Searching for Purpose? Here comes Marketing with Purpose, starring Responsibility, Values and Inclusion

“It starts with Why“, doesn’t it? It explains why Apple and Nike are so successful because they have such a strong mission statement at the core of their business. Simon Sinek explains this brilliantly in his presentations and his books. He presents us with the golden circle, an illustration of concentric circles of What and How surrounding the core purpose in the central Why.

But it is harder when you are just a local accounting firm or an undertaker, isn’t it? “Some guys just wanna drive a forklift”, as Colm Regan puts it in the Late Late Show. They don’t need a vision or to be passionate about a cause, or innovation, do they? (Good laugh for you in that short video, and more about passionate tax optimizers, passionate sofa retailers and accountants from David Mitchell’s Soapbox here).

What is purpose?

Where Simon Sinek explains the purpose of a business as “The Why”, Microsoft Advertising makes it more concret and tangible in their “Marketing with Purpose” framework which was kicked off at the Elevate event these last few days.

The Marketing with Purpose framework breaks the Why down into values, responsibilities and inclusion. The effect these factors jointly create on users is to make a brand more authentic. Perhaps authenticity is what Simon Sinek calls “consumers don’t buy your products’ functionality, they buy your reason for producing it”.

In one of Microsoft Advertising’s research studies, it was found that 72% of consumers were more likely to support brands that are authentic in their advertising.

Towards a more ethical marketing

The rise of this trend comes at a time where users have become distrustful of digital marketing and perhaps somewhat tired of the shear number of ads they see every day. The Cambridge Analytica scandal was the symbol for misuse of user data. The interests, affinities and behaviours of millions of users were logged and cross-referenced in a giant database that was used to exerce influence believed to have affected elections across the world, including the US Presidential election. The one that surprisingly instated Donald Trump as what was once called “the leader of the free world”. Fake news proliferated out of control.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal was about uncontrolled use of covertly obtained user data. This was based on the same priniciples on which brands have been retrieving data via digital marketing channels over the past years.

In the world of marketing, users turned to ad blocking and anonymous browsing as the only means they had to fight back. As one would expect, users also began to lose trust in brands that were felt to misuse their data or disrespect their privacy. A Microsoft research study focused on Generation Z showed that 48% of users stopped purchasing from a brand because it didn’t represent their values. (“The Psychology of Inclusion and the Effects in Advertising: Gen Z“)

In 2021 a number of things are happening. GDPR, the European privacy legislation and CCPA, California’s privacy regulation, are leading regulatory frameworks starting to set a standard for what user data can be collected and how. Whereas they are far from perfect from a functionality standpoint, they are setting a standard for what is acceptable and what is overstepping, and thus are helping end users know where to put their own limits. And from the end-user perspective, the pandemic has caused a great disruption in both end-user behaviour and marketing techniques, as we described recently in our article about user unpredictability and marketing in the 20’ies.

Within the big online platforms, Apple is on a crusade to kill third party cookies in the name of privacy. And Google is following in their footsteps for this noble cause, and with a much higher impact on marketers. For outsiders, it frankly does look a bit like internal fighting between GAFAMs (the data driven companies Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). Apple is in a dogfight with Facebook, Google is fighting Amazon. They do this to regain user trust while providing a sizable blow to their competitors. This will have great impact on the way marketers work in the future as they are directly affected by these impacts. This is addressed more in detail in Innovell’s digital marketing report: “Digital Marketing in Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous Times” (commercial report not freely available).

Oh, and Microsoft? Well, here is an interesting initiative where Microsoft Advertising is taking an altruistic and entirely positive approach to the topic by publishing a playbook and setting up a course with accompanying certification: “Marketing with Purpose” which we are looking closer at in this article.

An authentic brand uses responsibility, values and inclusion principles

In the Marketing with Purpose framework set forth by Microsoft Advertising, the core building blocks are responsibility, values and inclusion. And meeting best practices and enhancing these factors leads to higher brand loyalty.

The brand loyalty curve from the Marketing with Purpose framework

The three components of marketing with purpose help to build an authentic brand which in turn translates into consumer trust trigger a higher propensity to purchase that brand’s products. Supporting the entire framework is a number of Microsoft Advertising research studies.

