When building a consumer brand, audience reach and community depth are both critical—but too often they are confused as being the same thing. 

Communicating with your audience describes a one-to-many relationship. It’s primarily broadcast by nature. While social media users can comment, the experience for the majority of your audience is consumption of information. There is huge value in having a broad, receptive audience, and building their experience is absolutely essential—it means that when you have something to say, there will be people to listen.

To attract and retain a truly engaged audience, content should entertain, engage, inspire or educate. No one likes to feel that they are constantly being sold to. This doesn’t mean you can’t share functional information, but it needs to be brought to life in a way that goes beyond the sales pitch. By finding other relevant and relatable topics that a brand can share with its audience, it can hold their attention without every communication being a pure sales message.

But as important as this audience is, it’s not a community. Communities connect over shared interests or values—whether that’s a neighborhood in a small town, a unified religious belief, a shared professional skill or a united love for a football team. Unlike a large audience, members of a community interact with each other. A community represents a many-to-many relationship, a connected group that, in the case of a brand, bonds through a shared passion for that brand and what it stands for. These communities often discover that they have other shared interests, deepening their connections beyond the single topic that originally united them.

The significance of nurturing a true brand community really can’t be understated. While I firmly believe that communities are at their best when given autonomy to grow in a natural direction, there are some things you can do to encourage your community to form and flourish.

Use a platform that facilitates two-way conversations 

Not all platforms are created equal when it comes to developing communities. Some platforms like TikTok or Instagram are still very audience-driven, promoting a one-to-many relationship with brands putting out content for their audience to primarily view, like, share or (if they’re lucky) comment on. These platforms are important, and the engagement you see can has a real impact on awareness and sales, but they don’t intrinsically empower people to engage with each other.

Platforms like Facebook Groups or Google Groups, on the other hand, are designed to facilitate many-to-many interactions, encouraging people to engage with posts from others and share their own content. A great example of this type of community is Starbucks’ Leaf Rakers Society—a community that celebrates fall, and the iconic Pumpkin Spice Latte, all year round.

WhatsApp or Slack can also work, but they become challenging when the communities grow to be too large: Comments get easily lost and conversations can be hard to follow. Some brands choose to take their community in-house by creating their own forums within apps or websites, but this requires an expectation for new behavior of users beyond platforms they’re already interacting with, going against the grain rather than capitalizing on natural user behaviors. 

It’s a lot easier to leverage platforms people already use on a daily basis. But one great exception is LEGO Ideas, which enables fans to become LEGO Fan Designers, submitting ideas via its own platform. Ideas that garner the most community interest can be brought to life, produced and sold. 

There’s no one place to establish a community, but you should consider things like your customer demographic, the size of your community now and in the future, and where you’re already seeing the most chatter about your brand. Our community operates in various Facebook Groups where members create and share a huge volume of organic content, and it’s in these posts we see the magic happen: People are sharing personal stories, supporting and encouraging each other with tips, advice and compliments. They promote our products (better than we ever could!) but they also ask questions and share honest answers, even in instances where they haven’t had the best experience. We encourage this honesty because it creates credibility—people know they can trust what they’re reading. 

Invest in moments that are hard to scale 

Not everything you do to build your brand has to be scalable. There are opportunities everywhere to create moments that make people feel heard and special. This could be a small act—responding to every comment they take the time to share, even just with a short note, showing people that you acknowledge and care about their engagement—or something bigger: inviting a number of people to be guests at your next product launch, or offering the chance to contribute ideas for a new product.

These are moments that are hard to scale, but they say a lot about your brand and create shared experiences that take the customer relationship beyond just a buy-sell transaction. Think outside the box and keep in mind that these small moments create experiences, and experiences are what create loyalty. And we’ve found this is something that motivates not only our customers but our employees as well.

Often, the brand activities that are hardest to measure with traditional marketing metrics are the ones with the greatest long-term impact.

Empower your ambassadors 

Once you’ve galvanized your community, identify brand ambassadors who can give you a direct line to your customers’ voices. Engage with them regularly through polls, discussions, focus groups and personal conversations and empower them to know that their opinions are valued and have real influence on the business.

Trinny London has ambassadors across the world who organize local meetups several times a year and act as spokespeople for the region, collating and passing on feedback, requests and wish lists. Our ambassadors are supportive but aren’t afraid to share their honest views on opportunities for improvement. That kind of unfiltered customer insight is invaluable. 

Leave it alone!

But with all that said, I remind you of an important point: The power of a community is in its autonomy. It shouldn’t be driven by a sales team with an agenda.

Communities that are given space to grow become more trusting of the brand, so insights shared become more authentic and therefore more helpful. In this kind of open environment, a community becomes not just a space for brand discussion, but also for personal connections and friendships to be established and for opportunities beyond the brand to be discovered.

A thriving and engaged community remains one of the most efficient routes to growth. Through word-of-mouth and knowledge-sharing, your community will fuel itself, with new members being brought along to discover the brand at little or no cost to you. If you can find the most relevant customer motivations to develop and nurture a community for your brand in 2023, you will discover huge possibilities and benefits to your brand as you watch it thrive. 

With the click of a button, you can buy almost anything under the sun from millions of sellers and have it on your doorstep in two days. Going to the airport? Download an app and skip to the front of the line. Need to send money to friends and family? A growing list of companies can do that for you.

Without a doubt, the success of these business models speaks to what modern consumers really want: ease and convenience. Yet all too often we marketers assume that means speed. Yes, Amazon, Clear and Venmo give us what we want quickly, but the foundation of all of them is ease.

