Mediaboss Marketing

To decide on the Creative Marketing honorees, weve assembled a lineup of seasoned and respectedmarketing execs on our jury:

Jury chair: Joan Colletta, senior director of global brand marketing at McDonaldsTim Ellis, chief marketing officer, NFLTanja Grubner, global marketing and communications director, feminine care, global brand, innovation and sustainability, EssityKathleen Hall, corporate VP brand advertising and research, MicrosoftFrancine Li, VP, brand management and marketing, Riot GamesAlex Lopez, global president and chief creative officer, McCann WorldgroupMinjae Ormes, VP of marketing, global brand and consumer, LinkedInNathaniel Ru, co-founder and chief brand officer, SweetgreenRicardo Viramontes, chief creative officer, Springhill CompanyAmy Weisenbach, senior VP, head of marketing, New York Times

The Creative Marketing awards honor the following categories:

Brand CMO of the YearBrand Manager of the YearBrand Chief Creative Officer of the YearSocial Marketer of the YearBest RebrandBest ROI: Work that WorksBest Product Launch of the YearBest Brand Launch of the YearD-to-C Brand of the YearFounder of the Year

The final deadline to submit for both Ad Ages A-List and Creativity Awards is Jan. 11, 2022.

See full descriptions of all the Creativity Awards categories here.

Enter the A-List and Creativity Awards here.

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Creative marketers: Submit now to Ad Age's Creativity Awards - AdAge.com

Whether its International Podcast Day, Hamburger Day, or Eat an Extra Dessert Day (yes, this is a real thing) - these days, there seems to be a celebratory date for everything, and these events can also be valuable prompts for your social media marketing efforts, and aligning your messaging with thematic elements to gain additional traction and traffic.

Keeping tabs on upcoming celebrations can be a great tool for your content planning, providing helpful inspiration to complement your brand messaging, and enhance connection around specific, related themes.

But in order to do this, you need to know when all the various days are coming up which is where this listing from Socialinsiders Maria-Mirabela Ganta comes in.

Maria has provided a handy, quick overview of some of the key events of note throughout the year. Worth keeping on hand, in order to help you map out the key opportunities for your business.

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Key Holidays and Celebrations of Note for 2022 [Infographic] - Social Media Today

Many small and mid-size businesses had to close their doors for good because of the pandemic. With people highly conscious of the need for social distancing and self-quarantining in their homes, an enormous volume of shopping dollars shifted to digital channels. Looking back, we wondered if there were alternatives to this fatal end game.

Imagine if these main street retailers had employed a successful online digital marketing strategy. Could things have been different? Could some of these retailers sustained sufficient volume to cover costs and weather the Covid-19 storm?

According to research published by WebFindYou, the opportunity to create digital strategy exists for all, but92% of businesses in the U.S. dont have the budget to afford what it terms True Digital Marketing.

Apparently, small, and medium-sized companies are losing out to bigger companies with larger budgets and resources to do digital marketing the right way. With inflation just reported to be at a 30 year high, main street retail will struggle even more in the coming months, and the availability of marketing dollars needed to compete with online giants will become even more scarce.

The ability to create and maintain an effective digital strategy is not only about reaching out to customers to generate sales. Another huge benefit is the ability to protect the retailers brand from over reliance on the dominant social media aggregators like Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Recently, these channels experienced a global outage with millions of businesses financially impacted due to their heavy reliance on Facebook and Instagram Ads as their main source of lead generation and Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp as their single line of communication with new and existing clients via their website.

A more holistic approach to digital marketing protects against these outages, meaning when one digital channel goes down, businesses still have other digital channels available to generate leads and maintain communications.

We wanted to dig deeper on the meaning of True Digital Marketing and gain more insights into the research conducted by WebFindYou. We reached out to Robert Blankenship, founder and CEO ofWebFindYou, to get some answers.

Wise Marketer (WM): You did some research which returned many interesting findings, among them: 92% of businesses in the U.S. dont have the budget to afford True Digital Marketing. Can you share more about the research and share key insights?

