Top marketing trends for 2018-part I

Content marketing will bring the biggest commercial impact for the brand

After years and years of talking and writing about the power of storytelling and its huge impact on the brands and businesses, it looks like business people and marketing representatives are starting to put bigger emphasize on it and see its full potential. On a study conducted by Smart Insights, content marketing is the most important trend (20 % of the respondents recognizing it), content marketing being seen as the ‘engagement’ fuel that powers all digital communications from search to social to email marketing to creating website experiences which convert.

Businesses are getting serious about treating content as a strategic resource, that means developing a customer engagement strategy using different media as shown in the lifecycle diagrams above, and at a practical level, developing content for different audiences using techniques like Personas and Content mapping.

Personalization takes the extra mile

“A key tenet of account-based marketing (ABM) is providing content tailored to specific accounts or account types. As ABM principles go mainstream, look for content personalization to proliferate. Platforms provided by Adobe and Optimizely make it possible for marketers to recommend specific pieces of content similar to the way Netflix suggests shows,” wrote entrepreneur.com.

Moreover, according to AdWeek, personalization also takes other forms on mobile and through AI. According to Robert Garf, vice president of industry strategy and insights at Salesforce Commerce Cloud, a technology like AI can help guide a consumer to better product recommendations or remind a consumer of their size for an item. “Over on mobile, personalization will manifest itself in the checkout process, the navigation to show you the right products or reminding you of past purchases and the sizes you used to buy for those items, adds AdWeek.

In e-commerce most of all, creating unique customer experiences will be an important part of the industry, and product suggestions based on past purchase history, geographic location and personal information will be key to success.

“If you aren’t in the business of saving your customers their precious time, making their lives easier and better, you risk being disrupted by a newbie who will. Personalization is the best marketing investment you could make. People want experiences that are actually relevant for them. Customers today demand the hyper-personalization of everything. Personalization is what happens when the company leverages a deep understanding of customer preference, structured and unstructured customer data, conversations in and across all channels; when companies can preemptively anticipate a customer’s needs,” wrote Forbes.

Integration. Integration. Integration

You might say, what is new about that? Experts have been talking all the time about integration in the last years. But integration is about so many factors: integrating machine learning into marketing automation, integrating social messaging apps into communications, integrating video into the customer journey, integrating content marketing into the customer journey using a customer engagement strategy, integrating search marketing into your content marketing activities, integrating marketing technology, etc.

One can read more here.

Top 5 Video Editing Trends in 2017

1.Having a video strategy is a must

Every campaign and business must have a strategy behind them in order to succeed. The time of improvisation has passed, letting its place to creativity and smart thinking, with a strong business and strategic insight. Almost 73% of video marketers admit that videos help them getting the best ROI, but 29% also admit that the lack of an effective strategy is the main reason why they don’t see bigger returns.

When it comes to video editing, a well-planned video strategy is becoming especially important and will soon become commonplace. The audience is smart and demands the same from companies and brands and, at the same time, doesn’t settle for less anymore. Moreover, the targets are getting extremely knowledgeable and know how to differentiate between a randomly edited and thought out video.

2. Video Chapterization is totally necessary

The attention span of the target audience, whatever field you may be in, has drastically reduced. Faced with a wealth of information on social media and video sharing channels, very few people are willing to sit through an entire video. Video Chapterization is a boon for video editors and creators by allowing the users to skip through the video chapter-wise to get to the relevant content faster. YouTube already allows uploaders to add chapters to their videos and is an upcoming video editing trend which will see widespread adoption in the coming years.

3. Professional Video Editing Software Will Go Mobile

This trend has already caught on when it comes to high-quality photo editing software such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, etc., making their smartphone debut 2 years back. In 2017, we can expect to see high-quality video editing software release versions of their mobile apps to facilitate ease-of-use and seamless mobility.

4. Live Video Editing Becomes the Big Thing

The rise of live video on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, was one of the latest video editing trends in 2016. In 2017, as the technology catches more place and establishes itself, live video editing should become a norm across all these platforms.

5. Edited Virtual Reality Videos, integrating with Social Media Platforms

2016 saw YouTube gain a string of competitors in the form of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. as all these platforms started making video a bigger part of their overall user experience. Video editors have now the opportunity to choose from a variety of channels found at their disposal and also publish on them. But what is more interested and suggested by the specialists is an upcoming trend which can help: VR videos integration onto these platforms.

Facebook is already developing Sorround360, a high-quality and cutting-edge VR camera which would facilitate the production, editing, and publishing for VR video content on different social media channels. “This black circular camera—with its 17 evenly spaced lenses—looks kinda like the flying droid that descends onto the ice planet at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back (though it lacks those insect-like dangly legs). Drawing images from all 17 of those lenses, it produces 360-degree spherical video for viewing both inside virtual reality headsets like the Samsung Gear (stereoscopic 3D) and on ordinary smartphones, tablets, and PCs (monoscopic). Similar videos are already popping up in News Feeds on the Facebook social network,” wrote Wired.