In today’s customer experience-led world, ease has become one of the most important elements to consider when designing a new customer experience. Research proves that ease is directly correlated to task completion: The easier the experience, the more likely the customer is to complete the desired action. Though this is hardly news to many marketers, ease continues to be a pervasive design problem across industries. In most cases, it’s not due to lack of resources or commitment to customers but in failing to answer the question: What does ease actually mean?

Let me take a stab at that here: Ease is about making an experience intuitive and solving basic questions for the customer. Why am I here? What should I do next? Why should I do it at all? Solving these basic questions reduces cognitive load and removes points of friction. When a user is presented with an easy-to-use interface and a seamless transition from start to finish, they are more likely to return and purchase again in the future. Not only does this increase customer satisfaction and conversions in the short term, but it also creates loyal customers who will spread the word about your brand. If you can provide them with a seamless experience, they will have faith in your product or service because they know it works well and runs smoothly.

It is important not to equate speed with ease, or as a component of ease, but rather a byproduct of it. The trap of focusing on speed is an easy one to fall into: Instinctively, when things become easier, you can do them faster. Plus, we all know how hard it is to capture and hold someone’s attention, so the conventional wisdom says to get through it as fast as we can before we lose them. Combine these two lines of thinking with how data gets interpreted and how often it doesn’t tell the full picture—the data is likely showing you how long people are staying on your site and how far down the funnel they’re getting. It’s not hard to do the math and say, we only have this much time to get them to the end. But what if you took a few additional seconds to help people, created something compelling enough for them to stick around or your data was telling you more about correlation than causation?

It is essential to remember that consumers are more than happy to give you additional time, even more so if you have a strong brand and value proposition. However, there is one major condition—they want to get good value for their time. Checkout flows, account/profile creation, quizzes and product finders are great examples of places you see this confusion occur. When it comes to people going through these experiences, users should feel they generally know how much time it will take and whether they trust your motives in capturing this data. But most importantly, they need to feel a strong value for their time.

A well-built example is how Brooks Running’s Shoe Finder quiz does far more than just pick out the perfect pair of shoes for runners—it offers a unique, in-depth experience that utilizes science to address needs specific to each user. It starts by letting the user know that it could take up to five minutes and is here to support their goals. Along the way, users are asked questions and provided with quick explanations as to why their answers matter, not only helping them find suitable footwear but also giving valuable insight into their support requirements. And Brooks has clearly done its homework: Via links throughout the process, they back up all assertions made regarding how different body movements impact shoe choice. It’s a great example of why Brooks has a great reputation, strong authority and such a loyal following.

When creating an online experience, ask yourself: Can I reduce complexity and focus on transparency? How can I make sure my customers don’t feel overwhelmed? Are users always best served by removing as many steps and screens as possible? These questions should provide guidance when creating an engaging yet intuitive experience.

Every consumer is judging all their interactions through the lens of their last, best experience. It no longer matters, and hasn’t for quite a while, if you are best in your category. To win, you need to be the best in class.

Consumers’ expectations are higher than ever, and a big part of the expectation is that things should work the way they expect it to. Brands would be well advised to slow down, take their time and help users through this process while showing at every step that this is a good use of their time and they will be glad they did it. If you do this right, you’ll have created an engaging customer experience that leaves people feeling satisfied each time. And you don’t have to take my word for it—that’s what testing is for.

There are some marcom agencies where growth in their early years is nothing short of spectacular. Often—though certainly not exclusively—they’ll be in emerging, ultrafast-growth disciplines. This was once the case for “social” or even “digital” back in the day; now, it’s more likely to apply to areas such as influencer or the metaverse.

For buyers looking for their next deal, they can present a seemingly irresistible opportunity. Yet on the flip side, agencies that have gone from a couple of people to several hundred or more in just a few years can trigger alarm bells as well as excitement—that febrile growth often comes with downsides, as no one has yet built a perfect 360 agency at that pace. 

As with any opportunity for great reward, there is the potential for great risk, and buyer mindsets often need a bit of encouragement to adapt accordingly, especially in a market where all the focus is on risk rather than upside. The secret in securing a successful transaction is in how to tell the story of that growth—not glossing over the issues that inherently come with stratospheric growth but putting them into a context that explains how they sit within the particular growth narrative of the business in question. It’s also about knowing a buyer well enough to have a gut feel for their tolerance for different kinds of risks—what is a red flag to one buyer might well be a selling point for another.

Understanding red flags and how to manage them

Superfast-growth businesses usually have a founder—sometimes, two or three people—who first saw the opportunity and ran with it. Even in these more enlightened days, our industry still refers to “key man risk”—rightly or wrongly, success to date and into the future is seen as tied to these individuals.

It’s terrific when those individuals carry on running the business post-acquisition—something earnouts are designed to ensure—but it’s not always the case. A founder who’s made $10 million at the age of 35 (and increasingly in their 20s rather than their 30s) may or may not be motivated to continue. There has to be succession planning in place to mitigate that risk, and more than succession planning, there has to be a credible “parachute in” plan in case the business leader decides to step out in circumstances other than a structured transition over time.

Specialisms and client concentration—good and bad

Some of these agencies can often be buried deep in a particular niche within a specialist sector or have found success with a specific formula or service model. A dollar of revenues from a tobacco producer or arms manufacturer has never carried the same value as a dollar from healthcare, but acquirers also assess quality of earnings through the lens of their own clients and teams. Agencies with clients in certain geographies may not be welcomed, just as we see buyers nervous about petrochemical clients and those at odds with ESG and DEI imperatives.

Buyers looking for consistency of revenue will also want to know that the source of that income isn’t going to dry up because the business is so deeply focused on a single area of expertise. Which leads to another potential red flag: client concentration. Some buyers will get twitchy when an acquisition target has more than 15% of its revenue tied up with a single client, where the loss of that client could wipe out most of the profits. But on the other hand, some turbo-charged businesses actually make their name by working with a particular brand that in some cases may account for as much as 60-70% of revenue.

