UPCOMING ADVERTISING WEEK EVENTS

Seasonal advertising tends to converge on the same safe, predictable formula within each category, so brands that follow it blend into the noise they’re paying to cut through.

A platform’s content tells you why people are there. It doesn’t tell you everything about who they are.

Media still largely tests its assumptions by spending real budgets on real campaigns. Advertisers should follow other industries like Formula One, says Rob Hall, founder and CEO of Parallel, and use simulation to explore hundreds of possibilities before going live.

I recently spoke with Jaime Lyons, SVP of Engagement Strategy at Mighty Union, about the gap between what consumers expect from digital experiences and what hospitals are delivering.

Performance marketing has a measurement problem, and it’s costing brands money as US advertisers are paying more for media while getting less visibility into what their investment delivers. Privacy changes have weakened traditional tracking, customer journeys now span more channels, and AI answer engines are changing how people discover brands before they ever reach a website.

Out-of-home advertising has a familiar advantage: people encounter it while doing something they already planned to do. They are walking to work, waiting for a train, heading to a game, or moving through their city. On Modern Marketing and Measurement, we spoke with Chris Grosso, CEO of Intersection, about the harder question for marketers: how to buy those placements efficiently and compare their results with the rest of a media plan.

Marketers have often been guilty of reaching for a shortcut. Every era seems to produce a new way of trying to work around the system, from hidden text and keyword stuffing to buying followers, clickbait headlines and gaming social algorithms. The tactics change, but the goal is usually the same: find the loophole, beat the platform, get the result faster.

Starbucks’ Bearista is bringing friends for Christmas.

More than half of CMOs say their marketing tech stacks have meaningful gaps. The tempting response is to buy a bigger one.