BrandKnew October 2022

Dear friends:

As the metaverse becomes more than a talking point, it was only expected for us to talk a little more about it. Which you will get to read in this issue including the new definition of CMO being Chief Metaverse Officer. And the possibility of getting married in the metaverse- doesn’t seem to be a knotty issue at all given the available technology. Entrepreneurs are a different breed. In their drive to get things off the ground, oftentimes they look at branding as an afterthought. We talk about the pitfalls of that in this edition.

AdTech has been at the epicentre of marketing and community building for a while. It was time for us to give it a review- what’s in and what’s out- understand more in this issue. Listen to a podcast on how your brand should look, sound and smell like- there is a lot to take away there. With so many emerging trends and platforms like ecommerce, mcommerce, social commerce, voice commerce, all being reinforced by the virtual and augmented, not to mention the metaverse, we dive deep into understanding the future of the branded retail store. We also pick up the thread on where video advertising is headed? With the rise of social platforms and the FOMO factor, personal branding has a lot to cope with. We talk about it in this edition.

There is ample more to soak from and imbibe and I leave you to do exactly that. Till the next my very best.

Suresh Dinakaran

Brand Knew

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran

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Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher

Chief Strategy Director: Rishi Mohan

Business Performance Director: Sunil Vasudevan

Chief Country Man, India: Rohit Unni

Brand Trends and Research Architect: Meeta Pendse

Revenue Growth Architect: Ritu Dey

Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza

Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil

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How Will Gen Z Shape the Future of the Design Community?

Forecasting the future of the branded retail store

Want to get married in the metaverse?

Is your company logo a ‘Karen,’ a ‘Heather,’ or maybe even a ‘Brandon’?

Is there a new CMO in town? How the chief metaverse officer is shaking up the C-suite

How and why DTC advertising hasn’t cooled off as much as once thought

The definitive guide to what’s in and out in ad tech in 2022

How intersections can help you find business direction

Why livestream commerce is on the rise

4 ways to become a creative problem-solver

Entrepreneurs, Don’t Let Branding Become an Afterthought

Dealing with the creepiness of personal branding

Should brands sue their own fans? It’s working out for Netflix and Oprah

Reach Each Generation in Today’s Marketplace with These Marketing Tactics

Where is Video Advertising Heading?

There’s a new Gmail. But can it ever really change?

Podcast: What Should Your Brand Look (and Sound and Smell) Like?

How Misleading Content Impacts Brand Perception, Favorability And Trust: IAS Report

Sustainability: who cares and what matters?

How agencies are using AI to innovate for clients and work faster

Book, Line & Sinker

With Gen Z creatives now entering the workforce, how will their influence be felt across the creative industries? D&AD President and Dean of Academic Programs at Central Saint Martins Rebecca Wright investigates.

Young and emerging creatives have always played a vital role in the creative ecosystem. But the current cohort is notable for their widespread active engagement with world issues and the conviction that through their engagement, they can help bring about change.

This is not just anecdotal; the 2020 US election saw a record turnout of young voters with almost 50% voting, according to stats from Tufts University. Meanwhile, research from Pew Research Center last year revealed that Millennials and Gen Z stand out for their high levels of engagement with the issue of climate change, in comparison with older generations. And engagement for this generation means more than talking about it on social media— it involves actively doing things to create positive change.

For those entering the creative industries now, career choices are already being shaped by their values and informed by their proactive approach to engagement. We’ve seen this at D&AD’s annual New Blood awards, which give emerging creatives the chance to work on industry-set briefs to launch their careers in the creative industries as they emerge from study. Holly Killen and Sam Pilkington-Miksa created a great example in the form of Clout, a fast-fashion solution that won them two honors at D&AD’s 2022 New Blood Awards: the coveted Black Pencil, and a White Pencil, which is reserved for designers using creativity for good.

“I think our own belief systems will definitely factor into

where we want to work, and the types of work we want to create,” Killen said. “If you have a strong aversion to something, it’s unlikely that you’ll be hell-bent to create work for it, so the same goes for things you don’t believe in or support.” She also sees challenges associated with being at the beginning of her creative career; “as we’re just starting out, I’m not sure we are quite afforded that luxury yet, but when we are more established and can be a bit pickier with what we do, we will weed options out based on how they align, or don’t align, with our values.”

At a time that is fraught with social, cultural, and environmental turmoil, we need the values-led approach of Gen Z more than ever to help create a more just and sustainable world. At the same time, we need the creative industries to embrace and support these young creatives, and the change they will bring.

From my positions as both Dean at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and as President of D&AD, a non-profit education organization and awards program for advertising and design that bridges the gap between education and industry, I see this as an opportunity the creative industries cannot afford to miss.

As Gen Z creatives in their early 20s enter the workplace, their attitudes can have a transformative, bottom-up impact on not just the type of work creative industries do, but the kind of organizations that assist them, from grass-roots and start-ups to the most experienced creatives and agencies. But in order to create this environment for change, creative industries have to actively engage in it.

There’s evidence to suggest this culture shift is already

How Will Gen Z Shape the Future of the Design Community?

starting to take place. For example, global branding consultancy Interbrand has introduced specific programs that ensure Gen Z viewpoints are integrated into the fabric of the agency, influencing its overall culture, and the kind of briefs it works on.

“It’s long been a danger for agencies and brands that you create a culture that emerging creatives don’t want to join— or you don’t support a future that they want to see come to fruition,” said Andy Payne, Interbrand’s Global Chief Creative Officer.

In order to address this, Interbrand has introduced a “Horizon Board”: a multi-disciplinary group including rising talent from each of the offices around the world, and mirrors the executive leadership team. “We know that Gen Z wants responsibility for writing their own futures, so we’ve given them the chance to integrate these behaviors into the global business from the start.”

“The last task we gave them was to set the ambition and purpose of the business, and they collectively agreed on boldly creating the next generation of icons,” the Interbrand team continued. “This is about disseminating our creative and intellectual power to level the playing fields around the world in terms of how people can benefit and grow their own lifestyles, and ways of living to enrich themselves the way they want to.”

It’s promising to see agencies giving Gen Z creatives a platform to voice their perspectives and create direct impact, but there is still more to be done. McCann New York Art Director Alysa Browne said that while creative agencies are ready to listen to what Gen Z creatives have to say, more work is needed to communicate this to them.

“As a creative, success doesn’t just depend on having the right skills,” Browne said. “What really sets you apart is knowing what you want to say. Gen Z creatives are at a huge

advantage in that respect. However, in my experience, they don’t always know that. So the creative industries have more work to do when it comes to opening that door of communication, and reminding new entrants to the industry that we want to hear those unique perspectives.”

At D&AD, we understand this more than most. For 60 years, we have been committed to nurturing the next generation by bridging the gap between education and employment, improving routes of access to the industry, and most importantly, providing opportunities through which young creatives can make their mark on the world.

The New Blood Awards is a key example that encourages entrants to apply their perspectives and values to industry briefs. This year, D&AD awarded 186 prestigious Pencil Awards to exceptional graduates, whose winning works addressed a mix of important issues that included fast fashion, women’s safety, cultural equity, and social inclusion in the metaverse.

Creativity thrives on diverse minds and wide-ranging perspectives, qualities that typify Gen Z. But it can be all too easy to try and mold young creatives in our own images through the lens of what we know, while forgetting what they can teach us, and giving them space to lead. As an industry and creative community, we have a responsibility to not only mentor, but to listen and learn from— and with— them. All our futures depend on it.

Forecasting the future of the branded retail store

Shoppers’ behaviors and expectations have changed dramatically—and continue to evolve. If retailers want to keep their physical stores relevant, here are five things they’ll need to get right.

In a world where consumers are doing more of their shopping online and getting orders delivered to their homes, what’s the role of the brick-and-mortar store?

McKinsey retail experts Tiffany Burns and Tyler Harris say there are “five zeros” that retailers should keep in mind as

they plan for the future of stores. They explain the five zeros on this episode of the McKinsey on Consumer and Retail podcast, hosted by Monica Toriello. An edited transcript of their conversation follows.

Monica Toriello: There’s a lot going on in the world right

now—a lot of change and uncertainty. That’s been true for the past couple of years; people everywhere have collectively experienced things that we’ve never experienced before, including a global pandemic. One of the things we’ve seen these past two years is that the way people shop for and purchase the things they need is changing quite dramatically. That’s what we’ll be talking about on today’s episode: specifically, we’ll be discussing the evolving role of physical stores. Our two guests today have studied this topic deeply, as they’ve advised some of the world’s leading retailers. Let me briefly introduce them and then we’ll dive right in.

Tiffany Burns is a partner in our Atlanta office. Tiffany has worked on large-scale transformation efforts at more than 15 of the biggest companies in the retail sector. She has been instrumental in developing McKinsey’s perspective on the store of the future and has coauthored several retail articles including, most recently, “The rise of the inclusive consumer” and “The five zeros reshaping stores,” which is what we’ll mostly be talking about today.

One of Tiffany’s frequent collaborators and coauthors is Tyler Harris, an associate partner based in Washington, DC. Tyler has been on this podcast before, talking about the jewelry industry—since Tyler is a gemologist, among other things. She is also an expert in retail operations, with a special focus on next-generation store technologies. Thanks for joining us, Tiffany and Tyler.

The in-store shopper of the future

Monica Toriello: One interesting statistic I read recently is that US retailers announced approximately twice as many store openings as store closings in 2021. Sure, there are lots of nuances in that statistic—including the fact that there had already been lots of store closings in the two prior years— but what it tells me is that stores still work. People still shop in stores. In fact, some of the brands opening stores are digitally native brands: they used to be online pure plays but have begun to build a physical retail presence.

So, as you say, there continues to be a role for stores— but that role is evolving, and it’s because consumers are evolving. Let’s start there: How is tomorrow’s in-store shopper different from yesterday’s in-store shopper?

Tyler Harris: A few years ago, we had thought that omnichannel customers were going to be much more valuable than single-channel shoppers. The past couple of years have given us the time and the data to confirm that: omnichannel customers shop 1.7 times more than singlechannel shoppers. They also spend more. The in-store customer, going forward, will be someone who is hitting all the different channels and touchpoints that a brand or retailer has. That means consistency and connectivity between all those channels will be really important.

Another thing that’s different about the customers of tomorrow is that they are valuing different things in the store, and we are seeing their behaviors change toward what they value. Let’s use self-checkout as an example. It used to be that if you shopped at a grocery or department store, you really valued that personal interaction with

a sales associate to help you check out. That’s not true anymore. Now it’s about speed and convenience. Checkout at a physical location is entirely out of the equation when people are using curbside pickup or buy online, pick up in store [BOPIS].

Tiffany Burns: We’ve seen such a drastic evolution in selfservice. Five or six years ago, retailers had a lot of doubt: “If we put a machine there and people have to use it to check out, they won’t want to shop with us anymore.” But people learn technology and new ways of interacting. If you went to the airport a decade ago, you probably wouldn’t have used a self-service kiosk to check your bag; today, it’s what you expect. In many ways, COVID-19 has accelerated some things that we were already on a path toward. Now, those practices are here to stay.

Tyler Harris: Tiffany, what underlies a lot of what you just said are the associates, the people. The role that associates play within the four walls of the store is fundamentally different than it was five years ago. Going back to the self-checkout example: you have folks who are no longer checking customers out. Instead, they’re doing consultative selling or new activities that didn’t happen in stores five years ago, like fulfillment. So investing in scalable, digitally enabled training for these associates is really important.

Zero difference in channels

Monica Toriello: We’ll talk more about training and talent a little later because it’s one of the five zeros reshaping the future of stores, as you say in your article. The first zero is “zero difference in channels.” As you said, Tyler, everyone’s an omnichannel shopper now. I could walk into a store but maybe I’m just there to pick up something that I already paid for online, or maybe I’m there to look around but I’ll actually buy the item on my phone as I walk out. And stores need to be able to meet the needs of omnichannel customers—for example, by having a dedicated BOPIS area, as you mentioned.

How are retailers getting this wrong? What are they not doing yet when it comes to zero difference in channels? On the flip side, what are the best retailers doing on this front?

Tiffany Burns: Many retailers still think, “There are omnichannel interactions and store interactions, and I’m optimizing those two things separately. I have two different teams working on and thinking about those experiences.”

But as a consumer, when I go on the retailer’s website or app, I expect to see availability, a connection to what’s in the store, and a way to order things that I can pick up in store. I also expect to be able to stand in the aisle in the store and research a product. Today, consumers are figuring out workarounds to do all those things: they’re switching over from the app to Google, looking up the product, and searching for reviews.

But we see some retailers saying, “We’re going to make shopping a seamless experience for you. Our app will help you with wayfinding, give you inventory visibility in the store, and allow you to access all of our omnichannel opportunities to place an order and pick it up. We’ll allow you to stand in the aisle and do research on a product by

scanning a QR code.” The best retailers—the ones who we believe will create winning omnichannel experiences in the future—are those who are solving for seamless interactions across channels.

As a consumer, when I go on the retailer’s website or app, I expect to see availability, a connection to what’s in the store, and a way to order things that I can pick up in store.

Tiffany Burns

Tyler Harris: There’s an element, too, of organizational change and how you measure success that has to go along with that. What retailers get wrong is, oftentimes, they’ll do these things that Tiffany mentioned—they’ll try to create visibility and cross-channel connectivity—but they won’t make the KPIs align with that. The best retailers are completely rethinking how they set KPIs and targets. It’s a fundamental change because the industry, to date, has been focused on four-wall metrics.

Tiffany Burns: It reminds me of a shopping experience I had a couple of weeks ago. I was thinking about buying something and going back and forth saying, “Hmm, maybe not now; maybe later.” I was about to leave the store and the associate, to their credit, went through the full selling process and tried to make a strong close and get me to buy it in that moment. I said, “No, I’m not ready.” And the associate said, “Come back to the store when you decide you want to purchase.”