It’s an interesting dilemma, because some clients translate as “crown jewels.” A business that saw massive growth because it worked with the likes of Google, Coca-Cola or Nike might only be attractive to buyers because of that household name. Or an extreme dependence on a specific global client might actually present such extraordinary synergies and growth opportunities for the right kind of acquirer that it becomes the key deal driver.

Where growth can destroy margins in the short term

The next red flag is where the founders or leadership teams were probably so busy taking advantage of huge revenue opportunities they didn’t have a chance to introduce cost controls and structures to manage it—meaning margins were negatively impacted in the short term. Even where cost controls are in place, they might appear not to be. Most significant account wins need upfront “investment” from the agency to onboard the client, and that investment will hit results before revenues are running at full tilt, even if the payback on the client investment happens over several years in the future.

A focus on international growth, for example, might see a collection of international offices opening up, each of which has its own finance function with all the associated inefficiencies and duplications. Costs can spiral simply because the leadership team never had the time, ability or inclination to stop to assess the implications of key decision-making. That spiraling might appear to be borne from a lack of control but equally might be a deliberate investment strategy with a short-term hit for long-term gain. 

That negative can be presented as a positive; a suite of international offices run by senior teams locally mitigates against a perceived overdependence on the founders in the home market and ticks the succession planning box. 

Are we moving up or down the growth curve?

A buyer will want to know where a target business finds itself on the growth trajectory—is it still soaring skyward or is it slowing down?

It can be difficult to price deals when growth to date has been so explosive. But if you take the example above of a business that has gone for international expansion early on, investing ahead of revenue, a future acquirer will be able to take advantage of the growth that should follow that investment.

When it comes to revenue projection modeling, most buyers will be unimpressed by what are often unrealistic assumptions about how much new business an agency thinks it can win. The historical pipeline might tell a better story if it shows how the business built and converted its client portfolio in the past; unfortunately, most agencies tend to be poor at keeping this kind of data. Much better to focus instead on showing that the agency has a clear plan and track record of expanding revenue from its existing client base, rather than unsubstantiated aspirations to break into new sectors.

The skill in understanding a buyer mindset

Potential acquirers of fast-growth businesses want precedent and industry benchmarks to work with. What they don’t need are second- or thirdhand insights. 

It’s also important to understand just how receptive the buyer actually is to risk—because every fast-growing business will probably have at least one of those red flags waving. Some buyers want steady income and low-risk acquisitions, but others are more prepared to push the boat out. 

There are many factors to consider that create a story worth telling. Does a U.K. buyer understand the nuances of margin performance for a U.S. agency, where margins of 40% are commonly cited, in sharp contrast to what they’ll be used to? To be honest, it can even be where the founders seem “too coached” when they meet with a buyer team looking for honest, unguarded conversation. 

In the end, it comes down to whether an acquirer wants an agency with scale and growth, and if so, understanding that it inevitably comes with risks attached. Most of those challenges can be mitigated by identifying the nature of the buyer’s appetite for risk and matching it with the right kind of business. That’s where the magic happens.

Marketing leaders are experts at juggling competing priorities. At any given time, there are dozens of big ideas and business demands vying for space on our to-do lists. But when done right, working toward multiple goals shouldn’t scatter your focus.

This year will be about understanding your customers on a granular level you may not have explored before. It will require getting comfortable with generative AI and automations, with an eye on how these tools can extend the work of your team members. And the most successful marketers will be those who democratize data across their teams, nurturing baseline understanding of the numbers and encouraging debate about their findings in service of marketing innovation.

Honing in on just three key practices can make an outsized impact on KPIs across your business. Here’s what will differentiate great marketing from best-in-class in a climate like no other. 

Harness your current customer base

You just acquired a wave of new customers at your Q4 peak—and those shoppers brought with them a fresh batch of data. It’s time to jumpstart those long-term relationships and create new loyalties, right?

As marketers, we’re often wired to chase new customers, both off- and in-season. Even though acquiring a user can run your company several times the cost of retaining one, many teams continue to spend a disproportionate amount of time measuring acquisition at the expense of tracking current customer engagement. 

This year, put communication—and revenue growth—with current customers at the forefront of your strategy, looking at acquisition as a secondary KPI. Setting this priority in Q1 allows you to leverage insights derived from your holiday acquisition data to upsell and increase retention. Start by getting granular on your data: You likely already have a handle on who’s buying your products or what triggers are most likely to result in a sale. Go beyond basic buying behaviors to understand and build on usage patterns.

One option is to compare the activities of your broader customer base with those of your best customers, looking for commonalities and challenging your assumptions. At Mailchimp, for example, our highest growth customers tend to use Customer Journey builder automations, which can help generate up to four times more orders than bulk email, or predictive segmentation, which can help marketers achieve up to 88% more revenue. Seeking look-alikes for those high-value customers at earlier stages, we can tailor educational content to encourage active use of those features—ones we know will drive growth for their business and in turn drive growth for ours. 

When you intimately understand your current audience, you empower your team to retain and expand it with precision and insight. 

Unlock personalization with automations and AI 

Just a few years ago, marketing teams were far more limited by bandwidth and budget when it came to personalizing campaigns. Consider a marketer looking to reach 20 different types of consumers at five different points in their journey: The task would have required creation and coordination of hundreds of assets, campaigns and measurement points—not to mention the time to analyze and act on the results. Plenty of target segments had to be left behind in the name of focus and efficiency. 

Today, with the likes of GPT-3 technology for text generation or automated email journeys and webhooks for timely contact, you can connect with consumers individually like never before. Think of artificial intelligence and automations first and foremost as enablers of personalization at scale.

