Intuit promotes its suite of products with engaging entrepreneurial animation

Intuit Video

By Kyle O’Brien

Most people know of QuickBooks and TurboTax, but until last year, many may not have known the name of the company behind those popular financial help products.

With the release of its latest brand campaign, Intuit puts a stake in the ground as the go-to ecosystem of financial products – QuickBooks, TurboTax and Mint – with an animated tale of an entrepreneur who uses those products to get her business and her financial life in order.

The 60-second spot, ‘A Prosperity Story,’ a girl named Luisa sits in her father’s coffee shop, designing a hat and coffee cups. When a customer gives her a tip, a new entrepreneur is made. She is seen selling the design on clothes at a street stand, where she loses receipts to the wind. Knowing she needs a better way, she is visited by the Intuit giant – a character introduced in last year’s campaign during a four minute film. The giant shows her positive cash flow through QuickBooks, financial health and tax cuts with TurboTax and financial management with Mint. She finds a storefront and is on her way to her version of prosperity.

Intuit states that it fundamentally believes that everyone deserves, but many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, where even the smallest emergency can send a family into financial crisis. Half of all small businesses fail, according to the company.

“Everyone deserves a prosperous life, but the path to prosperity not easy for everyone,” Lauren Stafford-Webb, head of global corporate marketing for Intuit told The Drum. “We’re committed to turning those realities around. Intuit provides the financial tools so people can take control of their financial realities.

“The giant is a metaphor showing the power of our products,” she continued, stating that those products are powered by the company’s continuous data and advanced technology. “We’re working on behalf of our customers, giving them the confidence they need.”

The reason that Intuit chose an entrepreneur for its tale is that it brings it to a personal level. Stafford-Webb said that all people have some level of challenging financial problems, and that there are 750 million people around world who work for themselves in some way. They all need to manage their finances while following their passions. The commercial animation demonstrates how Intuit can use its suite of products to work on their behalf.

The campaign was created and produced by Intuit’s agency of record, Phenomenon and the film was directed by Against All Odds of Oscar-winning production company Passion Animation Studios.

To get to the story the team worked with, Intuit spent a lot of time with its customers, researching all over the country to find out how people dealt with their financial lives. “The truth (we found) is that people have passions in their lives and are working super hard to achieve prosperity for them. They’re going out on their own, managing their finances. That was really inspirational to us,” said Stafford-Webb.

She added that the first animated campaign exceeded expectations, with 25 million views, and a view-through rate on YouTube that went past the average movie trailer. The name recognition for Intuit is still an ongoing process and one that doesn’t happen overnight.

“We are a 35-year-old company. For the first 33 years, we were building our product brands,” said Stafford-Webb, adding that with people seeing Intuit as the umbrella company, there is relevance. “Knowing the ecosystem of the products, they know they can work seamlessly across them with confidence…It’s only year two for the Intuit brand. We do have a journey ahead of building equity in the brand.”

Intuit also had a 30-second ad, ‘Power of Giants’, in the AFC and NFC championship games, and it plans to unveil 60-second ‘A Prosperity Story’ during the Grammys. The media buy will then cover other big events, plus integrated television, online and social elements.

On social media, Intuit is inviting its customers to tell the company what prosperity means to them. Luisa was decided on as a character after the company talked with numerous self-employed artists. For many of those people, said Stafford-Webb, it was getting to live the life they want, and the company decided to champion that dedication, while providing the tools for people to live that life.

Scoring the film is a newly debuted song by Raiche, an up-and-coming Latina singer-songwriter who identifies with the spot’s protagonist, Luisa, from her own self-determination to achieve her goals as a musical artist. The song in the spot is called Shine, and Stafford-Webb said the walking beat helped create the drive behind Luisa.

Article source: https://www.thedrum.com/news/2019/02/08/intuit-promotes-its-suite-products-with-engaging-entrepreneurial-animation

Popular Influencers Span Every Culture On Social Media

Image Source: Media Post

by Gavin O’Malley | 

The most popular online influencers increasingly represent every cultural and ethnicity imaginable, new research suggests.

Across social-media channels, nine out of the top 17 “stars” now represent multiple cultures, according to the Culture Marketing Council (CMC).

For its findings, the trade group — known as the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies until earlier this year — said it recently conducted an online quantitative study of 3,500 total 13-49-year-old respondents with equal representation of non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic African-Americans and Hispanics.

