MarketingDojo #40: Winnie The Pooh Is In Trouble.
A children's classic retold, ad-frauds are eating our budgets away, sales and marketing team's trust issues & much more.
Hello,
Welcome to the 40th edition of the MarketingDojo!
Navigating the world of marketing isn't always a walk in the park. This newsletter is my sincere attempt to share the latest marketing news and insights to help us sharpen our marketing skills.
If you find it valuable, please consider subscribing or sharing it with your fellow marketers.
In today's newsletter, we cover:
🕵️♀️ There's a leaky bucket: Exploring the costs of ad-frauds
🎨 Creative excellence: "Who gives a crap" will break your heart
🎥 20 ideas for your next video
💰 Is marketing a cost or an investment?
And lots more.
Let’s dive right in.
Creative Excellence: Reimagining Winnie-the-Pooh to Save Our Forests
Close your eyes for a moment and picture your beloved childhood friend, Winnie-the-Pooh, in his idyllic forest home surrounded by his cherished friends.
Now, imagine this familiar world transformed – every tree, every familiar nook, and every comforting branch- gone. All sacrificed to meet the unrelenting demand for paper.
The resulting image is unsettling, to say the least.
"Winnie-the-Pooh: The Deforested Edition" is a remarkable project born from the creativity of the Who Gives A Crap team.
This reimagining of A.A. Milne's timeless story is a stark departure from the whimsical tales we hold dear. Winnie-the-Pooh can't embark on his honey-seeking escapades in this version because no branches are left to tumble from. Christopher Robin can't climb his beloved oak tree, and Owl's once cosy home at The Chestnuts is reduced to a mere shadow.
This nightmarish twist on our cherished childhood memories is precisely what the folks at Who Gives A Crap aimed to achieve. It deftly taps into nostalgia's emotional power while compelling us to envision the real-world consequences of our actions.
Who Gives A Crap makes sustainable and eco-friendly household products, including toilet paper, tissues, paper towels, and biodegradable cloths. Their flagship product, recycled toilet paper, is crafted from 100% recycled paper.
Rather than taking the predictable route of lecturing about the environmental impact of traditional toilet papers, the Who Gives A Crap team chose a profoundly poignant approach.
Who Gives A Crap reminds us that change begins with introspection; sometimes, the most impactful messages come wrapped in a familiar tale.
The Money Heist: The Sneaky Heft of Ad Frauds in 2023.
Sometimes, digital campaigns can yield perplexing results. Earlier this year, we partnered with a new programmatic display provider to target a niche audience.
At first, our website traffic skyrocketed, but things soon appeared somewhat suspicious. The bounce rate soared to a staggering 98.5%, and visitors spent over 3 minutes on our site, but the number of form fills remained in the single digits.
Our traffic was mainly composed of bots, and my precious marketing budget was going down the drain.
Ad frauds are common in the digital advertising ecosystem. Click farms, click bots, redirect attacks, pixel stuffing, and more occur regularly.
Juniper Research's report, "Quantifying the Cost of Ad-Fraud," delved into digital advertising data from 78,000 "unique sources" spanning 45 countries, yielding some compelling findings:
In 2023, advertisers lost 22% of all online ad spending to ad fraud. In dollar terms, a staggering $85 billion will be lost due to ad fraud this year.
Mobile advertising is the worst hit - 30% of all mobile ad expenditure falling victim to fraud.
As media spending grows, Juniper Research anticipates loss due to ad fraud will reach a staggering $172.3 billion by 2028.
The proliferation of AI solutions presents a double-edged sword in the fight against ad fraud. While advertisers and their partners are increasingly turning to AI-powered tools to combat fraud, ad fraud entities are tirelessly leveraging AI to amplify their scale and impact.
Ad fraud is going to remain a persistent problem for digital marketers. However, working with a partner who can help reduce the impact of these frauds is more or less a compulsion rather than a good-to-have.
Meme-time: Trust issues, anyone?
Annual planning meetings are anything but mundane.
They're battlegrounds for aggressive positioning, where every team vies for a bigger slice of the headcounts and budgets pie.
In the world of sales and marketing, these meetings are ground zero for trust issues. So, today's meme is a nod to those moments when sales and marketing lock horns during annual planning meetings. 🙈💼💬
From Cost Centre To A Value Creator: Is Brand-Building Winning The Perception Game?
Is marketing a cost or an investment? The answer to this question holds the potential to reshape how marketing is perceived within organizations and by investors alike.
UK's Institute of Practioners in Advertising (IPA) interviewed over 200 financial analysts across the UK and US to understand investor views on brand and marketing.
The results are interesting:
The Power of Brand Strength: When assessing a company's potential for success, financial analysts overwhelmingly rated the "strength of the brand" as the most crucial factor. This factor outshone other considerations, including innovation, quality of leadership, and even profits.
Marketing Spend as Capital Expenditure: Nearly 90 per cent of analysts said they believe marketing spend should be placed in capital expenditure either all (56 per cent) or part of the time (33 per cent), similar to spending on technology R&D.
But there's a twist: Half (52%) of the investors surveyed say they would view a company cutting marketing spending as a "positive cost-saving measure". We marketers need to do a better job of communicating the correlation between budget cuts and brand value.
Advertisements & brand building efforts often deliver results in the long term. The shifting perception of brand value could mark a significant milestone.
It drives us towards a vision of marketing not as a cost centre but as a strategic investment capable of generating profits and enhancing price elasticity. Amen.
21 Video Ideas To Spice Up Your Brand's Video Library.
There are many ways to create engaging video content for your brand. Here are 21 of them. In case any of these catch your attention, Single Grain's article includes the type of video and a successful execution example.
Podcast video
How-tos
Presentation
Explainers
Animated
Unboxing
Live Stream
Interviews
User-generated content
Video listicles
Ask me anything
Testimonial
Gaming
Interactive
Unscripted reality
Behind the scenes
360 degree/VR
Event Coverage
Webinars
Promotional
Fake Documentaries
Short Stuff:
Canva’s Gen AI tool is here (Make some Magic).
The IOS 17 update might make it tougher to measure multi-touch attribution (Get your UTM game in place).
Google will start disabling cookies for 1% of Chrome users (Finally, the cookie crumbles).
That’s all the marketing goodies for this week. If you learnt something new or liked what you saw, please leave a like or a comment. It helps increase the discoverability of the newsletter.
Once again, thank you for your time and support. I will see you in your inbox next Wednesday.
Regards,
G
P.S: Storytelling in marketing. I spent the Monday morning last week in a breakfast catchup organized by the marketing society. Marketing folks from Unilever, IBM, SalesForce, L’Oreal, Singapore Arts Council and more got together to discuss the importance and difficulties in storytelling.
One big takeaway: Storytelling starts with internal audiences. Before attempting to create brand stories for our customers, marketing needs to get better at becoming a storyteller for the internal audiences.
A refreshingly honest conversation!
