Trying to stand out either by embracing digital or going old-school

By Ariella Brown

Johnny Rose is right, and that's a major problem for marketers.EVERYONE has an online presence, and EVERYONE is using digital ads, emails, and even texts to try to stay top-of-mind for their target customers. 

We're all inundated by ads any time we go online. For brands looking to get attention, what's the best way? Should the up the ante on digital with splashy CGI effects to achieve viral status? Or should they take the opposite track and return to paper images for billboards and catalogs to connect more intimately and concretely with their customers? 

Both approaches are currently in use, and the splashy ones are definitely getting more coverage.

Upping the ante for digital

You must have seen the gargantuan Maybelline mascara wands appearing to brush giant lashes no buses and Tube trains:

A similar tactic was used to show a skyscraper-high Barbie stepping out of her box in Dubai. 

Both the makeup and Barbie movie promo grabbed a lot of attention because they looked like real custom installations on location. Many people first thought that there really were giant lashes attached to a bus or train. In fact, though, these outsized promos only existed in the digital realm. You could only see the CGI-generated mascara, lashes, and towering doll on a video that blended them with a real background. effects with the real world. 

The amount of  buzz generated by  indicating that digital out-of home (DOOH) AKA faux OOH advertising may be the one to opt for to get the most publicity bang for your advertising bucks. While no one has shared exactly what these headline-grabbing stunts cost, it seems that they may be more economical  than traditional OOH advertising setups.

Retreating from digital 

Perhaps when the everyone else is zigging toward digital, the way to zag is to go in the opposite direction. That's seems to be the thinking of some brands that are conspicuously embracing good, old-fashioned paper to connect with customers.

It may not be altogether surprising that a bricks-mortar icon would return to its roots of publishing a paper catalog for its anniversary sale, a practice that it had abandoned only four years ago in the case of Nordstrom reintroducing the paper catalogs that it had abandoned in 2019. 

But even a brand born in the digital age is turning to paper. Zappos put its 2023 back-to-school catalog in paper format to be mailed out, Digiday reports, Perhaps the Amazon-owned shoe retailer is taking a cue from the ultimate online seller, which has mailed out holiday season toy catalogs since 2018. 

Amazon also has found it effective to use mail out paper letters, as I described in Amazon Uses Snail Mail. Amazon invests in the extra cost of printing and postage because when our digital inboxes hold thousands of unread messages, we still tend to open the envelopes that come in the mail. 

Reviving traditional OOH 

Instead of trying to compete with Maybelline to achieve virality from a faux OOH marketing setup, cosmetic brand Murad is investing in traditional billboards in New York and Los Angeles  to promote its products and store.

"The social space has become so competitive, it’s [become more] interesting for us to think about how to advertise differently,” Paul Schiraldi, CEO of Murad told Glossy .“It’s the old-school reach and frequency media advertising strategy, but it works.”


While traditional may resonate more with the viewers who see the actual billboards in strategic locations, including  Times Square, instead of having to view the effect on a screen, it certainly doesn't raise the same level of buzz as the CGI-enabled promotions.

But, at the end of the day, the goal is not just to have people talk about your promotions but to incentivize them to actually buy your products. So this may play out well for the company's revenue goals if it brings in their target market around that location. 

There's good data to back that assumption: The Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) recently reported that its popular has been increasing and accounted for $1.82 billion in spending in just the first quarter of 2023.  Businesses don't usually spend that kind of money unless they expect to achieve substantial ROI.

If you were faced with the choice of investing in paper or digital promotions, which would you choose? 

Related: 

Don't just aim for different
Visualizing the customer journey

What makes content marketing effective
What the Little Prince teaches us about marketing

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When two screens are better than one

In the last century, people who would plan what to watch on TV would turn to printed guides. Thanks to the proliferation of channels and the rise of streaming services, they have a lot more options to choose from. But this brave new world also opens up new ways for marketers to reach the audiences that will lift viewership. 