Let’s have a look at the three big components one by one:

Responsibility: Brand’s need to both be and communicate responsibility to their audiences:

• Respect user data and privacy
• Be transparent in their communication
• Apply brand safety control to their advertising
• Make their communication media accessible to all categories of users

Values: A brand is built on a mission statement carrying it’s values. When these values overlap and resonate with users’ values, brand trust and loyalty increases.

• Establishing a brands ethical foundation
• Knowing and communicating a brands’ values
• Understanding consumers’ values
• Removing or reducing data bias from the equation

Inclusion: The openness and inclusivity a brand exercices in its’ practice and its’ communication.

• Knowing the 9 feelings of inclusion: celebration, zest, hope, relaxation, relief, safety, confidence, acceptance and clarity
• Using inclusive keywords in search campaigns
• Aplying proximity, empahty, insights and innovation to communication

Better and more responsible marketing drives better performance

Many advertisers care more for marketing with performance than marketing with purpose, maybe because goodwill is harder to measure than sales. After all, any business is by definition geared towards generating profits. That is the purpose of a business.

Advertising has long been aiming to be on wavelength with the values of its audiences, but in the past not many studies or metrics pointed to the importance of advertiser responsibility or inclusivity. Those have become building bricks for authentic marketing which is in user demand.

Perhaps this is a wakeup call for those who have had a too narrow focus on short term business metrics and who have neglected the greater good and the image of their brands in the long run.

If you want to dig deeper into the Marketing with Purpose framework, you can download the Marketing with Purpose playbook here and you can access the course and the (rather fun) certification. The course is a 2-3 hour investment well worth your time.

Have we reached the End of More? Or is it only the End of Cookies? Will Buy Nothing, Fly Shame, Reuse Recycle and the Planet, People, Profit paradigm be trendsetting for the 20ies?

The COVID19 pandemic marks a pivot for user behaviour. We are all hopeful that we are currently (spring 2021) seeing the end of what seems to have been an endless struggle, a war against an invisible enemy, a challenge to our social patterns. But what about behavioural patterns?

In digital marketing, “mobile” and “touch” have been major revolutions of user behaviour over the past 10 years, brought about thanks to technological change. But the pandemic struck them both down. Touching has become a contamination risk. Mobility was taken to a halt. We do not yet know for certain what fundamental changes will continue once the world returns to a new normal, but we can see a lot of indicators already. Let’s explore.

How was marketing affected by the pandemic?

My good friend and co-author of the Amazon Marketing Report, Dan Saunders, kindly shared some before vs after screenshots from his Amazon homepage with me last year. Yeah, you guessed it: toilet paper, coffee, cleaning products were all over that homepage during the pandemic. Essentials. Once the first lockdown was over, it returned to some normality including his favourite tech devices. But things didn’t return to pre-pandemic conditions on the high street. We still have not come to any normality, and our behaviours are changing.

In digital marketing, the pandemic first struck budgets down. In the research for our most recent report, agencies responding indicated budget reductions of around 40%. When there is uncertainty, one of the first things to suffer is media spending. Advertising plunged. Agencies took a hit.

Next there was the great data disruption of 2020. For over a decade, the paradigm for digital advertising has been “machine learning applied to audience data”. Artificial intelligence would use behavioural patterns to predict the best forms of advertising based on real-time user behaviour.

Machine learning is a powerful tool. Its weakness is that it is expecting data to be homogenous and truths to be universal. Nobody helped the machines learn there was a pandemic. With broken data, marketers had to resaddle campaigns and acquire new data. Stop, take a step back, rethink, redeploy.

In 2021, the first impact of the data disruption is past us, but marketers are facing many more challenges: the end of cookies, removing access to some of the behavioural data, the continuing rise of AI and the increasing opacity of its predictions: search terms reports, broader matching, imposed automated bidding. Marketers can no longer expect to see the raw data.