Now, that’s because the store associate is incented on revenue that comes through the door. Another way that associate could’ve been incented was, “Let me get the email address from this potential customer and follow up through a digital channel to offer her something to help push toward a sell.” Until the day that that associate can get credit for an interaction that helps “make the assist” (to use a sports analogy) over to the digital channel, then these things won’t really work together. That’s a tactical example of the broader system of incentives and metrics that Tyler is talking about.

Zero desire for assistance

Monica Toriello: That story is a good segue into the second zero, which is “zero desire for assistance.” That’s not a blanket statement, right? It applies only to transactional activities—shoppers want to be able to walk in and out of a store and not interact with a salesperson if they don’t need help. But zero desire for assistance is not about having a store with no employees; it’s about redeploying store employees to provide the services that customers actually want, right? Talk a bit about how retailers can avoid swinging the pendulum too far the other way: you can imagine some customers not wanting to shop at a store that just has technology and no people.

Tyler Harris: During the pandemic, people have used curbside pickup, BOPIS, and self-checkout at much higher rates than in the past. What we’re seeing in a lot of our consumer research is that those behaviors are pretty sticky; about 70 percent of people who tried self-checkout for the first time in the pandemic say they’ll use it again. So the tides have really turned.

There are, though, two places where associate help is value-additive. The first is in consultative selling: How do

I understand more about the product? How do I match a pair of shoes with a dress so that it looks great? That’s one. The other is in helping customers when the technology doesn’t work. You can’t install technology and just let it ride; you need some oversight from an associate because when the machine behaves badly or if you hit the wrong button, not having someone there to help is just as frustrating as waiting in a long line.

That job is a lot harder, from an associate perspective. It’s a lot harder to look over a bunch of self-checkout machines, read customers’ body language, and realize that the person at machine number four is frustrated because the machine isn’t working. There’s a lot of training and nuance that goes into making that work well.

Zero wait time

Monica Toriello: I’m sure there’s also a lot of nuance in the third zero, which is “zero wait time.” You say that twoday delivery is table stakes: consumers are becoming more impatient and speed is of the essence. Demand is growing for same-day delivery and even instant delivery. But is backlash also growing, both at this I-want-it-now mentality and at the instant-delivery providers and the noise and congestion that some neighborhoods and cities have started to complain about? How should stores be thinking about zero wait time? How do you advise retailers on this topic?

Tiffany Burns: The expectations for speed have significantly advanced. Five years ago, you didn’t expect an online order to get to you in less than a week. You also were completely fine ordering your Friday night pizza and waiting 90 minutes for it; you weren’t sitting in front of your phone and watching the dot as it turned down your street and stopped at the red light.

The question gets down to, “Where is it all going to land? What will be the future standard for delivery?” What we do know, though—what we have a fact base on—is when you tell a customer that it will take three days, how often they say, “Never mind.” We’ve seen that when the wait times are higher than customers’ expectations—and that varies; it’s not one definitive number for all customers—half of them will abandon their carts. Retailers lose sales when they don’t get this equation right.

You asked about congestion. Funny enough, I had a delivery from a mass retailer to my house. The delivery person backed up across my driveway, onto my front yard, and onto the retaining wall. We had to get a tow truck and the police to come. And it was raining, so I was outside with the umbrella trying to help. It was too crazy. I thought, “I would’ve been so much better off just going to the store.”

So, to your point, the inconvenience to neighborhoods that could come with zero wait time is a consideration. There are going to be lots of delivery people driving around; there are about 60 million people engaged in the gig economy. Although I don’t think we’re at a breaking point yet, you could imagine that we could be in the near future.

Tyler Harris: I also think it raises the question, “What is worth the wait?” I ordered an item for a friend as a gift, and it took two weeks to arrive—but it was customized and monogrammed with her initials, and it arrived in this box that was a gift in and of itself. That whole experience of

getting something that is really special was worth the twoweek wait. That’s the flip side for retailers: figuring out what is worth the wait and making those experiences and products really treasured, because there’s a magic to that in a world where you’ve got all of this instant noise.

Zero tolerance for inaction on equity and sustainability

Monica Toriello: There seems to be some tension, too, between zero wait time and your fourth zero, which is “zero tolerance for inaction on equity and sustainability.” As you say, consumers will vote with their wallets: they’ll shop from stores that value diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI] and that sell sustainable products and have sustainable business practices. But zero wait time almost certainly means more packaging, more delivery vehicles on the road—so, not great from a sustainability perspective. How should retailers reconcile those contradictions?

Tiffany Burns: Folks are starting to acknowledge that our delivery preferences are creating more waste. Some retailers are saying, “Are you willing to combine your shipments?” In the packaging space, they’re doing a lot in product development to try to use recyclable materials.

In the past year and a half, we’ve seen a broadening of the things that matter to consumers. One thing that matters to consumers now is diversity—both in terms of gender and race—of founders and creators of products on retail shelves. Consumers are saying, “I want to use my wallet to help promote equity. It’s one thing that I can do as an individual.”

Customers are also willing to make some trade-offs. One interesting example on the sustainability side is around solar energy. IKEA, for example, is installing solar car parks. You might say, “Hmmm, aesthetically, would I want those? No. Is it as convenient for consumers to navigate the parking lot with these structures? Probably not.” But are consumers excited to see retailers putting a stake in the ground and saying they want to be more energy efficient? Yes. Consumers are more willing than they’ve historically been to trade off a little bit on experience or convenience in the spirit of more sustainable outcomes.

Tyler Harris: We conducted some research recently about the inclusive consumer—the consumer who is looking for more Black-owned brands and more diverse brands on retailer shelves. We found that the inclusive consumer is all of us: the demographics of this consumer look very much like the US population. Ideas of inclusivity and diversity on shelves aren’t isolated to a certain age or racial demographic— it’s all of us—which means that it’s pretty sticky and here to stay. It’s embedded in the fabric of who we are as a consumer population.

Eighty percent of respondents tell us that brands have a responsibility to better the world. That raises the bar for retail, because in many ways retail is the battleground or the crucible where this is all happening, so it’s important to think about the complexion of retail shelves and the brands represented, and where they are merchandised in the planogram. Are they in the back of the store? Or are they at the front, where all shoppers will see them? It raises new questions for retailers. But it’s exciting because there are so many small, diverse brands out there, and it creates a lot of opportunity.

We conducted some research recently about the inclusive consumer—the consumer who is looking for more diverse brands on retailer shelves. We found that the inclusive consumer is all of us.

Tyler Harris

Zero wiggle room on talent

Monica Toriello: Your fifth zero is “zero wiggle room on talent,” which you alluded to earlier in this conversation.

To me, this is a confusing issue because there’s been a lot of press both about the tight labor market and about how hard it’s been for many frontline retail workers to get enough hours. What are you seeing and hearing? And what are the implications of zero wiggle room on talent on the future of stores?

Tiffany Burns: Employers across all industries have to understand that we’re in a Great Resignation. Over 20 million people have left their jobs. Frontline jobs have to be transformed to improve employee engagement and experience because that frontline colleague has good alternatives now. They could take a job in the gig workforce and have complete flexibility. It used to be that a retail frontline job was a fairly flexible job: you could give preferences for the shifts you want to work and you could do part-time quite easily. But now, people have on-demand availability in the gig economy.

As a retailer, you have to think about how you’re improving the employee experience and the value proposition so you can continue to attract people. When you’re hiring and onboarding them, think about the best way to build their capability, incentivize them, excite them, and continue to develop and broaden their skill set. That’s the new name of the game. It’s where retailers need to double down and be distinctive.

New products, new brands

Monica Toriello: The five zeros present new challenges but also new opportunities for retailers. What’s your favorite thing that you’ve seen a store do that you think is representative of the future of stores?

Tyler Harris: I get really excited about the new products and new brands, especially with the DEI lens. When you look out over the landscape of entrepreneurs who are building new businesses, there are so many incredible new products and ideas that diverse founders are bringing to the table.

It definitely requires retailers to work differently because a lot of these brands are teeny tiny, and what it takes to get them into stores and on shelves is very different from how retailers are used to operating. So the operations have to change. But I think it’s really exciting for the future of stores.

Tiffany Burns: And it’s a big part of the population to unlock innovation. Hispanics make up slightly less than 20 percent of the US population; Black Americans make up about 12 percent. That’s almost 35 percent of the population that we’re trying to activate to make sure that there’s equity. And if you’re a diverse founder, you can make a product for anybody; you don’t have to just make a product for a diverse population. I’m with you, Tyler—I think it’s really exciting. It should be game-changing. Retailers can use these diverse founders’ stories to create a new, fresh customer experience and to keep driving traffic into their stores.

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Want to get married in the metaverse?

Dive Brief:

•

Taco Bell is bringing its wedding services into the metaverse following five years of hosting real-world nuptials, according to a press release.

•

The fast-food chain is running a contest through Sept. 6 where engaged couples can submit a registration form and video detailing their love story, Taco Bell fandom and why they want to tie the knot virtually. The winners will be treated to a personalized event on Decentraland this fall.

an explanation of why the virtual realm is the right fit. Applicants receive only one entry per person, but the brand is encouraging them to post their submissions on Instagram and TikTok to get the #TacoBellMetaverseWeddingContest trending. Social media videos must be linked and uploaded to the contest website.

Unlike real-life weddings, which can be cost-prohibitive, metaverse celebrations carry theoretically endless possibilities on the planning front. Taco Bell is asking couples to share their ideal walk down the aisle, first dance, attire and menu, along with choosing a notable officiant.

•

The digital celebration carries the typical wedding traditions, like toasts, dances and the exchanging of vows and rings, while those unable to attend can livestream the gathering. Taco Bell is attempting to port over a far-fetched but surprisingly successful concept to the metaverse as hybrid experiences become more common in marketing.

Dive Insight:

Taco Bell raised a few eyebrows in 2017 when it started offering wedding services through its flagship Las Vegas Cantina location. The brand was able to adeptly capture the ethos of Sin City — infamous for spur-of-the-moment elopements — and has since legally married nearly 800 couples from its “restaurant chapel.”

Now, the Yum Brands chain is attempting to translate the concept to the metaverse amid a rush of brand experimentation on interactive virtual platforms and as more dating takes place online. Creative agencies Deutsch LA and The Electric Factory worked on the effort.

“In the age of swiping for love, Taco Bell’s metaverse wedding will allow one couple to take part in the voyage of what may well be the next evolution of modern love — and we’re proud to be leading the charge,” Taco Bell brand chief Sean Tresvant said in a statement.

The marketer is selecting a winning couple from a contest that asks interested consumers to film a video espousing their passion for each other and Taco Bell, as well as

A yet-to-be-named designer will help customize the outfits, while Taco Bell is providing couples and their guests with nonfungible token (NFT) wearables for their Decentraland avatars. Additionally, Taco Bell will mint the wedding certificate and send the bride and groom their own swag package.

Following the ceremony, attendees can explore a virtual iteration of the premium Cantina store concept for the reception. The space includes a dance floor, drinks lounge, photo booth and “challenging quest,” though further details on the latter weren’t available. Decentraland is browserbased, meaning visitors don’t need to download a separate application to gain entry.

Taco Bell’s push into wedding services five years ago helped enshrine its image as a lifestyle brand with a cult following. The QSR has tried its hand at other outsized experiential promotions, like a hotel takeover that saw reservations book up in under two minutes in 2019.

The metaverse and other Web 3.0-adjacent ideas have factored more into the playbook. Last year, the brand created a line of taco-themed NFTs that sold out in thirty minutes.

Peter is the Senior Reporter of Marketing Dive. A graduate from the Medill School at Northwestern University, he studied magazine journalism and English literature, and previously has worked at publications like New York magazine and the investigative initiative The Medill Justice Project.

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Is your company logo a ‘Karen,’ a ‘Heather,’ or maybe even a ‘Brandon’?

Karens have gotten a bad name in recent years, battered by memes painting them as rude, entitled, and constantly demanding to speak to the manager. The stereotype, which reflects societal conflict grounded in issues of gender, race, and age, was able to coalesce in the name “Karen” because of its popularity among parents of baby girls at a particular time.

Type “Karen” into Namerology’s invaluable NameGrapher, which visualizes U.S. baby name data from the past century and a half, and you can see the name spike into prominence in the 1950s and ’60s, then begin to fall out of favor almost as quickly. Karen had her moment among the top five baby girl names from 1957 to 1966—long enough ago for the name to now serve as a convenient repository for Americans’ most negative perceptions of boomer white women (even boomers in spirit).

Such spikes in popularity may stem from new parents hitting upon a name that sounds original and appealing without realizing that many other parents, subconsciously tuned into the same cultural zeitgeist, were choosing the same name.

A similar pattern takes place in the world of logo design. Seemingly novel logo designs are adopted by companies in adherence to what marketing textbooks dictate: logos should function to differentiate. The result can be an outpouring of logos that may appear distinctive to their respective owners, but in fact resemble one another. And once that novelty of design wears off, those logos may come across as a little dated . . . much like the Karen name.

For instance, in the 1957-1966 era of peak Karen, polygons with one or more curved sides, such as the iconic Kraft logo, were used as design elements in American logos two and half times the rate of all the years prior to 1957 and from 1967 until now, according to data analysis from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It’s unclear why there was such a preponderance of this particular shape in logos at that time—much like why the name Karen was so popular. If nothing else, chalk it up to the vagaries of fashion.

Meanwhile, the style of polygon borders could be called

the “Heather” of the logo world. From 1974 to 1978, Heather was one of the top five baby girl names; and even into the ’80s, it ranked among the top 10, according to NameGrapher. During the same period, logos featuring polygon borders were popular, at a rate of more than two and a quarter times other periods. Like avocado refrigerators and Earth Shoes, these eccentric shapes, including the logo for Roche Pharmaceuticals, exude an unmistakable, and kind of funky, ’70s hip.

