Marketing Futures Pulse

Tips for sustainable marketing

If your team has been looking for a way to use AI more to support creative strategy, ChatGPT may actually be helpful for you. While it may seem counterintuitive to have an AI chatbot enhance creativity, the technology can help gather data, research, use the dialogue to plan campaigns and meetings, headlines, key words, copy, and images.

The metaverse is being presented as an exciting opportunity for brands and consumers alike, and while some consider it an exciting future, there are likely more challenges ahead than real and sustainable business and content models.

Besides the fact that the app is more ideologically similar to gen Z's wants, the app has reached "3.3 million downloads globally in Q1 of this year, a 390 percent jump from Q4 of 2021, according to data.ai. It sits in the No. 1 spot for free apps in Apple's App Store," as reported by Marketing Brew. These numbers are telling an important story: Gen Z is tired of promoting stilted selves.

Digital audio consumption has steadily risen over the last 10 years. There were 7.9 million music subscribers in 2014; this figure eclipsed 82 million in 2021, according to Statista. Weekly digital audio listenership has increased by over 38 percent in the past decade, with an audience of 192 million, reported by Insider Intelligence. Advertisers have been quick to take note of this shift. Global digital audio ad spend is forecast to hit $6.78 billion in 2022 and rise to more than $10 billion by 2027, via Statista

Watching television, scrolling through social media, and working on a laptop, are all inherent parts of everyday life. But screen time is becoming excessive. The average American spends over 7 hours per day looking at a screen.

Google defines micro-moments as occurring, “when people reflexively turn to a device –increasingly a smartphone – to act on a need to learn something, do something, discover something, watch something, or buy something. They are intent-rich moments when decisions are made and preferences shaped.”

What is a circular economy? A circular economy aims to reuse its waste in a sustainable system of production and consumption. It’s an improvement on the old-fashioned, awful-sounding “take-make-waste” linear business model that begins by extracting resources from the earth and ends with piles of waste in a landfill. It’s a model that—you guessed it—goes full circle to minimize both resource use and waste production.

Despite significant investment in AI, only 8 percent of banks are able to apply predictive insights from their machine-learning (ML) models to inform campaigns. And although banks know that time to insight matters, just 16 percent have standard protocols for algorithm development. By codifying, unifying, and centralizing key analytics and supporting processes, these organizations generate 5 to 15 percent higher revenue from their campaigns and launch them two-to-four times faster. The secret to at-scale personalization isn’t just the analytics. It’s the ecosystem organizations set up to use the analytics well.

Restaurants suffered greatly at the hands of COVID-19, when only take-out could feasibly be an offering. Add staff shortages, supply chain issues, rising inflation, and gas prices to that blow, and one can see that restaurants have not had an easy time regaining their footing. With the pandemic mostly behind us, consumers’ pent-up desire for dining out has increased, and despite the other setbacks the industry is facing, restaurants are seeing a resurgence, as QSR magazine recently reported. The struggle is not over yet, however, and an agile approach to marketing a restaurant brand is key; the resources here look at some strategies restaurants can take to help their recovery.

As audiences on major social sites continue to grow, opportunities (as with any other media type) for monetization grow as well. This is especially true for sites like Facebook and Instagram, where advertisers, according to Axios, are paying more for ads, and, as analysis from Ignite Social found, organic reach keeps dropping. In 2022 no brand can eschew social media marketing, but some brands can’t afford to go all-in on paid strategies, and an organic approach leaves little visibility. The solution?

Since their introduction, video games have been widely popular, but they saw a special sort of rise during the pandemic’s lockdowns, where sites like Twitch and the introduction of the Metaverse brought gamers to more sophisticated, communicative worlds that also fostered communities.

With the (slow) erasure of the third-party tracking cookie, zero, first, and second-party consumer data has emerged as one of the main ways to collect consumer information. But with this large stock of private customer data, marketers now need a secure way to share that data with their partners, while simultaneously maintaining their users’ privacy.

No matter which side of the cancel culture debate you may fall on, the impact it has for brands hasn’t essentially changed from any other previous form of accountability companies have faced. Consumers expect brands to act, at the least consistently with the values they espouse, and studies continue to show that a brand’s reputation and trust among consumers increase when they’re doing good for society, whether that’s through sustainability initiatives or in the ways they’re helping communities.

Net0 defines net zero emissions as “the balance between the greenhouse gases that have been emitted and the offsets that have brought those emissions to zero. Zero carbon is when no GHGs were emitted to begin with. Successful carbon reduction strategies include lower emissions targets every year until zero emissions are achieved.

Marketing to any demographic includes looking at sets of trends and profile basics to craft a message that will reach them most effectively (the explosion of articles discussing "marketing to millennials" is an easy way to see this in action). The issue with reducing groups of a similar generation, race, or preferences to a target on a marketing calendar, however, is that it forgets the individual, and betrays strong consumer preferences for personalization.

As the well-worn proverb says, “necessity is the mother of invention,” the pandemic hit retail spaces particularly hard, pushing consumers to use e-commerce more as social and safety protocols increased. While there may be more stores open now, shoppers have found that the convenience and speed when ordering items online is invaluable even long after the protocols have gone.

QR Codes are an extension of the barcode, and were first introduced as a way for manufacturers to scan larger amounts of data quickly. By 2011, retailers and trade shows were able to take advantage of smartphone technology to utilize QR codes in their inventories, badging, and check-ins — and slowly there emerged consumer usage in the form of online offers.

SEO was a lot simpler in a less-crowded marketplace; you could optimize by keyword for your product, industry, or customer demographics and watch your traffic grow. In 2021, however, not only is the online space left with little metaphorical keyword elbow room, but search engines have gotten smarter to keep up with consumer demand.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the quarantines that followed quickly changed the way brands could sell and show off their products, fostering a need for marketers to get inventive with their tactics. The online space also evolved during this time, becoming increasingly dominant and the perfect place to welcome creativity beyond banner ads, video, and social posts. Enter livestreaming, a tactic already well established by gamers and other communities as a way to connect with one another in real-time. What better way for marketers to connect with consumers with so many traditional methods inaccessible for the foreseeable future? Similar to a television informercial or home shopping network, livestreaming offers all of the benefits of those models but cuts out production costs and call-center intermediaries. While brand livestreaming is mainly centered in Asia at the moment, there is a huge opportunity and an eager audience ready for marketers to connect with everywhere else. Read on for more information about the livestreaming trend, how to do it, and what other brands have done in this space.