And remote work has additionally impacted their organisations. Digital marketing is extremely well suited to work from home and even to #workfromanywhere. Agencies sent their people home, but they remained connected to the virtual enterprise, and some may never return to an office.

For a more in-depth analysis of these trends, check out our 2020 Digital Marketing Report.

How is consumer behaviour changing?

Even more fascinating is consumer trends that emerged or expanded during the pandemic. Microsoft Advertising and the Suzy research initiative looked more deeply at those in the 2021 Consumer Trends report.

Some of these trends resonate strongly with me. They even make my wish to stop calling people “consumers” stronger. People are people, and successful marketers understand that and look for motives rather than impulsions. Enough of a terminology rant, let’s look at some of the emerging user trends in 2021

The End of More. Our economies are built on a growth paradigm. Economic growth is the solution to poverty, unemployment and inequality. The pandemic created negative growth in most economies. Some are eagerly looking towards the return of growth whereas others consider it the end of a cycle. The end of more. Have I ever been more grateful to have a garden? The pandemic has not pushed be to have a bigger garden, but to appreciate what I have and feel priviledged because so many others are suffering.

Buy Nothing. Even more radical. Recycle, reuse, share, repurpose. Vinted is one of the strongest ecommerce platform if you feel you have to buy. Buy nothing is a sign of circular economies reducing waste and limiting new production. Preserve the plane, use less raw materials, less energy.

Local not global. It seems almost symptomatic that the Suez canal would be blocked and making global commerce suffer. 15 years ago, it was all about the “global consumer” desiring strawberry desert at any time of the year and drinking orange juice every morning. But global circulation of goods requires logistics which were put under dire pressure during the pandemic due to restrictions, sick people, distancing, precautions. We refound “local” and starting appreciating it. European economies have started “relocating” certain industries that were massively “delocating” 15 years ago. It is the end user who is driving this trend.

Sustainable travel. Fly shame pre-existed the pandemic, but how could anyone imagine a world without flying. Now we have seen that world, and whereas we may not be entirely comfortable with the perspective of a different setup, we can also see new models emerge. Travelling can be about the trip and not just the destination. It doesn’t have to be fast. It is of course quite a trip to cross the pacific by boat rather than plane, but the experience of it, might be put at the front of the scene.

Nostalgia tripping. I don’t know how many times has this crossed my mind over the past months. If only I could go back to New Zealand to revisit the most beautiful country in the world. Or if only I could do another road trip to Spain under the baking sun. Oh wow, would love to take my wife to Istanbul to experience the gate between East and West. Nostalgia is entering my mind, and I think this will be a trend when and if the world opens up again.

There are more trends to discover and their explanations in the Microsoft Advertising report mentioned below. The research was carried out in collaboration with Suzy. The ones above resonated with me and may not with others. Download the report to get a chance to discover the in-depth research on consumer trends in 2021.

The Many Challenges of Marketing in the 20’s

Our own digital marketing report stresses the need for marketers to be proactive with change and embrace it but not with closed eyes. Keep an eye on the AI. The Microsoft report announces the new business paradigm they call “People, Planet and Profit”.  Virtual enterprise is rising, social distancing has entered our consciousness, user motivations are changing, the “consumer” is mutation. And in all of that, we are waiting for the pandemic to phase out and the new normal to crystalize. Marketing in the 20’s is quite something.

Read more about how the digital marketing landscape is changing in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world in the Innovell digital marketing report: Digital Marketing in a VUCA World. 

Download the 2021 Consumer Trends Report from Microsoft Advertising and Suzy here.

Advertising is on a roller-coaster ride in the 2020’es. As one of the first budgets to be affected in times of uncertainty, advertising took a dip at the start of the pandemic. It also picked up for new types of advertisers. Then the entire underlying data set for targeting based on user behaviour changed, as people’s financial situations changed, as their relation to touching products and going to shops degraded, and as ecommerce picked up. And then ecommerce boomed and digital advertising rose to new heights again.

And under the hood, things are changing too. Artificial intelligence is making inroads into advertising management, new privacy legislation changes the use of data. And the disappearance of third-party cookies is promising to send shockwaves through the adtech industry.

