Mediaboss Marketing

Once the global lockdown ends and people around the world return to restaurants, shopping malls and offices, the increased risk of doing business in a post-pandemic world will begin.

In the United States, companies are urging the White House and Congress to enact measures to protect them from legal liability so that they cant be sued if someone contracts COVID-19 at their locations and blames the company. Without that shield, which labor unions and other workers groups oppose, businesses may decide to limit their work on environmental, social and governance factors, including climate change.

At this point, the social component has become all of it, and theres no bandwidth for anything else, Vlad Edelman, CEO and founder of social-marketing platform Targetable, which bills itself as the first virtual ad agency in the world, told Karma. Itll normalize. But its going to be a tough 12 to 18 months, particularly for retailers.

Impact investors have long sought ways to measure the ESG risk of both companies and portfolios. While the term covers three areas, its been mostly synonymous with climate issues over the past few years, with less attention given to the others. But that may be changing now, with the pandemic bringing social and governance issues such as those affecting human capital to the forefront.

As the business environment has shifted in the past decade to compel companies to appeal to a broader array of stakeholders, they have given their ESG-related goals and targets priority, according to a Standard & Poors blog post. We believe companies will now likely have to signal how theyll balance near-term concerns regarding economic viability with longer-term aspirations to be more sustainable.

Sustainability issues were front and center in both the public and private sectors before the pandemic, and the world cant afford to ignore them now, according to a McKinsey report last month.

Governments and citizens may struggle to integrate climate priorities with pressing economic needs in a recovery, it said. This could affect their investments commitments and regulatory approaches potentially for several years, depending on the depth of the crisis and hence the length of the recovery.

It may be easier to make climate issues a priority for businesses if they dont have to worry about the legal liability stemming from the pandemic.

White House chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow said last month on CNBC that businesses particularly small ones shouldnt have to fear trial lawyers putting on false lawsuits. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, told Fox Radio that theres an urgent need for a liability shield to prevent years of endless lawsuits.

But in a letter to congressional leaders on April 30, the Center for Science in the Public Interest argued that a liability shield would place food workers and the food-supply chain at risk, citing outbreaks of COVID-19 in the meat industry that have already shuttered plants and caused U.S. President Donald Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act to keep them running. The group also cited medical-products companies and nursing homes as industries where a liability shield would be detrimental.

It is the failure to take reasonable measures to protect employees and the public that have led, and will continue to lead, essential businesses to close and have resulted in further community spread of COVID-19, according to the letter. Thats the true threat to the economic recovery, it said.

Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal told the Washington Post that McConnells proposal is a non-starter. Providing some kind of blanket immunity shield is an idea thats the result of the majority leaders imaginary boogeyman of a flood of lawsuits, a parade of horribles that is a political ploy, he said.

The ramifications of this battle are profound.

Getting the S part of the ESG investment wrong at this point will shut you down, Targetables Edelman said. Its become existential. You have one health scare, and youre done. Can you really imagine a brand surviving one health scare at this point?

Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

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Will COVID-19 Lawsuits Overwhelm Reopening Businesses? - Karma

The strongest performers in terms of business growth in this year's Agency Report Cards tended to share some common themes that boosted their performance in a pre-pandemic 2019. Poring through the report cards and submissions complied earlier this year, we discerned some trends that helped drive growth for some of the industry leadersand scrappy insurgentsthat helped keep their heads above water in a challenging year.

In agency submissions and interviews, we noticed agencies across the board focusing on bagging more local contracts, relying on skills inherited from agencies they acquired or merged with, building out shiny new custom content initiatives, pitching intensively to make sure they were heard and seen while maximising their win rate by focusing energies on markets with higher odds of success.

Consider the case of industry-leader Ogilvy, which stands head and shoulders above the competition in terms of sheer size and in 2019, with its pace and scale of business growth. In Asia, the global powerhouse generated nearly-two thirds of its business from business in the region, with worldwide revenues from global accounts forming 35% from its top 50 clients in the region.