Logos with concentric oval elements might be considered the “Brandon” of the bunch. Before Brandon became part of a right-wing secret code followed by a left-wing meme, it was among the top 10 U.S. baby boy names from 1992 to 1998. During those same years, these logos with concentric ovals appeared 35% more often than in other years, resulting in a bumper crop of trademarks that today give off a serious mid’90s vibe, including those for Boston Market and Seattle’s Best Coffee.

To some extent, these once-trendy polygon and oval logos may seem stuck in bygone eras. What to do, then, if your company’s logo is a Karen, a Heather, or a Brandon? While most people live out their lives with their given name, firms can more easily change logos if they choose, and the temptation can be strong to replace a Karen logo for a design more modern.

Yet, a case can be made for sticking with a long-standing logo. For one, it’s immediately recognizable as the brand. And two, a strong brand often can overcome even a seemingly dated logo or stereotypic style—much in the way singersongwriter Karen O, for example, has used her unique style and personality to transcend any resemblance to Karenness.

Also, holding onto an iconic logo can pay off in the most distinctively classic sense. Consider the now iconic CocaCola script logotype. When it was designed in 1886, it reflected a common style of the day; now, it’s essentially the sole survivor of that style. Coke’s logo, then, is an “Ida,” a name that was seventh in popularity for baby girls in the 1880s before virtually disappearing. Today, it’s almost a one of a kind.

Attaining the title of chief marketing officer is, for many, the absolute summit of the industry. The ’Mount Olympus of marketing’ is an exclusive club with thick budgets and even thicker salaries and whose decisions shape the activities that launch to the public. Plus it comes with an equally exclusive and easily-recognizable acronym – the CMO – which has been a useful shorthand for the executive level of marketing and communicates an individual’s role with succinct ease.

The same acronym, however, can now also be attributed to a new group of people – chief metaverse officers. These new specialists are rising from a tide of work related to decentralized systems and spatial technologies. The title reflects the new type of working practices and processes that organizations are investigating, with the C-suite position signifying its importance and size within an organization. For some companies and agencies, the deployment of immersive bits and bytes warrants as much focus and marketing, human resources, and IT infrastructure.

But that title isn’t universally accepted. Its announcement has, in some quarters, sparked a debate on the validity of its existence. Cathy Hackl, the ‘Godmother of the Metaverse’ and chief metaverse officer of Journey, told me that she believes she is the first to adopt the title. She created the role because she wanted to “start a conversation around who should be leading metaverse and web3 within organizations”. Looking online, I believe she has succeeded.

I have seen some professionals guffaw at the new title, debating whether it is too early or, perhaps, pointless. The metaverse is already a vague concept: its very definition is still under discussion. How many companies need a metaverserelated role or have a team sizable enough to warrant a seat in the boardroom?

Not many, I agree. But for the few, it does make sense. Every organization has different focuses and, for the select few who need a metaverse strategy, it is necessary to have a figurehead that holds the finances. Plus, it helps to drive toward a company’s particular vision or corporate strategy. “The metaverse will create disruption that brings exciting opportunities for organizations that are ready,” according to Joanna Popper, chief metaverse officer at CAA. “[They] lead organizations through successfully preparing for and maximizing the forthcoming strategic business opportunities and be metaverse-ready.”

Then there is the economic argument. Pinning a value on the metaverse is like throwing darts on an invisible dartboard. McKinsey argues that the metaverse will be worth $5tn by 2030, while Citi argues it will be worth $13tn. $7tn is an extraordinary margin of error, but in the vast calculus of economics it is still a gravity-defying opportunity for businesses. The metaverse will iterate and grow with time, but it is vital to have someone in the company who focuses on its development.

The individual does not necessarily need to have a dedicated C-suite title, but having some level of leadership is desirable.

Hackl says that she is unsure if the title would ultimately be chief metaverse officer, “but someone from the C-suite will eventually have to be involved”.

But with the creation of a new role and new specialism comes a new label – even if only for lanyards and LinkedIn profiles. And for the purposes of distinction, the CMO acronym is inadequate. More importantly, it only confuses the field. For years, the CMO has been a useful shorthand that clearly and concisely communicates a specific role. Conflating it with metaverse professionals only clouds discussions and doesn’t enhance or further them. An alternative acronym is essential for linguistic clarity.

Popper is partial towards CMVO, CMvO or CM3O (which includes M from metaverse and 3 from web3). I’m personally a fan of CMVO – an extended acronym that is unique and distinct enough to warrant its nature. But its establishment takes time and a rising tide of additional professionals who join the exclusive club. The linguistic needle rarely shifts overnight and the corporate world moves at a slow but inevitable pace. An idea starts with one person, but its adoption is subconsciously adopted after years of repetition and a widespread acceptance of its requirement.

Still, the metaverse is comparatively young and prone to risks. Regulatory scrutiny, cataclysmic value drops and rampant fraud all damage its potential and trust in its development. The decision to have a chief metaverse officer is forwardfacing – but perhaps so forward that the results may fall prey to Amara’s Law. The title could become a relic of a hype wave – a signifier that a company investigated an area before it passed away. It is hard to say, but for now we should steer clear of discounting their relevance. Titles are transitory, but business opportunities are perennial.

Is there a new CMO in town? How the chief metaverse officer is shaking up the C-suite

How and why DTC advertising hasn’t cooled off as much as once thought

Apple’s move last year to institute limits on tracking with its App Tracking Transparency tool quickly inhibited a portion of online advertising — including what was then a red-hot direct-to-consumer (DTC) category.

More than a year later, it seems, DTC has gone through a few periods of contraction due to seasonality, but more importantly it’s also expanding again, with TikTok the primary beneficiary of growth.

Rob Figueroa, vp of sales at AudienceX, an agency that serves mid-market advertisers largely in CTV and streaming video, said just in the last few months he’s seen an increase in larger brands from sneakers to retailers (he declined to identify any by name) choosing to explore the DTC route, as a means of getting a bit more bottom-of-the-funnel action.

“We’re getting access to some brands that we normally wouldn’t, because of that direct-to-consumer conversation that’s starting to burgeon right now,” said Figueroa.

“There’s a lot of growth, where we were seeing 10, 20, 30% of our revenue from e-commerce or direct-to-consumer stuff, that could probably be at a healthy 50% if we do that right and focus on a little bit more,” he added, without providing exact figures.

So which platforms are benefiting from this surge in spend?

Facebook has the highest monthly median spend in July

2022 at $19,022 ($2,000 less than a year prior), according to Varos, a research company that tracks e-commerce spend for about 1,800 companies. Google’s median spend inched up from $8,101 to $8,209 over the same period; TikTok’s grew from $4,095 to $5,981.

Total spend of companies that are advertising on all three platforms, according to Varos data supplied to Digiday, saw similar shifts, with Facebook’s dropping from 74% of all spend in July 2021 to 60%, while Google’s grew from 20% to 25% and TikTok doubled from 7% to 14%.

With Apple’s ATT move, “what we’ve seen is some [DTC companies] haven’t survived, while some have basically diversified into a lot of marketing channels,” said Yarden Shaked, co-founder and CEO of Varos, who noted the primary beneficiary of that diversification has been TikTok while the primary loser of business has been Facebook.

Due to increases in cost-per-acquisition, which Varos also tracks, Shaked said that DTC is focusing more heavily on customer repetition and retention. “When a customer gets really expensive to acquire, it basically means [DTC advertisers] need to make that value for that customer worth it,” he said. “So if it costs [them] $100 to get a customer and the product only costs $50, then it’s probably cheaper to convince that customer to buy again than to get a whole new customer.”

The definitive guide to what’s in and out in ad tech in 2022

How intersections can help you find business direction

A few years ago in this space I reflected upon my old Datsun 210 hatchback, and how when its battery died I could get it running again with a simple kickstart. All I needed was a few friends to give the car a push and help me generate some forward motion so I could pop the clutch and restart the engine. The point I was trying to illustrate was that momentum beats perfection, not only for dead batteries but for business.

I thought about the metaphor again when I found myself explaining to someone how to find our new office. It’s on a side street that she likely hadn’t heard of, tucked away a block behind a well-known intersection. I gave her the address, but I knew that information alone would require her to take the extra step of looking it up on her phone while she was driving. By telling her where my office was in relation to a couple of major thoroughfares, however, I knew she would be able to picture the area in her mind and find it without a problem.

It’s interesting that when we’re giving people directions, we often reference intersections rather than addresses alone. An address provides more specific information, but it’s not necessarily more helpful.

An address is precise but abstract. My mother the real estate agent seemed to be able to visualize the location of pretty much any address she was given, but that’s because driving the streets of our city was vital to what she did for a living.

Most people wouldn’t know the difference between the 300 block and the 1300 block of any roadway unless the cross streets themselves are numbered (and sometimes not even then).

Intersections, however, are different. We can visualize them. And once we do, we not only know in what general direction to head, we can mentally look around and envision where the place we’re looking for may be. Picture the general vicinity and there’s a good chance you can recall the lay of the land, be reminded of a familiar sign, or infer where something is by the general surroundings. Depending on what you’re looking for, if there’s a retail center on one corner, an office park on another, apartments on a third and a gas station on the fourth, that’s helpful information. By picturing the intersection in your mind, you may not even need the address.

How to help others “see” direction strategically The point is that people think visually, and the more we can help each other “see” where we want to go the better, even if it’s just an approximation. My business partner, Jonathan David Lewis, tells the story in his book, Brand vs. Wild, of a team of young rugby players whose plane crashed in the rugged Andes Mountains. They were eventually rescued because they knew one thing to be true: “To the west is Chile.” That’s it. That’s all they had. There were debates about the best way to use that information, but knowing in

which direction salvation could be found ultimately led them out of the wilderness.

The future is always unknown, and it’s natural to want an address — to know exactly where we’re headed. But just as centralized planners can’t direct an economy, the finest strategic minds can’t anticipate exactly where a business plan will lead. You may have a preferred route to getting to your next appointment, but anything from an auto accident to a malfunctioning stoplight to a broken water main may redirect you. As long as you know approximately where you need to go, however, you can almost always find another way.

When my firm first conceived of Passare, a cloud-based platform that uses digital technology to improve the funeral planning process, we had no idea the twists and turns and near-death experiences the company would face. When we first presented the idea to investors, we couldn’t give them the precise place we would end up, but we could help them envision how the power of technology to improve consumer experiences could intersect with the most difficult moments any of use face in life. They were then able envision the potential of a solution that would be as helpful to bereaved families as it was inevitable, and we together set out to get there. Today Passare has found its “address,” both conceptually and online, and more people are benefiting from it every day. What’s your company’s powerful intersection?

That’s how startups work. The founders inevitably have a specific initial application in mind, but they begin by envisioning a powerful intersection: between technology and hospitality (Airbnb), between shopping and shipping (Stitch Fix) and between the assembly line and fresh food (Chipotle) to cite a few obvious examples.

If you’ve ever had a connecting flight at an airport that was in the opposite direction of your final destination, realized you were heading the wrong way down the highway, or assumed an address was on the east side of town when it was really on the west side, you know how frustrating, time-consuming and unproductive heading the wrong way can be. Even if you don’t know exactly where you’re going, starting to move in the right direction will put you miles ahead. The difference between progress and regress is one of direction.

No business model will work forever; you are inevitably going to have to move yours along. It may be hard to know exactly where it needs to end up, but if you spend all your time looking for an exact address you just might run out of gas. When you’re trying to get somewhere, direction beats perfection too.

Why livestream commerce is on the rise

Wharton’s Tom Robertson explains livestream commerce, one of the hottest trends in digital sales. There are great benefits to using the medium, but only if retailers can get it right.

If you’re not selling on social media, maybe you should be.

Livestream commerce, in which brands sell their products to online audiences in real time, is one of the hottest trends in retail. The format is growing in popularity, accounting for $200 billion in sales in China and $11 billion in the United States in 2020. Those numbers are only expected to climb.

“Livestream commerce is fast becoming a medium of choice,” said Wharton marketing professor Thomas S. Robertson, who is also academic director of the Jay H. Baker Retailing Center.

In an article he wrote for Harvard Business Review, titled “Selling on TikTok and Taobao,” Robertson examines the rise of livestream commerce and offers guidance for companies that want to jump on the trend. He spoke with Knowledge at Wharton to share some insights from the article and explain

why livestream commerce is a challenge for both retailers and the social media platforms they rely on to run their events.

Why is livestream commerce becoming so popular?

I think we have to look at the evolution of online. It started with text, and over time that became rather boring. Text then became accompanied by imagery, and that was a step forward in building audience engagement. The next step was video, which turns out to be more powerful than imagery in building engagement. After that came live video or livestream. The ability to buy from the stream was added, and that’s what this article in Harvard Business Review is about. That’s where we’ve arrived in terms of the evolution of online. It’s become an important means of going to market and selling with certain audiences and under certain conditions.

Did the COVID-19 pandemic spur this format?

Many retail stores closed during the height of the pandemic and had to come up with new ways to sell

merchandise.

I think it’s primarily the changing technology and changing generations. The pandemic would have been a stimulus, but it remains to be seen how long lasting that effect will be. The question is, will people go back to stores? They are, but it will never go back to where it was in 2019. About 85% of shopping is now in store, and 15% is online — some of that is livestream commerce. It’s my opinion that it won’t go back to 100%. Why should it? People have gotten used to online shopping.

reinventing themselves to be online more and to engage in livestream commerce — with some success. Their problem is that their audience is more mature than a TikTok audience. And advertisers love the younger audience.

Your article mentions how livestream commerce is maturing faster in China than in the United States. In China, it already accounts for 10% of online shopping and is projected to grow to 25% by next year. Why is the Chinese market so different from the U.S.?

I think the biggest difference is that they have integrated platforms. Taobao was designed for consumers to buy online and be able to pay for it without leaving the stream. We don’t have an integrated app at the present time in the U.S. It’s moving in that direction. I’m sure we’ll get there. There are companies trying to develop it right now. In fact, I have one company coming into my class this fall to talk about it.