Imagine you’re a direct-to-consumer specialty foods brand selling products with whole, natural ingredients. The same item might appeal to folks following vegan, paleo or keto diets—as well as those who don’t adhere to a single diet at all. To maximize your sales, you would market that product a little bit differently to each group. With a single input and an understanding of your various target audiences, ChatGPT or other generative AI tools can draft dozens of versions of the same message, each optimized for a specific audience, without exponentially increasing your team’s workload.

Segmenting and automation can deliver those targeted messages effortlessly and at just the right time, all based on real-time actions and data integrations. A travel booking company might use tags and automated email journeys to upsell customers with trip insurance or to offer timely, specific packing tips to ensure a great trip. They can offer additional excursions or remind customers to make restaurant reservations, increasing share of wallet through the journey. These workflows run on their own, proactively generating sales and increasing customer satisfaction while freeing up marketers to focus on big-picture strategy.

As you plan your resources, consider how you can implement technology to execute the what and free up your teams to focus on the why. By equipping your team with the advantages of automations and AI as a baseline, they can more effectively focus on the strategies that will differentiate your brand in the marketplace.

Make data hacking a team sport 

Data-backed marketing is table stakes. It’s no secret that following the numbers will lead you to faster growth and stronger brand loyalty. But to let data lead the way effectively, make structured debate a fun, gamified weekly ritual.

On our team, we bring marketing, business analytics and finance together weekly around a consistent scorecard. Using provocative hypotheses, engaging in passionate debates, everything is fair game. “Stupid questions” are common and welcome—and often, they’re not so stupid at all. The data always tells a story, and we find the most trajectory-changing information comes when we go beyond the obvious and take time to ask how others see the numbers differently.

This practice has yielded simple, immediate wins, like updating landing page copy for an immediate rise in conversion rates. It impacts long-term strategy, too, as we continue to analyze new user behavior and consider what innovative solutions we might offer to help marketers see results faster on our platform.

When you encourage unconventional and investigative thinking around a shared set of facts, you ignite bold experiments with outsized impact. Normalize debate and curiosity, and follow the outcomes to exciting results.

However you choose to implement them, these three principles all serve a common goal: to increase your ROI and deepen your customer connections without increasing your workload. Digging into first-party data allows you to be precise and efficient both in retaining customers and acquiring new ones. On a more human level, it allows you to get better acquainted with their specific needs, offering the opportunity to create compounding value. Setting aside time after your peak season to analyze behavioral data—and then, to create automated workflows that leverage the insights—will save you time and resources all year.

With an inquisitive, collaborative approach to customer data, you can empower teams to innovate based on the numbers, testing their theories and collecting immediate wins. You can foster a culture that balances short- and long-term growth, making real-time adjustments as the landscape changes. And you can continue to build on your success—or as we like to say on our team, “beat our best, together.”

As we celebrate Black History Month in the United States, it’s important to remember our purpose and goal to continue striving for racial equality and justice. We also need to recognize that for too long, the history and experiences of Black people have been marginalized and misunderstood. How can we tell a story we don’t understand? How can we connect authentically if we’re meeting a quota? If we are to truly honor Black history and culture, we must find ways to ensure that Black stories and perspectives are included in the narrative. In short: Black History Month needs a makeover. Rather than simply commemorating the past, we should be looking ahead to how we can drive inclusion in the future, and how data and AI can aid the cause. 

It’s been a little over two years since brands and businesses en masse pledged their commitment to diversity and inclusion—ample time for these proud corporate promises to turn into an empty checkbox on a very long to-do list. Don’t think we haven’t noticed. This first wave of DEI is over.

The second wave of DEI will have brands asking themselves: Is it even worth doing? Of course it is, and the smart brands will start to look at the ROI and see the payoff, literally, in the pockets of shareholders of companies that have made DEI a true priority. In DEI 2.0, we’ll see a new wave of inclusion that goes far beyond ticking a box—because when diversity and inclusion are taken into account with a business-minded focus, it rewards both shareholders and our society. 

It sounds like an oxymoron that benefiting shareholders also serves the greater good—but this is the benefit of being inclusive. 39% of your purchasing audience is multicultural, and mostly Black, which means inclusive communication can unlock this market. When you reach a wider audience, your ad dollars go farther, new customers are acquired and shareholders are happy. 

It’s easy to understand the importance of diversity and inclusion across the board, but these efforts are often misunderstood when it comes to marketing. In the olden days (and things are very much still being done this way), a brand might target women aged 18 to 34 who live in a certain city or make a certain amount of money. Our research has shown that these traditional demographic markers hold less and less power over purchasing behavior. Socioeconomic status, region and education don’t impact intent to purchase—but our experiences do. Studies have shown that a person’s lived experiences, diversity and gender are more significant signals as to whether or not they’ll make a purchase. It makes sense; the lives we lead, the things we do, the experiences that shape us far better explain who we are than statistics on a spreadsheet.

So where does AI factor in? AI is already being used to find hidden patterns and correlations in large data sets, which can be used to create predictive models and inform decision-making. We can use this technology to identify areas where disparities exist and ultimately create more equitable access and outcomes for marketers. By training AI to analyze content through a lens of diversity and inclusion, we can identify purchasing propensity, racial bias and risk factors in content. 

Human behavior, including consumer choice, is highly influenced by emotional state, diversity of experience and one’s internalized view of self-identity. These states are reliably expressed in our language and can therefore be detected in both written and spoken speech, with the latter providing multimodal cues (textual and audio) from which to detect emotion, and the latter processed along the unimodal text domain using natural language processing (NLP) techniques. This means that when provided with the right models, AI can be used to detect any bias or racism in content—from the concept to the script to the full-blown campaign level—as well as to identify any topics that may be associated with exclusion or discrimination. The patterns of emotions clearly differ across commercials in a highly interpretable manner. You feel this when you watch ads—now it’s calculable.