Across cultures, more consumers are also showing a preference for multicultural content, the CMC found.

In fact, most non-Hispanic white teens and Generation Xers like diverse shows, like “Black-ish,” “Luke Cage,” “How to Get Away with Murder,” “This Is Us” and “Orange is the New Black,” simply because they view them as quality content.

Ads placed on platforms with cultural content have more “power” across all ages, segments and languages, regardless of U.S. or foreign births, the CMC insists.

In particular, 71% of non-Hispanic African-Americans are more likely to buy from brands that advertise in their cultural spaces. Additionally, 60%-to-64% of Hispanics — 60% on English-language Hispanic sites and 64% on Spanish-language Hispanic sites — feel the same way.

Spanish-language ads — even on mainstream sites — create more engagement with Hispanics, including third-generation Hispanics, which incorporates time in Spanish as part of their in-culture digital activities.

As for channel preferences, younger Hispanics (18-to-34 years old) are equally passionate about social media and streaming video on-demand (SVOD) services.

Article source: https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/317714/popular-influences-span-every-culture-on-social-me.html

How Kate Spade is building an entertainment-driven content strategy

An image from Kate Spade’s ‘Make Yourself a Home’ YouTube series

By Minda Smiley |The Drum

About five years ago, Kate Spade found itself facing many of the same issues as other fashion brands. With glossy two-page magazine ads continuing to lose their luster, the handbag maker was struggling to shed its more traditional, print-oriented ways and create a digital strategy that worked.

Speaking at SXSW, Kate Spade’s chief marketing officer Mary Beech explained that at the time, the brand was employing a hollow one-size-fits-all approach to social by posting the same content on each platform. Additionally, the company was struggling to glean any real insights from the data it had on hand.

“We created content for all of the various mediums in which we were on, but we created one piece of content and just pushed it across all the mediums, not taking into any account what was specific about those distribution techniques,” said Beech. “We had lots of data, but we didn’t have insights, and so we weren’t using those insights to leverage them against the content we created and deployed.”

Fast forward to 2018, and the brand – which was acquired by Coach last year for $2.4bn – is doing things a bit differently. Through creating content that’s both platform-specific and entertainment-driven, the New York-based company has managed to create a digital strategy that it says is helping it connect and engage with fans.

Finding a story to tell

Getting into a “video-first” mindset is something that Kristen Naiman, senior vice president of brand creative at Kate Spade’s in-house agency, wanted to prioritize when she joined the company four years ago. At the time, Naiman said her team was “very stuck in thinking about the photograph” as the main form of communication.

To move away from that, her team began looking at what sorts of shows and series were popular to see if the brand could take any cues from the entertainment world.

“A lot of what was happening out there that felt really exciting was this renaissance of serialized narrative storytelling content,” she said, pointing to shows like HBO’s High Maintenance and the rising popularly of Netflix. It was around that same time that female comedians like Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer were beginning to see their careers skyrocket, something she said the brand also took note of since she believed they were helping to usher in a new era of comedy.

“We thought both of those things were amazing and really interesting,” said Naiman.

Those two insights led to the birth of Kate Spade’s #MissAdventure, a short-form YouTube show starring actress and singer Anna Kendrick that kicked off in 2014. In the series, Kendrick plays a slightly ditzy, quirky woman who spends her days exploring New York.

“Our principles were twofold: we were going to make something that behaved in a way that was digital-first, and we were going to make something that while it was meant to be a piece of marketing to a certain degree, was interesting first,” said Naiman.

Kate Spade’s products were tied into the series via a concept Naiman calls “product as character,” which essentially involves making a product an integral part of the story rather than something a character is simply wearing or using.

For instance, in an episode of #MissAdventure called ‘The Waiting Game,’ Kendrick realizes she’s lost her apartment keys once she arrives at her doorstep. To get in, she decides to create a makeshift rope using the Kate Spade clothes and shoes she’s just bought so she can climb in via the fire escape.

Naiman said making the brand’s products a “distinct element” in the stories it tells helps the brand become part of the narrative, a strategy she believes is more effective than simply sticking a logo at the end of a video.

“We are a materialist culture. We all live with a lot of stuff in our lives, and those elements in our lives are part of our story,” she said.

Choosing a platform

While some brands strive to be early adopters and try out every new platform, Kate Spade has taken a more cautious approach to social.

