If digital transformation is a top priority for your organization in 2017, you may be overlooking a critical factor to success: engagement. Because digital transformation within an organization requires systemic, enterprise-wide change, everyone at every level—from the mail room to the C-Suite—needs to feel motivated and empowered to make that change. Research by The Conference […]

If you can’t believe your eyes when you see the new Buick, then you’re in for a big surprise with “Not So Pee Wee Football” ad set air during Super Bowl 51 starring Cam Newton and Miranda Kerr.

We knew you’d want more, watch the behind scenes footage below…

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Ad Agency: Engage M-1

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What marketers need to know this week: How much Super Bowl ads cost, what Heinz is doing for its employees this Smunday, why Google deleted 1.7 billion ads in 2016, and more.

On GlobalXplorer, people around the world will team up to map satellite imagery of Peru. Image: GlobalXplorer

The power of the crowd has helped digitize the world’s books; it maintains the online encyclopedia many of us check by default. The crowd has fueled our understanding of the connections between neurons in the brain and contributed voice samples that will become a simple phone test for Parkinson’s.

Incredible things happen when people around the world team up to work on important tasks. Today, a new one for you: searching satellite imagery to help find and protect ancient sites that modern archaeologists don’t know about.

In today’s TED Talk, Sarah Parcak explains that hundreds of thousands of archaeological sites around the world are vulnerable to looting because archaeologists, and often governments, don’t know about them. The winner of the 2016 TED Prize, Parcak is a pioneer of satellite archaeology, which operates like a “space-based CAT scan.” Her team takes imagery captured by satellites and processes them using techniques that allow them to see patterns in the vegetation and soil that might signal manmade features, hidden from view. Parcak’s work has helped locate 17 potential pyramids and more than 3,000 potential settlements in Egypt, and led to major finds in the Roman and Viking world.

Searching satellite imagery once it’s processed is easy. But Parcak’s team is small. That’s where you come in. With the TED Prize, Parcak has built GlobalXplorer.org, a citizen science platform to crowdsource this work. Launched today, GlobalXplorer’s first campaign will take users to Peru, where they’ll help search 200,000 square kilometers of satellite imagery, from the highlands around Machu Picchu to the deserts around the Nazca Lines.  

“We’re the generation with all the tools and all the technology to stop looting, but we’re not working fast enough,” says Parcak in her talk.

Users will search 200,000 square kilometers of satellite imagery. Large sections like this will be broken into smaller tiles. Archaeological features like this stone structure on a hill will be visible. Image: ©DigitalGlobe 2017

GlobalXplorer is a collaboration between the TED Prize, National Geographic and DigitalGlobe, which provided the satellite imagery broken down into search tiles the size of a few city blocks. When users log on to the site, they’ll get a tutorial on how to search satellite imagery for signs of looting. Users will level up as they search and unlock photos, articles and videos from National Geographic’s archives that will give them rich context on the ancient cultures of Peru. When they train their eye, users will move on to comparing imagery from two different time periods, to look for signs of sites threatened by urban development. Finally, users will learn to search imagery processed with a technique called “Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI).” It makes healthy and unhealthy vegetation appear in different colors, and users can spot patterns in less-healthy vegetation that might be growing over ancient ruins.

To keep the location of potential sites safe, GlobalXplorer tiles do not contain any location data and are displayed to users in a random order, one at a time, without the ability to navigate or pan away. Peru’s Ministry of Culture is a close partner in the project and will put in place plans to study and safeguard potential sites. On-the-ground partner the Sustainable Preservation Initiative will help, and engage local communities in protecting sites.

“It’s not the Pyramids that stand the test of time — it’s human ingenuity,” says Parcak in her talk. “The greatest story ever told is the story of our shared human journey. But the only way we’re going to be able to write it is if we do it together.”

TED’s always on the hunt for new speakers with new ideas. But in our latest project, we’re offering speakers something unprecedented: anonymity. Our hunch? Inviting people to share ideas without having to reveal their identity might allow for an entirely new category of talks.

Today TED and Audible announce the release of Sincerely, X, an original audio series that features speakers sharing their important ideas in TED’s signature format, anonymously.

Episodes include speakers who need to separate their professional ideas from their personal lives; those who want to share an idea, but fear it would hurt someone in their family if they did so publicly; and quiet idealists whose solutions could transform lives.

Hosted by June Cohen and executive produced by Deron Triff, both TED veterans, along with executive producer Collin Campbell from Audible, each episode is shaped to bring out the importance of the idea.

