1) The convergence of Brand Building and Acquisition or performance marketing as connected and important disciplines. The highly quantifiable nature of performance marketing has seen it prioritized by some clients. They now face increasing CPA’s and decreasing ROI’s when brand is ignored. Clients are now looking to right size this with the optimal balance.
We have found clients are looking for agencies who understand and can execute both -especially digitally. That means we have to understand the disciplines, plan communications accordingly, produce the appropriate content, buy the media, review the data and interpret the results. And quickly. This makes an agency smarter, more accountable, and actually more creative as you can experiment and see what works quickly.
2) We did some great work for Brawny for International Woman’s Day and Women’s History Month centered around #SHNG (strength has no gender). This builds on the brand idea of “Stay Giant” that encourages people to stay resilient in the face of life’s challenges. We built a digital program celebrating strong woman in history. And to mark the event changed the Brawny man to a woman on pack. The combination of these program generated significant awareness on a low spend. The press picked up on the idea — we were all over TV and the internet, including the Today show and Ellen (twice). This was effective for the brand in fact it even won the top Effie in it’s category this year.
3) It’s hard to answer this question as there’s so much turbulence politically and in the business world. I’m not a economist and I am an optimistic person. Having said that the stock market has had a good run and we are probably due for a correction. I do not expect armageddon and a global financial crisis but people are cautious right now. I think 2018 should remain stable leading into the midterms. After that either this year or next perhaps we will see some slow down.
4) The biggest leap is to see how the creative community has embraced data and used it in new and imaginary ways to connect with more personal and human stories. Probably the best example would be the work Spotify has done using data to analyze listening habits and use this insight to create witty headlines that tap into our moods.
5) Personally I don’t see there being a major technological shift. I think the technology is there. The big shift is that people both client and agency side need to catch up with what it can do beyond the obvious. As we embrace this our the work we do can become more personal, targeted and clever especially in the hands of highly creative thinkers.
6) We always have diversity top of our mind. When we hire we always look for a cross section of talent to interview on many dimensions. Ultimately we hire the best person for the job. The gender balance within our agency is good.
This year we are looking to establish an internship program that sources talent from different communities and areas that have more diverse cultures. We want to open the door to our company and industry to talented people who may not know much about it.