Ogilvy/Ponds

In Ogilvy's submission, six of the top 10 new business wins were local contracts. "This reflects an ever-increasing trend in our business that our most important client engagements are developed on the ground in markets," the agency's submission noted.

As these business growth leaders looked to sustain their momentum, several agencies inevitably found more success in specific markets. For example, New Zealand was a bright spot for DDB, led by CEO Justin Mowday and regional chief creative officer Damon Stapleton. As well as winning a slew of new clients and growing its existing business, helping it post record growth, New Zealand scooped an impressive number of industry gongs and was responsible for the most innovations.

Elsewhere, Mcgarrybowen's Hong Kong office played the hero, bringing in local favourites Vitasoy and Cafe de Coral (an AOR appointment across Greater China), and helped its largest client, Manulife, stand out from its rivals in a new product space that opened up because of regulatory changes.

Mcgarrybowen/Manulife

With new business harder to come by in 2019, some agency executives who managed to gain traction in a tough year spoke of intensely pitching and chasing down new deals. In the media space, for example, Mindshare's APAC CEO Amrita Randhawa spoke of being being extremely proactive with clients where Mindshare has some relationship locally or globally, as opposed to waiting for pitches to be called.

After being punched in the face the year prior, Mindshare got its new business mojo back in 2019. It returned to the very top of R3s New Business League with huge gains in both the number of wins (260) and estimated win revenue (US$84.6 million), we noted. The global Ferrero win from PHDwhich applied to India, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and Philippines (but not China where Mindshare was conflicted)helped remove the sting of losing HSBC to PHD the year prior, reaffirming the networks ability to cooperate globally.

Mindshare/Ferrero

Elsewhere, David Tang, the Asia CEO of DDB described himself as a pitch junkie who oversaw his agency's ferocious pitching intent, taking part in as many as 110 in 2019, even as the competition scaled down its plans to preserve resources. This all-in approach seemed to work well for DDB, with the agency notable wins including BMW Asia, Vivo and Dairy Farm in Singapore, plus a variety of other blue-chip clients in other regions it could not publicly share.

To be sure, agencies that showed intent to grow their businesses had to word both harder and hungrier to bag new contracts and retain existing ones. For example, senior leaders attribute AKQA's new business success to less reliance on the traditional pitch process and stronger project work, forcing the team to works extra hard to prove their value.

To try to drive growth in a tough year, agencies that we felt showed strong business growth, looked for skills old and new in 2019. For example, growth in Reprises social-marketing business has been driven by the skills inherited from Society, the agency it subsumed in 2018. It now touts the largest Facebook creative study ever undertaken in the regionusing data points in new ways to advise brands on how to build creative for performance success.

However, agencies such as Iris, with its 'Insurgent Brands' initiative and UM, with 'UM Studio', found that content initiatives also helped drive business growth. In the case of Iris, Insurgent Brands, an internal strategy and ideology, along with the appointment of Rica Facundo as head of culture and Strayo de-Agarwal as lead healthcare planner also contributed to richer, more meaningful contentand catalysed business wins too. After a muted Q2, the agency recorded a strong Q3 in 2019, bagging new clients such as Netflix, Facebook, and Salesforce.

UM & Ensemble work for KFC hot n' cheezy burger

In UM's case, a key driver for growth was UM Studios, the custom content specialist division that it launched in eight more APAC markets in 2019. Led by newly hired head of content APAC Rajiv Jayaraj, who joined from Prodigious Worldwide, the division created work for several clients including Maybelline, KFC, McDonalds and Nestle. UM Studios is one of the ways in which the agency is diversifying the scope of work with its existing clients, we observed.

Many agencies that relied on their creative work to drive future business had a strong dose of purpose in their campaigns. AKQA's purpose-driven work utilising tech, for example, like its collaboration with the New Zealand Coastguard that integrated AI and data visualisation to assist the marine rescue operation centre.

