David Ward

Plant-based food products continue to expand, along with a marketing strategy that goes beyond a green or environmentally correct message and focuses on what consumers crave: taste. Big brands like IKEA and Disney join the fray.

Marketers for smaller brands don’t have the same resources as their counterparts at bigger companies. But there’s still a great deal that smaller brands can learn from their larger competitors when it comes to maximizing their marketing activities.

While an outside perspective can be helpful, fresh ideas readily exist within an organization. The onus is on upper management to encourage those executives who aspire to be the CMO.

Fueled in part by a lack of transparency in the media buying process, the marketing industry faces a troubling rise in the number of fraudulent websites and bots that convert illegitimate traffic into ill-gotten revenue. The problem is so pervasive that it’s begun to skew data and give an inaccurate view of the digital marketplace. For brands, it means keeping an eye on where the money goes is more important than ever.

Ad-skipping technology and a sea of content options are creating multiple opportunities for product placement.

While the glory days of glossy periodicals may never return, magazines still capture the attention of highly desirable consumers — and new methods to measure marketing effectiveness are helping print advertising prove its worth.

Adapt or die. In order to succeed these days — and bolster their overall value — CMOs must be true agents of change.

As brands boost their spending on influencer marketing programs, new tools and metrics are emerging to maximize investments in this rapidly growing area.

Older generations are beginning to join millennials in opting for streaming services like Hulu and Netflix over linear TV and it’s creating new opportunities for brands. But the complexity and fragmented nature of the space are presenting some challenges as well.

Understanding what consumers think of your brand is critical, but it’s not always an easy thing to determine — or understand. Here’s how marketing experts at Hershey, USPS, and Huge, among others, measure consumer brand affinity.

Multichannel attribution marketing — identifying each consumer touchpoint across both online and offline channels on the path to purchase — is a relatively recent phenomenon and many brands are trying to figure out how to make the best use of it.