By analyzing content through the lens of diversity and inclusion, AI can help organizations better understand how their content reflects their commitments. Our data reveals a strong correlation between positive emotional responses and positive interpretations of diversity in content. Technology has advanced too far for us to still be operating by guesswork, especially when it comes to inclusion.

Communicating with an audience as diverse as the U.S. population is much more nuanced than previously perceived by marketers. Businesses must focus on the most effective triggers of persuasion. Emotion and inclusion are major driving forces in consumers’ decisions to make a purchase and spread the word about their purchase. In order to make this process as frictionless as possible, and to open the aperture wider, requires a deeper understanding of emotions, sentiment and diversity experience, which were proven to predict purchasing propensity across our studies. Purchasing intent has a high and positive correlation with content that is perceived as inclusive and evokes positive emotions. 

As we enter DEI 2.0, we’ll also see the importance of updating our marketing strategies from “targeting” to “including.” The biggest difference between the two? No one wants to feel targeted, and everyone wants to feel included. We already see it in the media we’re served today, when we’re inundated by ads that make us feel like a walking statistic as opposed to consuming content that resonates with us and makes us feel heard.

Many companies believe the goal is to tighten the range and zero in on a singular, specific audience, when it’s really time to expand our reach. We’re long overdue to ditch the stereotypical tropes about gender and race and start to relate on an emotional, sentimental and experiential level with our audiences. Meeting consumers where they are, from an identity perspective, is key to moving from targeting to inclusion. For far too long we, people of color, have been portrayed in ways that do not reflect our identities and are removed from our experiences. Include our stories, appeal to our emotions and sentiments, connect with us authentically—we will invest in your brands and advocate loudly. We will create deep connections and become loyal to your products and brands. 

Just as American politics have diverged, brands will soon sit on either end of a similar spectrum. Brands that are waiting for this wave of diversity and inclusion to pass will realize it’s not going anywhere; brands that wholeheartedly bring scaled solutions to their businesses—solutions that put the power of inclusion in every content creator’s hands by leveraging multicultural models, AI and NLP—will be rewarded. Using the cloud of infinitesimal data computation empowers brands to get the scaled solutions we need to start to address the lack of representation in the marketing ecosystem.

In order to elevate Black History Month to keep up with the modern era, we need to not just take the stereotypes out of storytelling and marketing—there must also be a data-driven, insights-driven approach to DEI that ultimately benefits business growth. We’ve proven how multicultural understanding will only make your ads better; the brands that are really leaning into this approach are showing now, more than ever, that they truly have their finger on the pulse of this country. 

We are living in an era of permanent change. What’s relevant to your customer today may be in their rearview mirror tomorrow. Sweeping shifts brought on by emerging technology, geopolitics, economic headwinds and a global pandemic have created both constant turmoil and opportunity for marketers.

Indeed, not since the dot-com era have the stakes of navigating change—and a fundamentally changed customer—been so high. Most marketing organizations have accepted, in theory at least, that they must now meet customers wherever they are and convey exactly the right message, experience, service or offer in exactly the right context. Otherwise, they risk becoming irrelevant.

But it’s also important to remember that many marketers work within far-reaching global businesses—and most companies simply aren’t adapting fast enough to match the increasing uncertainty and complexity around us. According to research we’ve worked on at Accenture, 95% of global leaders say their customers’—and employees’—lives are changing faster than businesses. That’s cause for concern, as almost two-thirds of consumers said they wished companies would respond faster to their rapidly evolving needs.

To help their companies thrive amid change rather than merely survive it, it is imperative that marketers lead the way. Based on Accenture’s expertise in advising CMOs and clients on marketing transformations, we have found that marketers can be highly effective change agents by focusing on three areas.

Be a dynamic data steward

In this new era of digital-based competition and customer control, people are increasingly buying because of a brand’s relevance to their needs in the moment. For marketers, that means blending both proactive and reactive strategies, and using both first- and third-party data.

Take Kimberly-Clark, which wanted to connect more emotionally with its customers and open a two-way dialogue. The personal care company created a solution: pulling first-party data to the fore and collating brand data from different sources to build a cohesive picture of customer needs. The new digital connections meant Kimberly-Clark could connect in a more personalized way, such as offering new parents informational tools and loyalty rewards on its Huggies mobile app or reaching out to people buying cold medication to help them find related products such as Kleenex.

This kind of sophisticated data use and dynamic strategy can create a culture of change across an organization, proving that marketing is a new strategic center of the business.

Data has showed marketers to be more adept and stronger than we ever thought we could be, and the entire function more resilient. When the aftershocks settle and a calmer pattern emerges, marketers should look for new pictures of progress to emerge—for both people and brands. 

Simplify to innovate

As Accenture CEO Julie Sweet has said, simplification means innovation. When you simplify, you reduce and focus. And that allows you to innovate more. 

Marketing is steeped in data that we use for business outcomes. Given the ever-changing landscape we’re in, we marketers need to lead the way in simplifying our own organizations—again, with the use of data. 

This is important in a time of potential budget cuts, where creating digital twins—a virtual duplicate of a physical object, process or system that can be used to predict how those elements will respond to different variables—can model possible cuts and their effects, helping to inform difficult decisions while reaching new levels of effectiveness. 

The impact that focus and data have on the entire marketing function reveals a truth we can all embrace: Data can not only lead to effectiveness but can also open the door to more creativity. 

For years, marketing has discussed and debated technology and data’s impact on our industry. Now is the time to use them for the good of our craft and our organizations. 