Grey Group, which looked to carve out a more prominent role in the WPP network, relied on several purpose-driven campaigns like Volvos Living Seawall. First revealed in 2018, it used 3D printing technology to create wall tiles that mimic mangrove trees to hopefully, over a period of time, attract marine life back to Sydney harbour. Another was 'The Barbershop Girls of India' campaign for Gillette in India which garnered more than 16.5 million views on YouTube alone, and scored three Spikes and one Lion.

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Agencies worked harder and hungrier in challenging 2019 to drive business growth | Advertising - Campaign Asia

If you want to study somebodys beliefs and perceptions, study their behavior, especially when they are alone.Despite moments of despair and fear during this unique moment in history, I find myself incredibly inspired by how this experience offers an opportunity to understand human behavior in ways we never have before.Social distancing, isolation, and quarantine, provide a rare some may say, once in a lifetime unobstructed portal into the human experience. An opportunity for marketers to acquire a higher level of customer loyalty and advocacy than ever before.For example, what content do customers like to watch when they have no distractions? How do they engage in personal relationships when no demands are pulling them away? What do they want to eat when their regular workout routines are disrupted? How do their private personas differ from their public personas? How does isolation create visibility into the core of who your customers are?These points of view offer a look into a new Marketing paradigm.

Brands that can tap into and implement these insights into their Marketing strategies will come out of this pandemic stronger and more resilient than ever. They will be the ones with a clear competitive advantage the ability to transform the way they engage their audiences forever.

Read more:4 Best Video Game Marketing Strategies

Everything today is about COVID. And the current conundrum among marketers is how do we communicate during this time? How do we connect? How do we balance the need to remain relevant and top of mind, while demonstrating compassion and empathy? Should we sell? Should we hold back? Its a hard balance.Some are getting it right.Some are failing miserably.

Marketers, by their very nature, focus on the problems directly in front of them. Driven by economic demands, they utilize machine-based connections and historical data to inform reactive, immediate decision making. With a heavy reliance (or rather addiction to) machine-assisted audience collection platforms (the walled gardens of the world), marketers are often too focused on short-sighted gain. Short-sighted gain almost always comes at the sacrifice of genuinely understanding the causal relationship between the customer and the data.

The uniqueness of this pandemic is making machine gathered and historical data less actionable. Marketers are being forced to take a more holistic view of data and the humans behind the data, in real-time. Marketers are also being forced to think through multi-faceted Marketing strategies that address the needs of today, in ways that build long-lasting brand resonance tomorrow.

This means marketers will need to use human engagement, not machines, for collecting customer insights; take more proactive risks (in this less reactive climate) and do more things that connect directly with their customers.

Human nature dictates that people tend to only accept, believe and surrender to the thoughts and actions that are equal to their emotional state.

And right now, people want empathy. They are asking for it. According toKantars COVID-19 Barometer, 70% of consumers are seeking reassuring messages from the brands they trust, and 77% want guidance for navigating the new normal. Not surprisingly, social media consumption has skyrocketed 61%, but what is surprising is the content and tone of the conversations. They are becoming less superficial and getting more personal.

To communicate with consumers in todays COVID landscape, marketers must focus on identifying their audience(s) current need states and understanding their emotional drivers.

Heres how.

Marketers have lots of historical online and offline behavioral data on their audiences. But now, thanks to captive content consumption brought on by COVID-19, marketers also have direct insight into how their audiences work, engage in content, and consume tangible or digital products while in isolation (or while practicing social distancing).

Mapping historical data with real-time behavioral trends of today gives marketers a more robust unified view of their audience(s). Marketers can then leverage this information to define distinct cohorts and build future-based predictive models, unlocking limitless opportunities for enhanced value exchange.

Read more:How Precise Location-Based Advertising is the Future of Mobile Marketing

The process illustrates a six-step blueprint for deriving customer intelligence signals in the current landscape.