A  leader in global TV analytics, Samba TV, connects data on viewership with cross-screen ad exposure to helps programmers measure and optimize tune-in campaign performance. Toward that end it draws on partnerships for insight into what viewers are tuning into on their second screen. 

TV and digital are better together, says cross-screen analytics leader Samba TV.

Read more in 

Second Screen Synergy for TV Marketing

Gearing up for digital transformation

It’s the time of year when we’re gearing up for the spring forward (March 10). As we get set to advance our clocks, we should also be thinking about how we can advance our businesses on the road of digital transformation. That calls for making the necessary shifts in a technology portfolio to embrace the game changers, especially the ones that deliver on customer analytics.

Read more in Time to rebalance your technology portfolio for digital transformation

Blockchain Could Track Ads

Digital ads have the advantage of scaling personalization effectively. But with the rise of ad fraud pushed forward by “bots,” numbers can appear inflated way beyond true human audiences. Some see blockchain as the most promising solution to this problem, given its function to act as an immutable ledger,

Blockchain has the potential to play a significant role in marketing and advertising. That vision is now being realized, thanks to the increasing awareness of digital ad fraud that is prompting marketers to seek greater transparency -- a primary attribute of blockchain technology.

The revenue currently lost to ad fraud is staggering. According to Juniper Research, losses will amount to $19 billion this year, which translates to roughly $51 million a day. Those numbers are expected to more than double over the next five years, to the tune of $44 billion. 

Shidan Gouran, president and CEO of Global Blockchain Technologies Corporation,says the problem is exacerbated by “programming bots to emulate human behavior to simulate engagement and traffic to earn revenue from those ads.” But he sees the possibility of curbing the fraud through blockchain by implementing solutions like adChain.  

Read more in 

Using Blockchain To Beat The Bots

Silver platter service goes digital

via GIPHY

Though luxury shopping was once the province of bricks-and-mortar locations, it now has arrived online.

When it comes to summer vacations, most begin planning online – including those in the luxury market. What many of us do is compare prices for various flight and hotel options on sites like TripAdvisor and Kayak, to find something within our budgets. For those whose time is more valuable than money, however, the goal of online shopping is different.

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is famous for observing, “They are different from you and me.” The same goes for luxury marketing.

via GIPHY

Read more in

Luxury Marketing For The Digital Age

Tailored and Targeted Marketing in the B2B Space

The problem facing B2B marketers is that they have not been given the same tools and capabilities available for B2C marketers to reach people on more than 500 channels available. That's because they don't have integrated data on the people they need to target, which hampers their addressable audience and reach.

The 2016 Forrester Report, “B2B Budget Plans Show That It's Time For A Digital Wake-Up Call," found that even though two-thirds of B2Bs indicated they would be increasing their digital budgets within the year, only about one-fifth considered their teams truly adept at leveraging data and insights for effective digital campaigns. 

Darian Shirazi, CEO and cofounder of Radius, a leader in connecting B2B data and intelligence spoke with me about the big challenge that B2B marketers have had in trying to target a CIO. 

Read more in 

Targeted Advertising for B2B

A simple tool to counter ad fraud

Do you know where your ads are? The less than satisfactory answer to that question has prompted some companies to pull back from the digital ad space.  Pixel tracking may solve that problem.
Read more in 

Where Your Digital Ads Are At

NFC taps IoT's potential for marketing

Once upon a time, retail stores tried to get our attention with special displays, signs and stickers, but now they can tap into the power of IoT to communicate a lot more than just “New!” or “Special!” The smartphones we carry can convey marketing messages built into the displays or even the product themselves with just a tap.

Thin Film Electronics ASA is a global leader in NFC (near field communication). It creates printed tags, labels, and systems that incorporate memory, sensors, and wireless communication to enable one-to-one digital marketing through just a tap of a smartphone.

Together with GlaxoSmithKline, it deploys Thinfilm's SpeedTap™ tags in interactive “smart” shelves featuring Flonase®  in stores in six Canadian provinces. Customers who tap their NFC-enabled smartphones to the shelves can get information about the product at the moment of decision.

