maggie + marketing

I'm Maggie Hilliard. I'm into marketing, media, advertising, branded content, social, startups, travel, art, sports, pop culture, and Diet Coke, among other things. I live in Chicago and I'm the Global Connections Planning Lead for McDonald's at OMD. Opinions my own. Want to connect? Reach out on LinkedIn.

[maggiehilliard]

Post-It Moment

Spotted this good reminder on Twitter. We (marketers) would do well to remember: No one is as interested in your brand as you are. Our task is to break through and influence consumers who are, in most cases, largely indifferent to brands and advertising. There are many ways to reach that goal, but strategy needs to start with truth — so get out those Post Its and take note.

[maggiehilliard]

Virgil Abloh was a visionary. Truly an icon in a world where that word gets used way too often. Even if you aren't into fashion, art, or design, where he had an outsize impact in his too-short life, you've likely felt his influence in culture. “I feel like, what’s the point of design and art if you’re not creating and thinking freely? It’s the duty of artists to dream out loud in a productive way. For me, it’s depressing if an industry based on creativity just makes decisions on a practical basis.” In advertising, we blend both creativity and practicality, art and science. It's important to remember that balancing both makes our work the best it can be. So today, especially, remember to "dream out loud in a productive way."

[maggiehilliard]

What to do about brand trust

What do you think of brand "trust"? “Trust in Brands is Illusory, just look at Facebook’s continued growth” by Mark Ritson in Marketing Week hits on a lot of what I think and believe, but I think consumers DO need to trust brands. However, perhaps it's the word itself that's throwing us off. Brand trust isn't the same as human, relationship-driven trust -- to me, it's more a System One, baseline, are-you-legitimate form of trust. The kind of trust that you can generate by, say, running ads on TV, which costs more -- but generates the perception that the brand is successful in consumers' minds. There are other words for it, but it seems like a form of "trust" to me -- and one that is well worth keeping safe from the cull.

A choice quote from the article:

"We have spent a decade pouring a large bottle of cold, system-one water over the importance of brand relationships. And the cosy, lifelong marriage of brand loyalty has been replaced with the erratic, insecure excitement of ongoing polygamy. Never has Ehrenberg-Bass been racier. "But somehow trust survived this 21st-century cull. Mention customer loyalty or brand love and an army of ‘strategists’ will leap onto Twitter faster than you can say 'survivorship bias,' to belittle both concepts. But brand trust survives unscathed and unobjected-to. After all, what could be more inarguable than trust being important to consumers and essential for brand success?"

Image via Marketing Week

[maggiehilliard]

Sustainability drives value

New research from Bain on sustainability: Brands with strong sustainability elements outgrow their competitors -- and the more sustainability elements brands adopt, the more they grow. Given shifts in consumer attitudes, this isn't surprising, but it's compelling, clear evidence that behaving ethically and responsibly isn't just the right thing to do -- it also drives results.

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Enough with Imposter Syndrome

The HBR published a piece called “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome” and it is an absolute must-read for any women who have been told they have imposter syndrome, or anyone who has said a woman they know has it, or anyone who manages women, or works with women, or....you get the point.

The whole article is spot on, but this passage struck me -- the weight of assigning this “Syndrome” to women (and especially women of color) is more damaging than we realize:

The label of imposter syndrome is a heavy load to bear. “Imposter” brings a tinge of criminal fraudulence to the feeling of simply being unsure or anxious about joining a new team or learning a new skill. Add to that the medical undertone of “syndrome,” which recalls the “female hysteria” diagnoses of the nineteenth century. Although feelings of uncertainty are an expected and normal part of professional life, women who experience them are deemed to suffer from imposter syndrome. Even if women demonstrate strength, ambition, and resilience, our daily battles with microaggressions, especially expectations and assumptions formed by stereotypes and racism, often push us down. Imposter syndrome as a concept fails to capture this dynamic and puts the onus on women to deal with the effects. Workplaces remain misdirected toward seeking individual solutions for issues disproportionately caused by systems of discrimination and abuses of power. 

Need the point in an easily tweetable nutshell? Here you go: 

Imposter syndrome directs our view toward fixing women at work instead of fixing the places where women work.

THIS! This. Read it, understand it, and change your language and your behavior to be part of the solution, not the problem. 

[maggiehilliard]

Amazon and customer centricity

It sounds super obvious. “Listen to your customers.” But obvious is not the same as easy. The practicalities of most businesses mean that, as soon as they put down a textbook and pick up their tools, they lose focus on the people who pay for everything.

