It’s a new year and a new decade and for many of us, we hope they’ll bring new beginnings - but one glance at the stories filling our front pages would fill you with a sense of concern.
From slumping retail sentiment, to the climate change debate, to twitchy capital markets, you might feel comfortable placing a bet on recession.
That foreboding is particularly acute for marketers. Our craft is often viewed as part of “discretionary” spend and in bad times, it tends to be the first place that businesses look for savings.
In 2008, when the financial world came crashing down around us, legendary investor Warren Buffett bet big. He was playing the long game and famously quipped “bad news is an investor’s best friend” – and in the ten years since, the S&P 500 has increased by 130%.
Our businesses, shareholders, customers, partners and clients expect us to grow. To achieve growth against the grain, we need to weaponise marketing to make it a meaningful driver of enterprise value.
In this environment, media will serve as a key growth driver and be the critical factor in accelerating growth. As competitors with smaller risk appetites pull back, it’s an opportunity to win disproportionately.
It won’t be easy, and we’ll need to get comfortable playing in some uncomfortable places. I see a few key areas that’ll matter the most.
New Customers
Who would have thought that a brand like KFC would appear in Vogue magazine talking about weddings? Yet it has proven to be one of their most successful campaigns, shifting the narrative and expanding their cultural saliency. It takes courage to talk to light or ultra-light customers, those who live beyond the obvious audience of 20-somethings stumbling home after a night on the town.
We need to evolve our media planning and strategies. We need to surprise and delight with the experiences that we deliver, and to new audiences.
New Creativity
The world is upside down, with traditional businesses doubling down on “performance”, and digital businesses betting on traditional “brand” advertising. One pervasive truth though is that brands know that they need to lift their cultural relevance. It’s the reason Influencer marketing spend in the US is tracking to grow from $1.6B in 2016 to as much as $15B in 2022. Nike’s “Dream Crazy” blew us away because it harnessed the perfect storm of the health and wellness movement, race politics, sporting heroism and a focus on individualism, executed with brilliant story telling.
To arrest brand decline, the answer is not to reduce brand investment - eBay’s brand advertising in Australia is one of the reasons why this market continues to be one of their strongest performing worldwide.
New Commerce
Retailers have been scrambling to offer sophisticated “omni-channel” experiences. Customers have been conditioned to expect products to be available on-demand. Media is becoming increasingly transactable, where the point of exposure is also becoming the point of sale.
As Facebook Pay and simplified “click to buy” in Instagram launch this year, it will bring with it a step-change in the impact of social commerce. Tencent bet on this trend early, integrating payment gateways and shopping capability into the WeChat ecosystem to become a dominant platform for purchasing goods and services in China. As an example, with the help of a local hyper-influencer, Kim Kardashian sold 150,000 bottles of her new fragrance (at $47 a bottle) within minutes.
New Behaviours
Being data driven doesn’t mean you can’t be creative. Every brand, even the most sophisticated of digital-first businesses, is on some sort of transformation journey. We are more driven by data and analytics than ever before, because the science matters. Not at the expense of creativity but it isn’t about finding the “right balance”. The sequence should look something like this: the science and capability should allow us to find the core insight faster, to power the creative ideation or channel selection process faster and allow us to test effectiveness faster.
New Industry
Disruption is the new normal, and even the largest companies in the world are seeking ways to disrupt themselves - just look at the way the big four banks are investing in Open Banking.
As agencies, we need to embrace this ethos. Concerns around “the death of the agency” are both overblown and naïve, although it is true that we won’t look the way we do today. The rise of in-housing will open new opportunities for agencies to become the systems integration partner of choice, while the move to automated buying platforms will open new opportunities to refocus on the creative power of people. Whether we are “lifting and shifting” or creating solutions that are completely new, we have an opportunity to create brave solutions.
Accelerating Growth
When times are tough, unlocking growth isn’t going to come from a pessimistic, bunker mentality. By embracing these changes and the opportunities they offer, the smart marketer will not only survive complex and challenging times, but thrive. Let’s go.
Willie Pang is CEO of MediaCom Australia & New Zealand. MediaCom’s upcoming Unplugged event on Thursday February 20 in Sydney will host five sessions discussing these topics.
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