Krista Neuhaus, Kate Spade’s senior director of digital brand marketing, said the brand was on every single social channel when she joined a few years back. Upon joining, she made it her job to figure out not only which channels the brand should be on and which ones it shouldn’t, but also how it should approach each individual platform…Read more 

Article source: http://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/03/12/how-kate-spade-building-entertainment-driven-content-strategy

Why Businesses Will Struggle to Adapt to 2018’s Social Marketing Challenges

Image Credit: PonyWang/iStock

By James Jorner

In its ongoing efforts to redefine popular beauty standards as part of its decade-long Real Beauty campaigns, Dove learned the hard way about the thin line that exists between positive social message and controversy. For a company that has so successfully promoted positive body image in the past, it must have come as a shock that an idea so well thought out (or so it thought) ended up being so misinterpreted.

But that’s just one of many examples that what looks good on paper might not look as good on Twitter.

While the marketing mistakes we saw in 2017 might have taught us a thing or two about social marketing, 2018 might bring with it a fresh list of public relations mishaps, legal issues and other unanticipated challenges.

By looking at trends, we can predict and prepare for what’s to come in 2018.

People will expect authenticity

As brand messaging, giving to charity and claims of “green” become popular ways to attract customers, consumers are putting their guard up and being very selective about what they believe.

“Consumers are no longer being impressed by new old tactics that used to be woven together into cause marketing,” Electra Cruises CEO Randy Clayton said. “Going forward, businesses will need to be more believable.”

The answer to this is authenticity. To be able to connect with consumers at a personal level, social marketers––and marketers in general––will need to cultivate an authentic voice that customers can easily identify with. The messages sent out must reach customers, be genuine and at the same time enhance brand principles—something that’s not been very popular in 2017.

So, what can you do to make your voice more believable?

“The time is ripe for transitory content,” RockHer CEO Jim Vernon said. “Social marketing will need to pick up the momentum set on transitory content such as Instagram Stories and Facebook Live videos in 2017. This type of content has a better shot at making your brand credible, as opposed to other types of content, which look and feel rehearsed and perfected.”

Brands will be required to be even more transparent

Back in 2015, Machinima had to settle charges imposed on it by the Federal Trade Commission for failing to adequately disclose paid endorsements to YouTube influencers for the promotion of Microsoft’s Xbox One.

This is a case of influencer marketing done right (Machinima had promised its client 19 million views) but against the law.

With the rising application of influencer marketing, sponsored content and other related techniques taking center stage in social marketing, brands are under a lot of scrutiny. This has called for more transparency on their part in the way that they leverage these methods to get their products out there.

Speaking of the Machinima settlement, Jessica Rich, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, explained, “When people see a product touted online, they have a right to know whether they’re looking at an authentic opinion or a paid marketing pitch.”

Lawsuit Settlement Funding CEO Chris Janish said, “The legal aspect of advertising has long been a non-issue, but now, companies will need to carefully consider this area before they can even begin to sell their message.”

With such developments, influencer marketing might become irrelevant, or at least not as effective in 2018 as it has been in the previous years. Customers will find it hard to believe a message if they can clearly see that an influencer has been paid to push it.

Managing messaging across channels will be more challenging

Traditionally, the idea of optimizing content for different channels was to take the same piece of content and make small changes to fit it into the target channel. However, as it is, every piece of content has to be created for a particular channel, from the start.

The content-creation process is changing drastically, and social marketers will need to adapt to these changes. They will need to constantly look back at past content and see what has worked before, including the social data and target audience information.

“Each platform provides unique opportunities for you to tell the story of your brand,” Scorum CEO Vladislav Artemyev said. “To succeed in each, social marketers have to clearly define the type of content to create for their audience in each of the channels. They have to know the key pillars of each platform; what content matches the target audience, and which types to do away with; and the audience engagement levels on each platform.”

While 2017 gave us lots of Kendall Jenner Pepsi ads, it also gave us Heineken’s Worlds Apart ads. So, nothing is predetermined. Some marketers will still rise above the challenges and use the trends to their advantage. But the time to act is now.

Article source: http://www.adweek.com/digital/james-jorner-effective-inbound-marketing-guest-post-2018-social-marketing-challenges/

TV May Affect the Brain, But Influencer Marketing Affects the Heart

Image Credit: valentinrussanov/iStock

By Richard Wong | Adweek

Marketing and advertising have evolved in many ways over the past decade, particularly with the ways we consume media, most notably social media.