-- “Jeff Bezos’s success at Amazon is down to one thing: focusing on the customer,” by Mark Ritson in MarketingWeek (link)

I've certainly got issues with Jeff Bezos and Amazon, but there's no denying their success is THE definitive case study for the value of customer centricity. It’s not easy to take it out of the textbook and infuse it into the work, but it’s well worth it. 

And "the people who pay for everything" is a great turn of phrase -- clearly contextualizes a buzzword as a so-obvious-it-hurts business imperative.

[maggiehilliard]

Craunching marmosets

A very amusing but still extraordinarily relevant anecdote from Dave Trott’s blog:

In 1853, Jose de Fonseca wrote and published a Portugese to French phrasebook.

This was such a success that the publishers decided on a Portugese to English phrasebook.

They employed Pedro Carolino to write it.

The only problem was that Carolino didn’t speak English.

This didn’t seem a problem to Carolino, he would just translate Portugese phrases into French, using de Fonseca’s phrasebook, then translate the French phrases into English, using a French to English dictionary.

So in 1855, he wrote and published his Portugese to English phrasebook.

And he was oblivious to any disconnect between the three languages.

The book, published as English as She is Spoke, is full of mistranslated gems, including these “useful phrases:”

“A horse baared don’t look him in the tooth.”

“The stone as roll not heap up not foam.”

“To buy cat in pocket.”

“Nothing some money, nothing some Swiss.”

“To come back at their muttons.”

“To craunch the marmoset.”

About this book, Mark Twain said it best: “No one can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.”

The lesson here? Games of telephone -- either with a literal telephone, via email, or through three different languages -- don’t work very well. 

If the media team gets a different version of the brief from the creatives, or if the creatives get a translation of the brief from the account team, or if the strategists and media planners don’t hear the same information at the same time, you’ll end up with plans that are as garbled and unfocused as the useless phrases above. This is funny for a pithy Mark Twain quote; it’s considerably less funny when money, time, and your team’s sanity are on the line.

One brief. Every time. No excuses. 

[maggiehilliard]

Reveal, don’t tell. Great advice for planners, strategists, and anyone striving to write a compelling presentation. 

[maggiehilliard]

Strategic planning like a Futurist

HBR posted a great article about how to think like a Futurist when your’e doing strategic planning. It’s full of good advice, but my key takeaway is this framework:

So much of the challenge I see in developing and executing successful strategic plans hinge on the need for clarity of timescale -- what and when. It can feel overwhelming, particularly if your’e in the midst of a brand turnaround, to feel everything must be done at once. The reality is, not only is strategy knowing what not to do, it’s knowing when to do it (or not). Prioritize smartly to drive the biggest, transformational change. 

[maggiehilliard]

“Compartmentalization of intellectual life is bad.”

That headline is a compelling quote from Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller in this very interesting Washington Post article about the decline of English (and history) majors, and the unlikely source calling for more people to focus on these disciplines – economists.

More:

“Traditional economic approaches fail to examine the role of public beliefs in major economic events — that is, narrative,” Shiller wrote. “Economists can best advance their science by developing and incorporating into it the art of narrative economics.”

As an English and history major, I couldn’t agree more. The skills I learned in studying those disciplines – analyzing data (whether a text or historical information), identifying patterns, understanding the structure and “why” of stories, and human relationships and motivations – have helped immeasurably in my career. Humanities majors are underrated and undervalued in the public imagination today, compared to STEM, but perhaps that pendulum will begin to swing back the other way:

That early STEM pay premium also fades quickly, according to research by David J. Deming and Kadeem L. Noray from Harvard. After about a decade, STEM majors start exiting their job fields as their skills are no longer the latest and greatest. In contrast, many humanities majors work their way to high-earning management positions. By middle age, average pay looks very similar across many majors.

[maggiehilliard]

The long and short of it in action

This talk/summary article from Adidas’s media lead in Campaign is a great example of “the long and short of it” (thank you, Binet and Field) as it plays out for businesses today. 

In a nutshell:

“Adidas has been too ‘overly focused on digital attribution’, Peel said, partly as a result of the ability to ‘look at short-term measurements in real time’.

‘But when you look at econometric modelling it's telling you something very different,’ he said. ‘It's telling you that you should be investing in video, which doesn't do very well in last click attribution, that you should be investing in TV, that out of home and cinema is driving ecommerce sales.’”

Advertising effectiveness -- “did it work?” -- is a critical question for marketers and media practitioners to ask, but all too often, it is criminally oversimplified, a tendency that has been hugely exacerbated by digital. (I won’t delve into my POV about digital vs. traditional channels in full here, but suffice it to say that for most brands, traditional channels very much remain essential, alongside digital vehicles.)

