Kraft Heinz: Isn't Anyone Going to Help That Poor Brand?

According to Mark Ritson of Marketing Week, “Kraft Heinz is in 57 varieties of trouble,” which is a real pity. The American food company formed in 2015 by the merger of Kraft Foods and H. J. Heinz is the fifth‐largest food and beverage company in the world with 2018 net sales of approximately $26 billion.

Ritson, an award‐winning marketing columnist, professor, and consultant in the United Kingdom, thinks Kraft Heinz is suffering from a number of self‐inflicted wounds, from underinvestment in its brands to a failure to adapt its portfolio to modern tastes.

However, no company aims to inflict wounds on itself, so that explanation is too clever by half.

It reminds me of the scene in Blazing Saddles when Sheriff Bart takes himself hostage by pressing his gun against his own head, prompting Harriet Johnson to cry out, “Isn't anyone going to help that poor man?”

Sales Lift  But wait, there's more!

In January 2019, YouTube and Nielsen Catalina Solutions announced a new way to measure sales lift. So marketers at Kraft Heinz can now measure, in aggregate, how effective their YouTube campaigns are at moving products off of store shelves in the United States.

That's both a strategic opportunity AND a strategic threat.

With more than 2 billion logged‐in users visiting YouTube each month, the strategic opportunity is obvious. But the strategic threat is obvious too.

Marketers at other FMCG and CPG companies are already using the combination of brand lift and sales lift studies to measure their digital advertising campaigns.

They're also using tools like YouTube Director Mix to create customized video ads and serve them to suit the interests and intent of different audience segments. This means marketers can customize a base video asset with relevant creative elements, including the following:

• Headlines
• Images
• Prices
• Translations

Then, the video and these elements are stitched together, produced quickly and at scale, reducing the need for endless edits. This results in hundreds of video variations in relatively little time with relatively little effort.

For example, Kellogg's used YouTube Director Mix, Google Correlate, and six‐second bumper ads to reintroduce Rice Krispies Treats to parents across the country during the busy and emotional back‐to‐school season.

They used Director Mix to bring their new packaging to life online with more than 100 customized videos. In the end, the campaign drove best in class brand lift and sales lift, despite fewer retail displays (Figure 1.1).

Apply What You Just Learned

To assess whether the marketers at the Fortune 500 company that we were training could apply what they had just learned, our team of subject matter experts assigned a capstone project. We broke them into teams and gave them a couple of weeks to develop a new digital marketing strategy.

Because the marketing teams were located in multiple countries around the globe and worked on a variety of goods and products, we told them they could create a digital marketing strategy for their own market or brand. This ensured that the online training course wasn't a distraction from their day jobs.

The quality of their capstone projects indicated that the marketing teams could apply what they had just learned. And a series of recent interviews with senior leadership verifies that our bespoke digital marketing training program had also helped the company to pivot after the coronavirus pandemic dramatically affected consumers and brands around the world.

From 2020 to 2021, the Fortune 500 company improved its return on marketing investment by more than 70 percent. But it didn't improve overnight.

They achieved this remarkable success over 2 years by rethinking measurement, exploring actionable solutions to help their company gain deeper insights, creating growth opportunities, redefining budgets, being more agile, and building resilience for the future.

The key to their success was selecting the right metrics as KPIs so they were finally measuring the right things. Then they were able to learn what they need to do to improve their results. And that enabled them to suck less, every day.

I know this still sounds like it took a lot of time and effort. Because it did. This is just one reason why creating an effective digital marketing strategy is a challenge.

Nostalgia Marketing and What We Can Learn From John Lewis Ads

You've probably noticed an influx of seasonal television advertising campaigns by retail brands in the build‐up to Christmas. These spots tend to attract widespread media coverage and acclaim upon their release. Just look at department store brand John Lewis & Partners, which launched their first Christmas advert back in 2007.

Their nostalgic ads have become something of an annual tradition in the United Kingdom, and one of the signals that the countdown to Christmas has begun. In 2011, John Lewis uploaded their Christmas advert to YouTube for the first time.

Since then, the British department store chain and its London‐based agency, Adam & Eve/DDB, have followed suit each and every year. Judging by the quality of ads other brands in the United Kingdom have been releasing this past decade, they may have learned some important lessons from those John Lewis spots.

Let's take a look at how these brands are effectively harnessing the power of nostalgia marketing and what you can learn from them to make it a part of your own marketing strategy.

Google Trends Data for the Christmas Advert  You can use Google Trends to learn some surprising lessons about interest in the Christmas advert.

For starters, web search interest in the United Kingdom for the search term “Christmas advert” peaked back in November 2016 and was thereafter likely to be just 38 percent of that level.

But if you narrow the time frame on Google Trends to just the last 30 days, you can scroll down and see that the top‐related queries for the search term include the following (Figure 1.2):

• John Lewis Christmas advert (100)
• Aldi Christmas advert (42)
• M&S Christmas advert (20)

So people on the other side of the pond are so interested in seeing a brand's Christmas ad that they actually search for it.

Which Christmas Ads Harness Nostalgia Marketing Effectively In 2021?  Let's examine some of these Christmas adverts to determine if any of them effectively harnessed nostalgia marketing in 2021.

John Lewis Ad's Content Doesn't Live Up to Viewers’ High Expectations  We'll start with “Unexpected Guest | John Lewis & Partners | Christmas Ad 2021.”

The description of this YouTube video asks, “What happens when an unexpected guest lands in your forest? You show them how Christmas is done, of course!”

John Lewis has created a ton of related content. Maybe they have been learning some important lessons over the years. For example, there's an extended version of “Unexpected Guest.” And there's a related page on their website that provides the backstory of the “Unexpected Guest.” There's also a behind‐the‐scenes article and video on the making of “Unexpected Guest.”

It seems like John Lewis has learned a lesson about merchandising. Why? Because the brand's website includes content about the special Christmas jumper, customized with a star and twinkly lights, that Nathan gives Skye. Plus, John Lewis is donating 10 percent of the sales from their Christmas advert jumper to support families in need.

There's also content about decorating the tree—with links to “Shop in the Gemstone Forest” and “Shop all Christmas decorations.” There's additional content about setting the table too, with links to “Shop the advert table look” and “Shop all Christmas tableware.”

There's even a new interactive game, “Unexpected Guest: The Experience,” which My John Lewis members get exclusive access to play.

So, everything is queued up to “market goods and products in the present” —as long as the video's content associates John Lewis “with a period or place with happy personal associations.” (See Figure 1.3.)

How did the brand do? Well, according to data from Tubular Labs, “Unexpected Guest” got 2.5 million views and 17,500 engagements in its first 30 days. That's a worse start than any of the brand's other Christmas adverts from the previous decade.

If you read some of the 1,200+ comments on “Unexpected Guest,” you have to wonder if John Lewis has lost its touch for evoking a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past:

• Nature bunny said, “Ah… there's nothing more festive than a crash‐landed UFO in the local woods.”
• Wayne Prezzler said, “Let's be honest. John Lewis will never ever beat the lad waiting to give gifts rather than receiving them. It captured an essence lost and that Christmas is more about the giving of gifts than receiving. I believe it was their first and it was definitely their best ad.”
• Ethan Clarke said, “The 2012 snowman advert is still the best for me.”
• Strong Coffee said, “Monty the Penguin still makes me sob like an idiot. Love the song choice on this though!”
• Edward Osmond said, “Nothing will ever beat the rabbit and the bear.”