All the while, the major platforms, also known as the triopoly of digital advertising, Google, Facebook and Amazon continue to experience double-digit growth at 20-40-60%. Search engine advertising, at the core of the Google offering is still on a positive and growing trend. This is despite saturation of click prices in mature markets. And despite a halted growth in the basic market of search, as the majority of the worldwide population now has access to the internet.

But if the the number of searches performed by users – the search market – is not growing, and if click prices, the basic monetization of searches, can’t rise any higher, where is the search advertising journey going? For Amazon, search is still growing, for Bing, the CPCs may not yet have hit the ceiling, but Google might be close to maxing out on those two growth dimensions.  And so it is time to look inwards.

What Search Engine Advertising is today

Most search marketers who have been brought up with Google and Bing ads today agree that Amazon Sponsored Products should be considered as “paid search” too. But they can also get caught throwing display ads from the Google Display Network into the mix. Perhaps because those are still “pay per click”, or PPC, one of the other names search marketers often give to search engine advertising. Furthermore, the overlay of audience targeting which has arrived in search advertising engines in recent years is taking the focus away from the keyword.

Digital advertising is similar to financial investments today. You choose among a wide range of ad streams for which you try to predict future returns on the basis of past performance. Some are short term bets, others are long term. No outcome is ever guaranteed.

In the range of possible options, Search Engine Advertising represents a wide number of streams. Brand keywords, category keywords, automatic targeting, automated optimization and bidding, maximization of clicks or revenue or return on investment. Reliable and unfied tracking is key to succeeding.

But there are also some huge differences between financial investment and advertising. In finance, there is no hidden outcome, no organic growth, no retargeting pools, no brand effect and no synergy effects either. This is where advertising stops being scientific, it has a vast number of moving pieces which interact with each other.

What are the drivers of change in paid search?

For many years, search advertising was always the same: find the right keywords, write compelling ad copy, adjust bids for optimum visibility, send users to highly converting landing pages. It was spreadsheetable because the number of variables remained low.

Over time, however, more variables entered the equation: users morphed from desktop to smartphones, tablets and became multi-device users. The ads evolved with extensions and contextual elements to become multivariate entities with no fixed form or shape. And the audience targeting overlay made the number of variables explode. We explored all of these variables in our 2018 Search Trends report to conclude that something fundamental had changed.

Advertising engines started building optimization tools for managing this complexity. In Google, these tools are known as Smart Bidding. They take a wide range of variables into account, apply machine learning, and target one specific and measurable outcome. In the 2020ies, Smart bidding has become the norm rather than the exception. Search marketers are no longer testing between keywords, they are testing between algorithms.

Smart bidding is the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) in ad optimization. But it is not the only thing happening. In our 2020 Digital Marketing Report, set in the context of COVID19, we identified radical changes in user behaviour, and disruption in the data as immediate effects of the sanitary crisis. But overlaying these trends, the penetration of AI, and the data challenges became apparent. Privacy legislation is changeing both user behaviour and tracking methods, and the large platforms are increasingly accumulating data and restricting marketers’ access to it. On top of AI, user behaviour and privacy legislation, we are also entering a user tracking paradigm shift as third-party cookies are being phased out and the concept of “cohorts” taking over.

6 inflexion points for PPC automation

Automation is what drove the industrial revolution, and it is also a major driver of the digital revolution we found ourselves amidst. So whenever a search engine suggests automation tools, does that mean you should use them? Let’s look at some good reasons for automating or not.

• SKAGS: “Single Keyword Ad Groups” were a thing. Some agencies even automated processes to build SKAGs in their client accounts. Where search advertising is going today, there are many cases in which SKAGs risk performing worse. Optimization algorithms pull in the opposite direction of the SKAG, as they take more variables into consideration.
• Smart campaigns: Google Ads has a highly automated campaign type known as the Smart campaign. It simplifies campaign creation down to the basics and requires no keyword research. For small operations with a clear goal and reliable tracking, this type of automation can create great results. Just don’t ask how it did it, as you will get very limited insights.
• Dynamic Search Ads (DSA): Enter a URL and let Google Ads find the keywords to target. Then hope to find some of them in search terms reports.
• Responsive Search Ads (RSA): Enter variations for titles and descptions and let Google Ads find the winning combination.
• Smart bidding: Various types of smart bidding exist with the common feature of using a wide range of variables to optimize a search campaign towards once precise goal. This includes bidding on branded keywords to generate more conversions.
• Google Data Studio, PowerBi: Automate reporting of your digital advertising campaigns into dashboards updated in real time.