Employ cross-function collaboration

Marketing and communications professionals are seeking the best, most creative and strategic career opportunities available. According to LinkedIn, 618,000 marketers changed jobs in 2021. Having the best people is critical because their roles are critical. 

Retaining employees starts with keeping them engaged. And one way to keep them engaged is to set a positive example for working with others to achieve common goals. New research from Accenture underscores the importance of collaboration across the C-suite to ensure that people are at the center of change—particularly, that better alignment between the CMO and chief human resource officer drives better growth. In fact, the highest-performing CHROs are 42% more likely than their CHRO peers to have a strong, mutually influential relationship with CMOs. 

This focus, from the C-suite connection to the inspiration of every marketing and communications professional, will make a positive impact on both business growth and people’s careers. 

This means marketers should strive for closer alignment between marketing, communications and HR. Both functions are people-first, and both drive company growth. However, only one in three CHROs in our survey said they have a strong, mutually influential relationship with the CMO. This should be the year when 100% of CHROs and CMOs courageously embrace their partnership and together make a positive impact on business growth and their staffs’ careers and well-being.

Also rising in importance: the need to balance work-from-home convenience with the loss of workplace intangibles and the “accidental culture” that comes from chance hallway conversations and the spontaneous exchange of ideas that can help build careers and connections. Ongoing Accenture research has found that people miss office camaraderie, chitchat, shared lunch breaks, birthday cakes and more, because those unscripted moments have important connective value. A recent Gallup poll found that those who have a best friend at work were twice as likely to report feeling strongly satisfied with their jobs during the pandemic as those who don’t have a close friendship in the office (32% vs. 15%).

People want to be strategic, focused and connected. And they want to know what their career path is, along with opportunities for training and moving throughout the function. As marketers, we should revise the way we view outcomes, looking beyond quantitative metrics like leads or sales and considering qualitative factors like the experience of work itself. Creating this new consistency is a must-do—and the gateway to fairness and possibility.

Being the change

The single biggest challenge companies face is adapting fast enough to match the increasing uncertainty and complexity around us. Fortunately for marketers, we know how to read and respond to change—and we have the skills to do it. With today’s pace of change, CMOs and everyone in their organizations have no choice but to lead the way to help their organizations thrive in change, not just survive it.

In the pantheon of tried and true attention-grabbing content, the “in and out” list has stood the test of time. Who among us can resist these curated compendiums of where we have been and where we are going?

Sure, sometimes the balance between pithy and pragmatic, aspirational and actionable is a bit off, but occasionally they will strike at the core of an issue. Case in point: Adweek’s list of what’s in and out for marketing in 2023, which declared DEI pledges out and “DEI action and accessibility in practice” in.

It’s been almost three years since media agencies and brand marketers made headlines with pledges and commitments supporting diverse-owned media. But have these promises translated to meaningful headway? Granted, they started a conversation—one we’re still having. But that conversation is still far too confined to a single corner of the room, where the same historic group of marketers engage with the same narrow group of diverse media owners and publishers.

Making headway means increasing diverse media’s share of the big advertising budgets for the long term, in a way that supports brand values and business goals alike and moves the industry toward a truly cross-cultural approach to media planning and investment.

Moving from headlines to headway is certainly more complicated a challenge than any in-and-out diptych can support. But if 2023 is to be the year of DEI action, it must start with a shared commitment to four other words that begin with A.

Authenticity

Diverse consumers are America’s growth engine, representing 40% of the population. If diversity is a priority for an organization, then it should be a key factor in how brands act and show up in marketing and media every day of the year. An example of this is Dream in Black, an always-on lifestyle platform where AT&T celebrates Black culture and the creators who shape it, allowing the brand to foster a deeper and more genuine relationship with the community.

Alignment

Are all key stakeholders in the media and marketing process aligned to the organization’s diversity ambitions? CMOs can receive standing ovations for their diversity speeches at marketing conferences, but if it’s falling on deaf ears within their respective organizations, they risk becoming another performative marketer.

PepsiCo has done the opposite by becoming a trailblazer, recently celebrating the 40th anniversary of its diversity program, including committing to spend more than $400 million annually with diverse-owned suppliers and partnering with the National Minority Supplier Development Council to cover the expenses for minority business enterprise certifications.

Accessibility

No, doing a Black upfront doesn’t meet the bar here. Accessibility means making it easier for brands to discover diverse partners that aren’t currently on their radar—and once they have discovered them, building an architecture that supports ongoing, brand-specific, outcomes-focused conversations.

In other words, it’s not about giving diverse media their own upfront; it’s about keeping them in front of the people who control spend on both the client and agency sides, in hyper-relevant contexts. It’s with this thought in mind that new industry events have been launched, such as Mediahub’s Diversity-Owned Media Day and Omnicom Media Group’s “infronts” series.

Accountability

The fastest path to traction for any media channel is demonstrating results. As long as DEI investment is measured in terms of meeting social responsibility targets versus impact on business goals, it will remain an adjunct to the media plan as opposed to an asset for driving growth.

The lack of visibility in the marketplace from a marketing and data representation perspective, compounded by affordable access to advanced measurement tools, have walled off diverse-owned media from having any pathway to build a performance media narrative.

While there has been progress from agencies in highlighting the value of diverse-owned media, and measurement companies revisiting pricing policies to include more diverse-owned suppliers, we are still dealing with legacy data sets based on panels that aren’t representative of the general population, which continue to negatively impact the performance of diverse-owned media. 

Given that diverse-owned media represents 7% of the entire media ecosystem, the industry needs to band together in establishing an agreed-upon roadmap of standardized and relevant KPIs that both address and resolve historic measurement and data impediments. A tall order? Yes, but then again, if the video seller and buyer marketplace can come together in the name of more accurate measurement, the industry can certainly do the same to assure that the data on which we transact accurately represents the diverse media opportunity.