Work with your agency or data partner to align what data you currently have in your arsenal. What online and offline data points can you see today? Are you able to combine and normalize this data, or is the data in silos? What media signals can you access? Do you have a DMP where you can unify this data against media signals?

Once you have a more unobstructed view into your dataset, run a correlation analysis to establish what data points are trending and align with the use cases most relevant to your brand.

This enrichment process can be done with your brands customer data platform, or with your agency/consulting partner in a data clean room. Use the correlation analysis gathered from step one to build your high-level cohorts. Refine these cohorts once first-party customer data is introduced.

Establish a direction on how to define need states for your brand a work back process that aligns brand positioning, creative and qualitative data. These needs states should then be validated in a quant methodology using context-based definitions from past media engagement.

Where are there glaring opportunities that your brand has not yet considered? Is there an opportunity for rapid messaging and creative changes? Work with your internal creative teams to pull through these opportunities, insights, and recommendations.

This is a data, creative and psychological intense process using the derived insights from step four to develop two to three loyalty triggers per cohort. Map your messaging to these cohorts. It will be essential to lead with empathy; weave in comfort, entertainment, and responsibility, and focus on a non-traditional value exchange for your audience(s) (less selling, more giving and helping).

Lead with a digital-first strategy. Ride the streaming wave (OTT and CTV). Enrich data with a messaging resonance score for ongoing media execution.

COVID-19 has created uncertainty for marketers who rely too heavily on walled gardens to tap one-dimensional audience data. Marketers who use this pandemic as an opportunity to create a new, higher level of empathic value exchange and consciousness will be the ones to better connect with their customers today while preparing for the new normal of tomorrow.

Read more:Time To Get Social: Prioritizing Social Marketing Strategies

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Human-To-Human Marketing: 6 Steps to Cracking the Consumer Code - AiThority

New York, May 06, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Post-pandemic Growth Opportunity Analysis of the Marketing Automation Solutions Market" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p05891685/?utm_source=GNW

MAS serve the small- and medium-sized business segment and the enterprise segment.MAS are a global technology, and this document focuses and analyzes trends in North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia-Pacific for the MAS market.

There are more than 30 vendors for global MAS.Through primary and secondary research, this document explores the drivers and restraints to the adoption of MAS for businesses during the global COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2025.

The virus originated in China in late 2019 and has spread globally in the last four months, resulting in national lockdowns, shelter-in-place declarations, social distancing, and an increase in remote working for businesses and educational institutions. The document presents two likely scenarios in the conservative and aspirational forecasts from 2020 to 2025 with the COVID-19 pandemic causing a market slowdown and a recovery period of 18-24 months for the conservative forecast, and an assumption that the COVID-19 virus is contained by August 2020 and the global markets will be able to fully recover by the end of 2020 for the aspirational forecast. Each forecast examines drivers, restraints, and trends that will lead to more businesses investing in MAS during the pandemic and the likelihood of future growth past the pandemic. The document also touches on a unique growth opportunity within the market and enterprise solutions industry as a whole with a predicted opportunity size in five years and a timeline for action. The document seeks to answer the following questions: What will be the effect of the global pandemic on global MAS adoption? What technology trends will be focused on during the global pandemic? How will the drivers and restraints impact the growth of the market? What are the conservative and aspirational forecasts for the MAS market from 2020 to 2025? What are customers looking to do with MAS adoption in the wake of the global pandemic? How will MAS help the global pandemic effects? What unique growth opportunity is in the market today? What are select MAS vendors doing to help their customers in the wake of the global pandemic? What is the future outlook of MAS adoption after the pandemic?Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05891685/?utm_source=GNW

About ReportlinkerReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.

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Post-pandemic Growth Opportunity Analysis of the Marketing Automation Solutions Market - GlobeNewswire

Covid-19 has forced influencers to swap portraits of themselves in front of waterfalls in Bali with shots taken on the couch in their living room, and quirky coffee shops and upmarket gyms have morphed into homemade latte art and living room workouts.

