Mediaboss Marketing

It is unusual -- but not unheard of -- for comms leaders to get promoted into high-ranking marketing roles. It happened in November 2020 in the automotive sector when seasoned PR pro Tara Rush was elevated to chief marketing officer at Audi of America, moving up from chief communications officer.

Infiniti is portraying the promotion as an outside-the-box pick meant to capitalize on Orthmans skills as an advocate for diversity and inclusion, lifestyle storytelling and digital media. Such traits are becoming more important inside the automotive sector. Car brands are notorious for big-budgeted TV campaigns, but quick-moving social media campaigns are taking on new relevance as brands adjust to the media habits of younger buyers.

Infiniti is a brand born to defy conventions and Wendy has a flair for big, convention-breaking ideas. With this change, Infiniti is once again making a daring statement by truly integrating marketing, social and communications into one vision, Olga Filippova, divisional general manager for Infinitis global brand, sales and marketing, said in a statement.

Orthman will report to Filippova, as well as Infiniti Chairman and Senior VP Peyman Kargar.

Infinitis global marketing is handled by Publicis Groupe, which won the account in March.

Infiniti, like most auto brands, has seen sales slide due to supply issues stemming from the ongoing microchip shortage. The brands U.S. sales plummeted by 39 percent in the third quarter, according to Automotive News.

Originally posted here:
Why Nissan's Infiniti brand is merging marketing, PR and social media roles - Automotive News

Campaign: ThighstopCompany: WingstopAgency partners: Publicis Groupe (marketing), Leo Burnett (creative), MSL (PR)Duration: June 21 - September 8, 2021

Restaurant chain Wingstop launched its virtual restaurant, Thighstop, which offered a nationwide, delivery-only menu featuring crispy thighs in 11 flavors.

Strategy

Wingstop has been looking to move beyond the wing for a while, part of its whole bird strategy, which isnt just more economically viable but better for the environment.

Thighs were the perfect place to start, according to Megan Sprague, Wingstops senior director of PR. After testing the concept last year, we found that guests loved the juicy crispy flavor of thighs, and that you eat them like a wing, she said. Overall, they were a hit.

So when the pandemic radically altered consumer restaurant behavior, shifting revenue to online ordering, Wingstop decided to launch a digital brand focused on chicken thighs. The rewardintroducing chicken-lovers to the tastiness of thighswas swift, and the risks and costs were relatively low.

Tactics

To make the Thighstop menu, the company used its Wingstop locations as ghost kitchens for the brand.

Thighstops marketing never tried to hide that the brand was associated with Wingstop. Orders were delivered in Wingstop bags with a Thighstop sticker over the logo. The company wanted to show consumers that just like wings, chicken thighs were delicious and easy to eat.

Thighstop launched on June 21 and was announced through an exclusive interview with Bloomberg.

To launch the virtual restaurant, Wingstop partnered with rapper, record producer and Wingstop franchisee Rick Ross. In addition to being featured in digital, TV and social marketing, Ross was available for interviews with reporters.

Press releases, which were sent to journalists in advance of the launch, were tailored to each outlet. For business and trade publications, messaging centred on the companys whole bird strategy as well as the ongoing chicken wing shortage.

Meanwhile, entertainment reporters received an announcement that focused on Ross involvement, while releases to tech journalists highlighted Thighstops all-digital brand launch.

Thighstop orders were available through Doordash and Thighstop.com. The Thighstop items are still available, but on September 8, they were rolled into Wingstops menu.

Results

The campaign generated more than 1,700 media placements, including coverage in CNN, CNBC, Food and Wine, Forbes and Bloomberg. Two of my favorites were Thighstop being included in The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and Late Night With Seth Meyers, Sprague said.

Wingstops central campaign points were covered in 84% of earned media placements, while 99% of earned stories had a positive sentiment.

See the rest here:
Amid a chicken wing shortage, Wingstop turns to thighs - PR Week

By Alex Bozhin

Marketing tech, or MarTech, encompasses a huge number of digital tools that help businesses achieve their marketing goals. Its also an important sector to watch for growth.

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Even with consolidations and acquisitions, nearly 1 in 5 of the current MarTech solutions is new on the scene. To me, this paints a clear picture of a thriving industry.