John Lewis replied to this last comment. Someone representing the brand said, “Those two certainly pulled on the heart strings! But glad you like Nathan and Skye's story too.”

Key Insights

• It appears that nostalgia marketing still works. Tying your company to a period or place with happy personal associations to market goods and products doesn't work if your video's content fails to trigger that deeply nostalgic psychological response, though.
• Plan supplemental content to get more mileage out of your video ads and enable the experience to go on.

Now, let's evaluate Christmas adverts from some other brands.

Aldi Video Ad Combines Humor with Deeper Emotional Sentiment  According to Kantar's latest research using facial coding to determine the power of the ad to provoke an emotional reaction, the most effective of 24 festive adverts was “Aldi Christmas Launch Advert 2021.” (See Figure 1.4.)

It's worth noting that the version of this TV ad that was uploaded to YouTube got 2.9 million views and 7,400 engagements.

Featuring Kevin the Carrot for the sixth year in a row, this year's Christmas advert has been Aldi's most successful so far. In fact, it scored in the top 6 percent of all U.K. ads in terms of being both “distinctive” and “enjoyable,” and was also the campaign that sparked the most conversation.

The description of Aldi's Christmas advert asks, “Will Ebanana Scrooge discover his Christmas spirit?” Um, who is Ebanana Scrooge? The brand uploaded a teaser for this year's Christmas advert to provide the backstory for this new character.

According to Kantar, Aldi focused on traditional Christmas themes such as kindness and togetherness. Data from their research found that 35 percent of people feel this Christmas is more important than last year, with a particular emphasis on friends and family and less focus on extravagant spending.

Lynne Deason, head of creative excellence at Kantar, said, “Aldi's new take on a Christmas classic is a great example of how a brand can convey serious messages about purpose and social impact while still being great fun.

Aldi uses humor effectively, something especially important in a year when we all need an extra laugh, but it also has a deeper sentiment.

The clever inclusion of “Marcus Radishford” highlights a worthy cause—the campaign to provide meals to those in need—without coming across as too somber to viewers.

And by borrowing from one of the most well‐known and loved Christmas stories of all time, it sets out a complicated narrative without ever being confusing.”

Key Insights

• The most successful Christmas ads in 2021 captured a positive mood while making the ads highly relevant to their brands and products.
• Those that struggled to get resonance have been the ones with sad or complex storylines, where the intended happy ending doesn't stand out or the audience is left feeling confused.

Marks & Spencer Uses Character and Storyline to Elicit Emotion  Another standout campaign was “Percy Pig comes to life for the first time EVER! | 2021 Christmas Advert | M&S FOOD.” (See Figure 1.5.)

In addition, Percy Pig along with his fairy friend discover the delicious delights of the Marks & Spencer festive foodhall, from triple chocolate panettone to collection smoked salmon. This video has 1.8 million views and 7,200 engagements.

Much like Aldi, Marks & Spencer relied on the help of “recognizable” characters, a tactic that proved effective in linking messages and storylines with brand names.

In this case, Marks & Spencer leaned on its well‐loved and highly recognizable Percy Pig voiced by English actor Tom Holland, and the “fairy that fell off the top of the Christmas tree” voiced by British actress Dawn French.

Key Insights

• According to Kantar, the characters created a greater emotional reaction among audiences than previous years’ ads from the brand, contributing to its increased effectiveness.
• Familiarity—in characters, voiceovers, and other storyline elements—supports nostalgia marketing.

Coca‐Cola Has Brand Loyalty and Connection on Its Side  I asked Deason, “Which brand was the most effective at harnessing the power of nostalgia?”

She said, “Coca‐Cola's ad is by far the most nostalgic Christmas ad, achieving iconic status in the minds of many.” (See Figure 1.6.)

The version of this TV ad that was uploaded to YouTube, “Coca‐Cola Christmas Commercial 2021,” is unlisted, which explains why it only got 2,573 views and 22 engagements.

She added, “Coke's festive truck sings out Christmas to most viewers, but it is also intrinsically associated with the Coca‐Cola brand. It is in the top 2 percent of all ads in the U.K. in terms of brand connection, so the success of the festive campaign will translate to long‐term brand loyalty.”

Final Thoughts  I asked Deason via email, “What happened to John Lewis? Why didn't an ‘Unexpected Guest’ named Skye do better than Kevin the Carrot?”

She said, “It's great to see John Lewis back with an ad that people have really enjoyed. Although not quite as emotionally evocative as some of its previous hits, it still lands in the top 16 percent of all U.K. ads and was the second most enjoyed Christmas campaign of 2021.”

“Music continues to be a key driver of emotional engagement for John Lewis, its track was the second most enjoyed this year. The ad is distinctive (top 16 percent) and is one of the top ones which people would share with others,” Deason added.

While the role of the John Lewis brand is weaker than in previous years, she said, it always benefits from the anticipation and conversation around the ad each Christmas. The absence of an obvious must‐have mascot might also impact its ability to drive traffic to the brand.

This could explain why it may not grab potential shoppers in the way it has before. Even so, Deason pointed out that it is still keeping viewers entertained, as it has done consistently over the past decade.

If the John Lewis team wants some inspiration, then I would encourage them to get their SEO, content marketing, social media, and paid search teams together and watch “John Lewis Christmas Advert 2015—#ManOnTheMoon,” It has 30.4 million views and 163,000 engagements.

That demonstrates the potential power of nostalgia marketing during the Christmas season. Unfortunately, it is no longer available.

In fact, none of the John Lewis Christmas adverts listed in the chart at the beginning of this section are available, even though they would have all ranked in the top 20 videos created by a brand in the United Kingdom with Christmas in the title with the most engagements of all time. That's a great pity.

Why should they still be available? Three explanations come to mind.

• First, when people continue to watch old Christmas adverts that evoke a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, it can continue to build brands for the future.
• Second, your social media and paid search teams can add up to five cards to each old Christmas advert to make them more interactive. These cards enable you to link your old Christmas adverts to you newest one. If you're in the YouTube Partner Program, you can add a card that allows you to link to your external website to share the latest merchandising opportunities with your audience.
• And third, John Lewis should review their old Christmas adverts to discover how the emotions elicited by video content is related to engagement. As Winston Churchill said in 1948, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

Apply What You Just Learned

Based on this case study, it appears that the marketing strategists at John Lewis and Adam & Eve/DDB underestimate the role that YouTube can play in the build‐up to Christmas. That would explain why their advertising strategy, which doesn't leverage a concept‐level understanding of YouTube and video marketing tactics, looks like it's the slowest route to victory.

They don't seem to realize that the potential audience marketers can reach in the United Kingdom using adverts on YouTube is 53.0 million, according to Digital 2021: The United Kingdom from Hootsuite and We Are Social. That's 84 percent of the U.K.'s total population aged 18+.

By comparison,

• ITV reaches 35.9 million viewers a week.
• Channel 4's audience peaks at 6 million viewers for The Great British Bake Off.
• The BBC domestic television channels do not broadcast advertisements.

The marketing strategists at John Lewis and Adam & Eve/DDB might also be surprised to discover the outsized role that digital video marketing can play throughout the customer journey—from discovery to consideration to conversion.

