ANA Magazine

As full-time employees return to the office, they’re bringing with them new demands that go well beyond asking for a “hybrid” schedule; CMOs and marketing departments will need to adapt or risk increasing turnover. In fact, people are leaving their jobs in growing numbers, with the quit rate at an all-time high.

As people return to a post-pandemic life, marketers are going to need to reevaluate their content marketing strategy if they want to stay viable and keep their audiences engaged. Producing content that brings meaning to people’s lives is shaping up to be the biggest challenge, along with devising new measurement tools.

Marketers are adapting their messaging as the U.S. starts to emerge from a tragic period. But without a single ecstatic moment to mark the pandemic’s end, brands will have to continue to recalibrate their strategies and update their ad creative on a fairly constant basis.

A marriage of entertainment and e-commerce, livestream shopping is engaging and fast-gaining in popularity. ANA magazine reached out to Ali Fazal, VP of marketing at influencer marketing platform GRIN, to learn more about how brands can get in on the trend.

Recalibrating how their audiences consume information is just one of the key challenges facing marketers on the analytics front post-pandemic. The death of cookies and the rise of online privacy concerns will also spur brands and organizations to bring new strategies to bear when it comes to data management. First-party data awaits.

For marketers diversifying their product portfolios, the aim is to build on the existing strengths of a brand while actively engaging a new set of customers. But in pursuing such a strategy, marketers have to be careful not to dilute the characteristics that have made their company so popular already.

Consumers are much more likely to remember interactive ads, perhaps because they’re not interruptive in nature. As marketers boost their online budgets, there are several ways they can improve the performance of their interactive ads and make them a more robust aspect of their overall communications strategy.

There are deaf people who like to use sign language while others prefer using their voice. There are people hard of hearing who culturally identify as Deaf and those who do not. As brands add more assistive tools to their advertising and marketing campaigns, marketers and organizations need to keep such nuances top of mind.

Marketers and agencies are struggling with how to tackle the issues that have taken on newfound urgency in the past 18 months, ranging from spurring diversity to protecting consumer privacy to cultivating talent. The various challenges are perhaps most vividly represented by the striking number of agency reviews, consolidations, and overall account changes in the past few months.

In thinking about creating a brand identity with a modernized look and feel, it’s important that marketers update their logos without losing the familiarity that sparked a connection with consumers in the first place.

A growing number of states are moving toward legalizing recreational use of marijuana and publishers are getting more accepting of cannabis-themed advertising. Nevertheless, achieving scale will likely be a long slog for brands that want to join the fray. For clues as to how cannabis might eventually emerge as an everyday product, marketers should take a closer look at the CBD space.

As Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar posits in his new book, Quantum Marketing, companies can no longer compete solely based on their product features, pricing, or distribution network. In order to stay viable, they must differentiate their brands through creativity that is relevant to human beings, as opposed to “consumers.”

Brands for humans (B4H), or the humanization of brand persona, is starting to circulate throughout the marketing field. However companies choose to operationalize B4H, there’s a growing onus on marketers to provide clarity to the public about a corporation’s values and beliefs and how it is meaningfully acting on those convictions.

Clubhouse, the invitation-only audio-chat app that launched last year, is attracting a growing number of consumer brands. But will the app end up being a creature of the pandemic and lose its appeal as things start to loosen up and people get back into circulation?

When the pandemic disrupted its ad production, USAA turned to an innovative idea — letting the onscreen talent shoot the entire thing with no director, technician, or crew members on site.

A recent study provides brand managers with a window into how the pandemic has altered consumer behavior, as people take stock of their lives and recalibrate what’s truly important to them. With nearly 40 million Americans on the move and major changes in the workplace due to the crisis, marketers will have to recalculate their communications strategies and avoid “Before Times” thinking.

Political campaigns are chasing a growing number of independent voters, with the ad budgets to show for it. While linear TV still commands top dollar, social media channels are maintaining their share, despite bans on some or all political advertising during the 2020 election.

While diversity has been moving to the forefront in recent years, the reality is that the marketing industry remains mostly white, particularly within the C-suite. To stay viable, a growing number of agencies and brands are taking concrete steps to build more diverse teams and respond to a rapidly changing country demographically.

When lockdowns began in March 2020, they accelerated a change in consumer behavior that gyms and other fitness studios had seen coming at a gradual pace for years. Wearables, health tracking apps, and digital media fitness experiences moved to the forefront, and brands had to adapt digital technology like apps and livestreams quickly to meet customers in a new setting — their living rooms.

The pandemic has had a devastating effect on the country’s health, economy, and psychological well-being. It’s also contributed to a severe lack of trust in major institutions, according to Edelman’s 2021 Trust Barometer. As the U.S. starts to recover from the virus, people are looking to companies to fix problems the government can’t.