The digital out-of-home advertising is already blooming

The share of global advertising spend going to out-of-home (OOH) advertising remains stable at 6 percent, shows ‘Why Out Of Home Performs’, a joint study by Magna Intelligence and Rapport, IPG Mediabrand’s out-of-home agency, into OOH’s continued growth and impact. The report was based on findings from an analysis of the global OOH industry and OOH advertising in 70 countries. This is largely down to major investment in digital OOH (or DOOH), which is growing in every environment and has seen unit numbers jump 70,000 to 300,000 worldwide in two years, and revenue increase by 30 percent.

Digital OOH is boosting advertising revenues by creating more opportunities for marketers in premium locations like airports or malls, thus increasing the revenue per panel multiple times. Although digital units account for only 5% of the global OOH inventory, they already generate 14% of total advertising revenues. In fact, DOOH already accounts for 30% of revenues in some markets like the UK and Australia, and the global share is predicted to grow to 24% globally by 2021.

“With the explosive growth of digital-out-of-home (DOOH), the diversified lifestyle touch points it reaches, and the veritable mountain of mobile driven audience data, we are best positioned to accurately, and in real-time, track audiences and deliver contextually relevant messages through out-of-home media. OOH’s sustained growth on a global scale will further enable us to create engaging consumer experiences,” said Mike Cooper, Global CEO Rapport.

source: Campaign Asia

“The digital-out-of-home market is a return to advertising’s roots, quietly shifting the industry by way of re-imagining the classic advertising experience. Nearly $4.5 billion is expected to be spent on DOOH advertising in the U.S. by 2019, an increase of approximately $1.2 billion from 2016. Zenith forecasts that DOOH will grow faster globally than all other buying methods, and PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that DOOH advertising revenues will overtake traditional media spend in 2020, growing at a rate of 15% a year for the next four years,” writes AdAge.com.

According to MAGNA, OOH advertising is now a $29 billion market, responsible for approximately 6% of the $500 billion global advertising spending. However, OOH market share increases to 10% to 12% in some countries, including France and Russia, compared with other media categories including Internet, TV, print and radio. OOH market share has remained stable in the last five years, hovering around 6%. However, as part of its increasing importance in the media mix, OOH market share has increased from 8% to 10% of traditional media advertising spend, which includes TV, print, radio and out-of-home, among other categories.

MAGNA Intelligence, in partnership with Rapport, conducted an in-depth survey in 22 key markets including Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, United Kingdom and the United States. The objective of the survey was to assess OOH advertising’s sustained growth and impact during a period where offline marketing budgets are stagnating and other media categories are struggling.

Moreover, MAGNA showed in another study launched in June, that in the USA, Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising is expected to grow +2% to $7.9 billion in 2017, including cinema. MAGNA reduces its 2017 growth forecast following weak first quarter advertising sales, which grew by just +0.3% in a sudden slowdown, as seven of the last eight quarters had shown year-over-year growth of +3% or more. The 1Q17 stagnation occurred as a result of several key verticals reducing spend, including both automotive and food & beverage, which both experienced double-digit declines. This offset the continued growth from tech brands (e.g. Google, Apple, Hulu and Netflix) that have driven OOH sales over the last two years.

The DOOH market encapsulates everything from digital billboards to screens in elevators to screens on jukeboxes. Unlike internet or mobile advertising, it allows advertisers to reach target audiences in a specific, real-world context. Instead of interrupting an internet user’s online experience with an ad, it’s focused on marketing to consumers when they are “on the go” in public places or in transit. Due to its specifications, the technology has the opportunity to give to its target the message in a format that’s automated, dynamic and interactive.

“The DOOH space presents a major opportunity for creatives, technologists and consumers alike. We see DOOH’s effectiveness in the numbers: the 2016 Nielsen OOH ad study found 91% of U.S. residents age 16 or older, who have traveled in a vehicle in the past month, noticed some form of OOH, and 79% noticed OOH in the past week. The same Nielsen digital billboards study found 71% of digital billboard viewers find those ads to stand out more than online ads. Ultimately, the emerging digital-out-of-home market is groundbreaking in its interactive technology, but it’s also a return to advertising’s roots and the original purpose around advertising: to provide an engaging and useful service to the public,” writes AdAge.

