Tag: digital marketing

Influencer culture has taken over the world — but has it completely conquered the marketing world? In this fast-paced space, brands continually seek smart ways to connect with their target audience. In recent years, the advertising world has been marked by a massive transformation — moving away from traditional advertising methods to embrace increasingly digital avenues for promotion. The rise of influencer marketing is one of the more significant trends helping reshape the ad industry in the last decade.

The Meteoric Rise of Influencer Marketing

Using celebrities and public figures to sell products is nothing new. After all, brands have long hired famous actors, athletes, and musicians to endorse their products and services on television, billboards, radio, and print.

However, the rise of social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and more recently, TikTok has minted a new class of social media celebrities — with massive followings and influence over their fans — commonly referred to as “influencers.” These influencers have become a marketing juggernaut for brands looking to promote their products and services to a younger, more digital demographic.

Influencer marketing strategically uses social media stars to promote brands, products, or services to their audience on their social channels — an approach that has grown exponentially in popularity, particularly among Millennials and Gen Z. As social media platforms thrive, influencers wield significant influence over consumer behavior.

Here are some of the top reasons influencer marketing has such an outsized influence on advertising.

Where Influencer Marketing Excels

Niche Audiences and Targeted Reach

One of the main advantages of influencer marketing is its ability to precisely target niche audiences. While traditional advertising can reach a mass audience, it often lacks relevance to more specific demographics. By leveraging the power of influencers, who have amassed loyal followings within particular niche groups, brands can connect with audiences who are genuinely interested in their wares or services — creating a more meaningful and significant engagement. This is a departure from the more traditional approach of reaching as many people as possible, whether they’re interested in the product or not.

One-Way vs. Two-Way Engagement

Traditional advertising is a bit of a one-way street, offering limited engagement opportunities with a brand’s target audience. Companies produce ads and hope people will see or hear them and act. Influencer marketing has upended that mono-directional approach by creating a space where brand promotion is more engaging, authentic, and relatable — letting brands partner with influencers who have cultivated a loyal following that essentially hangs on their every post, purchase, and stylistic whim. And this often enables them to promote a brand’s offerings more organically than traditional routes, making influencer marketing a go-to advertising tool because it offers a more tangible (and measurable) connection to their target audience.

Not Just for Big Brands

Influencer marketing has also disrupted the traditional advertising model by making it easier for smaller brands to compete with major industry players. In the past, large brands with big advertising budgets were able to dominate the market. Influencer marketing has upended this status quo, allowing smaller brands to work with influencers who actively engage their dedicated following and ultimately reach their target audience more effectively.

Measurable ROI and Engagement Metrics

In traditional advertising, success is typically measured by the reach and frequency of ad views but often struggles to measure the direct impact of its marketing and ROI. In contrast, influencer marketing offers more transparent, measurable outcomes, letting brands analyze performance, track conversions, and measure direct impact on their bottom line. Success is typically measured by engagement, such as likes, comments, shares, and saves — a more data-driven approach that empowers brands to make increasingly informed decisions which has led to a greater emphasis on creating engaging and shareable content.

However, there are also profound benefits to more traditional forms of advertising that we should keep in mind.

Benefits of Traditional Advertising

Broader Reach and Wider Audience

Traditional advertising excels at achieving a broader reach and vast audience because television, radio, and print — despite digital incursions — have retained sizable viewership and listenership. Recent studies have underscored the enduring power of television, with 88% of people watching TV daily, which means brands that advertise via traditional commercials can reach diverse demographics — including those less engaged with digital platforms.

Trust and Reliability

Consumers see TV advertising as more trustworthy, with 63% acknowledging its reliability. This legacy of trust is built from the presence of reputable brands on TV and print media, conferring a deeper sense of legitimacy.

Emotional Impact and Brand Building

Traditional advertising has a unique capacity to evoke emotions that can leave a lasting impression on viewers. TV commercials craft memorable experiences with masterful storytelling, visuals, and curated music choices. This kind of potential outsize emotional impact can help cement brand recognition, fostering deeper connections with consumers. When TV advertising is part of an omnichannel campaign, with print ads and out-of-home signage, the brand message can reach consumers at key touchpoints in their daily lives.

It’s a Complementary World — Traditional Agencies Are In a “Yes, And” Frame of Mind

Instead of choosing between marketing modalities, agencies are leaning into the strengths of both traditional and influencer marketing, finding ways to stitch cohesive, blended strategies together. By combining the two, brands can leverage the strengths of each approach, maximizing impact. While traditional methods cast a wider net, raising brand awareness, working with influencers can provide a more targeted approach that reaches specific niche customer segments more successfully.