As we continue to become a more tech-centric society, the numbers show that MarTech will keep playing a pivotal role. That said, there are some obstacles that need to be addressed. Below, I outline why privacy concerns matter, how sustainable growth can be achieved through social media, why investors are so keen to back MarTech startups, and where I think the industrys future is headed.

MarTech is now a $121 billion market, so the challenge of ethical data collection is serious.

Nobody minds when aggregated data makes life easier with personalized user experiences, streamlined workdays or a better bottom line. However, theres a general feeling of discomfort from the public when they understand that were tracking and analyzing personal data.

In response to these unsettled feelings, regulatory bodies are stepping up consumer protections. This is good for security but frustrating for marketers. Remember the EUs GDPR directive? The entire internet had to race to adapt, costing more than $9 billion.

Statistics show that the demand for data protection has skyrocketed, and brands like Apple are already implementing privacy updates in response. These policies will keep coming, so we need to be proactive.

Did you know that 67 percent of internet users have no idea what their countrys privacy and data protection rules are? Worse, 79 percent of internet users worldwide feel they have no control over their data. This means its our job to educate and empower the public.

So, lets change the narrative around privacy. For my startup, I decided a proactive approach was best. The sooner that MarTech and AdTech startups can build transparency into their brand strategies, the sooner theyll be able to move forward and tackle other challenges.

Social media is the final frontier for businesses looking for new avenues of active user growth. Facebook last year expanded 7.3 percent, while Reddit, Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat added 20 percent.

Consumers want to find your products, interact with your brand and share your content. The trick is knowing how and when to give them what they want. For example, my startup launched in 2020, and thanks to our strong social media presence, weve booked 100,000 clients globally. We make sure that our services are visible across all major platforms, and we make engaging our potential client base an integral part of our marketing strategy.

The MarTech sector is flooded with VC money right now. Even in 2020, top projects signed six-figure deals.

Here are a few notable ones:

Another omnichannel customer engagement platform, Emarsys, was acquired by SAP in October 2020. This shows that the current buying spree includes global corporations too.

Even my startup piqued investor interest. We raised $2 million in 2021 and strengthened our relationship with firms like TMT Investments and YellowRockets.

A recent poll shows that 69 percent of marketers believe theyll be expected to produce better results with fewer resources from now on. Because of this, only brands with budget-friendly, effective solutions will thrive.

Another avenue to pursue is client education. According to research, even skeptics will bring in MarTech if marketers can show them how it improves their marketing strategy.

Finally, interconnectivity is going to be essential to successful digital transformation. If youre still trying to compartmentalize, youre going to get left behind.

Right now, businesses of all stripes are poised to invest in MarTechmarketers just have to prove that its worth their time and money. The industry is at 8,000 companies and growing. Build-on acquisitions are gaining popularity, and global reach is becoming a make-or-break part of marketing strategies.

Despite the challenges of handling privacy concerns and seeking new avenues of growth, theres still so much exciting, unexplored territory to cover in MarTech.

Alex Bozhin, founder and CEO at Postoplan, is a serial entrepreneur with 15 years of marketing experience. In 2020, he founded Postoplan, an AI-powered system for marketing automation in social networks that helps to create, publish and promote content in social media and messengers.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

Stay up to date with recent funding rounds, acquisitions, and more with the Crunchbase Daily.

Originally posted here:
Marketing Tech: Why The MarTech Industry Is Thriving Despite Several Challenges - Crunchbase News

When marketers Paul Benigeri and Geoffrey Woo were at their former companies, in food tech and e-commerce infrastructure, respectively, they experienced how manual and repetitive digital marketing workflows were, especially as the number of disparate and unintegrated marketing tools grew.

With the goal of making their own lives easier, they formed Archive.ai in March to build technology that connects databases and distribution channels so they talk to each other and to address what they believe will be the future of marketing building with you versus the talking at you approach the founders believe traditional digital marketing is doing.

Its two initial products are Archive, a Shopify app that automatically detects, classifies and saves Instagram stories relating to a brand, and Archive Communities, which makes influencer marketing programmatic so that brands can more quickly scale their community-building efforts.

Archive.ai dashboard

In fact, Woo, who is chairman of Archive.ai, said via email that the company is pioneering a new approach to digital marketing it calls community marketing.