Matt Bright, Senior Director of Product and Technical Marketing, Thinfilm, spoke with us about why the “smart” shelves are just the tip of the iceberg in IoT marketing. We're not only talking about delivering marketing messages, but being able to customize and adapt to them and pick up the trail of the customer journey even beyond the buying decision.

Read more in 

Tying the Physical and Digital in NFC

Increasing IoT Investment for Supply Chain

At the beginning of 2017, IDC published its forecast for worldwide spending on the Internet of Things (IoT). It came up with the figure of $737 billion for spending on IoT in 2016 to cover organizational investments “in the hardware, software, services, and connectivity” it requires. That amount would continue to grow based at “a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.6% over the 2015-2020 forecast period, reaching $1.29 trillion in 2020,” the firm projected.

A huge chunk of that is to come from industry. In fact, IDC’s estimates allocate the lion’s share of IoT investments in 2016 to that sector and found that it involved several large investment amounts. For the 2016, investment in IoT for manufacturing operations would have amounted to $102.5 billion. It also involved a chunk of investment in logistics, specifically freight monitoring  to the tune of $55.9 billion.

The motivation for such hefty investment at this time, according to IoT World’s report Manufacturing IoT & Supply Chain Transformation in 2017 (registration required) “is simple: a compelling ROI through increased efficiency, productivity, reliability and safety.”

Indeed, that fits “the formula for the Industrial Internet” that GE set forth in its 2015 Industrial Internet Report. It described the IoT for industry “as a source of both operational efficiency and innovation that is the outcome of a compelling recipe of technology developments,” which are composed of the following parts.

• Data: both from the standard forms of Big Data and the additional streams coming through the sensors that track “equipment, products, factories, supply chains.”
• Analytics that can assess the status of the connected things.
• The definitive core of the business that defines the desired outcomes

Read more in 

Investment in Supply Chain IoT Grows

If you're wondering about Bitcoin

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/Bitcoin_logo.svg/1024px-Bitcoin_logo.svg.png

I've written quite a number of articles about the potential of digital currency, most of them for CoinDesk, but also for CFO. EETimes, and  EBN.

Find out why alpacas became an official mascot for Bitcoin and how the the “Casascius” got its name. You can even learn about the history of currency in real life and why metal and paper currency isn't practical on the final frontier.

The Digital Advance of a Venerable Medical Journal

Since 1840, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has been associated with health care expertise. Now the brand includes 60 specialist medical and allied science journals with millions of readers around the world.

As a global brand, the BMJ relies on a digital platform to reach its worldwide audience. To keep up with the demands of this growth, it needed a partner to help it meet its needs.

The printed copies of the venerable journal are still mailed out, but the journal also embraces digital technology and expanded reach. It was the first medical journal in the world to go online 21 years ago, says Sharon Cooper, chief digital officer at the BMJ.

- See more at: http://www.baselinemag.com/cloud-computing/virtualizing-a-venerable-medical-journal.html?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=BL_NL_BB_20170202_STR2L1&dni=393649804&rni=25396992#sthash.qU3lEl7D.dpuf

Making attractions more attractive: digitizing the CN Tower

photo: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/CN-Tower_Skypod.jpg

To celebrate its 40th anniversary, Canada's CN Tower deployed new wireless infrastructure, a mobile app and 150 beacons with location services capabilities.

One of the top tourist attractions in Canada is the CN Tower, which is 553.33 meters (1, 815 ft., 5 in.) tall. It opened in 1976 as a communications towers, and to reflect that role in today's digital age, it planned on celebrating its 40th anniversary with a new wireless infrastructure and the CN Tower app.

Read more in Digital Tech Enhances the CN Tower Experience

The key to digital real estate marketing

“Location,” that key word emphasized how important  physical location was by repeating it twice in identifying the three most important factors in real estate. However, that may be outmoded in today’s trend for shoppers to seek out what they want online. To reach that market, it’s necessary to locate them via the web. That’s what Union Street Media (USM) is all about.