What should brands be thinking about as they jump into livestream commerce?

What is the role of the social media influencer in livestream sales?

One of the important factors of livestream commerce is the influencer. They can be a professional influencer, or the influencer may be a salesperson in a store. Sometimes they have enormous followings, so they guide the discussions and encourage people to buy. If you go back to the beginning of online shopping, it was a solitary experience, whereas livestream commerce is very much a communal experience. People are relating to one another, so you’re not alone. You may not know the people shopping with you, but you identify with them because you have similar interests. Other people buy, and you feel it’s legitimate and will do it as well. There’s a social pressure of sorts in livestream commerce events.

If we look at the literature, we’ve always known that personal influence is one of the most important factors in making decisions. It’s often friends and neighbors who make you aware of something and encourage you to buy. Switch that over to livestream commerce, and you have a form of personal influence coming from the influencer and from the other people who are shopping.

Is this changing the business model for social media platforms that provide the channels for livestream commerce?

It depends on the platform. If we look at META, Facebook Live is no longer going to exist. They are switching it over to Instagram and Reels, which is like TikTok. TikTok has been so successful, and the challenge for Meta is that Facebook and Instagram weren’t designed as a short-form video experience. So, how do you compete with TikTok? Facebook said let’s give that to Reels and let Reels carry the banner to compete with TikTok. It’s changing the business model, for sure. Some platforms will be in better positions than others.

“Advertisers love the younger audience.”

It’s definitely a challenge, even for companies that were built for digital shopping. [Television network] QVC has been

I would start with the notion that there is no magic marketing bullet. This is part of your arsenal. You have to integrate livestream commerce with your other marketing strategies and tactics. How does it fit in?

I recognize that, as I talk to some of these major brands, it took more than one experience to get it right. There’s a learning curve involved. It does, indeed, depend on the product category. In talking to Ferragamo, for example, they made the good point that you can’t just show up in the store with a camera for your existing customers. You can’t do that for a luxury good. You have to have a livestream commerce event that’s compatible with the prestige and the price of the item you’re trying to sell. You’re going to have a different feel, use different influencers, and have different expectations about how many people will buy. If you’re Ferragamo or Jimmy Choo, you’re trying to sell a few items to a limited market segment.

You have to choose the right platform, and you have to choose the right influencer. Is it someone with a following, or a more specialized influencer who knows more about a specific category, such as cosmetics or a technology good?

You’ve also got to measure your success against expectations. You must test whether you are able to achieve those goals. It’s not just about making immediate sales. Maybe your objective is to reach new market segments, introduce new products, or create buzz for the brand. Given your expectations, you are going to track sales outcomes, social media mentions, likes and dislikes. But you would have determined before I run the event what your objectives were and how to evaluate outcomes.

“If you go back to the beginning of online shopping, it was a solitary experience, whereas livestream commerce is very much a communal experience.”

“There is no magic marketing bullet … you have to integrate livestream commerce with your other marketing strategies and tactics.”

4 ways to become a creative problem-solver

Creativity and creative problem-solving are highly valued and sought-after skills, especially in the world of business and marketing.

In fact, new ideas – the outcome of creative problem-solving – typically lead to innovation and breakthrough brand and communication ideas and ultimately to brand and business growth.

Unfortunately, our brains are not wired to be innovative and creative and to explore the world of the unfamiliar. Instead, our brains like the familiar.

So, what prevents us from thinking creatively and coming up with truly new ideas to solve our business problems or brand positioning assignments? The answer is our biases.

How biases influence marketing decisions

1.) Personal biases

First, there are our own personal biases and thought patterns which are based on our experience, on the ways we’ve been taught to analyze information, on our beliefs and our value system.

The list of personal biases that affect our ability to absorb and select information and turn this information into truly novel ideas is long. Most readers will, for example, be familiar with “confirmation bias” (the tendency to search for, interpret, focus on, and remember information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions). Or will have experienced the “conformity bias” (the tendency to give an opinion that is more socially correct than one’s true opinion, so as to avoid

offending anyone). The list goes on and on and I am sure we have all witnessed these biases in our work environments.

2.) Corporate biases

Beyond those personal biases, corporate biases involuntarily stifle the creative problem-solving ability of an organization. In fact, many organizations have a way of doing things, a certain understanding of how their business works, a certain set of practices, behaviors and beliefs about how to build their brands.

These biases are usually the outcome of years of experience in building their business and typically have some legitimacy. But that doesn’t mean that those beliefs, practices and behaviors are a guarantee for success in the future. These corporate biases taint the thought processes of the individuals within the organization and tend to limit the creative problem-solving skills of employees. This leads to a predictable outcome, one which is deemed acceptable within the organization.

3.) Cultural biases

Last but not least, there are what I would call cultural biases where we project the value system and beliefs of the culture we live in (or embrace) and apply it to the type of solutions we are trying to identify for the brands we work on. I would argue, for example, that the obsession with “brand purpose” is in most cases a cultural phenomenon and bias rather than the outcome of a rigorous process.

Many marketers and strategists, especially the younger ones, crave more meaning in their lives and the desire to do some good, so they tend to project these desires onto their work.

These three biases and patterns help us manage life’s complexity and fit into our environment. But, they are not useful when trying to think creatively and come up with truly original solutions.

4 creativity techniques to overcome mental biases

Overcoming a mental bias in the business world when trying to solve a problem is actually not that difficult. Below are four exercises that can help you do so. Which exercise will work best for you and your organization will vary, so I would encourage you to experiment and find out what works for you and the group you are working with.

How would “XYZ,” a businessman you admire, approach this exercise?

The idea is to get the group to put themselves in someone else’s shoes and thus get out of their own mental blocks. I typically start by asking the group to make a list of all the business people they admire. Note: I don’t allow them to choose Steve Jobs, Richard Branson or Elon Musk.

I then ask them to select their top two most admired ones. I then ask the group to list all the things they admire about these business people. Once that is done, I ask them how their chosen businessman or woman would solve this exercise.

Do a negative brainstorm

It is sometimes easier to harvest the negative energy of a group rather than its positive energy. Try doing the exact opposite in your exercise. Instead of asking what are the attributes of the brand, ask instead what is the brand not? If the original question is “how can we associate ourselves with

and become part of today’s prevailing mommy culture?” for example, ask instead “what should we do to be excluded by today’s moms?”

Once you have generated a list of negative ideas, go through each generated item with the group and have them list the opposites. You’ll be surprised by how many rich ideas a negative brainstorm can harvest.

Brain-writing

Another way to get the group going is to ask them to start generating ideas on their own and in silence by writing at least 10 ideas on a piece of paper. It helps to put a time limit on this exercise.

Once this step is completed, ask the participants to pass their list of ideas to their neighbor on the left and take the sheet from their neighbor on the right. Ask them then to get inspired by what their neighbor wrote and have them add 10 new ideas to that list.

Do this another couple of times by passing the lists around and you’ve harvested hundreds of ideas from an uninspired or less than collaborative group.

Time-pressure

You can also increase the energy level and productivity level by limiting the time available for each exercise. It is deceptively simple but amazingly effective. There are many more exercises you can apply but those four are simple enough, always work, and can easily be applied to the territories.

Entrepreneurs, Don’t Let Branding Become an Afterthought

It is something of an understatement to say that most early-stage entrepreneurs have a lot on their plates.

“You focus on your product,” says Neal Roese. “You focus on your service, your overall business model, the plan to secure your funding.”

Stretched thin by such critical issues, many entrepreneurs set aside the work of branding—work that, at least on the surface, seems like it can be dealt with later. But what if prioritizing this piece of the puzzle could help other parts click into place faster?

Roese, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School who studies the psychology of judgment and decision-making, believes it is never too early for entrepreneurs to focus on the customer and their needs.

“As you develop your branding, you move beyond the purely functional aspect of your product or service over to the psychological side,” Roese says. “And that’s really important for building a long-term, sustainable brand.”

Roese offers three ways entrepreneurs can incorporate earlystage brand management into their startup plans.

Give Your Brand a Personality

Entrepreneurs looking to manage their brand from the outset need to develop a clear sense of who their target customer is. How do they envision their future customer’s income level, age range, demographic characteristics, and purchasing habits? This information can then be used to create a psychological profile of the customer, which will help the startup determine what benefits their business can provide them.

“For example, is your customer a person who is adventurous, and if so, are you going to satisfy their thirst for exploration?” Roese says.

This is what allows you to define your brand’s “personality”— in short, how it would behave if it were a person.

“Establishing your brand’s personality allows you to cultivate a vision of where the brand is going in terms of what it is

and what it is not. This helps startups anticipate future growth into other product categories.”

“You focus on your product,” says Neal Roese. “You focus on your service, your overall business model, the plan to secure your funding.”

Stretched thin by such critical issues, many entrepreneurs set aside the work of branding—work that, at least on the surface, seems like it can be dealt with later. But what if prioritizing this piece of the puzzle could help other parts click into place faster?

Roese, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School who studies the psychology of judgment and decision-making, believes it is never too early for entrepreneurs to focus on the customer and their needs.

“As you develop your branding, you move beyond the purely functional aspect of your product or service over to the psychological side,” Roese says. “And that’s really important for building a long-term, sustainable brand.”

Roese offers three ways entrepreneurs can incorporate earlystage brand management into their startup plans.

Give Your Brand a Personality

Entrepreneurs looking to manage their brand from the outset need to develop a clear sense of who their target customer is. How do they envision their future customer’s income level, age range, demographic characteristics, and purchasing habits? This information can then be used to create a psychological profile of the customer, which will help the startup determine what benefits their business can provide them.

“For example, is your customer a person who is adventurous, and if so, are you going to satisfy their thirst for exploration?” Roese says.

This is what allows you to define your brand’s “personality”— in short, how it would behave if it were a person.

“Establishing your brand’s personality allows you to cultivate a vision of where the brand is going in terms of what it is and what it is not. This helps startups anticipate future growth into other product categories.”

Dealing with the creepiness of personal branding

Of all the rudimentary forms of the metaverse out there, few if any are as fully realized and well used as Epic Games’ Fortnite. Fortnite grew from game to metaverse in an organic way: People began lingering in Fortnite‘s 3D world after they were done playing, just to hang out with friends. Picking up on this, Epic began hosting planned events for Fortniters, such as concerts and movie previews.

Earlier this month, Epic released the latest version of its gaming engine, Unreal Engine 5, which includes new tools for creating highly detailed 3D objects with automated natural lighting effects. There’s an emphasis on creating large-scale photorealistic environments with realistic sound and digital humans. Unreal Engine is, I believe, tooling up to build metaverse experiences.

In March, I went to Epic’s headquarters in Cary, North Carolina to speak to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney about those new tools, and about the metaverse of the future. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. Are we reaching a stage where graphics technology can

build worlds that are so lifelike that they can spill out of games and be used as realistic simulations of things we’d normally do in person?

That’s exactly what’s happening, and it’s making possible this phenomena they talked about in the 1990s, of convergence. Remember that? Like CD-ROMs and multimedia? The idea pitched back then was that you would have the same kinds of media capabilities across film and games, and that they would come together into a single industry that had the best of both worlds. It took 25 years extra, but we’re actually there now, and convergence is happening because you’re able to use the same sort of high-fidelity graphics on a movie set and in a video game. And in architectural visualization and automotive design, you can actually build all of these 3D objects–both a virtual twin to every object in the world, or every object in your company or in your movie. And then you can use all of those same assets across many different forms of media.

This is you talking to CNBC in 2020: “We want to make it possible for any developer to bring their content into

Fortnite and for any brand to have their presence known in Fortnite . . . and to have it grow into an ongoing selfevolving ecosystem.” That was two years ago, well before the industry’s current metaverse fixation. And it sounds like you’re talking about an open sort of metaverse where developers and creators have more control.

Fortnite Creative is a set of tools that anybody can use to build their own Fortnite island. About half of Fortnite play time by users is now in content created by others, and half is in Epic content. And that’s just the very beginning. Later this year, we’re going to release the Unreal Editor for Fortnite–the full capabilities that you’ve seen [in Unreal Engine] opened up so that anybody can build very high-quality game content and code . . . and deploy it into Fortnite without having to do a deal with us–it’s open to everybody.

Our aim is to make it a first-class outlet for reaching the consumers, just like you might look at the mobile app stores and consoles and Steam as ways to reach users. Now people are also looking at Fortnite, and at Roblox, as ways of reaching users. Along with that, we’re building an economy, and it will support creators actually building businesses around their work and making increasing amounts of profit from the commerce that arises from people playing their content.

The web we’ve got today is dominated by a few big platforms and app stores that charge high rents to reach users. The platforms and their investors spent a lot to build their technology, and they got rich. Will the financial incentives be there to build a more decentralized web?

Well, at the same time they’re burning the world down, and governments and courts are chasing them all over the world to stop their bad practices. Speaking broadly about all gatekeepers or social media, there’s the App Store monopolies, but the good news is that all the companies [app developers, brands] that participate in these ecosystems get it. They’ve now seen the trick. They were tricked 10 or 15 years ago. They got lured into this, and now large parts of their businesses are trapped within these walled gardens.

Whenever we talk to third-party companies, world-class brands, about bringing major brand presences into Fortnite, they’re all about how they can reach customers and build direct relationships with customers themselves. They’re not going to accept any gatekeeper. So as all of the brands talk to all of the different aspiring metaverse platforms–Fortnite or Roblox or Minecraft, or more broadly maybe you start looking at PUBG Mobile, GTA Online–they’re really going to be keeping us honest and ensuring that they’re not going to support another company inserting itself as an overlord between them and their customers.

What’s it going to take to build a metaverse that’s not dominated by such “overlords”?

