Partner Content

Brands are cautiously circling the metaverse, wondering how they’ll eventually engage consumers in these vast, virtual spaces. They’re factoring in the possibility that the metaverse could change everything, from their approach to creative and consumer engagement to how they measure and analyze campaigns. The metaverse will not exclusively take place with virtual reality headsets, but marketers will have to embrace 3D to participate.

One of the ironies of the past two years is that while the pandemic accelerated the arrival of what were once thought to be future trends — including marketing automation, contactless retail, and virtual reality as a collaborative productivity tool — it's also triggered an increased fondness for the past.

Changes wrought by the pandemic offer marketers the opportunity to leverage new technologies in out-of-home advertising. Here are four things marketers should consider about OOH in 2022.

There is no doubt that marketing operations — the layer between marketing strategy and customer experience — is making an impact today. However, marketing ops is ripe for exponential improvements in both efficiency and effectiveness through next-generation technology. A new study from BrandMaker offers insights into how to move forward.

As businesses continue to embrace their digital-first future, marketing executives must integrate millennial marketers in a way they never have, engaging them as key contributors in their marketing discussions. In fact, their business' survival may depend on it.

Successful leaders understand that a culture of innovation is built on strong teams. Here, corporate leaders from Pfizer, Blue Shield California, Johnson Controls, BECU, and Webex provide insight into what it takes to build those teams and inspire real change.

In this interview, Jon Gibs, global director of advertising science at Spotify, who oversees the brand’s measurement, research, and audience solutions, shares findings from recent research about audio and what it means for brands.

TV has changed. To reach the masses today, messages must appear everywhere people watch video. This means advertisers must embrace both linear TV and streaming. Cross-platform, unified impression measurement is now essential.

Showing empathy isn’t based on data. It’s a gut feeling, intuition, an understanding of how to connect meaningfully with the human on the other end. Ever since people rallied around essential workers 20 months ago, they’ve demanded that same level of transparency, empathy, and understanding from the brands they support.

There is no crystal ball to determine what’s next for small- and medium-sized businesses, but these five observations of the current landscape may help B2B marketers divine where things are going next.

Building a successful innovation engine has many rewards, from operating efficiency to greater ROI, higher NPS ratings, increased sales, and stronger brand loyalty — but it takes the right process and talent.

The convergence of traditional television and digital video presents unique opportunities for marketers but also adds a layer of complexity. The goal for advertisers is to get away from siloed approaches when it comes to media selection, as the current landscape enables companies to reach audiences whenever and wherever they may be consuming content.

When brands implement agency-management initiatives, there are usually two drivers or goals. One is to rationalize and optimize agency relationships for more effective marketing programs, another is to achieve cost efficiencies in the form of savings or spend optimization. But such initiatives can help companies address and mitigate business risk as well.

Third-party cookies, which provide brands with consumer data to create targeted advertising campaigns, are starting to get phased out already, with Google’s Chrome apps going to pasture in 2023. But CMOs can’t wait to prepare for a cookieless world. Marketers and their teams will need time to understand new tools and technologies and incorporate them into their workflows.

Without the ability to execute strategies that are both flexible and simple, marketers are missing out on an opportunity to learn about and engage their customers in the real world — to be where audiences actually are and optimize across platforms, or even to understand which digital campaigns are successfully driving offline sales.

While data and technology are still the right way to drive scale and automation, perhaps it’s time for marketers to take a step back and consider how those resources can be aligned in new ways to enlighten the customer, to inspire them, maybe even to help them grow in new and unexpected ways.

Marketers seeking to hardwire DEI into their organizations need to understand what factors into decisions their customers make, what is driving brand perceptions, and what role strategy and communications can play. To do that, they need relevant data as well as expert perspective.

In a perfect world, organizations should be able to make budgetary changes in near real-time, but only 11 percent of respondents say they can make the necessary updates within a day. It’s time to put away the spreadsheets and adopt 21st century solutions.

Out-of-home (OOH) may be advertising’s oldest medium, but time and time again, OOH has proven resilient in a dynamic ad industry that has evolved greatly over many decades.

Marketers have to change how they evaluate success in a first-party world. The question to ask now is, “How can I help this person with what they need?” Not “How can I get this person to convert?”