But beyond the change in content is an even more significant shift. The marketing model that makes up most of an influencers income is falling apart, with brands pulling out of lucrative sponsorship deals and advertising revenue plummeting. As we face a new economic era, it is unclear whether the aspirational lifestyle lauded by influencers can emerge unscathed. Could coronavirus provoke a reconfiguration of the influencer age?

Over the past decade, influencer culture has reshaped how brands reach consumers the influencer marketing industry was worth around $6.5bn in 2019, and almost half of marketers spent more than 20% of their budget on influencer posts. The combination of accessible celebrity and trusted endorsement allowed companies to target their customers in a more tailored way.

Payment for posts reflected this businesses pay influencers with more than a million followers $10,000 or more for a one-off post endorsing their product.

Yet despite creating an innovative new model that defined a digital era, the influencer industry was not without its issues. A saturation of social media marketing recently led to backlash, with many stars being forced to refocus their brand to appear more authentic after fears that they were alienating their fans with heavily posed and paid-for posts. High-profile scandals also rocked the industry, such as the Gabriel Grossman and Marissa Casey Fuchs surprise social-media proposal, which the Atlantic uncovered as having been pitched to brands, heavily staged and sponsored, and the now infamous Fyre festival which saw influencers being paid thousands of dollars to promote an event that had barely been organized and left attendees stranded on a beach in the Bahamas.

2020 should have been the year for influencers to get back to their followers desire for realness. Instead, because of Covid-19, many influencers are being forced to focus on simply surviving 2020s economic downturn rather than taking the chance to grow their businesses.

Due to the disruption in business operations a lot of companies are facing financial challenges, explains Shane Barker, a digital strategist who offers consultancy services for companies using social media to boost their brand, and influencers hoping to reach the right brands and monetize their follower count. In light of that, they are cutting down on all unnecessary expenses. Some are barely able to pay their employees, let alone hire influencers.

One of Shanes clients, Chris Ruden, is a bodybuilder and amputee who uses his platform to share content on overcoming adversity. As one of many influencers who relies on speaking engagements and events to make up some of his income, Ruden has already experienced disruption as a result of coronavirus measures.

I had 28 events scheduled for the year; 95% of them had been postponed, he says. It has made me hit the drawing board to find different ways to give me value that are pandemic proof. Ive resorted to funny content and eased up on motivational content after all, you cant inspire someone and fire them up just to watch Netflix.

While some popular influencers have attracted death threats after sharing images of glamorous trips despite social distancing measures, Barker believes that more sensitive content is crucial in order for influencers to future-proof their brand.

Influencers should create content that resonates with the current situation that people are in, he says. This does not mean that influencers from all industries should just start writing and talking about the pandemic. What I mean is that they should create content relevant to their niche, but keeping in mind what people are going through.

People want to see home content right now as its relatable and we are all in the same boat

Although 69% of brands expect to decrease their advertising spend this year, the amount of time that we are all spending on our devices also means that social media engagement has increased. In a time of crisis, people are also looking online to feel less alone. Lifestyle influencer Em Sheldon recognizes that and has tailored her content accordingly.

Ive always loved sharing workouts and healthy recipes, so for me its been more of an adaption, she says. People want to see home content right now as its relatable and we are all in the same boat. With more eyes now online, people are scrolling more than ever, so actually, as long as its fitting, authentic and tasteful, now is a great time to work with influencers.

Some even believe that this renewed awareness of authentic versus paid posts and the shift away from brand promotion is a good thing.

Biased product reviews were threatening to poison the well as people started to become disenchanted with self-serving influencers who had lost their objectivity, says Michael Solomon, marketing professor and author of Social Media Marketing. Where possible, influencers need to revert to a more altruistic message and find ways to help get through the crisis with constructive suggestions. In times of instability, people look to trusted sources and those that deliver will be remembered after the crisis is over.

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The pandemic and the influencer: will the lifestyle survive coronavirus? - The Guardian