An article entitled, “A new way to think about online video's role in the purchase funnel,” which was written by Debbie Weinstein, vice president of YouTube/Video Global Solutions, and published in Think with Google in January 2019, reported:

• More than 90 percent of people say they discover new brands or products on YouTube.
• More than half of shoppers say online video has helped them decide which specific brand or product to buy.
• More than 40 percent of global shoppers say they have purchased products they discovered on YouTube.

Now, video marketing isn't one of the top eight disciplines. At least, not today. But you will probably want at least a concept‐level understanding of YouTube and other social video tactics before you develop a digital marketing strategy for your organization in 2023 and beyond.

How Is Marketing Going to Help Deliver on Your Business Strategy?

The first stage of M3 is marketing strategy. And the first question that you need to answer is: “How is marketing going to help deliver on your business strategy?” The marketing competencies and capabilities required to execute the marketing strategy element are as follows:

• Articulating the marketing approach and plan you'll use to deliver against your business objectives
• Outlining your approach and key decisions around each element and the resources (including budget) required to execute the marketing strategy

At a basic level, “suck less, every day” articulates the marketing approach you need to use to deliver against your business objectives. But I suspect that telling your CEO and CFO that your plan is to “consciously suck less” at whatever you're doing today may not help you get the resources (including budget) that you need to execute your marketing strategy.

At an intermediate level, Avinash Kaushik outlined the evolutionary approach that works in a post entitled, “Digital Marketing and Analytics: Two Ladders for Magnificent Success,” which was published on Occam's Razor on December 9, 2013.

Google's digital marketing evangelist shared this strategic insight: “More often than not, magnificent success results from executing a business plan that is rooted in a strong understanding of the landscape of possibilities, and a deep self‐awareness of business capabilities. These business plans will contain a structured approach.…”

Then, he shared a digital marketing ladder of awesomeness (Figure 1.7.).

The ladder articulates the marketing approach and plan we'll use to deliver against our business objectives. This should help us convince the CEO to give us the time that we'll need to pivot our teams, which were built for traditional mass marketing, and train them to OMCA digital marketing standards.

Then he introduced a Digital Analytics Ladder of Awesomeness, which outlines our approach and KPIs for each element. That should convince the chief finance officer (CFO) to give us the resources (including budget) required to execute our marketing strategy.

These two ladders of awesomeness might look a little different, because this is 2023, not 2013. And both digital marketing and digital analytics have evolved. But the process that he outlined will help us make the hard choices that are most relevant for the company and the evolutionary position it finds itself in.

And if you have a graphic artist on your team, then you can update the illustrations for these two ladders and create something that looks like a double helix, because the marketing strategy requires you to change more than the skills, education, and experience of some of your teams. In other words, magnificent success results from using digital marketing to change the DNA of your entire organization.

Why? Because at an advanced level, your marketing strategy is not just to tackle the challenge of digital transformation, but to embrace it.

And “digital transformation” isn't a nebulous buzzword. It's a process, not a project. By taking incremental steps toward transformation, you can ready your business to drive results today and build resilience for tomorrow (Figure 1.8).

Every company is at a different point in its digital transformation. But the marketers at Kraft Heinz and John Lewis will really, really want to read, “Results, resilience, and the Route to Ready for 3 brands.” Written by Bethany Poole, Google's senior director of ads marketing, this perspective on getting started with digital transformation was published in Think with Google in October 2021.

She said, “We're in a new era, in which COVID‐19 has accelerated digital consumption habits so much that analysts talk about seeing a decade's worth of change happening in a few short months. Marketers must create messaging that's agile and responsive enough to capture short‐term opportunities, while also building long‐term business resilience. But how? The standard answer has been ‘digital transformation,’ but, too often, the term is used as a buzzword. And if we aren't clear about what we mean by ‘digital transformation,’ then it's easy to imagine a long, complicated journey.”

She shared examples of how successful brands got started on their journeys.

One was Mondelēz International. (Them again!) Their journey began with a single insight: meeting each consumer where they are means evolving from a mass‐marketing strategy to one that delivers a more personalized, helpful set of experiences. This helped galvanize the entire company.

With customer‐centricity as their guiding principle, teams from across Mondelēz International—from marketing and information business systems to finance and customer service—broke down their organizational silos to align on shared goals and adopt an agile approach to a companywide initiative called “empathy at scale.”

For example, the company launched the “Don't go far for hunger” campaign in India for its Cadbury brand, which used the latest advances in machine learning and programmatic buying to drive consideration among specific audiences. Optimized ad creative combined eight consumer passion points, like cricket or Game of Thrones, with six other contextual elements, including time, day of the week, and location. This process generated 92,000 unique, personalized assets that drove a 50 percent increase in ad recall and a click‐through rate 2.6 times higher than the CPG benchmark.

Deploying its digital strategy across multiple markets has helped Mondelēz International outpace the rest of its sector and deliver double‐digit growth. It has also given the company a template for reorganizing its entire long‐term business strategy to focus on building deeper, longer‐lasting relationships with consumers.

She also shared the story of how the pandemic accelerated the digital transformation underway at Crate & Barrel, an international home decor brand with more than 100 stores in the United States and Canada. Its online sales have jumped more than 40 percent since the pandemic started, and online sales now comprise more than 65 percent of its overall business.

But the retailer's transformation hasn't been about abandoning its physical stores for an exclusively digital storefront. It has focused instead on making shopping experiences more inventive and inspirational, both online and offline.

Crate & Barrel knew it needed a better way to understand and measure the full customer journey and to respond to those insights in near real time. So the company's transformation journey has centered on building a more unified view of its customers, through a strategy that prioritizes organizational agility and outcomes.

Crate & Barrel began by leaning into the power of cloud computing to gather diverse data from various touchpoints—like traffic information in‐store, mobile shopping patterns, and other online purchasing behaviors. Then they created a single data source to represent a holistic picture of the customer.

The company relies heavily on Google Cloud's BigQuery data warehousing and analysis tool, which allows it to draw on 10 times more information sources compared to a few years ago. Data are then analyzed and transformed into actionable insights that can influence a customer's next interaction and, in turn, drive revenue.

So how should you articulate this marketing approach? Well, you could say it's “suck less, every day,” “climbing two digital ladders of amazing success,” or “tackling the challenge of digital transformation.”

But, no matter what you call it, your evolutionary approach is more likely to work than a revolutionary one. Why? Because it will help you infuse agility into your plan, create marketing‐driven growth for your company's bottom line, and future‐proof your business so you're ready for whatever comes next.

Are You Adequately Aligned and Capable of Succeeding in this Market?

This brings us to the Analysis stage in the M3 model. The second question that you need to answer is: “Are you adequately aligned and capable of succeeding in this market?” The marketing competencies and capabilities required to execute the market/customer orientation element are as follows:

• Avoiding product and sales orientation, how to achieve market orientation and customer focus
• Including market/competitor insight and analysis

Despite the traditional pressures to be product‐centric or sales‐oriented, most CMOs understand the importance of being customer‐centric and market‐oriented. So they are adequately aligned to succeed even when market dynamics change rapidly or competitive threats appear unexpectedly.