“The reach of TED Talks has expanded wildly over the years,” said Cohen. “But one question always nagged us: How many ideas worth spreading remain hidden because people can’t speak publicly about the very thing they feel the world needs to hear? It’s an exciting moment for us to now have Sincerely, X as a vehicle for unearthing and sharing just this kind of idea.”

The first three episodes are now available within the Audible Channels experience, with additional episodes coming out every week. (Get the Audible app.) You can listen with an Audible or Amazon Prime subscription. Learn more here … and watch the trailer:

The temptation for most businesses and indeed most brand managers is to look for growth right across their portfolios. But that’s far harder and far less effective than it sounds. The secret, it seems, is focus.

The paths to extracting greater value and growth for brands are well-trodden. Perhaps too well-trodden – because many are now unquestioned assumptions. Brands looking to grow are expected to advertise heavily, grind out efficiencies, invest in areas that show promise and push their portfolio out to demographic segments in the hope of gaining their attention and their loyalty.

The problem, according to Strategy+Business, is that flat economies have stalled market growth, cost cutting has become more difficult, and the cash to drive meaningful innovation has become harder to source as investors look for returns within timeframes that are increasingly short. So fewer and fewer brands can afford to blindly speculate across their entire portfolios in the hope that some areas will prosper and that those wins will make up for losses elsewhere. Yet they persist.

“In many markets, one-third of customers or products typically generate more than 100 percent of the company’s value, while one-third create no value and the remaining third actually consume value,” the authors note. Lovers of segmentation may see this as a repudiation of Dr Sharp’s views on brand growth. But, before you rejoice, look a little closer. The secret is not segmentation, per se. It’s profitable segmentation: resourcing those areas of the portfolio that deliver the greatest returns with services and experiences that help those customers feel recognized and rewarded.

The observations are timely because they remind marketers that brand lift is never uniform, and for that reason, brand managers and owners should be careful in how they identify and support the brands that are in their care. Instead of treating all their brands as precious, brands should work from heat maps that reveal where and why value is concentrated in terms of return on internal resourcing, comparative market profitability and likely future value based on dependable market trends.

In the ebb and flow of today’s markets, some brands will thrive, some will remain steady, some will stall and some will decline. By investing in those brands that are displaying the strongest growth and rethinking those that are not hitting their benchmarks, brand owners can ensure that every brand is working to its full potential. That’s important because it turns brand portfolios into meritocracies, driven by a 6 point framework of actions:

1. Resource generously – winning brands should be rewarded with priority. They should receive a greater share of the resources to achieve targets that are set higher than other brands in the portfolio.
2. Maintain strongly – steady evergreens should be tasked with keeping the middle-earning part of the portfolio accelerating over at a good period. Done right, these brands underpin returns and provide much-needed reliability.
3. Re-energize decisively – brands that are flagging should be restructured so that they are able to better achieve their returns. That may mean actively looking for new efficiencies, repositioning of the brand to appeal to a part of the market with higher yields, or the injection of new value to boost market interest.
4. Simplify aggressively – too many brands can cause a company to lose focus. I often find that businesses are reluctant to rationalize their portfolios because they don’t want to send a signal to the market that they are cutting back. The key to distilling your portfolio is to do so confidently and with intent.
5. Remove objectively – these are the hardest decisions, but often the most important. Taking the brands that are holding you back out of your portfolio via divesting, parking or dis-establishing not only lifts your returns, it also enables you to redirect those resources to your top performers.
6. Introduce regularly – just as your sales teams must look to bring in new leads, so you should be looking to extend or expand your current brands where that makes sense, and to introduce new brands to test market viability. Those extensions, expansions or new brands should then be evaluated via the five criteria above to determine next actions.

Interesting to see Revlon choosing to prioritize their brands over their distribution as their key growth driver. Reach is vital – no-one’s denying that – but at a time when consumers are less picky about where they shop, ownership of targeted relationships through brands matters more than ever. You need to be as close to your customers as you can. But you also must represent as much of what your customers want as possible. Valuable is much more profitable than available. More brands really need to get that.

Don’t let the future leave you behind. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Architecture Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

The titles we give to people are incredibly important indicators of what we consider their role to be within a certain context. Doctor, partner, mother, father, supplier, recipient, driver, pilot – the list is endless but has a common theme. A title indicates what we expect from someone, which is why the term ‘consumer’ is not only inaccurate but is irrelevant for any business who wants to develop beyond an industrial era model.

The Industrial Economy

In the industrial economy the prevailing value chain was simple.