Globally, in 2016, the OOH market was worth $28 billion in net advertising, according to Magna’s report, and is predicted to grow by 4 percent per year to reach $33 billion by 2021. Behind this growth is an ever-more concentrated supply-side market, in which the top international OOH media owners are continuing to expand their influence: the six main global vendors (in order of 2016 revenue size, JCDecaux, Clear Channel, Outfront, Lamar, Stroer and Exterior) now control almost 40 percent of the whole market. By 2021, the report predicts small, but significant changes, in the environments most used for OOH. Use of billboards, currently the top revenue-generating segment and performing particularly well in India, Russia and the US, will drop 4 percent from 45 to 41 in the next five years. Street furniture and transit, meanwhile, are due to grow, respectively, from 31 to 34 percent and from 14 to 15 percent as local authorities become more willing to partner with OOH vendors. A series of major contracts—typically over 10 years long—in big cities are also in the process of renewal, the first time this has happened in the era of DOOH and programmatic opportunities, which partly explains DOOH’s recent giant revenue leap.

According to APAC, while the US is the largest OOH market, valued at $7.1 billion last year, APAC countries Japan ($4.7 billion) and China ($3.1 billion) come in at second and third position and per capita spending on OOH amounts to a record $38 per year in Japan, compared to $22 in the US. Singapore spends the second highest amount per capita at $36 a year. In the Philippines, meanwhile, OOH accounts for one of the highest percentage shares of overall ad spend in the world, at 15 percent compared to the global share of 6 percent. Singapore (12 percent) and Thailand (9 percent) also exceed the worldwide average.

Singapore’s OOH ads have the highest reach range of any other APAC market, with a penetration of 70 to 80 percent of the relevant population, due to its concentrated levels of urbanisation. Australia’s have the second highest, reaching 60 to 70 percent, but neither matches the reach of OOH ads in Argentina, which are considered seen by a huge 85 to 95 percent of the population.

In Australia, DOOH represents more than a third of total OOH spend, which the report attributes to a sophisticated advertising market and a population relatively concentrated in a few urban centers.

In China, the total OOH spend about matches other markets, it is one of the top five global markets in terms of penetration of digital, led by the transit segment. By 2021, MAGNA predicts that digital growth will have doubled, while OOH growth will be stagnating, partly due to lack of interest in non-digital inventory.

“OOH’s natural convergence with other digital media has hurt most other ad forms. OOH complements digital media by amplifying and enhancing it. This phenomenon has brought additional ad revenue to OOH, while most other media have experienced revenue losses as a result of the growth in digital.OOH has benefited from other new technologies, too, such as social media and mobile. Many OOH media campaigns are now picked up on social media, which greatly amplifies the total viewership. When consumers are on mobile devices, OOH is typically one of the last ad forms they’re exposed to just before important path-to-purchase decisions,” explained Steve Nicklin, Vice President of Marketing, OAAA, for  billboardinsider.com.

The innovative opportunities provided by the digital platform have provided the OOH industry with new thinking and new ideas. Moreover, in the USA, as shown by the  USA Touchpoints/RealityMine study, OOH and Today’s Mobile Consumer, consumers spend more time with OOH than any other form of advertising media except TV. The findings are supported by the  2016 Nielsen OOH ad study that found that 91% of US residents age 16 or older, who have traveled in a vehicle in the past month, noticed some form of OOH, and 79% have noticed OOH in the past week. Their research also discovered impressive levels of engagement, with 82% of billboard viewers reporting they look at the advertising message at least some of the time; and over one-third looking at the billboard ad each time or almost each time they noticed one. The  Nielsen digital billboards study found 71% of digital billboard viewers find them to stand out more than online ads.

OOH is expanding to brand new environments. Digital screens have allowed OOH advertising vendors to penetration niche environment allowing to reach young urban population that is otherwise hard to reach by traditional media: offices, elevators, taxi, gyms, bars, retail etc. The “Digital Place-Based” segment offers targeting capabilities and programmatic opportunities. Moreover, OOH becomes addressable and experiments with programmatic. Initially developed to automate the trading of online display ads, the programmatic technologies are now being used in to buy and optimize ad campaigns on connected DOOH units.

Programmatic techniques not only optimize the workflow of media-buying but help brands deliver the right ad in the right place and at the right time, using consumer data and mobile location data. Giving advertisers the ability to plan, buy, optimize and measure the effectiveness of their outdoor campaigns through an online platform represents the natural evolution of OOH’s technology-driven transformation with many vendors developing Private Marketplaces (PMP).

Besides that, DOOH is going social. “There are two main avenues DOOH is being used to complement social campaigns, either through integration or through content creation,” says Neil Morris, founder and CEO of UK-based creative production house Grand Visual.

Gmail versus Outlook: which e-mail provider is better for you? Part II

Last week we started a bigger discussion about the best two free email providers – Gmail and Outlook – and which one might be the best to choose from your business. Now, we continue and elaborate the subject.