USM is a marketing firm that applies the model of capitalizing on social media to convert sales with targeted ads and communications through these platforms to the real estate industry. It has a staff of campaign managers whose job is to expand the reach of their clients’ sites through digital marketing strategies, including demographic analysis and reporting and tailored ads and communication to their target market.

Read more in 

Location, Location, (Virtual) Location

A digital strategy for growth in the biotech sector

QIAGEN is a German life sciences and diagnostics firm that has customers in more than 100 countries. Given the trend toward e-commerce in the biotech sector, which has emerged in the past few years, it became clear to the company's management that future growth called for a digital strategy that included online self-service.

To achieve that goal, the company partnered with TCS and used SAP Hybris solutions to design, engineer and launch a new global Web shop. The shop plays a central role in allowing QIAGEN to effectively serve its customers, according to  Florian Wegener, head of eCommerce.

- See more at: http://www.baselinemag.com/networking/web-shop-enhances-customer-experience.html#sthash.kaDE8mSn.dpuf

Iot enables JIT

"Fast, good, or cheap; pick two." That used to be the motto for manufacturing, as the

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Manufacturing_equipment_095.jpg

reality was you'd have to compromise on at least one of the three. However, today's technological advances like drones and 3D printing combined with advanced data collection make the inventory strategy of Just-In-Time (JIT) inventory more feasible than ever before. As a result, manufacturers now have the possibility of making their supply chains fast, good, and cheap. "This is nothing less than a paradigm shift in industry: the real manufacturing world is converging with the digital manufacturing world to enable organizations to digitally plan and project the entire lifecycle of products and production facilities," observed Helmuth Ludwig, CEO, Siemens Industry Sector, North America.

Read more in

JIT: The Promise of Emerging Tech for Electronics Manufacturing

3D printing at MAD

My first-hand account of the 3D exhibit at MAD
Living in New York is wonderful for a number of reasons, but high on my list is access to so many great museums. Not only do we have world-famous museums, like the Met and the MoMA, but we have small, specialized museums that offer unique exhibits focused on innovations in art and technology. The Museum of Art and Design’s Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital, on view through until July 6th, is definitely worth a visit for anyone interested in digital design and production.

Read more in http://3dprintingindustry.com/2014/03/17/3d-printing-review-mad-exhibition/

Related: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-moma-goes-mobile.html

Keeping your identity

Clones, robots, alien shapeshifters, or disembodied consciousness take over people's identities in shows such as Star Trek and Doctor Who. They can then take over the lives of the people they've duplicated, particularly when they have access to their memories. How can anyone defend himself when he can't tell friend from foe?

In real life, most of us don't fear having someone else show up in person claiming to be us. But we are concerned about identity theft. Our digital world makes it all too easy for the bad guys to hack into personal information posted online, as well as financial information that we can think is secure. The cost of identity theft can be huge when hackers get access to our credit cards, debit cards, and bank accounts.

Read more in Your Personal Online Guardian

The URL,which was first put up very long form was changed on my article. Here's the new one: http://ww2.cfo.com/it-value/2013/09/is-digital-currency-catching-on/http://

I took this picture at the Bitcoin Conference

on/ … #bitcoin #Ripple #CFO

Bitcoin: the stereotype, reality, and possibilities

Bitcoin wants to emerge from its somewhat shady reputation as a currency for folks with something to hide and become a useful tool for legitimate business. Some say it can even do more -- like alleviate poverty and disease in Third World countries. Read more in 

Bitcoin: A Stereotype & a Possibility

Don't leave earth without it

Whether it will be in just a matter of years or of decades, the possibility of regular people taking trips into space the same way they travel to the far reaches of the globe could become a reality within our lifetime. The question is: when you set off for such a trip, what do you pack along for money?
While previous generations may have packed travelers’ cheques, such paper relics just don’t seem to fit in with the space age. The only feasible solution to the problem of payments in, to, and from space, is a digital one. PayPal believes it will handle that problem with its introduction of PayPal Galactic.  But that answer raises a number of other questions. Read more here

Related post: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2013/05/star-trek-and-final-frontier-of-currency.html