Everyone knows the Aflac duck. “We’re lucky in the respect that the Aflac duck can stand alone and people automatically know it’s Aflac,” said Gail Galuppo, SVP and CMO for Aflac. “The Aflac duck, to me, is as iconic as the Target bull’s-eye and the Nike swoosh.” But the insurance brand needed to reinforce its […]
Pearle Vision was having an identity crisis. Over the years, the eyewear chain cycled through around a dozen different positionings, from wholesome and family-friendly to early 2000s-era ads featuring a naughty librarian. “What happened was what happens to many brands as the marketplace changes – there is this urge to change with it,” said Pearle Vision […]
While consumers typically don’t convert after their first contact with a brand, many marketers measure as if they do. But specialty retailer Cariloha, which sells bamboo-based apparel and accessories both online and in 50 stores, is taking a different approach. Rather than assigning 100% of the credit for a conversion to the last ad a […]
Gamblers from all around the world will unite in prayer Saturday, as the Kentucky Derby kicks off and the hopes for a big payout will be either answered or not. And Ian Williams, VP of marketing for TwinSpires, has placed his own bet on the European marketing automation platform Emarsys. TwinSpires is the official betting […]
Seven years after first embracing programmatic buying at scale through its secretive Project Hawkeye initiative, Procter & Gamble is saying goodbye to long-time ad tech partner AudienceScience. In its place the company will install Neustar as its data management platform alongside an assortment of demand-side platforms, including The Trade Desk. Ad Age first reported the […]
All marketers want to personalize their messaging, but not every marketer can do it, especially without the resources to dictate who gets what message and when. That was one of the issues faced by GE-owned ServiceMax before it beta tested Demandbase’s Site Optimization tool. ServiceMax develops field service software for clients as diverse as Siemens, […]
Procter & Gamble will slash $1.5 billion from its marketing budget over the next five years, the CPG giant said during its Q1 earnings call Wednesday. At least $1 billion will come from media, specifically by lowering rates and getting rid of supply chain waste, said Chief Financial Officer Jon Moeller. P&G wants to save […]
MGM Resorts International needed to revamp its go-to-market strategy. The hospitality company, which owns hotels along the Las Vegas Strip such as the Bellagio, MGM Grand, The Mirage and Mandalay Bay, as well as properties across the globe, was operating competing media plans for each hotel brand. “We’ve always gone to market as individual resorts,” […]
Facebook may be sidling away from ad tech, but it’s cozying up to marketing automation through a smorgasbord of APIs. At its F8 developer’s conference in San Jose this week, Facebook rolled out the next version of its marketing API suite, which includes new tools to automate creative production and targeting parameters. Those APIs make […]
Marketing may be a trillion-dollar industry, but its supply chain needs a makeover, says Microsoft’s CMO. “What makes marketing such a unique case is that the labor component is much higher than any other industry,” said CMO Grad Conn. “I think there’s a lot of opportunity to optimize the way we’re working in marketing and […]
Dr. Martens, the iconic British boot maker popularized in ’80s and ’90s subculture, is adding a new sheen to its customer data strategy. Although each of Dr. Martens’ regional businesses in the UK, Americas, Europe/Africa and Asia is responsible for its own marketing, development and IP, the company’s digital efforts are converging as it eyes […]
McDonald’s is on a “mass personalization” push to attract more millennials. Even though it markets to national audiences, many of its fast-food restaurants operate as local franchises. Thus, McDonald’s must create content that resonates at a community level in addition to its national assets. To pull off an operation at McDonald’s scale requires unity among […]
Airlines are not known for their great customer service. But while they can’t control the weather, they can do something about their data silos. “We have a lot of data, but the problem is it’s mainly unstructured data sitting in different databases,” said Aurelius Noell, director of ecommerce and commercial IT at VivaAerobus, a low-cost […]
After its merger with Starwood, Marriott is doubling down on paid media to drive awareness for some of its new portfolio brands. One ad campaign, “Go Beyond,” which launched this week, commemorates Sheraton Hotels’ 80th year in business. “We are trying a lot of new things in digital including people-based marketing and sequential messaging with […]
Last year, American Express’ B2B division – a unit that delivers 40% of the company’s total billings – saw serious results from its programmatic advertising strategy. On Wednesday at the Programmatic I/O conference in San Francisco, American Express VP Tatyana Zlotsky revealed that the financial services company had quadrupled programmatic media spend in 2016. The move […]