The advent of social media has ushered in a new wave of creators— the talented individuals who have showcased their creativity and developed a following around their content.

Enter influencer marketing—one of the fastest-growing segments of marketing—a new and exciting way to bring your brand to life. The big question that always remains is: “How do I measure the impact of my marketing programs?”

The #paid team decided to tackle this challenge by working with the team at Nielsen Consumer Insights on a marketing effectiveness study to better understand the consumer impact of branded influencer marketing materials, specifically reviewing the creative campaign of a major food and beverage brand.

To accomplish this, Nielsen conducted an online study to:

• Evaluate the effectiveness of influencer marketing on key performance indicators (recall, affinity, etc.).
• Assess the attributes associated with each piece of content (unique, credible, cool, etc.).
• Determine the impact of influencer marketing on future purchase decisions.

As a basis of comparison, the team wanted to establish a benchmark against the primary channel for brand-based marketing—video advertising and TV commercials—by using a pre- and post-exposure methodology, often used by Nielsen Media Lab. The published study can be found on the #paid website.

The results were surprising but insightful into the ways consumers view these different types of content. The research showed that video advertising performed extremely well on brand recall and driving brand awareness. However, social media content drove stronger brand perception shifts, and content quality was viewed as equivalent or greater than traditional video ads.

So, what does that mean for influencer marketing? These are some of the major takeaways from the study:

Influencer marketing and TV work in complementary ways

Many marketers view these two investments as an “either/or,” essentially creating a divide between the two channels. In the end, the research revealed the various impacts of marketing and how they actually work best simultaneously.

When consumers see a TV ad, they see the brand logo, product shot, key claims and tagline. Catchy jingles can get stuck in people’s minds. All of this works well to get people to notice and remember a brand, but this is only the first step within the path to purchase.

Influencer marketing takes this a step further by integrating products into the creators’ lives that consumers seek inspiration from and relate to. In short, creators make products highly relatable and desirable. These attributes have been shown to increase consideration and purchase intent—the next stage of the path to purchase.

Content can be produced—at scale—from social media creators

Marketers should look at how we develop creative content in the 21st century. It doesn’t require pricey studio rentals, a production crew, casting talent and editing anymore. All of these tasks are performed by content creators—the 21st century production crew.

Initial concerns about the quality of the content were put at ease when the results showed that content quality was actually viewed as equivalent or exceeding that of the traditional video ad.

Tools to measure the impact of influencer marketing are becoming more abundant

Measuring the impact of brand marketing has always been an elusive and tricky thing to figure out. The ways we measure the impact can vary depending on the type of campaign that’s run, the objectives set out and the conversion funnel.

That said, establishing campaign goals and running brand measurement studies or any conversion analysis are excellent ways to track the performance of influencer marketing and determine the brand’s return on investment.

When traditional research leaders like Nielsen partner with brand teams, agencies and industry innovators on finding new ways to measure the impact of new approaches to marketing, the industry wins. It allows all marketers to understand the different use cases and make everybody’s efforts stronger.

Authenticity and relatable at its core

A strength in influencer marketing stems from its ability for brands to partner with creators that develop content perceived to be authentic and relatable to their audience. Their audience has come to know them for an extended period of time, heard their reviews on a range of different products and services and see a bit of themselves in the creators they follow.

When a creator voices their opinion and integrates a brand into their feed, it connects to their audience in a much more powerful way than simply getting a video view or an ad impression.

Influencer marketing should be considered a key part of a marketer’s tool kit

While influencer marketing programs can be led by different teams—PR, creative, media or the brand—the simple story is that influencer marketing is here to stay and deserves significant investment and coordination within a brand plan.

When the #paid team works on various influencer marketing programs, they either partner with brands directly or with their media agencies, as they often hold the media budgets. Those budgets are crucial in order to ensure the scalable success of influencer marketing: Creators deserve to get compensated for their work, time and talent; brand teams need to ensure that content is created on time and according to the brief.

All in all, the future of influencer marketing is bright. Influencer marketing budgets continue to rise, creators are learning how to integrate brands in a more sophisticated and authentic way and the industry as a whole is adopting best practices to drive even more value for everybody involved.