Robert Blankenship (Robert): According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, there are 30 million businesses in the United States. This number consists of both non-employer businesses (80%) and employer businesses (20%).

Non-employer businesses (80%):

Businesses with 0 to 4 Employees (12%):

Businesses with 5 to 19 Employees (5%):

Businesses with 20 to 500+ Employees (3%):

Doing digital marketing the right way requires the proper resources, people and technologies, which at a minimum will cost an average of $3,000 to $5,000 per month. With this data, it is clear to see why 92 percent of businesses cannot afford True Digital Marketing.

WM: Why is having a well-constructed and executed online digital marketing strategy so important for main street retailers? Could it have really made a difference in their fortunes during the pandemic?

Robert: Having a well-executed online digital marketing strategy makes a huge difference when it comes to increasing leads, sales, conversions, and ultimately, revenues.

Even before the pandemic it was important to have a good online presence. COVID escalated the need for this and in most cases, the businesses that had an established online presence and a solid digital marketing strategy fared better than the ones that didnt.

The problem is, many of these small and mid-size businesses are working with small marketing budgets and cant compete with large companies with large marketing budgets.

The purpose of WebFindYou is to help businesses implement digital marketing in the right way and at a price point that fits their budget. Their budget shouldnt affect their ability to be successful online. My vision when creating WebFindYou was to revolutionize the digital marketing industry because there are too many companies selling a bag of goods to people and not delivering on their promises. I want to help businesses get on the right path with digital marketing.

WM: Tell us a little about WebFindYou. What do you do and how do you do it?

Robert: Our mission is to make successful digital marketing simple and affordable for everyone. Equally, we want to fix the tainted digital marketing industry that often gives businesses only pieces of the complicated digital marketing puzzle based on their budget restrictions.

In our opinion, the digital marketing industry has become complex, time-consuming, costly, and oversaturated with influencers, experts, and gurus who make a lot of promises for a paycheck but often produce little to no results. In short, the digital marketing industry has become tainted. And its only getting worse with more paid ads dominating Google Search, Apple iOS privacy updates making Facebook Ads less efficient, and the list goes on and on.

My vision was to create an affordable technology that small to medium size retailers could understand and easily put into practice, even with no or limited digital marketing experience.

WM: You use the term True Digital Marketing in your work. What does this mean to you and how do you apply it to help small businesses so that when one digital channel goes down, businesses still have other digital channels producing leads?

Robert: True Digital Marketing means doing everything digital, and it is required to maximize the true power of the Internet for any business. This allows each element of the complete digital marketing puzzle to support and help maximize the other. Without True Digital Marketing, businesses miss out on having a steady stream of leads and sales that they can rely on, especially in times of crisis.

As a business owner, you need to make sure to build a solid infrastructure for your business. You never want to put all your eggs in one basket, because when that basket drops, youre left with a mess. In some cases, a mess you cant recover from. If social media is a big part of the day-to-day function of your business, you cant risk these unexpected outages.

We provide tools to ensure that your social media experience will never be interrupted when a social media platform unexpectedly goes down, a post is unexpectedly removed, or a social media account is temporarily suspended.

WM: How can main street retailers learn more about affordable digital marketing?

Robert: True to our digital approach to marketing, we offer online classes. We recently held a Digital Marketing Master Class. Anyone interested in watching the class can get immediate access here. By the way, we will also be hosting classes covering more in-depth information on ecommerce, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, paid search, social media, how to start a digital marketing business and more, with dates to be announced later.

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How True Digital Marketing Could Have Saved Retail During the Pandemic - TheWiseMarketer.com

The NCAA has changed its Final Four logos and basketball tournament social media channels. It's a seemingly small change that might have a big impact on the continued effort to equalize the men's and women's games. Getting both tournaments equal branding has long been a goal of advocates for women's athletics.

If you're going to make them separate, then make sure that the marketing for both tournaments is equal and fair, IU women's basketball coach Teri Moren told IndyStar in November. If you're not going to do that, then youve got to bring us together, because to do that for one and not the other is wrong. Our women deserve that.