I think we can build this open version of the metaverse over the next decade on the foundation of open systems, open standards, and companies being willing to work together on the basis of respecting their mutual customer relationships. You can come in with an account from one ecosystem and play in another, and everybody just respects those relationships. And there’s a healthy competition for every facet of the ecosystem.

That’s the thing that the world had in the early days of

the web. But that’s been torn down by the walled gardens and their monopolization processes. Right now, you don’t have a competitive app store economy. You don’t have a competitive advertising online advertising economy. And you can probably pick out a dozen economies which are not competitive because they’re controlled by tied services where a monopoly ties use of one category of its services to its uses of its others, and so you’re forced to take on them all or to leave entirely.

That’s the big focus of worldwide antitrust efforts–ensuring each market participant can compete fairly in their market without monopoly ties. That’s going to open the path to the open metaverse. Without that, even if you did build the open metaverse, Apple and Google would still end up dictating all the terms to everybody.

When you look at the current antitrust debate through that lens, the lens of how power might be concentrated, or not, in a future metaverse, it makes the stakes seem even higher.

I think it’s not just the foremost economic issue and the world economy now, I also think you can’t have a free world if you don’t have freedom online and freedom on platforms. If you have two corporations controlling all world discourse and kowtowing to governments–especially oppressive governments–to act as agents on their behalf and spy on users and sources of opinion and dissent, then I think the world you end up with isn’t one we’d want to live in. I think it would be quite a horrible place. So, I think it’s a first-class social issue that we don’t let any of these giant mega-corporations control online commerce, discourse, and control the metaverse. Really.

Will it take this kind of openness and cooperation among companies to create the metaverse people will want?

So yeah, the metaverse is the intersection of everybody’s ecosystem, kind of like back in the early history of the internet. In the early 1980s, you had a lot of different research universities and companies with their own local area networks. They’re all separate from each other, and somebody realized, well, we could run some cables between them all across the nation, and the internet came from that.

Then they realized we need to connect our email systems, and so at some point somebody invented that address system where if you were employed at X and your name was X, that would be your email address. They put the @ into email addresses.

Being able to connect all of these different ecosystems together into an internet of ecosystems, or a metaverse of ecosystems, is one of the critical steps. We don’t want a dozen companies to fight each other to create the one monopoly that rules them all, and one wins and now everybody is locked into their proprietary thing. We want to work with all of the companies to help build one open system that arises over the next decade. Every year, we want more of it. It’s not going to magically appear all at once, because it’s monstrously complicated. Every year, we want to get closer and closer to this connected ideal, where every company can participate.

Those standards and protocols you mentioned are what made the internet what it is. But that was a long time ago. Do we have the will to go through that process again and

create standards and protocols for the metaverse?

Epic does. We’re doing more and more of this all the time. I think Roblox is also another really good-spirited company. You know, after IPO-ing and facing enormous investor expectations, they took their scripting language that powers all of Roblox and they released it, permissively licensed, open source, so any game developer can decide to use that. It’s quite an incredible move toward openness.

You have Microsoft adopting Linux and making long-term commitments to partners and the world about the openness of their Microsoft Store and how they will not use the tying practices Apple uses. I think you can find a good enough set of companies that are all willing to work together on this. And I think even for the companies that currently aren’t, they’ll be going through generational changes in which the next generation of leadership might actually take a completely different view of the world. And then it’s blue skies ahead.

This larger ecosystem, the metaverse, is going to arise from a lot of different things coming together over time. One of them is going to be massive groups of players and their friends, which are represented in social graphs. Epic has one with 600 million accounts and 4.7 billion social connections. Microsoft has a huge one with Xbox Live, and PlayStation has one, and Nintendo has one, and Steam has one. We’d really like to work with other partners to connect them all together.

In the sense that we’re talking about a move away from platform dominance and toward creator autonomy, we’re talking about a decentralization. Since decentralization is foundational to crypto and the blockchain, do you think those technologies might play a role in the metaverse?

There are some great ideas and principles driving that work. The idea of a digital economy that’s not gate-kept by any one company, which is decentralized and open to all participants and has incredibly low transaction fees, that’s an awesome aspiration. I support the idea of universal ownership–the idea that if you were to buy an avatar in one place that you’d own it in every other place where it’s conceptually compatible. That’s an awesome idea. I think there’s a lot of incredibly interesting technology foundation work being done there. The field of zero knowledge proofs–the idea that you can verify that something happened without receiving any private details about it–that powers a number of the cryptocurrencies in protecting privacy while running a decentralized system, I think that’s going to be the backbone of a large part of the next century in technology. But, unfortunately right now it’s bundled up with a lot of speculation and a lot of outright scams, and a lot of efforts are scammy by construction in that the thing they’re pursuing doesn’t achieve a plausible version of the stated goals. You know, like the blockchain avatar economies for example, there are a bunch of companies aspiring to make avatars that you universally own, but none of them I’ve found, not a single one, has actually made any effort to foster actual adoption of these avatars by any actual games or ecosystems. They just want to build this thing and sell people avatars, but they’re completely useless in practice.

I firmly believe there’s going to be a multi-trillion dollar economy around digital goods in the future. But I think so much of the crypto currency effort, especially touching the gaming space, doesn’t address that problem of utility. They’re showing you digital goods you can’t do anything with except to say that you own it. You can cryptographically prove that you own it, but who cares?

Is there room for both AR and VR in the metaverse?

I think these are both incredibly important facets of the metaverse. The metaverse is going to have purely digital manifestations, places that don’t exist in the real world. If you want to go up to a space station or another planet, that’s going to be purely digital. And there will be real-world manifestations, too, which integrate virtual overlays on top of it, like Pokémon Go does. Imagine the entire world being a beehive of different activity. In some places, there are Pokemons running around. In some places, there are other game assets. And [there are] protocols for disambiguating what should be there at any time. And that’s going to be massive.

And I think there’s a lot of magic to be had by converging both parts of this, so sometimes you’re in the physical world with virtual enhancements and sometimes you’re in the purely virtual world. And the economy is going to be highly linked. Every maker of fashion products of all sorts would like that in the future when you buy the physical clothing you own it in the metaverse. And when you’re in the metaverse, to see some cool item of clothing and buy it and own it both digitally and physically, and it will be a way better way to find new clothing. Looking at photos of it in low resolution on Amazon.com isn’t that great compared to seeing how it flows in a physics system, simulating cloth and your character.

This has been great. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I think it’s really interesting. We’re releasing this engine [Unreal Engine 5] with a bunch of code and a bunch of tools, but it’s really exciting to probe what it does for the world–what really happens as a result of this and how it fits into the bigger picture. It’s a shame that the metaverse is so over-hyped right now. There’s all this gas and blockchain and this, but you add up the users and we found [there are] about 600 million people playing metaverse types of experiences socially with their friends.

That’s impressive, and telling. I just hope people don’t get overly excited about the Web3 stuff and then get disappointed when it doesn’t all materialize at once.

I think it’s like 1999 [part] two and [there’s] going to be some reckoning with reality for the companies that are building things that don’t quite or don’t really work. But it’s also a renaissance. When the foundations for the future are actually being built right now.

Should brands sue their own fans? It’s working out for Netflix and Oprah

Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture.

In her afternoon talk show’s heyday, Oprah Winfrey specialized in surprising fans with unexpected giveaways. Last month, “Oprah obsessives” Kellie Carter Jackson and Leah Wright Rigueur got a different sort of surprise: a trademark-infringement lawsuit from Winfrey’s production company charging that the pair’s Oprahdemics podcast is using both the Oprah name and “O” logo without permission.

Carter Jackson and Rigueur are both historians, academics, and authors; they are also, according to a statement from the head of their podcast’s production company, “sincere, longtime fans of Oprah Winfrey.” The premise of Oprahdemics, launched this past March, is that Winfrey and her cultural impact over time are worthy subjects for the hosts and their similarly highbrow guests. The podcast is promoted with a light touch (a “study of the Queen of Talk”), and despite being openly “unauthorized,” seems like yet another boost to Oprah’s historical/societal profile. So the upshot is that it sounds an awful lot like Harpo, Inc. (Oprah’s company) is picking a fight with its own supporters. And really, should a brand ever sue its fans?

It’s actually a trickier question than it sounds. For context, consider another recent legal squabble involving Netflix and the makers of an unauthorized

Bridgerton spinoff. Bridgerton, of course, is the multiracial, sex-soaked costume-drama escapism sensation from Shonda Rhimes that debuted in December 2020. Among its immediate fans were Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, twentysomething musical-theater-loving TikTok users who promptly set out to offer their own answer to the question: “Okay, what if Bridgerton was a musical?”

The duo made up their own songs and invited their social media audience to participate and contribute, but borrowed heavily from the series—quoting dialog verbatim, following plot lines, etc.—and, obviously, using its name. An album of their songs, The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical, won a Grammy. Netflix tolerated and even occasionally praised all this, treating it as a sort of feel-good story and fan tribute that presumably helped the Bridgerton brand more broadly.

Things soured when Barlow and Bear decided to mount a live production at the Kennedy Center; Netflix (which backs an official live production called The Queen’s Ball: A Bridgerton Experience) said the musical’s creators would need to pay for a license to stage their show. According to the company, it offered such a license, and Barlow and Bear allegedly turned it down—hence the lawsuit.

But, in a surprising turn, many Bridgerton fans have taken Netflix’s side. (Or, perhaps they were rallying for Rhimes or Julia Quinn, the author of the novels behind the series. “I was flattered and delighted when they began,” Quinn

stated. “There is a difference, however, between composing on TikTok and recording and performing for commercial gain.”) According to a Slate recap of the resulting social media drama, the online mob mocked the duo and sympathized with Netflix wanting to protect its intellectual property. In short, many seemed to believe that Netflix was supportive for as long as it could be—but ultimately had no choice but to sue the world’s most famous Bridgerton stans.

Which brings us back to Oprah. Notably, Harpo is seeking no monetary damages and is not asking for the hosts and their production company to stop making their show. Instead, it’s asserting that the show’s name and branding implies that it’s Oprah-approved (and, in some sense, benefits from that impression).

In other words, Harpo is trying to thread the needle of making its case that Oprahdemics has crossed a specific line—but doing so without looking like a bully. After all, a brand that fails to defend its trademarks is taking an enormous risk: a track record of letting others borrow or reuse your intellectual property without consequence can set a precedent in the law’s eyes, making it harder to protect that property from further misuse.

And as much as suing fans can be a bad look in the court of public opinion, the consequences aren’t always so dire. When J.K. Rowling successfully sued the creator of an unauthorized guide to her Harry Potter series, even its author said he would remain a superfan just the same.

Oprahdemics producer Roulette Productions has said the podcast “comes from a place of both deep admiration and critical thinking,” and that it “has been engaged with the team at Harpo for some time.” The various parties have fallen silent since the suit was made public, but perhaps there can be a deal—or even an opportunity.

There, so far, has been just one Oprahdemics season, about a dozen episodes released between March and June of this year, and a couple of live events. Now, in a peculiar twist on the so-called Oprah Effect (that is: the idea that when Winfrey highlighted a brand or product or book on her show, it promptly took off), the podcast has received more attention than ever. This could be a great time to treat this whole episode as a branding event and announce a new season—even with a tweaked name.

Harpo, of course, has a different agenda: Sending a message about what it considers the boundaries around the Oprah brand. And it’s letting even well-intentioned stans know the potential consequences of crossing those boundaries: You get a lawsuit, and you get a lawsuit, and you get a lawsuit!”

Reach Each Generation in Today’s Marketplace with These Marketing Tactics

Today’s marketing strategies prove significantly different than those from only a few decades ago. Now, while mostly virtual, they represent just a new tool, and aren’t always fully understood when attempting to separate outreach efforts to the current four generations of clients and consumers.

Two decades ago, the main approach to marketing was “throwing Jell-O against the wall” and hoping some of it stuck onto prospects. Now we have much-improved knowledge of what works and the tools needed for measuring results so we can cultivate successful approaches and discard those not fulfilling our objectives. Yet, at the same time, it’s essential to understand the optimum tactics for reaching each of the four generations in today’s marketplace. The differences between the four generations are noteworthy.

Solutions-oriented Boomers. Today’s Baby Boomers fall within the age range of 55 to 73. They are hard workers and are the first generation that’s seen a significant number of women in the workforce. This group wants to hear solutions.

Work/life balance-seeking Gen-Xers. The Gen-Xers range in age from 38 to 54. Theirs is the first generation to closely examine ways to find balance between work and non-work life. They actively push for this balance from employers and have been able to really enjoy their lives. They prefer valuebased selling — selling the values defined by the brand by converting them to the customer’s needs.

Casual Millennials. Gen-Y (Millennials) now fall between the ages of 25 to 39. They’re impatient, remote in their manner and deal casually with people. They’re environmentally and globally concerned. Addressing these concerns will add strength to any sales approach. They prefer digital marketing and want to buy digitally.

Gen-Z digital natives. Gen-Z, the “I” Generation, are those ages 24 and younger. They have some overlapping beliefs and approaches with younger Millennials. A very pragmatic group, they’re digitally programmed and are great multitaskers. It’s not out of the question to meet 24-year-old millionaires. Selling on social media is their milieu.

Should Your Business Use Conversational Marketing?

Whichever is the target group or combined groups, refinements will need to be made accordingly regarding how to provide information, give presentations, and share proposals. Learning to apply the different preferences represented within the four generations will hit the target

— while taking a one-size-fits-all approach will result in a miss.

Learn the preferred method for communication. Virtual and electronic communications have all made it much easier to stay in touch with customers. Many Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers value old-fashioned face-to-face meetings. Zoom is one way to achieve this. Asking prospects how they prefer to receive information — via text, email, phone call or in-person — can be a very fruitful discussion leading to future promising interactions. Employing their preferred communications mode means a greater likelihood they will see and respond to queries, which can lead to uncovering useful information about the prospect’s needs and challenges. Finding alignment between the prospect’s needs with the selling organization’s values provides a good chance to convert the outreach into a sale.