Production > Market > Consumption

Roles were clearly defined, where businesses would produce goods or products, these would be brought to a market, and would then be ‘consumed’ by consumers. This linear process was simple in its structure, if not always in practice. Each actor in the process would be responsible to either creating value or consuming value. In the industrial era value chain the consumer would ‘eat’ value, being the final link and end of the chain of value.

Even within this seemly simple industrial value chain, the consumer began to derive value themselves from their consumption. In contemporary consumer culture, the development of self-identity became an important function of consumption, where ‘identity is defined through the exchange, possession and use of goods’. As people shaped their identity through consumption, they identified themselves partly through their role as consumers. The consumer itself became an ‘important social ‘role’ or ‘identity’, the economic analogue of the ‘citizen.

Post-modern individuals are on a never-ending identity quest; a quest to define the meaning of their lives. Consumers go to markets to produce their identity – specifically their self-images.

As the role of the consumer developed, we began to see the introduction of what was termed the ‘productive consumer’ or the ‘active consumer’. This label acknowledged and indicated that the consumers role was no longer solely that of ‘consuming’ value but that they also had an active, productive role too.

The role of the active consumer has been defined in many ways, ‘co-creation’, ‘peer production’, ‘immaterial labor’, ‘crowdsourcing’, ‘prosumer’ (‘prosumer’ being producer/consumer) and the ‘value constellation’. These approaches primarily consider the active consumer as contributing ‘human capital’ or ‘intellectual capital’, which can be described as ‘knowledge that can be converted into profit’.

As the economy and the roles of consumers have developed, so the economy has become increasingly intertwined with culture, making the role of the ‘consumer’ multi-faceted. Economic life has become increasingly ‘culturalized’ and culture is more ‘economically inflected’.

A Digital Era

The capitalist economy is no longer structured through the temporal sequence of production, markets and consumption, as the economists and Marxists still teach us. So the term consumer was fine for the era of the factories of Smith and Marx, whose products would be destructively consumed, but when consumers are productive and active is the term ‘consumer’ actually useful or helpful as a definition?

Value Creators

As outlined previously, the ‘active consumer’ now creates value in a number of ways. Take, for example, the ‘immaterial labor’ of self-service which has effectively turned people into creators of value for businesses. From people collecting, delivering and building their own IKEA furniture, to the self-service utility of ATMs, to the dispensing of the need for waitering realized so effectively by the likes of McDonalds and Burger King et al.

This type of value creation is primarily focused on the direct and specific benefit to the person involved, and has little in the way of interaction with the organization of production. However, there are further types of value creation which go beyond immaterial labor and see people providing essential productive capital, ripping up the industrial era value chain model in the process.

By productive capital, we mean that people will contribute assets or resources which can then be used by a business from which to gain profit or advantage.

Examples of these include:

• contributed wealth – crowdfunding is a great example of where the finance contributed by people is the productive capital by which a business can derive a profit. Without the contributed wealth the production could not happen, and therefore the industrial era value chain is turned on its head. Here people are contributors, not consumers.

• co-create identity through content – businesses who make products have found smart ways of encouraging people to go beyond simply ‘consuming’, by enabling them to then share how they use the product. A prime example of this is Go-Pro, which selects peoples created footage of how they are using the camera to show to the world how great their product is. This is ‘consumers’ creating marketing aimed at further consumers, so not really consumers then.

• essential content – one of the most important shifts in the role of people to create rather than simply consume value is in the creation of essential content. Some of the largest companies in the digital age have their most valuable, if not all of their, content created by people. The value of Facebook, Twitter, AirBnB, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc, is not so much in the platforms they create but in the content people produce on these platforms. Without this content the platforms would be worthless, so are people consumers here or actually the producers of the value?

The Third Wave

This shift away from people simply being consumers was predicted by the futurist and author Alvin Toffler, in his book The Third Wave. He describes The First Wave as being the Agricultural revolution, where there was no producer and consumer and people mainly produced and consumed what they required. The Second Wave was the industrial age, in which the producer and consumer became primarily two separate entities, with the ‘market’ in the middle. The Third Wave is the digital age, in which we are seeing the collapse of the producer – consumer dichotomy and the re-emergence of the prosumer.

As Toffler put it, ‘“Just as the feudal manor was replaced by the business corporation when agrarian societies were transformed into industrial societies, so too should the older model of the firm be replaced by a new form of economic institution.” This new institution will combine economic and trans-economic objectives. It will have multiple bottom lines. Crowdfunded projects, the co-creation of identity and shared content, the ‘platforms’ on which people create essential content – these are all excellent examples of where we find what Toffler termed prosumers (producer consumers).

