Digital Trends: 10.15.21

BRAND PURPOSE
Ever since Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with Why’ Ted Talk went viral throughout agencies and marketing boardrooms, the concept of brand purpose has been a hot topic. Marketers initially embraced the concept like religion, but it has fallen somewhat out of favour lately. New research shows that it works (brand purpose, not religion). Richard Shotten (writer of the hugely useful book The Choice Factory) counters that the research is half-baked, and Samuel Scott takes the middle road to explain how companies should approach brand purpose - namely, committing to credible actions vs. advertising.

BRAND vs. PERFORMANCE
If you’re interested in another polarizing marketing debate, look no further than Brand vs. Performance Marketing. This false dichotomy of choosing between the two is ridiculous, but it does lead to some decent articles and presentations. I'm a fan of the content that Callum McCahon from Born Social shares on social-first brands – here is a great deck on ‘How will tomorrow’s brands be built’, and a video from the agency on a related topic. Some smart thinking in this presentation from the CMO at Trinny London on DTC marketing – marrying brand & performance, through the different stages of business maturity.

DIGITAL MATURITY
Speaking of maturity, some useful stuff on the topic of organizational digital marketing maturity from BCG. McKinsey also recently published something similar, focused on CPGs. Both have some useful ways to frame the different stages of maturity and the components that need to be in place for marketers. It’s interesting to see what's common between these – specifically, the importance of agile workflows and embedded experimentation. It’s not just the tools, it's how people can best organize to use them.

TESTING & EXPERIMENTATION
If you're exploring how to increase your digital maturity through experimentation, this is a super-interesting read from the Doordash Engineering Team blog (and yes, I know how uninteresting that sounds). They share the principles that they put in place to build a test & learn culture and scale experimentation. Here is another useful chart from @johncutlefish on how to choose from different potential experiments. And the last word on experimentation goes to Seth Godin from his blog post ‘Life by Anecdote’: “What evidence would you need to see to change your mind?”

SIRI, AIRPODS & AUDIO
For fellow AirPods users, you might be interested to know that Apple is turning the product into a health gadget. A leaked report shares that Apple is exploring ways it can be used to help with hearing loss, to check your temperature, and even correct your posture. It will also integrate closely with Siri – the voice-based service that The Verge recently criticized. I don’t know why more R&D focus isn’t on audio-based augmentation (vs. visual augmentation through AR glasses). While I see everyone walking around wearing AirPods, I just can’t see a world where everyone is walking around AR smart glasses on. To quote Larry David: "You know who wears sunglasses inside? Blind people and assholes."

DIGITAL ADVERTISING & MEDIA
The digital advertising industry is under a lot of heat for increasing costs, and decreasing targeting capabilities. Scott Galloway throws a haymaker at the industry in this piece, predicting that the industry is on the verge of collapse. If you don’t believe the sky is falling (and I don’t think Scott Galloway does judging by how often his company retargets me with digital advertising) – here are some useful pieces:

SMART ESSAYS

  • Better Briefs: Mark Ritson shares some research and his profane insights into the poor state of client briefs (90% of marketers fail to brief agencies effectively).

  • 7 Principles of Effective Marketing Communications: Really clear, smart overview of the basic components of an effective communications plan. Like a training session in a post by Tom Roach.

  • Share of Search: New IPA research that shows the that share of search (as in online search measured by Google Trends data) is linked with market share. Meaning the more share of search increases, the more market share increases. Could be a useful and inexpensive measurement approach for brands.


Finally, as many of you start to head back into the office over the coming weeks and months – consider if you have ‘Tall Zoom Energy’. People are freaking out when they meet coworkers outside of Zoom to discover that they are much shorter IRL!