Extend into other generations. Sales representatives must learn to sell to those outside their own generation. The way in which approaches are received differs greatly from generation to generation. As a rule, understand how Boomers prefer solutions-oriented selling, Gen-Xers want value-based selling and some digital selling, Millennials prefer digital, while Gen-Zers are almost exclusively via social media.

Consider the audience on the receiving end. Another concern is considering how the message sent will be received by members of different generations. Reviewing how words, phrasing and translations might be decoded by the receiver is a step often overlooked in the rush to market and sell. A telling example is when Kentucky Fried Chicken opened its first stores in China. Their slogan, “Finger lickin’ good” was translated as “Eat your fingers.”

Utilize a range of tactics. In making a pitch to a team composed of a mix of generations, identify all the various techniques available and select those that include the most potential to win that diverse team. Known as the Force Multiplier Effect, it emphasizes that more than one tactic must be employed. One that’s often overlooked today is the in-person meeting. Winning a contract usually takes more than one kind of approach.

Spend time researching the demographic details of each group representing today’s four generations of buyers. Take special note of their differences. It’s important to know when sealing a deal with a handshake in person may be best for specific clients or customers.

Where is Video Advertising Heading?

Going further into 2022 and looking forward to 2023, we can expect to see these key developments in AdTech and Connected TV in particular.

Technological advances will continue playing an undoubtedly essential role in digital advertising. So what will the next round of technological development bring us in the years to come? Going further into 2022 and looking forward to 2023, we can expect to see the following key developments in AdTech and Connected TV in particular.

VR, AR and metaverse: A myth or an upcoming trend?

The metaverse is the next evolution of the internet, and giants like Facebook are hedging their bets on it. The opportunity here for the AdTech industry is ad content that exists in this virtual reality world that’s tailored to individual users.

Individually tailored ads can enhance gameplay by imbibing a degree of realism, while gamers would be willing to view a specific number of ads to unlock in-game content for their character. The opportunities for online events like concerts, interactive product placements, and other recent developments like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) all offer ad options.

CTV is destined to acquire AR/VR technologies: only two years ago Apple promised to bring the VR experience to the screens of TV owners. The newest Apple VR/AR headset was rumored to arrive this year, giving viewers an exclusive

opportunity to experience sports events and live concerts in new exciting ways.

A new immersive viewing experience requires interactive advertising approaches to reach an audience. There is a high probability that VR- and AR-driven CTV will see the adoption of in-game advertising mechanics creating the possibility to place ads within the virtual environment. Many technology startups already provide capabilities to run ads programmatically within virtual environments. However, as VR and AR-based environments will likely operate as isolated ecosystems, this could possibly create a potential impediment. To resolve this potential issue, interoperability and standardization must be ensured.

AI-enhanced approach and contextual advertising

Advertisers are looking for a sound alternative as thirdparty cookies are headed for the door. Artificial intelligence (AI) has formed the advertising industry into the way it looks today: The state of media buying is vastly superior compared to the way advertisers conducted their business in the 2000s.

AI is all about leveraging data. But chasing cookies is not the only way, and priority should be given to analyzing digital content. There’s a lot to be examined there like keywords

and engagement metrics that can be used to ensure the accuracy of contextual targeting. These AI-powered capabilities allow for better audience segmentation without violating GDPR or any other privacy standards.

AI’s ability to automate data gathering and analysis to provide every accurate contextualization for ad content, matching the right research and actions to the ideal consumer, is something that AdTech companies should focus their efforts on. Not only does it eliminate issues like human error, but also a far more individualized experience for the user. The real problem with this approach is accessing visual content like video because image recognition technology still has a long way to go. This makes it potentially difficult to use this AI-enhanced approach within a complex virtual environment like a CTV video.

Measuring ROI and the role of eye-tracking tech

Even when the ad shows up, it doesn’t necessarily mean it reaches the required objective. The average industry CTR is only 0.35%, meaning that only 35 in every 10,000 people ever engage with display ads, not to mention the blindness phenomena.

To get the most out of an advertising campaign, several critical elements must be ensured, including ad relevance, format, placement and recognition. Interactive ads are currently popular among marketers - questionnaires, hat windows, quizzes and puzzles can do a much better job of capturing viewers’ attention than just a static banner.

The question that still remains is, how can we adequately measure the effectiveness (ROI) of such campaigns?

Many video ad campaigns can be judged by the number of installs, launches, session length, and more. However, not all of them are designed for taking specific actions. In this case, measuring ad recognition comes of the utmost importance, and eye-tracking technology is here to help. Short Term Ad Strength (STAS)has shown better results in brand choice from those watching TV than those exposed to social media ads, making it a CTV viewers-oriented tech. While this technology is the subject of further research mainly due to privacy concerns, there is a high chance we will see extensive use of eye-tracking in digital advertising.

Wrapping up

In 2022-23, new challenges in AdTech and CTV advertising will rise. Recent technological achievements (VR, AR, AI and eye-tracking) will help advertisers cope with them; some of these technologies are already available today. The early adopters can genuinely benefit from using such technologies and gain the upper hand in the competitive digital advertising landscape.

With childhood brands, a walk down memory lane can be a little disappointing and somewhat distressing.

Many brands just don’t age well. Cost-cutting measures, product mismanagement, shifting consumption patterns, the innovator’s dilemma, new owner subjugation, and a tendency to rest on one’s laurels are just a few reasons why household brands fall from their lofty heights.

Honey, who shrunk the Romany Creams? One of my fondest memories of childhood treats was Romany Creams. Alas and alack, this enduring brand from Bakers (part of National Brands) in South Africa no longer lives up to its brand promise and enticing package label.

Like many products, the size, taste and texture has suffered from cost containment and margin pressures. Food technologists have created processed offerings that are far from the original classics and certainly don’t live up to their claims of being made with the finest ingredients. Experts have labeled this “shrinkflation,” and you’ll be seeing more of it this year as food makers downsize and economize.

My mail order Romany Creams (consumed one month before the sell by date) had the skimpiest layer of chocolate and the

coconut biscuit flavor was one only a canine might appreciate. Product degradation is a big issue and brands will pay the price for not adhering to enduring quality standards. No more Romany Creams for me!

And I’m not the only one. Check out social media chatter and conversational bush fires about fabled brands. In the opinion of many: Victoria’s Secret has lost its luster in lingerie. Super Soakers no longer hits the mark. Girl Scout Cookies and Breyer’s Ice Cream are not the palate pleasers of old. Vicks VapoRub must recover its arresting eucalyptus hit. And toys in Happy Meals and Cracker Jacks are just a joke.

Disillusioned consumers are not hesitant to dump or disconnect from brands that have lost their inherent value, taste, quality, allure, memorable essence or comfort.

I asked the CMO Council team if they had experiences similar to mine. Our chief content officer, Tom Kaneshige, recalled his most prized possession in the early 1980s: a Sony Walkman 2. It cost around $150, and he mowed many lawns to get it.

The small, silvery portable cassette player boasted the firstever stereo sound — or so it seemed — and delivered a

There’s a new Gmail. But can it ever really change?

magical experience. Listening to music was like being at a private concert in your bedroom. It was simple and elegant with only four buttons (fast forward, rewind, play, stop) and a volume wheel.

What happened? Competition in the portable music player market heated up. Sony made the poor decision to compete on features, its products becoming ever more complicated. Simplicity in design didn’t return to the market until Steve Jobs took back Apple in 1997 and launched the iPod four years later.

Today, Tom owns an assortment of electronic products — Samsung TV, Apple iPad, Bose headphones, etc. — and only one Sony device, a portable digital recorder for interviewing marketing leaders. The recorder is a motley of confusing buttons and hidden features that he’ll never use, a sad reminder of how far Sony has fallen in this form factor.

Just for fun and with a hankering for the days of watching Sesame Street with my kids, I looked at product categories with the letter “B.” No lack of enduring brands in these market sectors! What great examples of applied innovation and brand ovation, when you look at bikes, boats, bats, balls, batteries, beds, bottles, barbecues, books (digital), banks, and boards (skate, snow, waterski, surf, etc.).

Loyalty, repeat purchase, word-of-mouth and strong affinity are key measures of product success and emotional brand attachment. Names that come to mind include Brooks Brothers, Carhartt, Woolrich, Levi Strauss, Rawlings,

Slazenger, Mitre, New Balance, Dickies, Sperry, O’Neill, Eddie Bauer, L.L. Bean, Triscuits, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Heinz, Tabasco, Cadbury, Colman’s Mustard, Twining’s Tea, and many more.

Food and beverage companies, particularly, have realized the evocative imagery and nostalgic association of craft, artisan and boutique branding to gain authenticity and consumer curiosity. No better examples than in the wine, cheese, beer, bread, pasta, and condiment sections.

A good number have grown or diversified their customer base by leveraging new ingredients, bioscience research, materials, designs, packaging, preparation, production, or organic cultivation practices to perfect products. Berry growers, most notably with Driscoll’s at the forefront, have leveraged plant science innovation, year-round growing, protective packaging, and derivative product development to stimulate demand and consumption.

To be fair, many classic brands have successfully adapted to changing times and continuously evolved. My hats off to all those brands that have stayed relevant, real, and tightly coupled with their customers’ changing tastes, preferences, and lifestyles over many decades.

Donovan Neale-May is the Founder and Executive Director of the CMO Council, the Growth Officer Council and the Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network (www. bpinetwork.org), a global community of executive change agents driving business reinvention, IT transformation, and process improvement across the enterprise.

Podcast: What Should Your Brand Look (and Sound and Smell) Like?

Channel your inner artist because it’s design time. But it’s not enough to create something “nice.” You’ll need to determine what reaction you want your brand to evoke in people—and then use design to make that happen.

Supplementary Materials

Prof. Bobby Calder highlights Coca-Cola as a brand that has used design to evoke specific associations with customers. To watch how the brand (and its design) has evolved over time, we recommend this slideshow.

We started with a text-only version, using the encircled R to evoke a copyright symbol. This felt a bit flat for us.

So we tried a version that brought the two-layered circle from our other podcast, The Insightful Leader, into play. It was progress, but we found the BRANDS text too busy.

Courtney Spritzer and Stephanie Cartin were pioneers when they started their social media business in 2011. Not just because the medium was relatively new, but also because they were one of the few women-owned startups in the industry. That’s why, today, they use their social media savvy to build a support network that inspires female entrepreneurs of all ages. And with Mastercard’s Digital Doors program, these Citi Small Business clients can further amplify their digital presence. So businesses like Courtney & Stephanie’s can thrive in the digital world while they’re busy impacting the real world. Because their business is much more than the services they provide.

Jessica LOVE: Hey there listeners! The episode you’re about to hear is number THREE of a five-part mini-series. So again, if you haven’t already, we encourage you to listen to the FIRST TWO episodes before you dig into this one. You can find them right in our podcast feed…or, you can search for Insight: UNPACKED wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks!

LOVE: We as humans tend to think that we’re aware of what happens in our brains. We imagine ourselves intentionally processing information… drawing careful, logical connections… and coming to thoughtful, deliberate conclusions. And it’s true… our brains DO do all of those things. But…that’s not all they do.

Bobby CALDER: But the human brain is of course designed to do much more than that.

LOVE: That’s Bobby Calder, an emeritus professor of marketing at Kellogg. Calder is a scholar of consumer psychology. And as he explains, our brains essentially have two systems running all the time. There’s the rational, deliberate, selfaware system, the one that reasons through things calmly and carefully. But running in the background, there’s also another system… one that’s much more automatic… more instinctive.

CALDER: People are not really thinking about thinking. Their mind is just processing what they’re taking in.

LOVE: This second system is the one that picks up on things like shapes, and colors, and smells. And this system… has served us well throughout human history. Because by taking in these TINY details in the blink of an eye, before our conscious brain even knows what’s happening, we were able to, for example, perceive threats, and respond very quickly.

CALDER: If, you know, you’re wandering through the jungle trying to figure out if that’s a lion out on the perimeter of your area, it’d be best to just react with a flight response and think about it later.

[JUNGLE SOUNDS]

LOVE: But in our modern hyperconnected world, that part of our brains is no longer just picking up on lions. These days, many of the tiny psychological cues we unconsciously absorb… are put there very intentionally by BRANDS that want to register in that part of our minds.

[MONTAGE: BRAND SOUNDMARKS]

LOVE: So for marketers, THIS is now where the competition is. Powerful brands… the ones that cut through the clutter… they don’t just appeal to that logical, self-conscious system. The best brands also operate in this deeper part of our minds. And they do that… through design… through the colors, the shapes, the images, the sounds, even the smells that are part of that brand. Which is why developing an effective brand design isn’t just about making something that looks “NICE”. It’s about figuring out the specific reactions you want to spark in people... and then finding a way to ignite those sparks.

CALDER: What you’re trying to do is think about cues that actually could work to your advantage. So it’s not an aesthetic judgment. It’s a judgment based on a consumer psychology of what’s going to give you the kind of thoughts you want in the consumer’s mind?

[THEME MUSIC]

LOVE: Welcome to Insight Unpacked, a podcast mini-series from Kellogg Insight at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. This is season one, Extraordinary Brands and How to Build Them. I’m your host, Jess Love.

On this, the third episode of our five-part series, we’re exploring brand DESIGN. And with design, comes a different approach branding…one that’s different from our previous episodes…because it means we have to look under the hood of the human mind…to see what attracts people to something…and then tap into those unconscious processes to really draw people in.

To do that, Bobby Calder will first guide us through what good brand design means, and the process for developing and testing your own designs. Then we’ll hear how cuttingedge brands are expanding what design means in the 21st century—by tapping into other human senses. Plus our team here at Kellogg Insight gets to work figuring out what our new podcast brand should look, feel, and sound like.