Many traditional advertising agencies have created social-focused teams that specialize in leveraging influencer marketing and other social-based marketing. These teams sometimes partner with influencer marketing agencies, whereas others are beginning to manage their own influencer engagements. Perhaps unsurprisingly, every major agency holding company has been on “a shopping spree,” snapping up influencer marketing firms, revealing how forecasting gurus see the trajectory of the industry. Traditional agencies are learning to adapt more quickly to technological shifts in the landscape, and buying up companies with specific expertise has proven to be the fastest way to get up to speed — or, at the very least, not fall woefully behind.

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Bottomline

Brands are approaching advertising by shifting focus from a brand-first approach to one increasingly centered on the individual, revolutionizing how success is measured. With the growth of digital-first marketing, smaller brands are better able to compete with larger ones, and smaller niche audiences are increasingly feeling more seen, with brands increasingly recognizing the value of leveraging influencers and even micro-influencers). New features, tools, and guidelines are helping make influencer marketing a more transparent and accountable avenue, ensuring that brands can engage across the spectrum and feel safe as they do so.

The more things change, the more critical it becomes to position your brand for future success. If you need help navigating the increasingly complex waters of advertising today, Creative Circle has social media and traditional marketing experts ready to help craft cohesive strategies for your brand — ones that will move the needle.

What started as a simple screensaver has become a dynamic destination. What?

If you let a Roku idle for a bit, you land in an immersive, magenta-hued cityscape, where you can explore art deco theaters, cozy diners, elegant cafes, noir-ish mansions, and a romantic moon-kissed lagoon, all with a Blade Runner-esque vibe. This noteworthy screensaver has taken on a life of its own — known on social channels as Roku City — with fans dreaming of packing their bags to move in. That’s the power of some seriously good UX.

When most folks flick on their Rokus, the streaming hub that says it has more than 70 million active accounts, it’s generally because they want to watch a movie, show, or event. However, what has become quite clear is that many of these people are also spending a bit of time watching Roku’s dynamic screensaver.

“This particular screensaver has taken on a life of its own,” said the New York Times last year, pronouncing that idle Rokus had become “the unlikely venue for a massive public art experiment.” With the sheer size of Roku’s customer base, millions of homes peek into Roku City every night, providing a window into its dazzlingly enigmatic streets. “It’s always golden hour in Roku City — it’s really appealing to everyone,” shared Cheryl Singletary, a design director at Roku. And over time, an enthusiastic subculture of Roku City devotees has emerged on the web.

This digital cityscape was born in 2018 and was designed by Kyle Jones, a freelance graphic designer at the time who now works at Pixar. He imbued the digital urbanscape with 30 plus movie references, from the emerald city of Oz to Sleepless in Seattle, King Kong, Spider-Man, and more — crafting an aesthetic that dances between Art Deco and noir.

In the foreground, we see a shining strip of theaters with lit marquees, romantic restaurants, cafes, and apartment buildings. But across the river is a more pleasingly frightful affair, with rampaging monsters, voluptuous volcanoes, and other assorted chaos. This friction-y contrast is part of what makes Roku City so mesmerizing and easy to space out to as your mind wanders into the contours of this land that is, yes, a screen saver.

Now, this digital Gotham is folding in something new: advertising.

While it’s a nascent endeavor, it’s a sign that Roku is pioneering new ways to grow at a time when other streaming services are cutting costs to stem subscriber loss. Roku had a strong last quarter of 2023, growing total revenue 20% year-over-year and, for the first time, opened Roku City up to major brand advertisers like MaNel and McDonald’s, integrating those brands’ visuals into their now-iconic screensaver, presenting a new way to engage their audience.

Earlier this summer, Grimace appeared in Roku City, bringing McD’s Golden Arches and all to R.C.’s Main Street, part of the first branded ad deal on the screensaver. Barbie’s marketing campaign this summer included adding an extravagant three-story Dreamhouse to Roku City, complete with an extensive shoe closet, hot pink slide, and rocking dance floor — along with a Barbie-branded Roku Movie Theater, with billboards showcasing the film’s trailer — representing a revolutionary approach to movie marketing. And more recently, an Acura dealership and a Walmart opened their own virtual storefronts, leaving some to speculate that Roku City may be spawning Roku Suburb.