Why? Because most have read one of the more than 80 books written by Philip Kotler, the S. C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He's regarded as “The Father of Modern Marketing” by many scholars.

But many of these same CMOs have difficulty making the business case for getting an adequate budget to be capable of succeeding.

Why? Because they haven't read Return on Marketing Investment by Guy R. Powell, which was published in February 2003.

Powell explained that the traditional return on investment' (ROI) metric measures money that is “tied up” in plants and inventories for years, which is a capital expenditure or CAPEX. But spending on marketing is typically “invested” in the current quarter, which makes it an operational expenditure or OPEX.

So he proposed a new metric for measuring the return on marketing investment (ROMI): [Incremental Revenue Attributable to Marketing ($) * Contribution Margin (%) – Marketing Spending ($)] / Marketing Spending ($).

For example, if a company spends $100,000 on digital marketing and it generates $500,000 in incremental revenue, then the ROMI factor is 5.0. If the incremental contribution margin for that $500,000 in revenue is 60 percent, then the margin ROMI (the incremental margin for $100,000 of marketing spent) is $300,000 (= $500,000 × 60%). Of which, the $100,000 spent on digital marketing will be subtracted and the difference will be divided by the same $100,000. So, every dollar expended on digital marketing translates to an additional $2 on the company's bottom line.

Once you learn how to calculate ROMI, you're in a much stronger position to make the business case for getting an adequate budget to be capable of succeeding in your market. If your CEO wants you to generate more revenue, then you can make the business case for a bigger marketing budget. And if your CFO wants you to spend less, then you can reduce the incremental revenue that you need to generate to be successful.

Who Are Your Customers and What Are Their Needs and Expectations?

The third question that you need to answer is: “Who are your customers and what are their needs and expectations?’ The marketing competencies and capabilities required to execute the customer insight element are as follows:

• Using qualitative, quantitative, traditional, and digital techniques to gather customer insights
• Designing customer surveys, conducting market research, and analyzing the data to identify or validate who your customers are as well as what they need and expect

Customer insight is always important, but you often don't have the budget to use expensive surveys or the time to conduct market research to gather them. Fortunately, a new audience intelligence tool was launched in April 2020 that solves this problem.

The tool was created by SparkToro, a software company co‐founded by Casey Henry and Rand Fishkin. Their tool, which is also named SparkToro, quickly crawls tens of millions of social and web profiles to find what (and who) your audience reads, listens to, watches, follows, shares, and talks about online (Figure 1.9).

For example, SparkToro's database quickly found 117,949 people who talk about “digital marketing.” And the following top words appear in their bios/profiles/about fields on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social platforms:

• Agency (11 percent)
• Marketing agency (8.6 percent)
• Consultant (6.2 percent)
• Web (5.4 percent)
• Marketing consultant (4.9 percent)

This tells me I should probably find a place somewhere in this book to mention that agencies like GTB, formerly known as Team Detroit, and MediaCom, a leading agency based in the United Kingdom, have trained their teams to OMCP digital marketing standards and lead the industry in marketing performance.

SparkToro also tells me that “marketing strategy” is the most frequently used phrase used by this niche audience over the past 3–4 months on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.

If one of your clients agrees to provide the resources (including budget) required to execute your marketing strategy, then you should use tools like Google Surveys, a market research tool that allows you to easily create online surveys in order to make more informed business decisions. Unfortunately, far too many account executives at agencies assume that the client knows who their customers are as well as what their customers need and expect.

But, it rarely hurts—and it often helps—to double‐check these assumptions.

For example, let me share a story that I told on September 19, 2019, at “Telling Y/Our Story,” Intrado's second annual digital media client summit in New York City, and again on October 8, 2019, at Pubcon Pro Las Vegas. This story is part of a longer case study.

In January 2019, my award‐winning digital marketing agency helped the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR) to launch an Online Professional Master's in Human Resource Management (MHRM) program. Our objective was to generate 30 applications by August 1, 2019. Graduate students could complete the 12‐course online MHRM program in as few as 18 months and as long as 5 years. And tuition is $3,174 per 3‐credit course, or $38,016 for 12 courses.

I used Google Surveys to double‐check some of the assumptions that my client had made about graduate students as well as their needs and expectations. Google Surveys enabled me to ask up to 10 questions, including a screening question, which let me target questions to a specific audience by filtering respondents.

I ran my survey on Google's network of publishers. It went live on Friday, January 11, 2019. The results were available on Monday, January 14, 2019, giving me time to analyze them before presenting my findings at a meeting later that afternoon in Piscataway, New Jersey.

Rutgers SMLR had planned to target human resource (HR) professionals, managers, and supervisors with four or more years of experience who wanted to advance their careers to senior HR or management positions. But Google Surveys found that you should also target professionals in personnel, staffing and recruiting, and talent acquisition.

This insight more than doubled the total size of the target audiences.

Respondents also said the following factors were important when selecting a university that offers an online master's degree in human resources management:

• No GRE/GMAT required
• Top‐ranked university
• Fully 100 percent online program

So we emphasized these key factors in our digital marketing campaign, which included Google Ads, LinkedIn advertising, SEO, and an optimize press release.

We also used Digital Analytics to evaluate the source/medium of the 8,337 new users and 694 leads generated by our campaign:

• Our press release generated 1 percent of the new users, but 8 percent of the leads.
• SEO generated 3 percent of the new users, but 19 percent of the leads.
• Google Ads generated 11 percent of the new users, but 18 percent of the leads.
• LinkedIn advertising generated 81 percent of the new users, but 37 percent of the leads.

More importantly, the campaign had generated 38 completed applications, worth up to $1,444,608 in tuition over the next 18 months to 5 years.

That's the benefit of using Google Surveys to double‐check some of the assumptions that my client had made about graduate students as well as their needs and expectations. The surveys cost less than $2,000, and the insights produced award‐winning results.

I shared this story a third time in July 2021, when I taught a two‐part course on “Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy” in the first Impact Digital Creator Program at the New Media Academy in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

One of the 22 influential and creative individuals taking my course, Abdullah AlMheiri, a self‐identified coffee connoisseur, asked if he could show how he had used Google Forms to easily create surveys and questionnaires to gather information about his target audience for free.

Google Forms let him select from multiple question types, embed forms on his website, or share them via Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. And he could watch responses appear in real time as well as access the raw data and analyze it with Google Sheets or other software.

It's worth noting that coffee is a huge part of Arabic culture, and specialty coffee has been on the rise in the UAE. New Media Academy created a show with Abdulla AlMheiri, who is the co‐founder of Coarse Coffee, a member of the Specialty Coffee Association, and the 2019 Aeropress champion, to educate and entertain coffee enthusiasts in the region. The show, Cooooffeeeee with Abdulla, initially launched on YouTube.

It was then recognized by Snapchat and featured as Cooooffeeeee with Abdulla on their platform. His Snapchat show is specifically designed for coffee lovers and enthusiasts in the region from one of the best coffee specialists in the UAE. It has more than 10 million views and over 20,000 subscribers.

This teaches us all another important lesson: it rarely hurts—and it often helps—when a “student” double‐checks what an “instructor” knows about using Google Forms to create online surveys.

Why Should Anyone Care or Take Notice? What Unique Value Are You Providing?

This brings us to the Planning stage in the M3 model. The fourth set of questions that you need to answer are: “Why should anyone care or take notice? What unique value are you providing?”