[MUSIC]

LOVE: So let’s say you want to develop a brand design of your own. There are FOUR steps you’ll want to take. You will first want to consider your brand position. You’ll next want to determine the kinds of associations you want to conjure in people’s minds…ones that tie back to your brand position. Third, you’ll want to engage in “design thinking” to develop a prototype design. And fourth, you will need to test that prototype to make sure it’s hitting the mark with people.

So let’s get into it.

How should you think about what good brand design even means? Before you start thinking about colors or logos, Bobby Calder, our expert for this episode, says there’s something much more fundamental that you have to do. And if you’ve been listening to this podcast… you probably know what’s coming. Here’s Calder again.

CALDER: The first step, as always, is to really articulate very clearly the brand positioning you’re after.

LOVE: Like just about everything else, design comes back to the brand position… the statement articulating how you want your brand to be perceived, who you’re targeting, and what sets you apart. If you remember, we talked a lot about brand positioning in the first episode. That’s what good brand design means…it’s something that effectively conveys your brand position. Putting this at the forefront of your mind before you start designing is the first step in our design journey.

That brings us to the second step: figure out what kinds of associations you want your design to instill in people’s minds. Obviously, you want those associations to be tied to your brand position.

So…how do you do that? Well, there’s a real science to it. Let’s take the example of Coca-Cola. One part of Coke’s brand position is timelessness. They want to evoke the feeling that you’re partaking in a time-honored tradition. Calder says, one way they project that… is with their choice of font.

CALDER: They realized very early on that you could render that name in a Spenserian script that made it more of a signature, traditional kind of look and gave it some veritas, if you will.

LOVE: But at the same time, Coke’s design also evokes another brand value... the unique, the refreshing, the outof-the-ordinary.

CALDER: The bottle has this unique shape that signifies both tradition and uniqueness, which is very hard to convey, right?

LOVE: Finally, Coke wants to evoke joy… the feeling that you’re taking time to enjoy a CELEBRATORY moment. Which, Calder says, is where COLOR comes in.

CALDER: The color red is sort of regal and above the ordinary, and so they use red at every chance they can get.

LOVE: As you can see, all of these decisions are PAINSTAKINGLY intentional. So how can YOUR brand follow suit? That is, once you know what associations to make, how do you come up with a DESIGN that will actually deliver them?

That brings us to step three of our design process…the part that involves getting your hands dirty…and it’s this: You have to think like a designer. This is called “design thinking.”

CALDER: What design thinking is, it’s not just turning it over to a packaging designer, which was largely the practice through most of the last century for a lot of companies. What design thinking adds to the picture is, let’s actually create and make different versions of the brand design, and evaluate whether they’re actually delivering the associations that you intend.

LOVE: Now, for some people, this may sound a little scary. You may be thinking, “I’m no designer!” Calder gets that a lot. Over and over again, he’s seen people, even confident executives, freeze up when they’re asked to draw a simple picture of a logo or package design they’re imagining. But, he emphasizes, being actively involved in the design process can pay real dividends for a brand. It forces you to articulate what your brand is about... not just using words, but in visual and tactile ways. And it can bring out your creativity. Because whether you’re a marketer or a CEO, you get to think like an artist for a while.

[MUSIC]

LOVE: The best way to get started with design thinking is by making a “mood board.” A collage of images that conveys the feelings or associations that you’re hoping to evoke from your target audience.

CALDER: Just go through some magazines and pick out things that you think capture the visual feel of it.

[SOUND OF CUTTING MAGAZINES]

LOVE: As we’ve discussed on previous episodes, around the time we spoke with Calder, our team at Kellogg Insight was in the process of developing a new podcast brand… one for the podcast you’re listening to now... So, once again, we were eager to test out this advice for ourselves.

We’d already figured out our brand position, and we were ready to start designing. So we all brought in old magazines, and looked through them for anything we thought matched what our brand was going for. We cut out photos, ads, and infographics, and taped them all up on our office whiteboard. It was a real hodgepodge.

VOICE MONTAGE: It’s a blueprint of a house… the airplane cockpit, you’re just looking in… this logo imprinted on what looks like a felt book cover… mine came from a magazine called “How” magazine, which I discovered via a Google search of “cool magazine covers”…

LOVE: So once you have your mood board… what do you do with it? Calder recommends using it to develop some prototypes for your brand design. The idea is, the images on your mood board can help point you towards certain colors, shapes, fonts, and so on. And these visual elements are, of course, central to any great brand. Just think about the powerful ideas and feelings that spring up when you glimpse a Campbell’s soup can or the Nike swoosh mark. But if you want to cut through the clutter even more powerfully, think beyond just the visual. Calder encourages brands to consider how they might “design” for the other senses, too.

CALDER: Both sound and scent had not been on the forefront of doing brand design, simply because they seem a little more esoteric. But they turn out to be incredibly important. So people have recently begun to get more serious about using those for brand design. Probably the hotel industry is at the forefront of this, creating different scents for different kinds of branded hotel products. Sound has always been used— the chimes for NBC TV, that kind of thing, which is just a differentiation sound.

[NBC chimes]

CALDER: But the example I use in the book is the lion roar of MGM, which obviously has much more of an association.

[MGM roar]

CALDER: This is a real live-wire, big deal picture that you’re about to see.

LOVE: The podcast we were creating… was, obviously, an audio product. So in addition to a logo, we wanted to see if we could come up with a “sound mark”... a sort of sonic signifier that we could include at the start of every episode, to establish our brand from the get-go. So we not only used our mood board to dream up some ideas for our logo but also some SONIC ideas. SOUNDS that we thought our brand might evoke.

And based on those ideas, we put together some possible soundmarks that we thought might suit our podcast brand. Some of them were kinda playful...but urgent-sounding.

[Soundmark #3]

LOVE: We wanted it to feel like…you’re going to have fun… but you’re going to learn something really useful, too. Others tried to evoke the feeling that people were about to

hear something academic.

[Soundmark #4]

LOVE: And we tried to do that with the sound of a page turning.

And some were… something else entirely…

[Soundmark #5]

LOVE: With the goal of … getting people to think they were going to listen to something enlightening.

But like Calder said earlier, good brand design isn’t just what you think will work. Once again...

CALDER: It’s a judgment based on a consumer psychology of, what’s going to give you the kind of thoughts you want in the consumer’s mind?

LOVE: Which brings us to the fourth and final step of designing for your brand: test your design on people to make sure it’s putting the right kinds of associations in the consumer’s mind. This is the step that will help you decide if all three of the previous steps were effective. Remember them? Step one was to put your brand position at the forefront of your mind…step two was to figure out what kinds of associations you want a design to evoke in people’s minds…and step three asked that you engage in “design thinking” by creating a mood board and using that to develop some prototype designs.

In this fourth and final step, you’ll want to figure out if your design is, indeed, making people think the things you want them to think about your brand.

And the best way to figure out what kinds of thoughts your design is putting in the consumer’s mind… is to ask them. Or, at least… ask some folks LIKE them.

Calder recommends doing some kind of focus group with people similar to your target audience.Now, focus groups are standard marketing practice. Marketers typically show their design to a group of people and ask them, “what do you think? Do you like it, not like it?” And while the spirit of this idea is right… Calder says that the questions you ask can make or break your focus group. For instance, a question like “Do you like this design?”... actually isn’t likely to give you the information you need.

CALDER: Because that forces them to try to turn it into conscious thought, and they end up making up stuff.

LOVE: A better way to conduct research on your design? By getting responses that come from that deeper, less conscious part of people’s minds. And it turns out, doing this is easier than you might think.

CALDER: The way to do it is, either a drawing or the finished design if you have it, expose it very fast to the consumer, and ask the consumer to just describe the first few words that come to mind.

LOVE: So we decided to test out our soundmark prototypes using this strategy. We recruited a few volunteers who were podcast listeners and played them all of our soundmark ideas.

MONTAGE: So I just say whatever comes to mind after I hear

it? … Alright! … Mmhmm, alright.

LOVE: And after we played each one, we just had them freeassociate. And, of course, we recorded their responses so you could hear them. Here are some snippets from those focus groups.

[Soundmark #1]

ALBA: So I don’t know, just like… Tinkerbell? Like, something fleeting away?

MURPHY: It’s very bright. It’s happy. [Soundmark #2]

BYRD: It sounded very Enya-like. Like I wanna be on the sides of an Irish coast, thinking about the meaning of life.

[Soundmark #3]

JACOBSON: Ah, I don’t know, it’s kind of like a murder mystery, but not as dark?

BYRD: You know, like the detective, or the sneaky Bugs Bunny. [Soundmark #5]

MURPHY: You’re getting some revelations, you’re getting some insight into something.

ALBA: OK this is like scratching my video game mind. It’s almost like some type of box was opened or like some treasure chest or something.

JACOBSON: I literally just had an image of like walking up a staircase to nowhere, and opening up a door, and all this light comes in.

LOVE: ...and so on. As you can hear, the fact that people didn’t know what they were listening to… and that they weren’t expected to offer an opinion…made their feedback really honest and unfiltered. It felt like we were kinda tapping into that subconscious system! And, needless to say… many of these weren’t the kinds of responses we were expecting. Which was really useful to know.

So we took all of these associations that our guinea pigs had come up with and thought about which ones aligned the most with what we wanted our brand to do. And from that… we decided on our soundmark.

Final KI soundmark: A Kellogg Insight production [MUSIC]

LOVE: We picked that one because people said it evoked the kind of feelings we were hoping to evoke from them…like they were about to get some sort of revelation or insight into something. Or that a box was being opened to reveal some kind of treasure…which is a good metaphor for what we’re trying to do! To us, it hit all the right spots.

Okay, so the process we’ve walked through can be used to start designing whatever elements your brand needs. From putting your brand position front and center. To figuring out what kinds of associations your design should instill in people’s minds….To actually starting the physical process of designing…To finally testing those designs on real people. This simple, scientifically-informed strategy can help make

sure your brand design is hitting its mark. And not only that… but a powerful brand design can also open up new ways to cut through the clutter.

CALDER: These days, companies are going more to experiential ways of creating brands where you actually have YouTube videos of actual experiences. You’re trying to engage the consumer around an experience rather than just persuade them. And in doing that, the brand design can become even more important, because you’re really trying to fit the brand into the consumer’s life in a way that they’re engaged with it.

LOVE: One of Calder’s favorite examples of design intertwining with customer experience was a campaign from a few years ago, undertaken by… who else…. Coca-Cola. They realized that the red and white of their brand design happened to be the same colors as the Denmark flag. And, in FACT, if you look carefully at the Coke logo… there’s a shape in there that looks JUST like the Danish flag.

CALDER: So what they did is—in Denmark, there’s a custom to greet people in the Copenhagen airport carrying a little Denmark flag. So they simply put in these lookalike Coca Cola machines that dispensed the Denmark flag. And you can see the people greeting people using this. And, of course, people photographed it themselves, it’s all over social media.

COKE COMMERCIAL: In just one day, people took over 2,400 flags and welcomed 25,000 arrivals from more than 30 different countries. But most importantly, Coca-Cola made it possible for the Danes to show what a welcome to the world’s happiest country should look like. All thanks to a small, hidden flag.

CALDER: You see my point: that design is just propagated into the whole branding effort in a way that a bottle appearing in an ad for a few seconds would never have the same kind of importance.

LOVE: By the way, if you want to see what this branding effort from Coca-Cola looked like, you can visit our website at kell.gg/unpacked. We’ll also have downloadable mp3’s of the different soundmarks we tested out for our own brand. Again, you can find that at kell.gg/unpacked.

[MUSIC]

Next time on Insight Unpacked... great brands don’t just exist in the world. They tell a story. But how do you do that today… when there are countless channels and mediums through which to tell your story?

Mohan SAWHNEY: Our definition of what’s a beautiful painting and what you want to produce remains the same. You still want to make a great painting, except what you have now is a million colors and thousands of paintbrushes.

LOVE: Kellogg experts explain how to deploy your brand in the digital world through storytelling… That’s next time, on Insight Unpacked: Extraordinary Brands and How to Build Them.

CREDITS

LOVE: We’ll be back with the next episode of Insight Unpacked in a week… But while you’re waiting, you can check out the ads and brands we mentioned on our website at kell.gg/ unpacked. The page also has related reading if you want to take a deeper dive into the world of branding. Okay, until next week!

This episode of Insight Unpacked was written by Jake Smith, Laura Pavin and Jess Love. It was produced by Laura Pavin, Jess LOVE, Jake Smith, Emily Stone, Fred Schmalz , Maja Kos, Blake Goble, and Kevin Bailey. It was mixed by Andrew Meriwether. Special thanks to Bobby Calder. As a reminder, you can find us on iTunes, Google Play, or our website. If you like this show, please leave us a review or rating. That helps new listeners find us.

How Misleading Content Impacts Brand Perception, Favorability And Trust: IAS Report

Consumer trust in a brand has become crucial to purchase decisions. Some 51% of consumers say online content adjacency influences their trust in a brand, and 69% say their level of trust influences their decision to engage with a brand’s products and services.

Integral Ad Science released a report Wednesday that examines misleading content and how it impacts consumer sentiment and brand favorability.

The company surveyed approximately 1,189 U.S. adults in July on their perspectives and found that while 91% of consumers are confident in their ability to detect misinformation, 63% say they are likely or very likely to remember brands that advertise next to misinformation. In addition, 65% are likely or very likely to stop buying from a brand that advertises next to misinformation.

The study, Advertising in the Age of Misinformation, suggests 62% of consumers believe advertisers, agencies, and publishers are equally responsible for ads appearing near misinformation. Of that, 16% of consumers put the blame on advertisers, 14% point to publishers, and 7% point to agencies.

Advertisers participating in the survey also say they are concerned about misinformation and the impact it may have on consumer perceptions.

