The Brain Science of Storytelling, SendGrid sets the record for most hugs, and ‘You Suck At Cooking’

Marketing Trends, 11/16/17

Quote of the Day

“I’m in my job for one reason: Because I’m a customer like all of you.” ~Phil Schiller, SVP Worldwide Marketing, Apple

Marketing Trends is a daily curated report of industry news designed to help executives in marketing, advertising and branding create ROI producing media, stories, and campaigns that deliver long term results.

News that Matters

• MarTech ain’t going anywhere. Double digit growth in 2018 budgets for marketing technology, so says AdWeek.
• AR ads. Facebook ain’t gonna let Snap eat its lunch.
• Contemplating 360-degree video? Well, the New York Times experimented with it quite a bit and after a year, decided to pull it back.
• SendGrid had their IPO yesterday and reportedly set the record for MOST HUGS. We are fans of SendGrid here at The Mission, and like Olaf, we are definitely a fan of warm hugs. The Colorado-based startup helps businesses send email confirmations, password reminders and more. They raised 131 million from the IPO.
• This is a great look at the ever-evolving landscape of marketing roles from the Content Marketing Institute: Why Marketers Need to Think Like Data Scientists (and how to do it)
• What comes after influencer marketing? Advocacy marketing says Tom Stockham, CEO, Experticity. It’s the everyday experts who influence their friends, family, and coworkers. Not the big celebs or athletes (though that has an impact as well). If I buy a record player, get into vinyl and purchase a few Sinatra, MJ, and Drake LPs, then invite you over for Hot Toddies next to the Christmas tree, and have an old school listening party, it’s highly likely you’re going to want to get into the game as well. So you then might ask me what record player to buy. I’m going to give you my expert opinion because I’ve done the research. That’s advocacy. Good old fashioned word’o’mouth.

Lessons Learned [Sidebar on GDPR]

If you don’t know about GDPR by now and you’re in the DMP/DSP and PII game, you’re in trouble. Not complying is going to cost AdTech companies 4% of revenue, for instance. It’s unclear what kind of enforcement is going to take place after May 2018, but the EU government isn’t going to put a rule out like this and not make a lesson out of at least one big, brand name company.

The wait and see approach might work for SMBs and publishers but if you’re F1000 or above, tread carefully my friends.

If you’re deep into this world, you might enjoy this post by PageFair where they discuss frequency capping and ad campaign measurement under GDPR.

Original Content, Series, and Shows

Check it out! Original Content out here in the wild! Right next to the wooden stirry-straw things.

Pretty cool idea from Starbucks to highlight stories of people in the community. Featured on Amazon Prime and Audible, so you can start your journey when you grab the coffee and listen as you drive home.

Storytelling

I wanna tell you about the time I almost died — Azazel

Denzel Washington whispers those words in the first line of the cult classic, Fallen.

Makes you want to keep watching, right?

It turns out that your brain prepares you to receive a story.

How do we do that with our marketing? The answer is obvious and you’ve heard it so much you’re probably sick of it. But if you’ve never seen the stats or the science behind it, we thoroughly recommend this infographic on What Happens To Your Brain When You’re Told A Marketing Story.

You’re going to learn something. Promise.

Marketing Q&A

Q: Do Linkedin Ads work?

A: I personally have had mixed results and am curious to watch the evolution of the product with Microsoft’s added love. Here is a quick from an agency:

We recently did an A/B/C split test campaign for a technology company. They were targeting CIOs, Directors of IT and the like across three different industry verticals:

1. Hospitals and Hospital Systems
2. Educational institutions
3. Governmental Organizations

We created a high resolution imagery aligned with the industry, and a very short call to action in big text for each one. We also experimented with directing traffic to a landing page on the company’s website as well as a blog post on Linkedin itself. We set up the analytics through two different tool sets to track funnel conversions.

The targeting on LinkedIn for job titles and industries was great, as you might imagine. But things got a bit worse from there. The ad platform was a bit high to use, the cost per click (we weren’t going for impressions) was very high and while we drove traffic to the desired links, we had zero conversions. Zero. Not a single person contacted.

Now, you can chalk that up to a few things, such as not being in the market for the services the organization had, but these are standard, high value things. Not some fly by night startup. This is a pretty decent sized software company with a professional services organization that has done this stuff at a high level for years.

So we’re left scratching our heads. Clearly we had zero ROI for the money we spent. Maybe some day these people who clicked on the ad and went to the site will reach out, but the truth is we’re a little gun shy from using Linkedin again.

Spotlights

My second favorite show right now is You Suck At Cooking. It is a deliciously-clever, over-the-head cooking show that teaches you mostly nothing about cooking.

The guy (who has not revealed his identity) is absolutely hilarious. Each episode he whips together a few inside jokes, silliness, a splash of raunchiness, adds a little pepper, pepper, pepper and wang-jangles it. Throw in some fast motion editing, some random shots of cutting boards, his apartment, and Canadian scenery, and about 4 minutes later you have a fully baked show.

68 episodes strong and messing around with sponsors (shouts to HelloFresh!) and Fullscreen, this dude creates fantastic stuff. Amazing to see how quickly high-quality shows can build a following on YouTube. Although I generally dislike the term “YouTube Influencers”, it is kinda the best descriptor we got.

Since it is the season, I recommend you start with Pumpkin Pie.

Beware. You might watch 20 of these in a row.

Opportunities

Chief Customer Officer: it’s the newest and most important role at banks. Perhaps your career could take a new fork.

Branded is brought to you by our team at The Mission. We create original content, shows, and series for brands and distribute them to our audience of millions. To learn more, connect with us here. Or you can email me at ian (at) themission.co