Earlier this year, Traci and Dave Gagnon got married on virtual platform Virbela. It was a hybrid event where part of the wedding happened in “real life” too. It’s a sign of the times. The boundaries between “real” and “digital” are blending into what is increasingly referred to as the ‘metaverse’: a space not limited to virtual matrimony, but one where brands can weave themselves into our digital DNA.
It’s a New Year. Somehow, even if we don’t believe in New Year resolutions, we use the New Year as a moment to refocus and reset. For those organizations on a calendar fiscal year, it’s a restart—new goals, quotas, perhaps shifted priorities. Even for those organizations with a different fiscal year, subconsciously we tend to reflect and reset much of what we to.
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For all their convenience, airplanes are one of the dirtiest modes of transportation out there. A fully loaded A380’s CO2 output is equivalent to each passenger driving six cars an equivalent distance. But what if airplane designers in the 1940s and 1950s had worked to embrace energy sources besides petroleum? How might the history of aviation have played out?
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“I developed our business model on the idea of creating an enduring, great company — just as you taught us to do at Stanford — and the VCs looked at me as if I were crazy. Read More
Heaven’s Gate, Jonestown, Scientology, Manson Family … destructive cults abound.
Destructive cults manipulate their members and do not care about their well-being. It’s no wonder why “cult” has become a dirty, four-letter word.
Not all cults, however, are destructive. At their cores, cults are groups that demonstrate a strong commitment towards someone or something.
Many cults are benign, harmless. In fact, they can be helpful to their members’ well-being. Some cults even have the power to elevate and inspire their members.
When a benign cult is centered around a brand, we call it a Cult Brand. Read More
Organizations pour a huge amount of money into running ads on traditional TV networks—about $66 billion in 2019, according to one estimate. They must believe that such costly marketing efforts are driving sales. Are they right? Read More
The people of the world have been whacked out by the fear, grief, and upheaval of a pandemic. Some of the consequences are obvious. We’ve learned new ways to work, shop, learn, connect, date, work out, and entertain ourselves, to name a few. But perhaps our marketing future will be determined by unintended consequences we can’t fathom at the moment.
It is going to take a long time to sort out what goes back to normal and what new norms transcend the pandemic. I’d like to want to share a weird little story that illustrates a much more subtle, and perhaps profoundly more important, business consideration as we emerge from our suffering. It starts with a playful child.
Neuroscience helps to confidently predict a campaign’s effectiveness, before it launches, says Simon Collister PhD, Director of Unlimited’s Human Understanding Lab and Cristina de Balanzo, Ph.D. Director at Walnut Unlimited.
We know there is a crisis of creativity in B2B. Just look at the research: 75% of ads analysed by LinkedIn’s B2B Institute were found to be rated 1 Star or less (where 5 Stars = likelihood of greater growth). The same source has found that using effective creative to build B2B brands becomes more effective over time, with a greater commitment to creativity delivering nearly 2x more very large business results in the long-term.
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Now that digital is disrupting every industry and job function, it is no wonder marketing has become agile.
Annual plans have given way to quarterly plans that usually end up getting scrapped for whatever is happening at the moment. Every marketing team is practicing some form of agile or reactive marketing.
In fact, today, a marketing team that can turn on a dime is critical to an organization’s growth. Read More
It’s hard to keep the content on your social channels fresh. Even with a topic calendar, it can be difficult to figure out a new angle, an original take, or something that doesn’t read and look like every other brand-created post.
Luckily, you don’t have to create everything you publish on social media platforms.
Your customers and friends likely are generating content, tagging your brand, or mentioning your products in their tweets, Instagram Stories, and TikTok videos every day. Why not incorporate that user-generated content into your brand’s social media calendar?