So what does this mean for businesses who want to treat people not simply as the consumers who ‘eat’ the value at the end of the industrial era value chain, but instead want to involve people in producing some form of value? Well, here George Ritzer and Niels Jurgenson have four very insightful pieces of wisdom on the prosumer.

• ’The first is the inability of capitalists to control contemporary prosumers in the way – and to the degree – that they have been able to control producers, consumers, and traditional prosumers’

• ’Second, it is difficult to think of prosumers as being exploited in the same ways as producers and even consumers are exploited. The idea that the prosumer is exploited is contradicted by, among other things, the fact that prosumers seem to enjoy, even love, what they are doing and are willing to devote long hours to it for no pay’

• ’ Third, there is at least the possibility of the emergence of a whole new economic form, especially on the internet. Capitalism involves the exchange of money for goods and services, and profits are made in those exchanges. However, little or no money changes hands between the users and the owners of many websites (for instance, users do not pay Facebook or Twitter to use the services)’
• ’Fourth, traditional capitalism, either producer or consumer capitalism, is based on scarcity, but prosumer capitalism online is increasingly a world of abundance.’

Forget About Consumers

The labels we give to people will affect what we, and they, expect their role to be within a certain context. If you want to move your business and brand beyond the industrial era model, forget about treating people as consumers. Maybe consider people as prosumers. Or better still, simply treat them as people.

Don’t let the future leave you behind. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.

The Blake Project Can Help: Accelerate Brand Growth Through Powerful Emotional Connections

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

If you’re new to marketing or if you work at a start-up or small business and don’t have the extensive experience and resources that other marketing professionals may have, you need some “Marketing How To” information and instruction.  So I recently ran a #MarketingMondays series LinkedIn.  Each week I provided a post and infographic on an essential marketing topic.  Now all five Marketing How To posts are here:

How To Set Your Marketing Budget in Five Steps

1. Outline your objectives.
2. Determine your budget range.
3. Set an annual calendar.
4. Use a 70/20/10 allocation plan.
5. Specify your measurements.

Read the full post here:  It’s Budget Time

Download the infographic here:  How To Set Your Marketing Budget in Five Steps Infographic

How To Select a Good Brand Name

Use these five criteria of good brand names:

1. Easy — A good brand name is easy to pronounce, understand, and spell
2. Appeal — A good brand name should be relevant and compelling to its target audience.
3. Position — A good name helps to position your brand.
4. Differentiate — A good name should differentiate your brand from competitors.
5. Adaptable — A good brand name works in different applications.

Read the full post here:  How to Select a Good Brand Name

Download the infographic here:  How to Select a Good Brand Name Infographic

How to Do Public Relations

Here are 10 tips for perfecting your P.R.:

1. Remember journalists are a bit narcissistic.
2. Respect that no two journalists are alike.
3. Learn their communications preferences.
4. Be social media savvy.
5. Create assets that can be repurposed.
6. Write for your audience.
7. Know your competition as well as you know your own brand.
8. Prepare for and embrace bad press.
9. Don’t hound.
10. Think out-of-the box.

Read the full post here:  Perfect Your Public Relations

Download the infographic here:  Ten Tips to Perfect Your Public Relations Infographic

How to Make a Great Logo

Five guidelines for creating a strong logo:

1. Simplicity — Simpler is better.
2. Versatility — Your logo needs to work in a range of applications.
3. Consistency — Consistent use will make or break a logo.
4. Fresh-ness — Keep your logo relevant and interesting by refreshing it from time to time.
5. Restraint — Don’t overuse your logo.

Read the full post here:  Turn Your Logo into an Icon

Download the infographic here:  The Signs of a Great Logo Infographic

How to Do Local-Store Marketing

There are three primary elements of a good local-store marketing program:

1. Partnerships. Relationships with community partners build your credibility and your exposure.
2. Public relations. Use local media to get “free advertising.”
3. Personal selling. Putting a face on your business makes your brand more likeable and trustworthy.

Read the full post here:  Three Local Marketing Strategies That Work

Download the infographic here:  The 3 P’s of Local-Store Marketing Infographic

The post marketing how to appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.

ANA’s Ask the Expert research service answers the question, “How do I ensure my team is paying competitive salaries to recruit (and retain) top talent?”

Febreze wants to help you get ready for Super Bowl 51, is your bathroom ready, America? Prep your busiest room at the #SB51 party with a new Febreze SMALL SPACES for the Halftime Bathroom Break. Then tune in to the Big Game to see our ad in action (if you can hold it that long).

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Ad Agency: Grey, New York

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