The marketing competencies and capabilities required to execute the brand and value element are as follows:

• Brand purpose, promise
• The value proposition of the brand, including (but not exclusively) price

In other words, you need a brand purpose and value proposition that can change the hearts, minds, and actions of people. And the best book on this topic is Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions by Guy Kawasaki, which was published in January 2011.

We've known each other since 1989, when he was a columnist for MacUser and I was the director of marketing at PC/Computing, a sister magazine that was also published by Ziff‐Davis. But I was still surprised when he reached out in late 2010 and asked me to contribute about four pages to his 10th book, Enchantment. He wanted me to help him explain how to use YouTube to enchant people.

I immediately said, “Yes.” And then I asked him, “What do you mean by enchantment? Is this just a synonym for engagement?” Actually, he had something very different in mind.

As defined by my old friend and former colleague, “Enchantment is not about manipulating people. It transforms situations and relationships. It converts hostility into civility and civility into affinity. It changes skeptics and cynics into believers and the undecided into the loyal.”

He added, “Enchantment can happen during a retail transaction, a high‐level corporate negotiation, or a Facebook update. And when done right, it's more powerful than traditional persuasion, influence, or marketing techniques.”

And he concluded, “In business and personal interactions, your goal is not merely to get what you want but to bring about a voluntary, enduring, and delightful change in other people. By enlisting their own goals and desires, by being likable and trustworthy, and by framing a cause that others can embrace, you can change hearts, minds, and actions.”

Now, that's a big idea. So instead of sending him some examples from the first edition of my book, YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day (2009), I spent some time thinking about what this bestselling business guru was really asking me to deliver.

When I got back to him, I shared this strategic insight, “Video content that can enchant people must provide intrinsic value to your viewers.” This value comes in four forms:

• Inspiration: Tell stories of courage, bravery, or personal triumph.
• Entertainment: Make people laugh out loud with a hilarious video.
• Enlightenment: Leave viewers in‐the‐know with a documentary film.
• Education: Show your target audience how to do something useful.

In the book, he says, “One way to remember these four categories is that they form the acronym ‘IEEE,’ which is funny in a nerd humor way. If you don't get it, don't worry.”

He adds, “One important point: The goal of companies is often to create a ‘viral video.’ You know, the kind that millions of people watch in a few days—for example, the Old Spice guy videos. This is the kind of video every other company wishes it or its expensive agency created.”

And he concludes, “Don't make this your goal. Luck makes a video go viral, and ‘get lucky’ is not a good strategy. The right goal is to provide a steady supply of video that is inspiring, entertaining, enlightening, or educational and that, over time, enchants people.”

Perhaps a case study can illustrate this point.

Procter & Gamble Case Study  The Procter & Gamble Company (P&G) was founded in 1837. Throughout their 185‐year history, their business has grown and changed while their purpose, values, and principles have endured—and will continue to be passed down to generations of P&G people to come.

Their website clearly states P&G's purpose: “We will provide branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world's consumers, now and for generations to come. As a result, consumers will reward us with leadership sales, profit and value creation, allowing our people, our shareholders and the communities in which we live and work to prosper.”

One of their values is integrity: “We always try to do the right thing.”

And one of their principles is to show respect for all individuals: “We believe that all individuals can and want to contribute to their fullest potential.”

Taken together, P&G's purpose, values, and principles are the foundation for their unique culture. So the leading CPG company, which is headquartered in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, didn't need any lessons on how to create a brand purpose or value proposition before earning the OMCP Talent leadership Award for Digital Marketing Certification Pass Rates in 2018.

Nevertheless, with strong support from senior leaders, Katy Moeggenberg and Carrie Rathod unified brand, IT, marketing technology, and other groups to achieve a company‐wide 94 percent certification rate—the highest rate that OMCP has seen.

And you can begin to see the impact that combining a clear brand purpose and value proposition with a training and certification program based on industry standards set by OMCP has had on P&G just by looking at their 350 brand and 22 corporate properties on YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms in more than 50 countries in over 30 languages.

As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, video marketing isn't one of the top eight disciplines. So it wasn't explicitly covered on the exams that 94 percent of P&G's brand, IT, marketing technology, and other groups passed.

But content marketing and social media marketing were both part of the programs that two providers had designed for the OMCA curriculum: Simplilearn's OMCA preparatory course, and LinkedIn's OMCA Course. So you could say that P&G has applied what they have learned in a related discipline.

Over the last 3 years, P&G has uploaded 35,400 videos to YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms. Collectively, they've gotten 14.6 billion (with a “b”) views and 35.7 million (with an “m”) engagements.

And the video with the most engagements is We Believe: The Best Men Can Be (Gillette). Uploaded on January 13, 2019, this enlightening and inspiring video has 35.7 million views and 1.2 million engagements, according to data from Tubular Labs (Figure 1.10).

The Twitter version of this video has 31.2 million views and 768,000 engagements, Facebook's version has 11.3 million views and 494,000 engagements, and Instagram's version has 443,000 views and 85,100 engagements.

The YouTube video's description says, “Bullying. Harassment. Is this the best a man can get? It's only by challenging ourselves to do more, that we can get closer to our best. To say the right thing, to act the right way. We are taking action … Join us.”

The initial release of The Best Men Can Be was the subject of controversy. But Ace Metrix found the creative for The Best Men Can Be actually developed the strongest positive purchase intent among recent “social stand” ads, including Nike's Dream Crazy featuring Colin Kaepernick. In fact, 65 percent of the viewers of Gillette's corporate social responsibility (CSR) ad indicated the short film made them more/much more likely to purchase from the brand, and two‐thirds rated the message the single best thing about the ad.

You can also begin to see the impact that having a clear brand purpose and value proposition has had on P&G's global rankings by video views of brand properties in the CPG industry. As the chart in Figure 1.11 shows, P&G's global rankings bounced around from 2016 to 2018. In January 2019, P&G ranked #34. But, within 3 months, the brand property had shot up to #2—where it remained fairly consistently for the next 32 months until P&G passed Unilever to rank #1 in December 2021.

More importantly, P&G has reported a notable improvement in the effectiveness of its marketing after increasing its investment in digital media.

How Does Your Market Break Down into Groups, and Which Will You Go After?

The fifth question that you need to answer is: “How does your market break down into groups, and which will you go after? And the marketing competencies and capabilities required to execute the segmentation and targeting element are as follows:

• Use classic (geo/demographic, behavioral, and psychographic) and digital (in‐market and affinity) segmentation to map our market.
• Select target segments based on relevance and attractiveness.
• Decide how wide/narrow to target (e.g., is mass marketing still a valid approach?).

To break down their market into groups, many marketers create fictional characters called “personas.” This is a fundamental and powerful concept—when done right.

David Meerman Scott, a friend and the author of 12 books, wrote an article entitled, “Back to the Basics: The Importance of Buyer Personas,” which was published on his blog and in The New Rules of Marketing, his weekly newsletter on LinkedIn, on December 13, 2021.

He observed, “Organizations filled with people who take the time to understand the needs of buyers they wish to reach, and then develop information to educate and inform those buyers, are more successful than organizations that just make stuff up.”

He added, “Buyer personas, the distinct demographic groupings of your potential customers, are critically important for successful marketing that leads to sales success.”

