The state of influencer marketing amid Covid-19: Concern but micro-influencers show path forward

Influencer marketing campaigns, so often trying to achieve a balance between aspiration and authenticity, have seen a fault line rip through them as the coronavirus pandemic has progressed.

For all of the missteps which made the news last year - Philip Morris breaking its internal rules on a campaign, fashion influencer Marissa Casey Grossman's marriage which brought a new meaning to the term 'brand engagement' - the statistics around influencer marketing were solid. According to...

29 June 2020 | Campaigns

Assessing two approaches to the modern CMO role: Traditional marketing or all-encompassing?

Earlier this month, McDonald’s announced that it will bring back the role of a global CMO, less than a year after scrapping it. In 2019, the company opted to split the role between the technical and non-technical aspects, but is now reinstating a CMO to drive the brand forward.

McDonald’s isn’t the only brand to bring back a CMO role. Last year, Coca-Cola also appointed a new CMO, after two years of trialling a different model. These examples showcase the two main schools...

18 June 2020 | Best Practice

Why the obsession with an influencer’s reach is over – and where to target instead

With new opportunities, such as Instagram’s branded content ads and shoppable posts, the influencer space is changing rapidly. Vamp hosted a survey with 124 marketers to find out how they collaborated with influencers, what they prioritised and where they had found success. The results showed that the biggest changes in influencer marketing hasn’t been the hiding of likes or cracking down on fake followers, it’s the monumental shift in marketers’ priorities.

27 February 2020 | Campaigns

The Domino’s effect: New personalised advertising campaign sees tenfold return

Anyone can claim they have become a technology company, regardless of their industry, but for Domino’s Pizza, when the company’s mission changed more to delivering pizzas, rather than creating them, it really was the case.

With a mantra to ‘outsmart rather than outspend’, the company’s latest initiative has proven wildly successful. A recent personalised display advertising campaign in the UK generated a 10:1 incremental return on spend, generating more...

12 February 2020 | Advertising

Consumers are seeking out eco-friendly beauty brands: Exploring the rise of ‘conscious capitalism’

Meaningful beauty purchases are increasingly driven by how eco-friendly a product is, with shoppers also embracing new technology to choose the products that fit their needs and wants.

Yet despite this, a new BBC3 documentary, Beauty Laid Bare, will reveal how little plastic is actually recycled. The three-part documentary follows four people in their 20s for two weeks across America investigating the secrets of the multi-billion dollar beauty industry and shows how it is one of the...

29 January 2020 | Best Practice

Why project management and communication are the secret weapons of successful agencies

Sometimes, working in silos is essential — especially in an agency, where certain teams handle certain clients. If team members aren’t on the Coca-Cola account, they don’t have to go to the Coca-Cola budget meeting. However, silos can do more harm than good when it comes to collaboration between colleagues and teams. If you aren’t careful, they can impair healthy communication.

Finding a balance between working alone and working together can be...

20 January 2020 | Best Practice

MarketingTech 2019 year in review: Influencer regulations, CMO battles, and social change

2019 in digital marketing, through the reporting eye of MarketingTech, has seen something of a two-pronged approach. While the exploration of emerging technologies and their use cases, from voice search to AI to blockchain, continues, it has been tempered with a more measured and nuanced focus.

While this publication found plenty of column inches to tell the stories those making the most of their technological bets this year, from Mastercard, to Starbucks – and will continue...

3 January 2020 | Advertising

On Black Friday, try showcasing your values instead of slashing your prices

This Black Friday, French cosmetics startup Typology won’t make a single euro cent in profit. That’s because instead of slashing prices and scrambling for customers, the company is launching a campaign called “#BlackForGood”, donating its profits to environmental charities. “This campaign is intended to be a positive and encouraging call to action for those who agree that Black Friday could be better,” says founder Ning Li.

27 November 2019 | Advertising

Gartner finds UK marketing budgets are on the slide – but optimism for the future

Analyst firm Gartner has put together something of a gloomy series of missives around the digital marketing sector in recent months – and its pessimistic look on UK marketing budgets released today is no different.

The company’s 2019-2020 CMO Spend Survey has revealed UK marketing budget allocations are overall ‘significantly’ behind their US counterparts. Yet while spend is cooling off in certain areas, others are seeing something of a boost.

The...

25 November 2019 | Advertising Technology

For cybersecurity marketers, a sense of clarity is desperately needed

Security marketers are all battling to differentiate the problem they are solving and how the solution or service they provide helps to solve that problem better than anyone else. Driving home this latter point isn’t always easy given how crowded the enterprise security stack is today.

According to CSO, the average enterprise organisation has 75 security products deployed on their network and even more alarming is that 20% of global employees would sell their credentials,...

15 November 2019 | Best Practice