This takes ideas from influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, loyalty programs and community management, he said. Much of the existing services operate in silos and dont inter-operate well. Also since Apple banned the Facebook tracking pixel with iOS 14 in recent months, a lot of the paid social media advertising has become exorbitantly inefficient for most e-commerce companies.

Before incorporating, the company was a profitable project, according to Woo. Its list of enterprise customers includes Four Sigmatic, CEO Benigeris former company Health Via Modern Nutrition and some household names he was not ready to say yet. There are over 40 alpha testers on Archive App with more than 200 people on the waitlist. The company expects to go live with Archive App before the end of November.

However, to properly build a next-generation community marketing technology company, as Woo put it, the company decided to go after some venture capital. Today, it announced $4.068 million in funding led by Stripe.

Also joining in on the round were Lux Capital, Sugar Capital and Anti Fund, as well as a group of individual investors that included Ramp CEO Eric Glyman and CTO Karim Atiyeh, Attentive CEO Brian Long and CPO Andrew Jones, Applied Intuition CEO Qasar Younis and Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue.

With the new funding, the company tripled its headcount to 36 people, and its monthly recurring revenue grew 58% since April. The company also intends to triple the engineering team to focus on workflow automations and machine learning to assist and streamline marketing tasks and decisions.

In addition, plans include building out a marketing team. Kwan Kim recently joined Archive.ai as head of growth after being the first digital marketing hire for Recurly and scaling the company to its acquisition by Accel-KKR in 2020.

Archive gives businesses an easy way to review and, more importantly, understand what their customers are actually saying the north star for every smart company, Chris Sperandio, corporate development lead at Stripe, said in a written statement. Were excited to invest in Archive and, in doing so, to help their users grow internet-enabled commerce.

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Archive.ai aims to free marketers from their monotonous workflows - TechCrunch

Social media marketing has started to take up a very big space in every organization in budget. The more we talk about social media marketing, you also get to understand how data is important for businesses. With the help of the data, that demographic can be understood based on which the more customer details can be tapped out.

Likes and preferences of the customers are really an important factor when it comes to selling a product. Digital marketing is all about understanding the customer preferences and selling the same product to them.

In this article, well find out how social media marketing can help your business grow at an accelerating pace. Social media marketing has really gained a lot of prominence compared to the fact that there are multiple social media platforms.

The numerous social media platforms actually are a bit confusing for digital marketers too. Finding on the right platform to use can be quite tricky.

It is with this reason that we need to be very cautious about which social media to use and which one not.

So, without wasting any further time, let us dive straight into the advantages of using social media marketing.

With social media marketing comes an ocean of data. This data can be leveraged to find out even more about the consumer perspective preferences and dislikes. This is really helpful when it comes to driving out whats best for the business.

This data can eventually help in reducing a lot of marketing expenditure. The marketing expenditure reduction will result in improvement of the return on investment moreover also driving profitability.

2. Enhancing the network effect:

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If youre looking forward to build a brand and social media marketing is a right network. It helps in identifying who are going to be your next potential customers. When a particular user goes ahead and likes any of your product and his friend circle goes around and looks into it, then you can find its potential customers from there.

Network effect is like the next big thing which is taking over the world of digital marketing. If you still think that you havent really understood how social media marketing is going to work, its high time you go ahead, revisit your old books and see where social media marketing can be applied.

3. Understanding of your competitors:

You should always be knowing what your competitors are doing. Social media is one such platform where you can understand that trend of area competitors is slowly moving.

Based on this trend, you can find out how you can go ahead and position the next digital marketing idea. It is for this particular reason that you should be very aware of what your competitors are doing.

If youre a small business, it is always best to follow the bigger fish in the sea. You can always learn from your competitors and it is the best way of growing as well as encapsulating many more ideas.

Though there are many agencies all over the world who are looking forward to giving best results for social media marketing. If you are from Australia then look for a reputed SEO agency in Australia that provides social media services besides SEO. The expansion of digital marketing in 2021 has been an eye opener for many businesses. Not only are they able to save a huge chunk of money, but theyre also able to generate excellent returns. If your business is still not gone digital its high time, you take it.

See the article here:
Social Media Marketing, and its benefit for businesses - TechiExpert.com