And he concluded, “Creating marketing and sales initiatives that target specific buyer personas is a strategy that easily outperforms the results you get from sitting on your butt in your comfortable office making stuff up about your products.”

But if you rely solely on demographics to create your personas, you can miss significant segments of potential consumers.

Why? Because demographics rarely tell the whole story. Customer intent—what customers are looking for—is a smarter way to segment our market and target the groups we'll go after.

I've written a column on this topic entitled, “Customer Personas Can Transform SEO, PPC and Content Marketing,” which was published in Search Engine Journal on March 12, 2021. It's more than 2,600 words long, so I won't republish all of it here.

But with permission from Search Engine Journal, let me share a lightly edited excerpt on the research and insights of Justin De Graaf, who is (appropriately) head of ads research and insights at Google.

De Graff says, “Acting on consumer intent is one of the keys to unlocking growth.”

He adds, “The things they search, sites they visit, and videos they watch are not only expressing intent, they're reshaping the traditional marketing funnel. And with the help of marketing technology, marketers can sift through all the signals left behind and gain insight that can help them predict intent.”

I agree. Too many marketers rely too heavily on demographics when they create customer personas.

Why? Because that's the only data that TV networks could provide about their audiences back in the 20th century. But demographics rarely tell SEO professionals, PPC advertisers, or content marketers what you need to know in the 21st century about search intent.

Keyword research, on the other hand, gives you a better way of unlocking search intent—although you don't have access to a fraction of the marketing technology that Google does. That's why I was amazed that De Graff shared some strategic insights from research that Google partnered with Kantar to conduct. They wanted to get a better understanding of the underlying motivations driving search behaviors. You might assume (as I did) that Google doesn't need any help with this. It turns out that Google knows “what” people search for, but it's often puzzled about “why.”

So they leveraged Kantar's NeedScope, which is an approach to segmentation that can help you to uncover the functional, social, and emotional drivers of consumer behavior within a target market.

In other words, NeedScope provides a framework for understanding why people make the decisions that they do, which, in turn, can reveal significant opportunities for companies and brands to create personas that represent those underlying needs more effectively.

De Graff admits that he wasn't initially sure if NeedScope's approach to segmentation could be applied to search, let alone to creating customer personas.

Well, it could. It was. And the result was revolutionary.

According to NeedScope, there are six “canonical” consumer needs and each one is made up of a different combination of emotional, social, and functional needs:

• Surprise Me: Search is fun and entertaining. It is extensive with many unique iterations.
• Thrill Me: Search is a quick adventure to find new things. It is brief, with just a few words and minimal back‐button use.
• Impress Me: Search is about influencing and winning. It is laser‐focused, using specific phrases.
• Educate Me: Search is about competence and control. It is thorough (reviews, ratings, comparisons, etc.).
• Reassure Me: Search is about simplicity, comfort, and trust. It is uncomplicated and more likely to include questions.
• Help Me: Search is about connecting and practicality. It is to the point and more likely to mention family or location.

De Graff also observes, “Emotions are the foundations of need states. The truth is, decision‐making is not a rational process, but one driven mainly by how people feel. The rational brain layers on reasons for our choices only after they're made.”

Before Google started this research, De Graff thought that one or two needs would dominate search behavior.

For example, he says that Educate Me seemed like a no‐brainer given that search is all about exchanging information. But he discovered that search behavior is driven by all six “canonical” needs.

This approach to creating customer personas can transform not only digital advertising, SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing, but also video marketing.

For example, visit Find My Audience. This free tool helps you to go beyond demographics to find the people on YouTube who are your most valuable customers.

First, you need to select a type of audience. You have two options:

• In‐market audiences: People actively researching or planning to purchase products or services like yours.
• Affinity audiences: People whose interests and habits relate to what your business offers.

Then, you need to select your category. For in‐market audiences, you have 22 options: Apparel & Accessories, Arts & Crafts Supplies, Autos & Vehicles, Baby & Children's Products, Beauty & Personal Care, Business & Industrial Products, Business Services, Computers & Peripherals, Consumer Electronics, Education, Employment, Event Tickets, Food, Gifts & Occasions, Home & Garden, Media & Entertainment, Musical Instruments & Accessories, Real Estate, Software, Sports & Fitness, Telecom, and Travel.

For affinity audiences, you have 12 options: Banking & Finance, Beauty & Wellness, Food & Dining, Home & Garden, Lifestyles & Hobbies, Media & Entertainment, News & Politics, Shoppers, Sports & Fitness, Technology, Travel, and Vehicles & Transportation.

In other words, the Find My Audience tool enables you to do the following:

• Discover new audiences based on their interests, habits, and what they're planning to purchase.
• Get a free audience profile, with insights to help inform your video ad strategy.
• Use your insights to start a YouTube campaign that reaches people who matter most to your business.

Now, that's a way to execute the segmentation and targeting element of the M3 model that you can take to the bank.

How Will You Convey Your Product/Service and How Might That Differ by Individual Customer or Segment?

The sixth question that you need to answer is: “How will you convey your product/service and how might that differ by individual customer or segment?”

If you tackle this question using traditional marketing, then the answers you'll find are probably going to be ineffective and incomplete. But if you're using programmatic buying to drive your media and applying the latest advances in machine learning for data‐driven creative, then automation can make positioning more effective and comprehensive.

So even if programmatic advertising isn't one of the top eight disciplines, the marketing competencies and capabilities required to execute positioning with a unified marketing and analytics platform are as follows:

• Organize audience insights
• Design compelling creative
• Execute with integrated technology
• Reach audiences across screens
• Measure the impact

Plus, if you segment customers by their intent, then positioning your product or service different ways to different groups becomes fairly straightforward. All you need to do is use a tool like Google's Director Mix to create multiple versions of a YouTube video ad that are customized to appeal to the different interests and intent of different shoppers.

For example, when soup sales were down in Australia, Campbell's Soup turned to Director Mix to create 1,700 variations of a single video. Users searching YouTube for “Orange Is the New Black,” for example, were served ads with cheeky copy about prison food. Those searching for Beyonce's “Single Ladies” were asked if they needed “dinner for one.”

With an average view rate of 55.43 percent, the “SoupTube” campaign garnered 1.67 million total views, generating a 6.9 percent lift in brand awareness—which is impressive for an already well‐known brand like Campbell's. The use of Director Mix reduced production costs, and best of all, Campbell's “Simply Soups” saw a 55.6 percent increase in sales between May and July 2016.

If you have time, watch the video in Figure 1.12 to see how the campaign didn't give users one reason to buy Campbell's soup; it gave them thousands of reasons, while targeting specific audiences on YouTube.

What Is the Customer Journey, How Will You Understand and Improve It, and How Will You Support That with Content?

This brings us to the Execution stage in the M3 model. The seventh set of questions that you need to answer are: “What is the customer journey, how will you understand and improve it, and how will you support that with content?”

The marketing competencies and capabilities required to execute the customer experience element are as follows:

• Map your customer's journey from initial impression to final conversion.
• Identify all of the communication touchpoints in your customer's journey.
• Create content to impact perceptions and behavior through the journey.

Traditional marketers were taught the funnel was a linear customer journey—from attention to interest, desire, and action (AIDA). Their key levers to drive growth were reach and frequency using mass media. And they used demographics to approximate user intent and inform their targeting and creative.

