs to maintain margins. Moreover, if your disinvestment strategy is more drastic than your competitors, the market share loss will make a later recovery 2-3x more expensive than the initial savings.
At this point, people may be tempted to suggest that to prevent this tricky situation, companies should have been more conservative in bolstering costs during a growth period. Still, we need to remember that limiting spend in a moment of growth also presents the opportunity cost of losing โfairโ market share with respect to the market and competition.
Since we canโt go back in time, letโs discuss how companies can navigate a worsening financial outlook and how marketing and finance departments can partner together to adjust their investment strategy to manage the current environment.
Continue readingThe 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 advertising effectiveness is becoming more prominent in the industry, there are still those who believe itโs a concept too ephemeral to properly be measured or too marginal to grant the investment needed to make it mainstream.
This adverse perspective is often driven by a limited understanding of the nuances around this topic or a deliberate effort to protect a business interest. While thereโs little I can do about the latter, I want to help address the former. I do so here by laying out some of the foundations for a constructive conversation around this fundamental resource.
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 experiences. In spite of this knowledge, brand marketing is often tied to vanity metrics that don’t drive any real behavior change, and performance marketing is not much better than the cheesy infomercial you see on late-night TV.
But marketers want to do better: no one sets out to do a mediocre job. The industry is continuously innovating to deliver better brand experiences and drive impact, but the results are often inconsistent, making it difficult to know what new practices to adopt.
This post explores some of the current efforts made to provide a better brand experience. Through this careful exploration, weโll discuss why itโs so hard to raise the bar and look to the future to see how to break out of stale marketing cycles.