WHAT MIGHT BE WRONG WITH DIGITAL
Today (in France), giant marketing network Publicis announced it is writing down the value of its digital brands (Razorfish, Digitas and Sapient) by 1.5B USD. [1] This was part of a discussion of the company's 2016 financial results, which indicated a loss of 567M USD, mainly [...]
DAZED & CONFUSED BY PwC’s RFP
My last post (IS YOUR MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT NOW YOUR CREATIVE PARTNER?) was of interest to almost no one. Despite that, and acknowledging in advance that it is bad marketing to do so, I’d like to continue on that same thread. According to Adweek/Agency Spy today, [...]
IS YOUR MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT NOW YOUR CREATIVE PARTNER?
This could be the case if your head office is in the UK and your consultant is Accenture. The latter’s November, 2016 acquisition of creative agency Karmarama [1] caught my eye because Marketing Wilderness previously came at this same topic from a different direction (see THE [...]
WHAT DOES YOUR COMPANY STAND FOR?
A while back, I wrote a post titled WHAT DOES YOUR BRAND STAND FOR?, which looked at how brands have handled controversy and how that strategy affects brand perception. This looks at a similar and possibly bigger issue–what does your company stand for and how [...]
TRUTH & TELLING FUTURE VISIONS
A very wise person once told me, “The truth in people is not in what they say, it’s in what they do”. That would be my Auntie E, Canadian farm woman, first introduced here. Rural America clearly needed her homespun wisdom earlier this month, but [...]
A TALE OF TWO LOYALTIES
Yes, Canadians love their loyalty programs, to the point where big retail marketers likely feel that having one is a cost-of-entry marketing investment. Let’s look at two very different approaches to loyalty marketing in the grocery store segment: Loblaws’ PC Plus and Metro’s Air Miles. [...]
THE DESTINY OF ETHICAL BEHAVIOUR IN MARKETING
Right now, there’s a lot of concern about sexism, racism and sexual harassment in the marketing industry. I’d argue there’s a larger ethics issue at play here and it’s been with us in North America since the Mad Men era. Eric Mower wrote a thoughtful [...]
YOUR MONEY ISN’T REAL
When you say this out loud, most people won’t respond with much in terms of agreement or disagreement. As if they’ve heard it before and figure there must be something to it but they don’t really want to know more. This is surprising because it’s [...]
WHAT NEEDS TO BE SAID ABOUT DIGITAL
I've heard it said many times by marketing people, quietly–even sheepishly, "I'm not sure social media/search/programmatic/mobile/whatever digital really works that well for our brand/company/anyone." This takes some bravery because questioning the status quo thinking in any industry brands you as an idiot or a savant. [...]
THE CASE FOR SOLID STRATEGY
I’ve learned the hard way that you should never build a marketing strategy that is dependent on something you cannot control, or at least cannot reliably predict. Here’s an interesting new business campaign from lg2, which currently bills itself as “one of Canada’s most internationally [...]
CHATBOTS JOIN THE CONVERSATION
Trending right now in the digital marketing world is the ‘chatbot’. Despite Microsoft’s very recent and (I’m sorry, see sidebar) humorous TAY failure, the rush seems to be on to create bots that talk to humans on multiple web and social media platforms and over [...]
THE BEST MARKETING CAMPAIGN EVER
Today’s big breaking news in the marketing world is that the best marketing campaign ever is ending. Sort of. I certainly won’t be alone in saying that the Dos Equis beer brand’s ‘Stay Thirsty’ campaign, which will no longer include actor Jonathan Goldsmith as The [...]
THE END OF WORK, AS WE KNOW IT
The headline and photo on the cover of the Jul/Aug 2015 The Atlantic magazine was chilling, which is why I took so long to read it. What it predicts is not the end of work, but the end work as we have historically and currently [...]
CRAFT & AUTHENTICITY
The October 16th Globe & Mail Report on Business (online edition) carried an article titled “Beer giants’ merger comes as the industry tries to get its buzz back”. In it, and in the print version of the same story in the weekend edition following, Globe [...]
THE BRAD JAKEMAN BRAND
This post is really about what the marketing industry should be doing, just like Brad Jakeman’s keynote presentation this week at the Association of National Advertising's annual "Masters of Marketing" conference. But just like Brad’s presentation/rant, it’s hijacked by another topic: the Brad Jakeman brand. [...]
CREATIVITY, INTELLIGENCE & INSANITY
Trying to understand the relationship between creativity and intelligence has always been intriguing to me. As a young person, I assumed there was a direct relationship and my later interest may be a product of wanting to know how wrong I was. The rabbit hole [...]
SEISMIC CHANGE IN AUTOMOTIVE RETAILING
In late June of this year, ‘global growth’ consultant Frost & Sullivan published a report on the state of automotive retailing—automotive being a key practice area for the firm. Here are some highlights from the USD 5k study, [1] most of which I needed to translate [...]
HOW STEPHEN HARPER COULD WIN
There's something clearly wrong with the generally accepted theory that political marketing is different from any other kind of marketing. It isn't. Politicians and political parties are brands, though the party brand is closely related to its leader's brand. Yet for some reason, political parties [...]
PROGRAMMATIC: THE PROMISE & THE PROBLEMATIC
You know when a new (-ish) marketing topic gets serious coverage in the general business media, the topic is a fundamental one. The June 27th Globe & Mail Report on Business cover story was titled “How automation is shaking up the advertising industry” [1] and described [...]
THE IN-HOUSE PHENOMENON
The practice of companies building and using their own internal creative and media resources has been around for a long time. It has often been the starting point for small entrepreneurial companies and larger companies that focus a major portion of the marketing budget in [...]