But Elmo Lewis developed the AIDA model back in 1898, and William Townsend introduced the funnel concept in 1924. These outdated models no longer illustrate what today's customer journeys look like.

After observing several hundred hours of shopping tasks, covering 310 different journeys across 31 categories, Alistair Rennie and Jonny Protheroe, who work on Google's Market Insights team in the United Kingdom, discovered, “People don't make decisions in a neat, linear fashion. A lot happens between the moment they realize they have a need or a desire for something and the moment they make a purchase.”

This is the gist of their 1,000‐word article entitled, “How people decide what to buy lies in the ‘messy middle’ of the purchase journey,” which was published in Think with Google in July 2020. And their article is actually a summary of their team's 98‐page report, which is entitled, “Decoding Decisions: Making Sense of the Messy Middle.”

Now, the “messy middle” is a big idea.

Their research found, “People look for information about a category's products and brands, and then weigh all the options. This equates to two different mental modes in the messy middle: exploration, an expansive activity, and evaluation, a reductive activity. Whatever a person is doing, across a huge array of online sources, such as search engines, social media, aggregators, and review websites, can be classified into one of these two mental modes.”

But Rennie and Protheroe were focused on just the “messy middle” of today's customer journeys. They didn't examine what happens before the triggers or after the purchase.

Digital technology and mobile devices have put people in control. We all now expect an immediate answer in the moments we want to know, go, do, and buy. And all of these intent‐rich moments are creating journey shapes as unique as each of us. In many ways, intent is redefining the old marketing funnel.

If no two customer journeys are the same, then how are you expected to understand where people are on the path to purchase and loyalty?

Well, the key step is the first one: Mapping your customer's journey.

And many people who work on mapping customer journeys have adopted Avinash Kaushik's “See, Think, Do, Care” framework to identify different stages (aka “audience intent clusters”):

• See: Anyone who could buy your product
• Think: Anyone who could buy your product showing some commercial intent
• Do: Anyone who could buy your product showing strong commercial intent
• Care: Your existing customers

Kaushik's framework has many benefits. But this framework was first published in July 2013 and then updated in July 2015. Since then, I've revised and extended it to incorporate new research that indicates there is a fifth stage.

For example, Justin De Graaf, whom I mentioned earlier, wrote an article entitled, “How consumer needs shape search behavior and drive intent,” which was published in Think with Google in May 2019. He said, “The truth is, decision‐making is not a rational process, but one driven mainly by how people feel. The rational brain layers on reasons for our choices only after they're made.”

That's why I've added “Feel” to Kaushik's framework (Figure 1.13)—after “See” and before “Think.”

With the map of your customer's journey completed, you're ready to tackle the next two steps:

• Identify all of the communication touchpoints in your customer's journey.
• Create content to impact perceptions and behavior through the journey.

Since Chapter 5, which covers Content Marketing, will address these next steps in more detail, there's no need to elaborate on them here. But let me just give you this sneak preview: 83 percent of marketers say video has become more important in the last 2 years.

How Will You Be Found in the Places Your Customers Are?

The eighth question that you need to answer is: “How will you be found in the places your customers are?”

The marketing competencies and capabilities required to execute the distribution element are as follows:

• Digital public relations (PR)
• Earned media

Getting found in all the right places requires you to go beyond owned media and paid media. It requires you to identify other places that are called “earned media,” which can be gained through publicity generated by digital PR, or organically, when content receives recognition and a following through communication channels such as social media and word of mouth.

If you have the time and interest in reading an article on this topic, then check out my post, “What is digital PR (aka online PR) and why is it so damn important?” It's more than 2,800 words long, so I won't republish all of it here (Figure 1.14).

Let me share a lightly edited excerpt of the key concepts.

Let's start with a definition: digital PR is a digital marketing discipline that uses press release SEO as well as digital media relations, blogger outreach, and influencer marketing to generate measurable results that are important to the success of a campaign or an organization.

Some people may mistakenly think that digital PR is just the early 21st‐ century version of traditional public relations, which was developed back in the early 20th century. But I'd argue that “PR” is experiencing a paradigm shift.

For more than 100 years, traditional public relations sent news releases to “the press” and engaged in media relations to generate publicity. But a funny thing happened in September 2002, when Google launched the beta version of Google News. When you did a news search, you could find press releases in the results along with articles from traditional news sources. This meant that “the public” as well as “the press” could find and read news releases that had been well optimized for relevant search terms.

In early 2003, SEO‐PR was founded to seize this opportunity, and we pioneered several techniques, including adding campaign parameters to URLs so we could track custom campaigns in Google Analytics.

This innovation was a game changer because it generated website traffic, B2B leads, and B2C sales as well as publicity.

For example, Southwest Airlines and SEO‐PR won the Golden Ruler Award for Excellence in Public Relations Measurement in 2005 for tracking $2.5 million in ticket sales in 2004 back to four optimized press releases. If you want more details, you can read our case study, which is entitled “You are now free to link PR and sales” and is posted on the Institute for Public Relations (IPR) website.

But press release SEO is just one of the key tactics used in digital PR. The other is digital media relations, blogger outreach, and influencer marketing. Together, they enable you to use a push/pull strategy to contact key people you know ahead of time and get contacted by key people you don't know after a newsworthy announcement.

This led to the development of an innovative digital PR tactic that put some newfangled “linkbait” on an old‐fashioned “news hook.” And, yes, Google considered this to be an ethical or “white‐hat” practice.

In fact, Google's quality guidelines said, “The best way to get other sites to create high‐quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.”

That's why SEO‐PR added blog outreach to our online PR services during this time frame. And we combined blogger outreach with press release SEO to generate publicity and build links for a variety of clients.

For example, we used some of the survey findings in the Harlequin Romance Report as linkbait for a campaign in 2007.

Harlequin Enterprises Ltd., one of the world's leading publishers of women's fiction, has polled more than 3,000 men and women across Canada and the United States and discovered that 55 percent of American men and 41 percent of American women had said, “I love you,” in hopes it would lead to sex.

We offered influential journalists and bloggers a draft of our optimized press release in advance under a “news embargo.”

This is another newfangled version of an old tactic that's been used for decades by traditional public relations professionals, who would ask journalists to hold a news story until a certain date in exchange for providing them with crucial information ahead of time.

This updated tactic enabled us to generate 11 news stories, 190 blog posts, and a mention in Jay Leno's monologue on the Tonight Show, as well as 202 natural links to the Harlequin Romance Report. That's what we were able to accomplish 15 years ago.

Today, we use SparkToro, the tool that I mentioned earlier, to quickly and accurately identify the places where our customers are, so our Digital PR efforts can be even better targeted and more effective (Figure 1.15).

For example, SparkToro's database tells us that a signification percentage of the 117,949 people who talk about “digital marketing” listen to The Growth Show, Marketing Smarts from MarketingProfs, and Content Inc with Joe Pulizzi podcasts.

Digital PR isn't one of the top eight disciplines. But you will probably want at least a concept‐level understanding of the tactics that were once called “online PR” and “linkbait” before you develop a digital marketing strategy for your organization in 2023 and beyond.

How Will You Actively Get Your Message in Front of the Right People?