Right now, it’s not clear exactly how much money Roku City ads may be bringing in, but Roku has said that there is more to come, suggesting that demand is higher than capacity. What is clear, however, is that Roku is building an ad-friendly digital city — which has become increasingly valuable real estate.

Last May, Paramount+ muscled into the Roku City space with its own “neighborhood” vis-à-vis a brand takeover that reimagined R.C.’s digital streetscape with Paramount-centric landmarks, from its logo to visual homages to Star Trek and Top Gun: Maverick among others — with billboards in this Paramount corner leading straight to Paramount content. What makes these engineered spaces valuable is the UX that makes them believable. Digital innovation is entering a new era of invention — and stellar UX is at the helm.

 

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Takeaway

The contours of the marketing landscape are ever-changing; Roku has crafted a monetizable digital metropolis, birthing a completely new way to engage with its customer base. Marketers, take note. If you want to lead your company’s UX marketing innovation charge but need help figuring out where to start, Creative360 can help you dream up a whole new world where you can proudly plant your very own brand flag.

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Our AI Insights blog series continues below. Catch the first installation here if you missed it!

AI is an immensely powerful tool that is revolutionizing the world of content creation as we speak. In addition to its ability to generate better results from content creation efforts — in conjunction with knowledgeable creative teams — can ensure that content is brand-safe, available in real-time, at scale. For this reason, it’s rapidly gaining in popularity across industries and job functions.

As AI continues to evolve, its potential for automation is becoming even more profound. According to Gartner, by 2026, 20% of repetitive processes will be automated by domain-specific GenAI implementations in every industry. This means that AI will have an increasingly important role to play in the workplace, streamlining processes and freeing up valuable time for more complex and impactful tasks.

The combination of AI and knowledgeable creative teams is a recipe for success, and we can expect to see even more exciting developments in this space in the years to come. With the power of AI at our fingertips, the possibilities for content creation and automation are truly endless.

 

Efficiency Without Sacrifice

The combination of top creative talent and artificial intelligence has proven to be a game-changer for marketers. With AI, marketers can analyze vast amounts of data, identify patterns, and generate new insights that can inform their decision-making. By automating tasks that are repetitive and time-consuming, the technology can free up marketers to focus on more strategic and creative activities and, as a result, allow them to deliver more impactful campaigns and content that drive better business results with their target audience.

Of course, what good is an increase in efficiency if you don’t have the marketing results to match? Optimizing the cost to deliver high-performing marketing campaigns and content is one of the major benefits of an approach that combines top creative talent with artificial intelligence.

Moreover, generative AI has been found to increase the performance of marketing campaigns significantly—a testament to AI-powered marketing strategies. In fact, 58% of US marketers said increased performance is a benefit of generative AI, according to eMarketer. With this heightened level of efficiency, the potential impact on productivity is truly impressive.

 

One Input, Many Outputs

The potential of generative AI in content creation goes beyond just omnichannel customer experience. Generative AI’s ability to take text-based inputs and translate them into a variety of mediums — from text-based blogs, to images, videos, and more — means that the future of content marketing and creation can utilize generative AI to create content for an omnichannel customer experience.

This is just another way in which creative teams can leverage generative AI to create highly personalized and targeted content for their customers, spending less time resizing, reformatting, and researching the latest size requirements for each of your marketing channels. This gives them more time to focus on creating great content that is impactful and ready to be translated into many formats for your omnichannel communications.

Ultimately, generative AI has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach content creation and marketing. Given the technology’s capacity to create content for multiple channels, at scale, and with unprecedented levels of personalization, the future of how humans create content is indeed exciting.

 

Humans Strategize, AI Multiplies

Generative AI technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach marketing and communication activities. With the ability to automate the work activities that absorb as much as 70% of employees’ work time, generative AI provides an opportunity to allow humans to be more strategic, and for the marketing work they perform to be more efficient and scale to meet consumers’ rising expectations for more tailored, personalized experiences.

By 2025, Gartner predicts AI avatars leveraging text-to-video using generative AI technology will support 70% of digital and marketing communications, up from less than 5% in 2022. This significant shift will allow companies to provide their customers with more tailored and personalized experiences, ultimately leading ultimately lead to greater brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.

When done well, this means that your creative talent spends their time and focus on the things that matter, like making sure your messaging is on-brand and laser-focused on your target audiences. Then, generative AI can produce the many brand-safe variants that your customers have come to expect. By embracing this technology, companies can stay ahead of the curve and meet the rising expectations of their customers while maximizing the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

 

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Takeaway

Fulfilling the promise of generative AI, delivering great results at scale in a brand-safe and ethical manner, takes more than a simple software solution, however. It takes a combination of skilled talent using artificial intelligence tools in an intentional, strategic manner.