Intel’s decision to bring programmatic media buying in-house boiled down to this: audience insights. “Our biggest aha, our epiphany, was that we wanted to have a holistic view of our customer,” Julie Keshmiry, Intel’s global media director, said Tuesday at Programmatic I/O in San Francisco. But getting that view is particularly difficult for a non-customer-facing […]
Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard continued his rallying cry for a cleaner and more transparent advertising ecosystem Tuesday at the 4As Transformation show in Los Angeles. This time, he called for simplicity in the agency business, which has become increasingly fragmented as shops pop up to service every channel, platform and digital […]
T.O by Lipton, Unilever’s Keurig-like tea brewer in France, was struggling to turn analytics from its ecommerce platform into actionable insights. “With [tools like] Google Analytics, I could know what consumers were doing, but I had difficulty knowing why they were dropping off or why they weren’t buying our machines,” said Mathieu Bernard, ecommerce lead […]
Intuit CMO Lucas Watson wants to give the financial services software company more name recognition among the Googles, Facebooks and Apples of the world. And he’s well positioned to do so, considering he last served as Google’s VP of global brand solutions and innovations before he joined Intuit last July. “As we start to stitch […]
While Nordstrom’s digital subsidiaries include Trunk Club, HauteLook, Nordstrom.com and NordstromRack.com, the retailer is trying to align around the concept of “one Nordstrom.” Initially, each property had its own data stash, which kept Nordstrom from doing cross-device targeting and comprehensive attribution. “We also didn’t have a good way to connect our online data to our […]
Until late 2016, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group had partnered with an agency to manage most of its programmatic and data capabilities. But like many marketers, the beverage brand sees value in making media its own remit. “It made more sense to pull that in-house so we’d have more transparency into how everything was working, what […]
Frontier Airlines is on a quest to facilitate direct customer relationships. To do that, it’s turned to Qubit to build a personalization engine from scratch. While site personalization and cross-channel communications used to be more of a “nice to have” for brands, it’s now table stakes for airlines like Frontier. “For a lot of customers, […]
by Allison Schiff, Alison Weissbrot, Sarah Sluis, James Hercher, Kelly Liyakasa and Ryan Joe Programmatic advertising comes in many flavors. A handful of brands load up to take their buying fully in-house. Many give their agency partners carte blanche. Other brands take ownership of the tech contracts and segmentation, while letting their agencies pull the […]
As a challenger to Shutterfly, the digital photo book startup Chatbooks has sought to carve a niche with millennials and moms since its 2014 launch. The brand’s initial marketing strategy has been mostly organic and word-of-mouth, but last fall it stepped on the paid media gas pedal and bought its first linear TV ad. Since then, Chatbooks has invested […]
Consumer packaged goods brands like Campbell’s Soup are the epitome of content and commerce. The company ladles up recipes and cooking tips through an online community, app and email newsletter called Campbell’s Kitchen. But socially distributed content increasingly is its main ingredient for success. To boost content engagement across its owned-and-operated site and social channels, […]
About three years ago, the paid TV channel AMC, known for shows like “The Walking Dead,” “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad,” realized it needed a B2C strategy. President Charlie Collier hired a business intelligence guru from Disney ABC named Vitaly Tsivin to head up a similar organization. As AMC’s SVP of business intelligence, Tsivin built a data […]
[pullquote][/pullquote]Coca-Cola’s global senior digital director has a refreshing point of view on the divide between creative and media: There is no divide. “Creative is media,” said Mariano Bosaz, whose job is to coordinate digital marketing efforts across markets and set the tone for Coke’s digital strategy. Thinking of creative and media in silos harks back […]
The move to one-to-one advertising requires a tech and data overhaul that’s immensely challenging – even when marketers have clear goals and executive buy-in. Marketers from Nordstrom, Sears and Lowe’s articulated their ongoing transformations on Tuesday during panel discussions at LiveRamp’s annual RampUp conference in San Francisco. Sears Chief Digital and Marketing Analytics Officer Kerem […]
The relationship between Lenovo and its agency partners is not what it used to be – in a good way. “That’s not to say that there isn’t a role for the traditional agency, like we have with our creative agency, Ogilvy, to drive the brand framework – we need that,” Lenovo SVP and CMO David Roman told […]
Conagra, which owns brands like Chef Boyardee and Orville Redenbacher’s, is no newbie at negotiating for better ad quality. In 2014, it started using comScore’s digital ad effectiveness tools to negotiate delivery guarantees with publishers to ensure display inventory was in view and seen by humans. But ConAgra wants both publishers and advertisers to work […]