There are few things more important than understanding how your advertising investment is driving your business. Good advertising effectiveness measurement require a strong, nuanced strategy that outlines a place for short and long term measures, tools, and protocols for action. How are your various models working together (or not)? When you talk about ROAS, is it last-click or modeled? What are you optimizing on day-to-day, and what are the impacts of that decision in the medium and long-term? These and more are critical questions should be top priority for organizations looking to maximize the effectiveness of their investment.

[maggiehilliard]

Target CMO: “It Didn’t Take A Miracle. It Took Getting Back To Basics”

Great lessons from Target at the ANA, on how they faced existential threats and turned the business back into profitability:

“For [Target CMO Rick] Gomez, who detailed the chain’s turnaround in his conference presentation, that meant revamping the business and its marketing while adhering to what has been a core tenet of the business since Minneapolis’ Dayton Company created it: “Meeting our guests needs in a truly differentiated way." 

Miracles are hard to come by. Bold strategies, meaningful investment, and hard work make the difference in making and keeping your business successful.

Read the full article here. 

[maggiehilliard]

Remembering iconic author Toni Morrison today -- her work is cutting, brilliant, and nothing short of  transformative. For the working crowd, I loved discovering her writing on work in The New Yorker, four key points of which are captured above. Wise words indeed.

[maggiehilliard]

Target, Pioneer of Brand Collabs, Celebrates in Style

Today, I saw some exciting news that Target is celebrating 20 years of its stylish brand collabs with a blowout activation that will see many past pieces return.

From Vogue:

Target, your friendly American neighborhood behemoth that was never afraid to go local (as in, hip and indie) is celebrating 20 years of its Design for All program, reissuing 300 pieces from the original collaborations. This new collection will be available September 14 for a limited time, both in stores and online. A documentary about the program is even in the works. There will be a dinner at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York during October’s National Design Week Awards, and lifting the curtain on everything is a collectible Rizzoli book, being published on September 3.

Let’s get this out of the way -- as a consumer, I’m thrilled and will absolutely stalk Target.com on 9/14 to see what, if anything, I can snap up. (And if anyone knows how I can get into the dinner at Cooper Hewitt, by all means, let me know!).

As a marketer, though, this is possibly even more impressive. As the Vogue article outlines, Target has been committed to its Design for All program wholeheartedly, making shrewd -- and bold -- partnerships time and time again. This, in combination with stylish, modern advertising, new store designs, and more, has helped transform the brand from just another discount retailer to the “Targét” beloved by many today. In an insanely cutthroat retail landscape, they have managed to create a brand that stands out and can compete (for now) with the likes of Amazon and Wal-Mart. If you can’t win head-to-head, find another way -- and execute flawlessly, from store, to marcom, to social.

The lesson here, I think, is simple: Find ownable space, be bold, and stay committed. 

Photo via Vogue

[maggiehilliard]

JPMorgan Says Robots Beat Don Draper in Writing Credit Card Ads

Robots aren’t just trading on Wall Street, now they’re persuading consumers to sign up for credit cards.

This story has gotten tons of play over the past few days, most of it with headlines like the one above, from Bloomberg. This is absolutely a positive adtech story, and a great outcome: +450% CTR! But CTR is such just one part of successful marketing, and crowing headlines like this (and many others) risk missing the bigger picture (for example, what about the impact of the brand-building media that preceded this?). I also wonder: What was the added CPM for layering on this technology? Did it return its investment?

Don't get me wrong -- I love this concrete proof of AI-aided effectiveness, and all of its promise. But I am tired of media trade headlines that oversimplify what we do.

But in any case...it makes you wonder: In two, five, ten years, what will the optimal human-machine advertising approach look like -- both from a creative and media perspective? (No, I don't believe "Don Draper" is going away entirely.)

Via Bloomberg 

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McDonald’s uses stylized fries in their OOH placements to drive you to the nearest golden arches. Great representation of something that’s surprisingly difficult to nail -- creative and media alignment. Kudos to TBWA/Paris.

Via AdWeek

[maggiehilliard]

Rick Steves and Brand Behaviors

“’We value travel as a powerful way to better understand and contribute to the world in which we live. We strive to keep our own travel style, our world outlook, and our business practices consistent with these values.’

This is no 'flash-in-the pan’ brand bite crafted for a social share. This is a mission statement backed by over 40 years of consistent delivery to its ideals. It’s like [Rick] Steves himself: earnest, sincere, thoughtful and just a little bit dorky.”

—

From MediaPost: Is There Still Room In Today’s Marketing World For Rick Steves?

Yes, I think undoubtedly there is – and must continue to be – room for brands, and people, like Rick Steves: Earnest, sincere, and thoughtful – and honest in its fulfillment of its promise. You don’t need to act like a caricature of an Instagram influencer to add value, and be valuable.