The men's and women's Final Four each have their own logo now, as well as their own Twitter handle. Previously, there was only one Twitter account (@FinalFour) which branded itself as the "official" handle for the tournament and only tweeted about men's games.

It is another step towards fixing issues that have persisted for years, but that only got major exposure during last year's NCAA tournament. A TikTok from Oregon's Sedona Prince showed disparity in weight room quality between the men's and women's tournament bubbles in Indianapolis and San Antonio. Soon, disparities between food, gifts and even COVID testing began to emerge.

'Can't be a flash in the pan': A TikTok made women's basketball equality go viral. What's next?

An NCAA gender equity review byKaplan Hecker & Fink LLP highlighted these disparities, and more, suggesting changes that should be made. In September, the NCAA announced that it would use March Madness branding for both the men's and women's tournaments. The women's tournament expanded to 68 teams in November, the same number as the men. This change is another step in the right direction. Unequal marketing of the tournaments has long been a concern. There have been discussions about eventually combining the men's and women's Final Fours at the same location.

Follow IndyStar trending sports reporterMatthew VanTryon on Twitter @MVanTryon and email him story ideas at matthew.vantryon@indystar.com.

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The NCAA changed its Final Four logos. It's another step for women's basketball equality. - IndyStar

You likely saw a post like the one below more than once over the holiday season a friend, family member or someone else you follow on social media sharing the results of their rapid tests.

And, whether the motivation is cynical or altruistic, one psychologist says the trend can go a long way towards normalizing the process health officials have touted as an important tool for preventing the spread of COVID-19.

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You are conveying that you can contract the virus, which can carry a bit of a stigma, which I think speaks to why its so beneficial to be doing this, said University of British Columbia Associate Professor of Psychology Azim Shariff.

It does de-stigmatize the communication of your virulence to others, which I think is a positive thing.

Shariff says that, similar to when people posted pictures of their vaccination stickers when that campaign debuted, social learning theory is at play.

A non-cynical interpretation is that people are motivated by virtuous processes its the right thing to do and theyre doing it because its the right thing to do, Shariff said.

Even if people are motivated to virtue signal to show that they themselves are virtuous, the byproduct which is a very positive byproduct is that it communicates to the community what actually is virtuous. In this case that youre being responsible, testing and isolating.

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Jane Caulfield, a lecturer at the University of Saskatchewans Edwards School of Business, also drew a comparison to the vaccination campaign and its stickers.

We are all consumers and we make consumption choices when we pick what we want to listen to, eat and buy, and often those choices are influenced by the groups we associate ourselves with, she said.

Thats the in-group we want to be a part of and the out-group we dont want to be a part of. So having the stickers or your rapid test and posting it on social media is a way of signaling to other people I believe in this stuff and it allows people who want to be part of that in-group to be a part of that interaction.

Caulfield says its especially valuable when people publish photos showing positive test results.

Theyre really demonstrating that theyre part of that in-group and helps consumers make choices, she said.And its not an organization pushing that. Its people doing what they are proud of and showing that which creates an in-group on its own without it coming from some authority. The sticker and the rapid test trends really did happen from the consumer, from the people.

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Both Shariff and Caulfield caution that posting these photos online could have the opposite effect as well.

The downside could be that it makes people feel ostracized, or on the outside, but from a marketing perspective, they may not be your target market. So the act of sharing that information isnt talking to people who are ultimately willing to use the rapid tests to begin with.

Shariff adds, though, that the benefits of normalizing healthy pandemic habits and reducing stigma is an overall positive.

I suspect there may be a contingent of people they disagree with and dont like positing their tests and theyre going to roll their eyes. Theres also the effect that it could diminish how seriously people take the virus if they say so may people have this so its not a big deal,' he said.

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There are a couple of danger zones but by and large because of the social learning effect, because of the way it destigmatizes and normalizes not only getting tested but showing others that you have the virus, I think its a good thing.

2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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Posting those rapid test results online can help normalize the habit, experts say - Globalnews.ca