For most of the items above, there can be a bit of a trade-off. Only the very last point on the list is a no-brainer: absolutely automate your reporting as much as humanly possible.

The challenge with automation is that it applies fast algorithms to sets of data. You need to be careful to provide the right data via reliable tracking and well-considered limits. If your tracking is not 100% reliable, automating campaigns will not work efficiently. If you leave the advertising engine define what data is included, you may see cannibalisation of other campaigns, of other channels.

Keep your eyes on the data and your foot on the accelerator

Search advertising is looking inward for growth. Its engines are aiming to monetize more of the search by using the data to its advantage.

Search advertising for small campaigns are easier to create than ever before. Search advertising for large campaigns is potentially more complex than before, as data access is becoming increasingly blurred, more algorithms are applied and targeting mechanism change. A good approach is to mix and match the various algorithms, and work actively on delimiting and providing the best data for your campaigns to work with.

Keep your eyes on the data and try to interpret it holistically across all your communication channels. Set your strategic goals and pin them down with the right KPIs, then use as much automation as you can to accelerate outcomes. Not quite the autopilot yet.

If you are interested in search trends and outlooks for digital marketing, you will find more in-depth analysis in our recent reports: “Major Trends in Paid Search”, “Paid Search Strategies”, “Marketing on Amazon” and “Digital Marketing in Uncertain Times”.

I wonder if people today know the film Matrix better than Plato’s allegory of the cave. They illustrate the same concept of a superficial reality projected onto us, from which only the fearless can escape. This is the image that we used to illustrate the state of digital marketing in 2020. Digital marketers staring at a wall onto which digital marketing providers are projecting images of end-users. Those images are not nearly as perfect as in our illustration. They are expressed as data sets, as interest categories, as intent.

For how long will we be calling it digital marketing, I wonder? We could already rebaptise it to Data marketing, for that is all it is about. Using data, to direct and optimize a campaigns executed by algorithms onto digital media. A few months back, Google removed more of the transparency in their data. They are of course far behind Facebook in that game: “No tracking allowed, here is the data you need”.

It made me think about the troubled waters data marketers are navigating in. We know that a lot of the digital activity that goes on behind the scenes is automated bot traffic. We know that we cannot track users from one marketing channel to the other, unless we are inside one of the big media players’s universe. We know that some users have installed ad blockers, that some are using incognito browsing windows, and in the future, third-party cookies will completely disappear. It is a wonder data marketers have any insight into the data at all.

Thinking like Plato and Neo: Does the data really provide insights? 

Nothing like a little philosophical step back to look at the bigger picture. The big worrying characteristic of the big marketing providers is that they are dictating the rules of the game, while they are providing the data on the basis of which you make decisions. By definition, the arbitrage is carried out by algorithms, not engineers fiddling with your data. This provides us with no guarantee whatsoever, that the data is free of bias. A very simple example from my days running a digital media agency: Google Analytics (the abiter) by default attributes conversions to paid search (the commercial offering) more favourably than organic (free) traffic.

Digital marketers are not dealing with raw data most of the time. It is interpreted data, and the interpretation has commercial intent. This is why the most important direction for digital marketers in these challenging times is to build proprietary data. If the entire user journey takes place within Amazon, or within the Google universe, or withing Facebook, you should be aware that you are not seeing raw data, but interpreted data. Building proprietary data means getting users to your own website, it means capturing tangible user data like email addresses, phone numbers and names, rather than relying on retargeting lists and intent audiences.

Read the full article on PPC Hero here:  https://www.ppchero.com/digital-marketing-in-a-vuca-world-is-it-time-to-emerge-from-platos-cave/