From reading Econsultancy’s recent Top 100 Digital Agencies report it’s clear that to some extent the industry is in good health, with a positive future outlook and strong growth.
As a client, it’s often difficult to know how much freedom to grant your agency.
Programmatic advertising continued to creep into the generalist marketer’s consciousness in 2015.
If you’re interested, we recently wrote up a handy digest of some of 2015’s programmatic trends.
But enough of looking backwards, let’s look in the crystal ball and ask ‘What’s in store for 2016?’
Marketing Week hosted the Data Storytelling conference in September, which attracted a large crowd of likeminded professionals from across both marketing and data fields.
The agenda was positioned to explain the concept of mobilising data through building greater understanding of the customer and then exploiting insights using informed campaigns.
It was a brave ambition that covered a wide gulf of technologies and opportunities.
Optimisation leads to incremental gain, while creativity leads to disruption.
In this extract from our Top 100 Digital Agencies Report 2015, I explore how the importance of creativity is being re-evaluated and how marketers are using this to build stronger connections with consumers.
Looking to create interesting, popular content?
Use data to determine the questions your audience are asking, then add your expertise to provide engaging answers to hold your readers attention.
Let us start with the bombshell. There isn’t anything new on the digital marketing horizon for 2015 that excites me much in isolation.
In previous years entire new disciplines emerged. Last year was big for content marketing, data, native advertising, programmatic.
Before that we had marketing automation, inbound marketing and going back further still social, mobile, video and so on. “Search engine marketing” was coined as a discipline back in 2001.
Last year, Coca-Cola launched the Journey website as its own media outlet, using an editorial, image-heavy format.
Fuelled by the brand’s Content 2020 plan, the redesign was described as ‘the most ambitious rethink of Coca-Cola’s web properties’ since it launched the first website in 1995.
The company has gone from being declared ‘creatively bankrupt’ by a chief exec in 2004 to being named Creative Marketer of the Year at Cannes in 2013.
There have been a lot of articles recently about big data, technical innovations, the internet of things, the latest search algorithms etc.
We have an increasing volume of information to consume and assimilate on a daily basis. Yet we can’t allow ourselves to get completely caught up in granularity and detail, we are emotional creatures and creative thinking must be part of our daily diet.
“Mobile ads suck,” claimed Steve Jobs in 2010. They needed, according to Jobs, to be more creatively appealing and engaging to be effective.
Has the industry changed? Do mobile ads still suck? Or has creativity in mobile marketing caught up with demand?
Here are my 10 essentials tips for creative mobile campaigns.
Recently I listed a bunch of creative 404 pages, which a) made for light reading, b) show that it is possible to deal with problems in an engaging way, and c) goes some way to prove that an interesting 404 page is an easy way of generating some extra link juice.
Since it’s Friday here’s another slice of fun.
Finding Easter eggs used to be a case of running around the garden once a year. Then came along computer games, which included ‘Easter eggs’ in the form of hidden treasure. Some websites have Easter eggs too, and I thought I’d point you at a few of them.
A note: this post shamelessly references this thread on Reddit, which contains a number of other examples.
Enjoy!
I’ve spotted a few outdoor ads / campaigns recently that I think are worth sharing. They blend innovation, creativity, technology and interactivity in a number of different ways.
You may think that offline ads aren’t especially relevant to internet marketers, but some of the more successful viral ads have been based around offline events (the Carlsberg biker video, for starters), and often involve real people and real reactions. If I was in charge of brand marketing for a large company then I’d be ploughing this particular furrow with vigour.
These ads can generate an incredible amount of noise and love (as highlighted in the TNT example below). It’s telling that a big budget TV ad such as Volkswagen’s ‘The Force’ is seeded online first these days. In terms of a feedback loop, there is none better than the internet.
Anyhow, some of these ads contain sound, so you might need some headphones. Enjoy!