In the meantime, agencies have opportunities to help manifest diversity in the media process by leveraging media-owned tools like TelevisaUnivision’s Hispanic household identity graph. Covering nearly 100% of Hispanic households, it marks a significant step forward in closing the representation in measurement gap, as evidenced by the 100% growth in audience revenue and the customer content and sponsorships it helped drive for TelevisaUnivision during the 2022 upfronts.

At the same time, consortiums of diverse media channels like Group Black, NGL Collective, Revolt and Urban One are offering solutions to the issues of both scale and measurement that have been barriers to investment.

The value is there—it’s up to us to unlock it. And when we do, that’s when the headlines become headway.

During an economic downturn, CMO priorities and funding decisions may have an impact on almost every department of an organization, including sales, service, operations and HR. With the odds of a recession becoming more likely, it’s imperative that marketing leaders and financial decision-makers are aligned on topics like long-term strategy, where marketing can add value and which bellwethers indicate economic shifts to come.

According to Deloitte’s fourth quarter CFO Signals report, CFOs said their top three priorities for this year are cost management (52%), financial performance (50%) and growth (38%). With that in mind, CFOs are preparing to cut down on expenses, and CEOs are starting to completely overhaul their workforce, operational costs and more in preparation for a recession. Deloitte’s 2022 report with Cannes Lions showed us how creativity can play a major role in brand success. It is with this same focus on creativity that CMOs need to tackle uncertain economic times to drive our businesses forward and generate growth.

With recession prep on the minds of CMOs everywhere, taking cues from your CFO can be the first step toward a resilient marketing organization and movement to an “adaptation” mindset versus a “reaction” mindset. Furthermore, you have to anticipate consumers may alter their behavior. Do you have a marketing strategy that can keep up or are you following a blind plan? During a recession, it becomes even more vital that marketing is proactive, effective and efficient, all at once. Reallocating funding from programs that do not fall into these categories will improve overall performance. Evaluate everything from advertising to personnel and platform investments.

Ready to build a resilient marketing organization? As a CMO myself, I’ve found three pieces of advice to be the most effective.

Focus on long-term market share instead of quarterly earnings

Choosing to cut marketing spending to save money can lead to your competitors and even new entrants to the market leaping on that opportunity to take market share from you. Recapturing lost market share is always more expensive than maintaining it, so be wary of cuts that will put market share at risk. Stay confident and use every resource available to efficiently protect your market share.

Thinking like a CFO means focusing on the two-year plan more than the quarterly report. How do you stick with ambitious goals even when times are tough? We’ve seen again and again that constraints can inspire creativity. Previous dips in the economic cycle have inspired significant business model innovations and improvements. Building a culture of creativity within your organization can help surface these groundbreaking insights and unlock new sources of revenue from disruptive new business models that can turn economic downturn into a transformative business opportunity.

As complex problems require creative solutions, ingenuity and innovation will get you farther than money alone. Adding value through innovation won’t just retain existing customers but will create new ones.

Engage in collaborative cost-cutting

A big mistake we can make as CMOs is waiting for our CFO to come to us for recommendations on where to cut costs. Like a CFO, CMOs should always have a pulse on the budget. CMOs should be watching the organization’s overall financial positioning and know which areas will add overall brand value, and which may not. Shape out these conversations and areas now. It’s never too late to start the conversation. Set up a weekly phone call with your CFO to begin collaborating on where it makes sense to cut costs during this downturn and gain insight on coming organizational strategies.

These calls also establish a shared vernacular, which strengthens the stronghold of the CFO-CMO partnership and allows you to better protect key resources and programs. CFOs are math-oriented. For marketing functions to be seen as a driver for growth and value, the CMO must be equipped with the ability to communicate marketing’s metrics, conversion rates and the value marketing brings to the full organization. Determining which KPIs are understood and appreciated by the CFO can impact where marketing falls in investment priorities and how investments drive revenue or cut costs. Additionally, your CFO will likely be able to share insights into upcoming business milestones that may determine when, how or where increased investment or cost-cutting is likely to occur.

After starting these conversations, it’s much easier to make smart, hard and fast decisions to identify your biggest ROI opportunities. Now more than ever, you need to bring performance data and ROI into focus by measuring and demonstrating value in every decision you make.

Choose your sources wisely

As all eyes are on the market right now, there are plenty of sources and forecasts circulating in the media each day. Some even drastically disagree with one another. Some doubt that forecasts have much value for executives making decisions that can make or break businesses and livelihoods. However, it’s better to have a few trusted sources with whom you can consult on a regular basis than to make decisions in a vacuum. There’s a lot of noise, and you need to be able to pick the right channels in order to decipher the noise. Pick a couple of your most trusted sources, use their past studies as a benchmark and track updates as they come along.

The bottom line is, don’t feel the need to adjust tactics based on every source you read. Your CFO is already a trusted hub of information. Ask for which sources they trust most and work from there.

Onward, with intention

It will take creative problem-solving to prevail during a recession, but it is possible. This industry has grown exponentially from the innovative ways we’re able to pivot, not just in content but in the way we adapt and listen. We must learn to wear many hats as CMOs and adopt new ways of thinking to challenge what we previously knew about recessions and have better outcomes. Now is the time to think less about marketing and advertising for marketing and advertising’s sake and lead your marketing spend with super-charged purpose. The means to do so certainly exist.

Taking the time to study and connect with your CFO to evaluate the needs and goals of your company are just two parts of the equation to remaining resilient during an economic downturn, but it’s a good starting point.

