Hammer describes how the evolving roles of a marketer are making these positions both more attractive and more applicable to recruits with different backgrounds. Today’s prospective marketers don’t “just want to advertise things, they wanted to impact things, to build things,” says Hammer. “It’s more of a maker culture. So we’re in this stage now where marketing has to reach out to find new skills as well as train the existing talent that we have.”
As product, performance, and content all respectively evolve and overlap, finding those with a knack for critical thinking, regardless of what types of problems a person is used to encountering, can be applied to modern marketing.
“In the end, marketing is problem solving,” says Hammer. “There’s a lot of other people in professions out there solving problems – engineers, scientists, all these other people who are great at problem solving. There’s no reason why they can’t transfer those skills and become great marketers as well.”
On top of the creative challenge, Hammer proposes that bringing this talent to an in-house team is not only leading to content that is more meaningful to the consumer, but creates an environment in which influence can be found from all areas within the company. For that reason, working for a brand can keep this perspective fresh while working for a consistent mission.
“Great creative talent wants to work on great creative work,” says Hammer. “And a brand is a great place to do that.”
This video is was produced in Orlando at the CMO Growth Council. The series is sponsored by iSpot.tv. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“When you see brands lead their creative with a purpose, I think people realize that brands stand for something greater than just the bottom line. That’s getting us noticed in a slightly different way,” Hammer adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Behind the scenes, IBM is sensitive to the reality that because people build algorithms, the end product could very well contain bias. “So what we’re doing is building models to evaluate the models that AI has, to make sure that there’s no bias within them and constantly check the technology we use in order to make decisions.”
Hammer believes that maintaining the public’s trust is one reason why the company has survived for more than a century. “Think of how we change what we sell every ten years. So we don’t sell products, we’re selling trust and a relationship. We help clients get from here to there.”
Blockchain technology is another tool in the pursuit of transparency, particularly among business partners, according to Hammer. One example is the amount of money on a digital media buy that used to end up in the pockets of technology middlemen but now more is ending up with publishers.
“A blockchain built with a network of partners can help deliver that,” Hammer says. It goes beyond the technology itself to “also having the players who are ethical and have the right DNA in their core to participate in a blockchain. You have to bring the right players to the purview, you provide that transparency and openness, and people tend to act in a way that’s better for the collective.”
A recent initiative by IBM called B Equal, which promotes gender equality in business leadership, isn’t just a campaign because “it has to be about the way we work and the things we do, and I believe that’s what you’re seeing in the brands here as part of the ANA and CMO Growth Council.”
Formed a year ago at Cannes, the Council represents “a diverse group of people” that is producing initiatives that are “not just words but they actually have action behind them, and I believe that’s the next step in this initiative. We’re aligning on some pillars, we’re aligning on our missions and our outcomes, and now we’re putting the actions in place and saying ‘let’s go make this happen.’”
You are watching Beet.TV coverage of the CMO Growth Council Summit in Cannes. This series is presented by Teads. For more videos from our series, visit this page. Please find all our coverage from Cannes 2019 right here.
]]>“I don’t think we should try to mimic business models that aren’t necessarily thriving,” Hammer adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference.
“The media and publishing world themselves are trying to figure out how to evolve. I don’t think the right model is actually trying to be a publisher where KPI is quantity at scale and trying to be in everyone’s lives all the time.”
A better approach is to determine whether brand-generated content has a purpose, an audience need and desire plus brand purpose and an ability to help drive KPI’s, according to Hammer.
For IBM, it’s about “making less matter more, as people want to have fewer but higher quality impressions, engagements, experiences with brands.”
The company tries to figure out the right number of engagements, which could be between four and 10. “It might not be fifty, it might not be a daily publisher per se that maximizes our relationship with the audience, because we’re only creating stuff that matters to them.”
Hammer led one of the conference’s three kickoff sessions titled The End Of Advertising As We Know It: Now What? One of the session’s talking points was “The key is to stop selling and do a better job of connecting.”
Asked about his work with the ANA’s CMO Growth Council and its client-centricity vertical, he says that driving the most effective ways of engaging with consumers needs support at the C-suite and board levels “to really drive the change. But then it’s mostly a people and change-management exercise than a technology based thing that needs to happen.”
Hammer doesn’t doubt the power of television as it continues to evolve and shift. “If it wasn’t powerful, you wouldn’t see digitally first companies actually going into TV. It just is a medium that needs to be explored the right way. Just like any medium.
“If we just focus on making great stuff, the channel, no matter what channel it is, will continue to perform. If we focus on just making a bunch of stuff and lower budgets, then we’ll ruin the experience and every channel will continue to erode.”
This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions. Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>“People who engage with video on a brand-owned site are watching, say, a minute of it,” according to Digitas media group director George Hammer. “When you take that content and put it out in to the places where people want to watch, where they already at consuming content, it’s about 40% longer.”
Hammer was speaking at Beet.TV’s Video Ad Effectiveness Summit, where he was also asked whether marketers should simply repurpose their 30-second TV spots for the new platforms.
“When we first started out, we were taking the same TV ads, putting them in as many places as possible,” he responded. “That had an impact on awareness.
“What we’re seeing now with products like Twitter, TV Ad Sync and other products… we have an on-air ad experience and an online that complements it and continues to tell that story and brings people deeper down the rabbit hole. It’s leading to longer attention cycles, more engagement and better purchase intent results.”
Watch the taped interview for more of Hammer’s insights. This event was sponsored by Nielsen.
]]>“We at Publicis’ looked at about 50 different types of online video formats and 100 different executions,” said the VP and media group director of Publicis’ Digtias agency.
“What we found was, when we give consumers choice of which video they want to see or how they engage with the video, it performs the best – 2x better than preroll in certain stats.
“People want choice on how to choose their own adventure. Midroll has the best completion rates – you’re more likely to keep watching.”
Hammer was speaking to interviewer Ashley J. Swartz of Furious Minds in this taped interview during Beet.TV’s Video Ad Effectiveness Summit. Watch the video for more insights.
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