The ninth question that you need to answer is: “How will you actively get your message in front of the right people?”

The marketing competencies and capabilities required to execute the integrated marketing communications element are as follows:

• Paid and owned media to promote your brand
• All forms of advertising and marketing

To actively get your message in front of the right people, you'll need an integrated marketing campaign that uses paid and owned media (as well as earned media) to promote your brand. This includes all forms of digital and traditional advertising and marketing approaches.

That's why we and the rest of our team need to learn how to master all eight of the disciplines that are considered core to OMCP certification. This includes these disciplines:

• Digital Advertising (including PPC, Social, Video, Display, and CTV)
• SEO (including local, publishing, and ecommerce)
• Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Conversion Optimization (including UX)
• Mobile Marketing
• Email Marketing

Since this is exactly what seven of the next eight chapters of this book are about, I won't elaborate about the integrated marketing element here.

What Data Do You Need to Support Your Marketing? How Do You Measure and Optimize Performance?

The 10th and final questions that you need to answer are: “What data do you need to support your marketing? How do you measure and optimize performance?” The marketing competencies and capabilities required to execute the data and measurement element are as follows:

• Define data sources/types (e.g., first party), metadata, schemas/taxonomies.
• Comply with data governance, privacy policies and procedures.
• Define what metrics will be used to gauge and optimize marketing performance.
• Provide reporting, analysis, and insights to improve performance and enable more efficient data‐driven marketing.

This is why digital analytics is the eighth discipline. It may not help you to actively get our message in front of people, but it will let you know if the other seven disciplines are getting your message in front of the right people. That's why it's the topic of Chapter 2.

But Matt Bailey, who wrote Chapter 2, focuses on universal analytics because this is what the OMCA standards and the OMCA exam for certification focus on. And even though I'm a Wolverine and he's a Buckeye, I agree 42‐27 with his decision. (If you don't get it, don't worry.)

Nevertheless, it won't hurt—and it may help—to have at least a concept‐level understanding of the following data and measurement elements before you develop a digital marketing strategy for your organization in 2023 and beyond.

On October 14, 2020, Vidhya Srinivasan, vice president of measurement, analytics, and buying platforms at Google, introduced “The New Google Analytics.” Called Google Analytics 4 (GA4), “It has machine learning at its core to automatically surface helpful insights and gives you a complete understanding of your customers across devices and platforms. It's privacy‐centric by design, so you can rely on Analytics even as industry changes like restrictions on cookies and identifiers create gaps in your data.”

GA4 also provides smarter insights to improve our marketing decisions and get better ROMI. As Srinivasan explained, “By applying Google's advanced machine learning models, the new Analytics can automatically alert you to significant trends in your data—like products seeing rising demand because of new customer needs. It even helps you anticipate future actions your customers may take. For example, it calculates churn probability so you can more efficiently invest in retaining customers at a time when marketing budgets are under pressure.”

In addition, a deeper integration with Google Ads makes it possible to address longtime advertiser requests. Srinivasan explained, “Because the new Analytics can measure app and web interactions together, it can include conversions from YouTube engaged views that occur in‐app and on the web in reports. Seeing conversions from YouTube video views alongside conversions from Google and non‐Google paid channels, and organic channels like Google Search, social, and email, helps you understand the combined impact of all your marketing efforts.”

However, GA4 doesn't help you show how you're delivering on your marketing strategy if you have the following business goals:

• Create brand awareness
• Build credibility/trust
• Educate audiences

If these are your goals, you need other tools to help deliver on your marketing strategy. And, as you will learn in Chapter 2, these other tools include surveys and qualitative research.

And as I mentioned earlier in this chapter, Google's Brand Lift solution measures the direct impact your YouTube ads are having on perceptions and behaviors throughout the consumer journey. With Brand Lift, you can answer the following questions:

• Do people recall watching my video ad?
• Are my target consumers more aware of my brand after viewing my video ad?
• Did my video ad move people to consider my brand or product?
• Are consumers more favorably aligned with my brand's message/identity after viewing my ad?
• Do consumers intend to purchase my product after seeing my ad?

Facebook also offers Brand Lift tests. So even if our goals don't involve increasing website traffic, website engagement, and conversions, you can still demonstrate that digital marketing is delivering on your business strategy. That should enable you to show that digital transformation is a self‐guided, step‐by‐step journey, propelled by a self‐sustaining flywheel instead of a grandiose project.

Why Do You Still Need to Add a Dash of Marketing Imagination?

Although adopting the M3 future‐facing framework can help you “suck less, every day,” you still need a dash of marketing imagination to continue “climbing two digital ladders of amazing success.”

Why? Because “tackling the challenge of digital transformation” isn't paint‐by‐numbers. It is a real art.

Yes, an evolutionary approach is more likely to work than a revolutionary one. It will help you infuse agility into your plan, create marketing‐driven growth for your company's bottom line, and future‐proof your business so you're ready for whatever comes next. And what comes next may have already arrived.

On October 19, 2021, I wrote a news story for Search Engine Journal entitled, “YouTube Announces Live Shopping and CTV Product Updates.” With permission from Search Engine Journal, let me share a lightly edited excerpt.

At Advertising Week New York, Tara Walpert Levy, Google vice president of brand and agency solutions, announced the latest live shopping and CTV product updates from YouTube. These announcements provide a clear picture of what's coming next in streaming and commerce.

As in‐store and digital commerce continue converging, shoppers are seeking inspiration and advice from different sources.

“YouTube creators have been at the forefront of this shift, sharing helpful, credible, and entertaining shopping content that cuts through the noise,” Levy says. She points out that 89 percent of viewers surveyed say they trust recommendations from YouTube creators.

In the video shown in Figure 1.16, Amy Lanzi, commerce practice lead North America, Publicis Groupe, explains how YouTube factors into consumers’ shopping journeys.

“Earlier this year,” Levy said, “YouTube also started testing an integrated shopping experience that allows viewers to tap into the credibility and knowledge of trusted creators to make informed purchases on YouTube.”

YouTube initially experimented with “shoppable” on‐demand videos, and now the platform is testing “shoppable” livestreams, as well.

More recently, YouTube partnered with several top creators to test their new live shopping features, and has also tested shoppable livestreams with leading retailers on their channels.

In the video from Figure 1.17, you can hear from White and Jill Toscano, the vice president of media for Walmart, about how YouTube's partnership has allowed them to better understand and adapt to consumer needs.

Streaming households passed cable TV households in the United States for the first time last year. And according to Comscore OTT Intelligence, 40 percent of all ad‐supported streaming watch time is currently taking place on YouTube.

Levy said that 60 percent of YouTube CTV viewers now watch video content with others, and that “people are connecting more deeply with each other by sharing the YouTube content that they love most on the big screen.”

Brands have an opportunity here to extend the overall reach and impact of their advertising campaigns.

In addition, U.S. advertisers can fully measure their YouTube CTV video investments across YouTube and YouTube TV. This provides a more accurate view of true incremental reach and frequency in Comscore Campaign Ratings.

This helps to explain why “tackling the challenge of digital transformation” isn't paint‐by‐numbers. It is a real art.

That's also why marketers and their agencies that need to learn how to apply what they have learned are reading this and other news stories to pivot, zigzag, and evolve their digital marketing strategy when things change.

Why? Because things are constantly changing.