5 Advantages of using Gmail

1. Productivity–  It comes in handy when you are looking to enrich your productivity. Some of its many features is the built-in tasks utility that you can use to send tasks to your Google Calendar.
2. Easy usage – The provider is very user friendly. Anybody would get used to it pretty fast.
3. Customization– Gmail allows for a great deal of customization. Not only can you  control the appearance of the Gmail interface using themes, you can choose the way your inbox works by turning features such as tabs off and on. Also, use color coding and markers to customize how various messages appear.
4. Integration– Gmail integrates with a number of other Google tools. There are also many Plugins that expand the capabilities of Gmail even further.
5. Community Support– The  Gmail help center is well-organized and addresses many questions. Plus, Google maintains a  Gmail help forum, where users can ask specific questions.

5 Advantages of using Outlook

1. Ease of Use– com is easy to download and use. It has a clean, modern interface that is intuitive and easy to understand.
2. Productivity– Outlook has a built-in task tool. You can easily access the calendar from within your inbox by clicking the Calendar icon and without leaving your inbox.
3. Customization– As with Gmail, you can use themes to change the appearance of your interface. You can make some limited changes to the way that your inbox works, such as choosing where the reading pane appears and choosing to show or hide preview text.
4. Integration– it integrates with other Microsoft tools. You can use the grid in the upper left of the inbox to open other Microsoft tools. There are also many add-ins that expand your email capabilities. You can add them from within your inbox using the Manage Integrations option.   
5. Community Support– Outlook for MS Office is widely acknowledged as the standard in many corporations. Outlook.com also has a  user community. Plus, there are many helpful third-party articles and tutorials written that can help you anytime.

Ultimately, choosing your email provider is a very intimate decision and it must be based on your work and personal preferences. A free email service like Gmail or Outlook.com can be a good choice for you or your small business.

Before finalizing your choice of email providers, it’s important to ask yourself what you really need from your email service, address the main important questions regarding your type of business, dimension, usage, security, how many people will be accessing it, etc. The email service you choose depends on how you use your email and what you need from it. If you approach the decision carefully and make an informed choice, the email provider you choose is likely to be the best email service provider for you.

In other words, no matter how many pieces of advice you receive, the decision belongs to you. Because while some consider Outlook to be an upgrade from Gmail, others still see Gmail as the king of the free email providers.

Here is an opinion about why leaving Outlook for Gmail, while here, an opinion in reverse.

Decided? What will you choose?

The secret to winning a Cannes Lion

No matter the changes that the advertising world saw in the last years, Cannes Lions remains the most important festival of the industry and its awards the most wanted and desired. Therefore, it’s only natural for all the agencies and marketers to be curious to know the secret of winning one. So what are the ingredients that turn your campaigns or executions into possible winning ones? The important, big awards are given to disruptive, irreverent, totally different pieces of work that are known and loved at an international level.

Looking at the works that one and listening to several jury members, we were able to highlight some points that will give you a clearer picture on the topic.

“We felt the new integration is about transcending intermedia and really integrating into culture and society,” said Jury President Tham Khai Meng, for AdAge.com.

• Works that push humanity forward.
• Works that are deeply original and sharable.
• Campaigns that effectively impact business objectives
• New ideas that change people’s perspectives. When inspiration is combined with a  rigorous experimentation program, companies can push today’s marketing innovation.
• Intuition balanced with data, big ideas with bold experiments, inspiration with rigorous validation.
• What wins a Grand Prix in a particular category is work that represents best the category and shows the way forward to the industry.
• Old ideas reinvented and putting things in a completely different perspective
• Including a societal angle in your campaign when producing your case study.
• Going big (a strong idea, consolidated by a depth of the execution and all the content created around it). Jury members were very vocal in saying that they wanted to focus on work that had been widely shared, got press coverage and was being made by big real brands.
• The PR component of the campaign becomes more and more important. No winning campaign has been “discovered” at Cannes. All Grand Prix winners were operations that had been already widely shared and talked about in the media, and had also made an impact on marketers all over the world, even before the start of the festival.
• The concept is still the king.
• Using emotion and focus on a positive attitude. Let’s not forget that jurors are humans as well, and if you can make them feel something, you’re much closer to being in the winner’s circle. The stronger the emotion, the better.
• Short videos presenting the campaign’s idea, execution and results. The shorter and to the point as possible, the better.
• “Work that has impact far beyond its initial intention or that creates a category shift is work that stands out. It’s often not the big brands, but the truly smart, innovative, and conscious work that scores highest with the judges”. – Sue Daun, Creative Director Intebrand London.
• Inspiring creativity envy.
• Works that break the rules and do not conform to what we expect to see—work that transcends a category.