Marketing Hall of Fame® Final Selection Committee – or – Name That Famous Marketer

I’m delighted to announce the final selection committee of the Marketing Hall of Fame®.

But first a message from our sponsors!  Many thanks to Columbia Business School, JWT and Greenbook for your support of the Marketing Hall of Fame®

 

Well, actually I’ll just quote from the press release.

This year’s stellar selection committee consisted of David W. Almy, CEO, Marketing Research Association (MRA); Gayle Fuguitt, CEO, Advertising Research Foundation (ARF); Nancy Hill, CEO, 4As; Bob Liodice, CEO, Association of National Advertisers (ANA);Kendall Nash, president, Qualitative Research Consultants Association; Bruce Nelson, former vice chair, Omnicom, and Earl Taylor, CMO, Marketing Science Institute.  The selection committee was coordinated by Don Sexton, NYAMA president-elect and professor of marketing, Columbia University.

“This year’s nominees represented an extraordinarily impressive cross-section of influential marketers, and the finalists were all well-renowned for their outstanding contributors to the field,” said Randall Ringer, NYAMA president and CEO, Verse Group LLC.  “We looked to the collective wisdom of our selection committee, who had the very difficult challenge of picking only three inductees from such an remarkable group.  The contributions of this year’s three inductees are shaping the ways we practice marketing today and inspiring the marketers of the future.  The Marketing Hall of Fame is all about celebrating brilliance, and we are thrilled to celebrate these brilliant individuals.”

Hold the date! May 28th!

The inductees will each speak for 20 minutes about the future of marketing — which they are creating right now!

Be sure to sign up for the May 28th event. This is the best of the best giving marketing’s version of the Nobel Prize Speech.

The ARF calls for “re-orientation in the creative briefing process”

The ARF, also known as The Advertising Research Foundation, has identified the creative brief as an area for improving the advertising process.

The following excerpt is from the conclusions and implications section of the report “On The Road To A New Effectiveness Model”.  You can get the full report from the ARF.

…rethinking the model for advertising might mean a re-orientation in the

creative briefing process.  That might include the following:

• A more visual approach to briefing.  Adding key symbols, images, textures, colors that

would help the creative team in understanding and developing the non-verbal aspects of

the brand.

• Providing more emotional insights into target audience descriptions by including two or

three example “life stories” of the customer.  These could be brief – 2 or 3 lines – that

give more specificity to the target audience.

• Greater emphasis on brand personality.  Going far beyond the typical list of personality

characteristics and really creating more of a persona, using both images and words to

describe who the brand is and is not.  More of a brand biography, with creation story,

likes and dislikes, tastes and style.

• A different emphasis on the proof points and rational benefits.  We would no longer

consider them as primary drivers of preference.  Proof points have a new role, which is to

give the consumer a plausible post-rationalization that supports their emotional choices.

• Development of new tools that would help with developing “narrative lines” for the

brand. What happens when the consumer interacts with the brand?  What are some strong

storylines?  How do we articulate them in a brief that will be useful to the creative teams?

How does the brand story interact with the consumer’s life story or stories about the

category?

To make a brand brief even more effective, it should be co-created by the client brand director or research director, a creative director and an account planner.

Agencies and clients agree on the need for a better brand brief

I was catching up on some old copies of Ad Age where I came across an interesting survey of agency executives.  The article reported that agency executives were frustrated with the briefs they get from clients.

According to Casey Jones’ study, at least 30% of agency time is wasted due to breakdowns in the briefing process.  75% of the agency executives say that they get at least 5 significant revisions of the creative brief after the assignment has begun.  Jones has put some real numbers around the anecdotal evidence that we hear all the time…or experience ourselves.

AdAge_BetterBriefs_081709

On the other side of the equation, clients have their own frustrations with the agency creative process.  We’ve done research among corporations and find that they are spending more time managing their agencies than before.  As Brandweek put it, “CMOs see agencies as a time suck”.  And only a small percentage — 21% —  believe they are getting the best work out of their agencies.

CMOs See Agencies asTime Suck

This blog is not about taking sides.  It is about discussing the problem everyone agrees on — clearly there is a gap between what the marketers want and what the agencies are delivering.  And both sides appear to have identified the same weak point:  the briefing process and documents for translating the marketers’ need into the creative executions.

Fixing that gap can help agencies sell better work.

Fixing that gap can improve the productivity of marketing.

Next blog — what the ARF has to say about the creative briefing process.