Generative AI has the potential to scale content creation and allow cross-medium creation, while improving efficiencies throughout the process. Get the best of it all by partnering generative AI with talent who knows and understands how to get the best results with the prompts, methods, and tools that will power tomorrow’s personalized customer experiences.

Our AI Insights blog series continues, next delving into the process of embracing scale while avoiding bias and non-compliance when working with generative AI. Continue reading here!

It’s hard to avoid the buzz around artificial intelligence these days, and unlike some fads that have come and gone over the years, there’s good reason to take notice of this one. Marketing and communications teams are amongst those who have the most to gain from these technologies, thanks to their immediate, practical application for organizations today.

In this setting, AI makes more sense than ever: after all, why walk up the stairs in a tall building when you can take the elevator instead? In fact, McKinsey estimates that generative AI could add the equivalent of roughly $3 trillion to the global economy, with 75% of that falling into marketing and other areas directly related to the customer experience.

 

Great Results, with a New Kind of Partnership

With customer expectations to receive personalized content, offers, and experiences constantly increasing, brands are feeling added pressure to ensure their content marketing is multi-channel, brand-compliant, and personalized down to the customer in the moment they need it. This means that more content is needed, and creating it at scale, across the channels, and in the multiple variants that are needed for hyper-personalization requires a level of effort that few if any marketing teams can produce on their own, let alone sustain. Thus, a new kind of partnership is needed.

The partnership we’re referring to, of course, is one between creative talent and their AI counterparts: the methods and platforms that are the toolset of the creative talent of tomorrow. This partnership leads to effective results, while saving copious amounts of time and focusing your creative talent on the work that matters. According to Gartner, 30% of outbound marketing messages from large organizations will be personalized using generative AI tools by 2025, up from less than 2% in 2022.

 

Better ideas, More Quickly

With remote and hybrid work, plus an increased demand on marketers, it can be hard to schedule in-depth brainstorming sessions for every new initiative that “needed to launch yesterday.” Smart brands are getting great concepts and ideas more quickly by combining human and AI brainstorming.

Generative AI is great at building on starting points provided by humans, and skilled creatives who understand how to prompt artificial intelligence-based tools effectively can supercharge the idea generation process with this AI-human hybrid method. When working with well-crafted prompts, AI can generate a multitude of potential ideas that creative teams can edit and build upon, eliminating any that may not be as relevant.

 

Scaling to the Occasion

If you operate on multiple marketing channels, have several audience segments, conduct business in several geographies, and/or have other demands that require content variations, you know the scaling issues that come with creating content for even the most routine campaigns. And when it comes to hyper-personalizing content down to the individual customer level, even the largest marketing department can quickly become overloaded.

Take this for instance: If an apparel retailer that sells several product lines on its multi-channel marketing platforms to different audiences in more than one geography creates a targeted campaign, they’ll need to create the following:

  • Multiple variants of copy and materials for each combination of product (e.g., shoes, shirts, jackets, etc.) and audience (e.g., gender, age, HHI, etc.)
  • Resized and reformatted the materials for each marketing channel (e.g., social media platforms, email, website, mobile app, etc.)
  • Unique country/language variations for each geography (e.g., US English, UK English, Spanish, German, etc.)

Keep in mind that this doesn’t account for personalized content that is tailored to the individual. This type of hyper-personalization can build on the above and tailor content to the individual based on things like:

  • Recent purchase behavior and frequency of purchases
  • Specific demographic information
  • Customer loyalty information

All of this adds up to many variations of content to be created. Rest assured, though, generative AI is up to the task of scaling content creation to meet customer expectations for personalized content and experiences.

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Takeaway

Maximizing the results of generative AI with the right tools and methods, piloted by skilled prompt engineers and creative talent, means forming a new kind of partnership between humans and artificial intelligence — and it does not require any sacrifices on the outcomes you should expect either.

For organizations that are unsure of where to start, bringing in freelance experts to help with strategy and setup of an AI strategy can accelerate this shift. Whether it’s automation of text content variations or something more advanced, having the right team to set up a personalization strategy can take a generic-feeling marketing campaign and make it compelling and increase conversions.

Our AI Insights blog series continues, exploring what it truly means to effectively personalize content at scale with generative AI. Continue reading here!