Letters: A new focus for Vision 100
Recently, Marketing Week launched its Vision 100 list. it purports to highlight the 100 most visionary marketers around. It’s a great list, full of inspirational people who have genuine achievements to their names. However, you’ll be lucky to find a B2B marketer in there, and that’s disappointing.
The absence of B2B marketers highlights a myopia in a sector infatuated with the shiny, the whizzy and the new, often to the detriment of traditional activities that, over the course of a campaign, help deliver significant revenues.
Marketing to businesses is too often pigeonholed as trade listings, dull conferences and branded mugs. Yet look at outstanding campaigns such as IBM’s smarter planet and GE’s ecomagination, or the speed with which Adobe (ironically, sponsor of the Vision 100) powered its way into the marketing analytics business. These are all solid examples of visionary marketing that has helped build stronger businesses.
The people driving these creative, sector-defining initiatives really ought to be recognised alongside their consumer brand peers.
Karan Chadda, director, Evolving Influence
Staying on target
When new levels of digital personalisation are making the relationship between brands and consumers even more intimate, the challenge for marketers is delivering an experience which considers their audience’s interests and preferences without raising concerns over their data privacy.
The answer here is establishing a mutually beneficial exchange between brands and consumers. Turn recently conducted research in association with Forbes, which showed that when consumers experience the value of targeted information, personalisation will be interpreted as a deep understanding of individual preferences, rather than an attempt by brands to over-familiarise.
If brands utilise anonymised first-party data to better understand their audience profiles and behaviour, then the consumer can also benefit from the information exchange by receiving targeted, timely and relevant content.”
Pierre Naggar, Managing Director EU at Turn
Is tinder hot or what?
Tinder is finally getting serious about monetising its users; its efforts will be interesting to follow. As with many other social networks, Tinder has a very attractive audience for advertisers, with a large and young base.
Data-wise, it is rich enough to ensure strong targeting and highly relevant advertising placements. Tinder has an added revenue opportunity with a subscription service, enabling more advanced features, or perhaps to opt out of advertising in a similar structure to Spotify.
The major challenge is a question of scale and format; the use of ‘fake’ advertising profiles has only a certain lifespan before the user becomes frustrated. But again, in a similar way to Spotify, they could well appear sporadically in the gap before the next profile appears.
If Tinder can get this right, it opens up a massive revenue opportunity that could even start to challenge the likes of Twitter and Facebook. If not, of course, many advertisers will simply swipe left.
James Briscoe, Unique Digital