Seventy-three percent of media experts agree or strongly

agree that ad buyers and sellers must avoid misinformation, while 43% are concerned about the impact on their company’s reputation in the event that their ad falls close to misinformation on a publisher’s page, and 42% are concerned about consumer distrust in legitimate content and advertising in the event of an adjacency near misinformation

In their daily lives, there are many situations in which consumers encounter misinformation. In fact, 73% of consumers check digital media several times a day on their smart devices, and the same percentage of consumers agree or strongly agree that they would feel unfavorably toward brands that have been associated with misinformation.

About 80% of consumers believe misinformation is a serious issue in digital media, and 71% of regularly encounter misleading digital content. Words like fabricated, misleading, manipulated, and propaganda all come to mind.

Some 60% look to social media for information, while 57% look to entertainment; 52%, news; 50%, music; 49%, shopping; 36%, gaming; 27%, health and wellness; 24%, sports; 21%, financing; 17%, fitness; and 17%, travel.

Some 27% look at the legitimacy of the source to detect misinformation, followed by 73% look at legitimacy of the supporting evidence. About 55% consider provocative headlines; 52%, the author; and 19% humorous or satirical language.

Sustainability: who cares and what matters?

Sustainability questions remain front-and-centre for business, but new studies shed light on both the ways in which we underestimate the popularity of such measures and the effectiveness of an increasingly popular, pragmatic response: plant-based meat.

Why it matters

The climate crisis is a huge problem, but it remains politically contentious even if the reality is far less fraught. Doubts have always played a big part in halting action.

This is a major conversation in advertising as brands weigh whether talking about climate credentials (and hopefully spurring action through acting on them) is the right thing to do.

Well, here are a couple of stats we think might help you out.

What people think Americans tend to think that climate action is unpopular, even if they support it.

In an interesting study published in Nature Communications, researchers looked at what people think other people think about climate change, by asking respondents to judge the public popularity of legislative measures, including the Green New Deal or Carbon, to tackle the crisis.

Across the 6,000 respondents, most believed that only a minority of Americans (37%-43%) want action, in contrast to the between 66% and 80% of that actually do want action.

The trouble is that “People conform to their perception of social norms, even when those perceptions are wrong,” explains Gregg Sparkman, professor of psychology at Boston College, speaking to Grist, which reported the study. This, he adds, can result in a “spiral of silence”, in which people limit what they express based on their understanding of social norms – even if that understanding is incorrect. This should also go for mentions of climate in advertising – it’s more popular than you think.

The effectiveness of commercial actions

The conversation around plant-based meat comes from a noble aim pragmatically addressed: rather than convincing the world (including developing countries that are only just starting to eat meat at a regular frequency like the West has

done for decades) to go vegetarian or vegan, we may do better to replace meat while keeping its prestige.

But the methods that companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat use to build plant-based meats from the proteinup require a huge amount of processing. But how much?

While both Impossible and Beyond have done their own studies (just 11% and 10% of emissions versus animal meat, respectively), some independent research is emerging.

Ars Technica reports that Johns Hopkins University researchers have brought together a literature review of the (relatively few) available published reports which have found that plantbased meats emit just a fraction of the gas for the same amount of protein:

7% of the emissions required to produce beef 57% of the emissions to produce pork 37% of the emissions to produce chicken.

There were also significant water savings: 23% that of beef 11% that of pork 24% that of chicken

And land savings (vital if we’re ever to reclaim the huge swath of carbon-capturing forest we’ve already lost): 2% that of beef 18% that of pork 23% that of chicken

In addition, plant-based milks – often questioned for their water use – are also far better:

Soy milk uses just 7% of the land and 4% of the water of animal milk prodution while emitting under a third of greenhouse gasses.

Oat milk uses just 8% of the land and water and just 29% of greenhouse gases.

Almond milk is more troublesome. While it uses just 59% of the water it takes to farm animal milk, if you start comparing equivalent amount of protein, it uses more water and emits more gas.

Digital Empathy: Can Virtual Interactions Create Meaningful Connections?

How agencies are using AI to innovate for clients and work faster

Agencies are getting savvier at using artificial intelligence as data comes into greater focus as marketing and information technology are becoming more entwined.

Some studies back this up. For example, 81 percent of marketing and IT leaders surveyed by data platform Lytics said their two departments will become more involved in marketing over the next five years, while 66% of marketers plan to integrate AI into their marketing stack.

Experts say the use of AI is increasing as ad targeting with first-party data has become even in more demand. AI can help automate some of those processes, from creative to segmentation and potentially help agencies optimize their ad spend by cutting down on tedious tasks.

“I believe the true power of these technologies and tools are not to replace creatives, but rather make us more efficient,” said Ben Williams, TBWA Worldwide global chief creative experience officer. “There will always be a need for and value in creative direction, human curation, human refinement of an idea and decision making in terms of what is right for the brand we’re working with.”

But organizations are still experimenting with AI as the space grows, using it in a range of ways from moderating content and brand safety to implementing it in their communications strategy and creative products.

Generating content and creativity

One of the key ways agencies are testing AI is in the creative

process, using data points to drive content. With these insights, AI generators are able to create relevant content in minutes or even seconds. But this doesn’t replace the work of content creators, acknowledged Nadia Gonzalez, CMO of AI marketing firm Scibids.

“It instead gives [creative teams] a rich tool to use, ensuring more diverse content is seen at just the right time and place,” Gonzalez said. “With companies of all sizes using data science and AI-driven analytics, we’ll also see greater dynamism in things like pricing, personalization and recommendations.”

At creative consultancy Codelab303, founder Anthony Chavez said understanding their clients’ desires is the first step in knowing how to use AI for the organization. Besides using automation for time-intensive tasks, they are utilizing AI tools for producing writing, music and other visuals. The firm has worked with brands such as Ulta Beauty and Carvana.

“There are activities that machines can do much better than humans,” Chavez said. “Whether the objective is providing real-time pricing, streamlining sales bookings or automating content marketing, there is likely an AI candidate within every organization, and the question is more about revealing the role than the resource.”

Similarly, TBWA uses AI content generators to produce assets and products for some of their clients, including Nissan and Corona. Williams described AI as part of a current “creative revolution” that can inspire teams and clients to think differently.

“We’re in a creatively exciting time that reminds me of the ’90s when people, brands and the world were exploring and experimenting how new technologies, tools and services can enhance and amplify their brand or mission,” Williams added.

Over time, these automated creative tasks can make the process more efficient, he said, though he also acknowledged the need for the human touch in this process specifically taking those assets and applying the creative direction of those ideas for their clients.

Training algorithms for brand safety

Many organizations have been using this technology to moderate content or identify harmful conversations on a platform. For example, Tyson and Mindshare recently partnered with intelligence startup socialcontext.ai to create a tool called Impact Index. Using this index, the organization is measuring the social impact of its editorial content in the Black community.

The tool will mark content as positive, negative, neutral or toxic based on an algorithm made with tens of thousands of human annotations. Over time, the partnership wants to refine its editorial strategy and help shape Tyson’s media investments to be more diverse and impactful.

“Through our partnership, we’ve been able to uncover a variety of meaningful insights that are impacting our buying strategy moving forward,” said Courtney Ballantini, vp of

marketing communications and design at Tyson.

“By considering the entire article and related metadata, we’re able to get down to the rhetorical level,” added Chris Vargo, CEO of socialcontext.ai. “By training algorithms to detect desired social outcomes, instead of just marketing cohorts and taxonomies, the Impact Index is more inclusive by design. Negative content is factual in nature. For instance, coverage of Black-on-Black crime is not toxic per say, but if it’s over-represented in news, it has a negative outcome on [the] perception of the Black community in society.”

Gonzalez of Scibids said AI content moderation is becoming necessary as the amount of digital information grows rapidly. This makes it difficult for even social giants like Facebook and Twitter to police user content and adapt their policies.

“With the world becoming more digital, it will be impossible for human moderators to oversee and anticipate everything,” Gonzalez said. “As with the AI we build for programmatic media buying, content generation and the data behind it will outpace and outperform human capacity.”

A broader strategy, from customers to C-suite

As machine learning improves, some agencies are also using these mechanisms as a way to help clients build a broader communications strategy at the leadership level. A new offering at Boathouse Group is focusing on behavior and engagement, aiming to help clients drive engagement and grow relationships in media, both internally and externally with customers.

Peter Prodromou, founder and president of Boathouse Palo Alto, sees AI as being useful to identify actionable tasks and solutions for executives. While working with Kaiser Permanente, for example, he said the focus was using AI tools to reduce the amount of data the CEO was getting so that he could make better decisions faster.

“Most of what is out there right now are either automated tools that do a fabulous job of telling you how to engage, or how to create volume and social and digital,” Prodromou told Digiday. “As opposed to thinking through what somebody who sits in my chair has to do to then put it in front of a client and make it work well and drive results.”

Additionally, Prodromou believes these AI-driven tools may spur greater changes in training and management at organizations. If a client has data on complaints about the company, for instance, the agency can recommend strategies on paid media and other customer service retraining for employees. They can use the data to help the client with solutions on the inside that impact perceptions on the outside.

“One of the things that we think has been undervalued is the opinion of employees, so the tools that we’re looking at focus on employee engagement as much as they do with external constituent groups,” Prodromou said. “There’s such a rich set of places that agencies can go based on the data outputs, and I think it’s going to create a lot of ‘aha’ moments between agencies and the executive suite.”

&

Book, Line Sinker

Obsessed: Building a Brand People Love from Day One by Emily Heyward

The 2020 Porchlight Marketing & Sales Book of the Year

The cofounder and chief branding officer of Red Antler, the branding and marketing company for startups and new ventures, explains how hot new brands like Casper, Allbirds, Sweetgreen, and Everlane build devoted fan followings right out of the gate.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. If you dabble or delay, you’ll never catch up to the people who got a head start. But a closer look at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule.

The 5 Am Club by Robin Sharma

Legendary Leadership And Elite Performance Expert Robin Sharma Introduced The 5Am Club Concept Over Twenty Years Ago, Based On A Revolutionary Morning Routine That Has Helped His Clients Maximize Their Productivity, Activate Their Best Health And Bulletproof Their Serenity In This Age Of Overwhelming Complexity.

The Halo Effect: How Managers let Themselves be Deceived

Too many of the most prominent management gurus today make steel-clad guarantees, based on claims of irrefutable research, promising to reveal the secrets of why one company fails and another succeeds, and how you can become the latter.

Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, And Unlock Your Exceptional Life

For The Last 25 Years, Jim Kwik Has Helped Everyone From Celebrities To Ceos To Students Improve Their Memory, Increase Their DecisionMaking Skills, Learn To Speed-Read And Unleash Their Superbrains. In Limitless, Readers Will Learn Jim’S Revolutionary Strategies And Shortcuts To Break Free From Their Perceived Limitations.

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way To Build Good Habits And Break Bad Ones

The 1 New York Times Bestseller. Over 4 Million Copies Soldtiny Changes, Remarkable Resultsno Matter Your Goals, Atomic Habits Offers A Proven Framework For Improving--Every Day. James Clear, One Of The World’S Leading Experts On Habit Formation, Reveals Practical Strategies That Will Teach You Exactly How To Form Good Habits, Break Bad Ones,.....

Good Vibes, Good Life: How SelfLove Is The Key To Unlocking Your Greatness: The #1 Sunday Times Bestseller

The 1 Sunday Times Bestselling Non-Fiction Book Of 2021 – Over One Million Copies Sold Worldwide. Join The Self-Love Revolution With Visionary Writer Vex King And Discover Inspirational Messages And Universal Wisdom To Help You Manifest Positive Vibes.

Building Distinctive Brand Assets

Building Distinctive Brand Assets is for anyone with a brand logo, font or colour scheme, and is essential reading for those who have wondered if (or have been told) it’s time for a change. Readers will learn how to set up a long-term strategy to build a strong brand identity, and how to make use of knowledge, metrics and management systems in order to build and protect a brand’s Distinctive Assets. Building Distinctive Brand Assets is divided into three sections

B.Y.O.B. Building Your Own Brand: Branding for Designers, Brand Strategy, Identity Assets, Logo Design, Blogging & Marketing

Who is this book for? This book is tailored for professionals in the fields of graphic design, branding design, visual design, ui/ux, business administration, brand management, public relations, architecture, interior design, content marketing and communication design.

Branding Bhakti: Krishna Consciousness and the Makeover of a Movement (Framing the Global)

How do religious groups reinvent themselves in order to attract new audiences? How do they rebrand their messages and recast their rituals in order to make their followers more diverse?

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Sutherland, the legendary Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, uses his decades of experience to dissect human spending behavior in an insanely entertaining way. Alchemy combines scientific research with hilarious stories and case studies of campaigns for AmEx, Microsoft and the like. This is a must-read.” —Entrepreneur (“Best Books of the Year”)

Personal Branding Strategies The Ultimate Practical Guide to Branding And Marketing Yourself Online Through Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter ... How To Utilize Advertising on Social Media

This book contains the following themes/titles: - Branding - Personal Branding - Rebranding - Reputation Management - Digital MarketingSocial Media Strategies - Artiste Brand Promotion - Author Branding - Book Publishing - Public Speaking - Podcasting. It is your Total branding guide.

Logo, revised edition

“A logo should be distinctive, memorable and clear. To be great, it should do those things better than the rest.” – Michael Evamy

This bestselling branding bible has provided graphic designers with an indispensable reference source for over a decade. Logo is now getting a revamp with the addition of over 300 new logos in this fully revised and updated edition.

Digital Branding: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Strategy, Tactics, Tools and Measurement

By Daniel Rowles

Use digital branding to enhance your online identity and learn how to plan, analyze, optimize and measure the tangible results of your digital brand campaigns, with this second edition of the bestselling book by Daniel Rowles - a respected CIM fellow, course leader, and industry thought leader.

THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO PERSONAL BRANDING: Monetise Your Expertise, Make Extraordinary Impact, and Create Financial Success

Are you ready to stand out from the crowd in this time of our ‘new normal’ and are desperately looking around for a well-researched guidebook on personal branding in the virtual world?Uju...

by Rory Sutherland