Article source: http://www.adweek.com/digital/richard-wong-paid-guest-post-influencer-marketing/

The anatomy of the modern marketer

Image source: thedrum.com

By Matthew Stevens– Originally published January 8 2018

What does the future of marketing look like? Last year, MOI Global undertook a six-month project to find out. Consisting of three global dinner discussions, a survey and top marketing thought leadership from some frankly badass panelists and speakers, Disrupt Forum 2017 uncovered many of the answers.

We started by dissecting the anatomy of the modern marketer. Today’s buyer has all the power, and any marketer who wants to redress the balance needs to adopt a new way of thinking. But no marketer is an island. And no single skill set will do. Instead, both MOI’s Anatomy of the Modern Marketer survey and the panellists from our first Disrupt Forum dinner revealed the key characteristics we should identify, promote and nurture in the Modern Marketer.

Future-focused

Sitting alongside a readiness to learn and to adapt is a hunger to improve. Many of today’s marketers choose opportunity and corporate fit over cash reward, and are aware of how their development and progression helps the business. This means they are focused on organisational goals, alongside their own.

Multifaceted marketing

Marketing is no longer a single discipline, but multifaceted. The Modern Marketer is part scientist, part creative, and while technology has brought the need for a whole new set of digital skills, traditional marketing skills are as relevant and crucial as ever: the need to understand data, finance, and to build a strategy, hook an audience…

Collaborative

Hook an audience. Isn’t that old-school in this age of inbound marketing and user-generated content (UGC)? Well you need to inspire and compel them to collaborate with you in the first place, or why would they bother? And collaboration skills are key internally too – 78% of marketers who took our survey chose ‘collaborator’ as the most important personality trait. Marketers who can work with and learn from other functions will have a broader perspective and a bigger ideas pool.

Curious

Perhaps the most important trait of all in an ever-changing world is curiosity. “Stay hungry,” says Disrupt Forum panelist Geraldine Kor, director of marketing, DXC. “If you are constantly hungry, you’ll always be curious and be seeking.” The ‘Modern Marketer’ is always alert to new trends and opportunities, always seeking new ways of doing things, always ready to listen, learn and adapt.

Customer-obsessed

The best marketers put understanding customers at the heart of their marketing, obsessing not just about who and where they are, but also their attitudes, behaviours and actions. They understand that the customer experience they provide is what differentiates their company from the rest.

So what did we learn? As hard as we tried to find it, there’s no single set of skills, training course or process today that will remain fit for purpose for very long. But for marketers not daunted by change, there’s a world of opportunities.

Article source: http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2018/01/08/the-anatomy-the-modern-marketer

The Nuts and Bolts Behind Business Cards

Don’t judge a business card by its cover? Ah, yes, I’m afraid so. Business cards, the silent piece of advertisement is scrutinized more than you think. It’s not just the design element potential clients are intrigued or impressed by. They want to learn the meat and potatoes, or the nuts and bolts about what your business has to offer.

Potential clients want to know,

• Who you are
• Where you are located
• What exactly do you do
• How can they contact you
• How much will your products or service affect their wallet
• How long will it take to reach customer satisfaction
• Are you trustworthy and what does the BBB have to report about your business
• What type of experience do you have supporting your business

Customers are savvier about their spending habits than they have ever been. Also, consumers have trust issue concerns with how they conduct business and the reputation of who they give their dollars to, especially when they have been burned by a business before. There really is more behind the business card than meets the eye.

You Don’t Do Marketing. You Live It.

CREDIT: Getty Images

And that means everything is a part of your campaign…

By Jon Westenberg  Startup mentor

I talk to a lot of businesses that don’t know what they’re doing to market themselves. Actually, scratch that. I talk to a lot of businesses who can’t tell me what marketing is in the first place. To their minds, it has something to do with social media or videos or advertising or calling people to hiring more sales folks or writing blog posts but they’re just not entirely sure…

…and that’s why they’re blowing it.
It’s not that their marketing isn’t working, it’s that they don’t really understand what marketing is, or how it works, or why it works, or anything else. It’s pure chaos, and it’s pure failure just waiting to happen.

Here’s the key to this problem. Marketing and advertising are actually pretty easy concepts to understand. They’re any activity that puts your business in front of the people who pay your business money. It’s really that simple. When you speak to anyone in your target demographic about your business, you’re marketing it. When you write a blog post. Record a video. Change your…Continue reading

Article source: https://www.inc.com/jon-westenberg/marketing-is-any-activity-that-exposes-you-to-your-audience.html