Last summer, the IAB Tech Lab released new guidelines that effectively declared out-stream the primary path for web video inventory moving forward. Those of us who have been around awhile—and associate the term “out-stream” with glacial page speed and scammy ad units—are doing a double take. Historically, out-stream ads have not been favored by publishers or users, but in recent years, they’ve become a go-to strategy in the world of programmatic advertising solutions. So how did out-stream evolve from a niche, oft-maligned ad offering to one of the biggest money-makers?

Out-stream describes advertising shown outside of the traditional video environment—for example, while you’re reading an article or browsing through a feed. In-stream, by contrast, is a video ad before, during or after video content that readers are watching (often referred to as pre-, mid- or post-roll). Out-stream ads are designed to autoplay as users scroll and then either collapse or pause when a user continues scrolling. In an era where consumers scroll all day every day, out-stream is inching its way to a best practice in programmatic advertising.

Years ago, out-stream video ran as 300×250 ad units that were overtaken by bad actors in the industry, causing a revolt from internet users, publishers and marketers alike. Low fill rates and low-quality ads followed as a result of this race to the bottom, and soon publishers were reluctant to run out-stream ads at all.

Out-stream has come a long way, though, and will soon be everywhere online—and that’s a good thing. Video ads, of course, generate more revenue than traditional display. They always have, and publishers have always been drawn to the revenue potential. Now, however, that revenue can be generated with a nondisruptive user experience—and without publishers having to produce video on their own.

In an ideal world, a seamless adoption and implementation of the IAB guidelines on both sides of the advertising ecosystem would happen. Out-stream would be the default web video option, CPMs would briefly fluctuate but return to equilibrium and advertisers would finally be able to properly differentiate between high-quality in-stream and properly labeled out-stream.

A more transparent buying and selling experience for video inventory that aids both supply and demand and ushers in more advancements in ad tech should be a win for all parties. So why haven’t the guidelines been applied, and why hasn’t inventory been properly labeled as out-stream in 2023? Other than the fact that we all know it’s next to impossible to get any changes of significance made in Q4, it all comes down to money.

Currently, there’s no incentive for publishers to change. It’s a classic prisoner’s dilemma. Why be the first to properly declare your inventory and experience short-term revenue loss while your competitors continue to cheat? Until advertisers demand proper declaration, no one is inclined to take the leap. However, as 2023 is still getting started, we’ve still got some Q1, “new year, new you” energy in the air. Revenue is always low this time of year, so it’s perfect for cleaning house (and that hall closet you’ve been putting off).

What are the IAB changes, and why were they made?

In pursuit of the almighty video dollar, publishers have long pursued any strategy by which they could declare their video as in-stream. An entire industry of “video discovery platforms” was created. These platforms would scan site content and, from that, generate a video on the fly—video content that would be considered relevant on that page, at least at first glance. These videos would automatically play when readers arrived on that page, but not before charging advertisers a premium for the pre-roll ads that preceded them. As readers scrolled past the video, which would still be showing the ad at this point, the player would then follow the reader as they read the rest of the article.

The problem? The reader likely never watched the video itself.

How many pages have you been to where a video you never clicked “play” on began playing just the same? How many of those videos have you actually watched? Thousands, or zero? Chances are, the video content was barely related to the article you read, and you would never have clicked play to begin with.

As a marketer, if you were creating a video commercial or pre-roll ad, how do you envision the user experience with that pre-roll advertisement running in front of a video that the target audience is watching? Chances are, it wasn’t the experience I described. You probably imagined a user who was about to watch a video on YouTube that they really wanted to see and were happy to watch your ad first in exchange. That’s what you paid the premium for. Instead, you got duped.

Advertisers grew increasingly upset by this pattern and it’s what ultimately led to the IAB changes. According to the new guidelines, any video ad experience without audio is now considered out-stream. Why does that matter? Well, in order to have videos autoplay when a user arrives on a page, browsers require such videos to start off muted or they will be blocked. Long story short, this means 99% of videos currently shown by these video discovery platforms are now supposed to be labeled as out-stream.

What will in-stream become?

Going forward, in-stream will only be defined as videos where someone actually clicked the play button—videos that people have elected to watch—which will be what marketers thought they were buying to begin with. This makes logical sense from the advertiser side, but what will happen to publishers? This is where the prisoner’s dilemma comes into play, as the first inventory to switch from in-stream to out-stream will likely see a drop in CPM.

But once we all do it, the industry will notice. Budgets will shift to out-stream. In-stream will go back to being the premium it was always meant to be, and CPMs will skyrocket. Marketers will still look to out-stream for many of their KPIs, but at a price that reflects this new reality, raising out-stream CPMs as well—just not as much as in-stream. If publishers can focus on the big picture, they’ll see that this means more video opportunities (and revenue) in the long run.

There’s a world in which we can go back to creating original, high-quality content our readers want to watch and be paid the premium we deserve. For everything else, we can run out-stream and still see improved video revenue. We can see the destination we need to get to, but we’re stuck in neutral. For this dream world to come true for both sides, something has to give.

How do we start this change?

IAB guidelines are one thing, adoption is another. Currently, the industry is the Spider-Man pointing meme, and that’s not a good look. We need to stop the blame game and work together to enact change, which will need to come from industry leaders willing to put action (and money) behind their words. Major buy-side partners should declare they’re only working with publishers who have properly labeled inventory.

Until that moment, publishers who are misdeclaring their inventory also need to consider their reputation. You may not like to think of it in these terms, but every impression you’ve been sending out since this announcement is a form of fraud. Your reputation as a publisher is on the line. You can only have the excuse of working to make this change for so long.

Out-stream video is a viable and lucrative part of the future for programmatic. It’s time the industry realizes this is a change for good. Let’s combine our considerable forces to not only adopt the IAB guidelines but put them into practice and improve the transparency and consistency in this ecosystem.

Signal. Telegram. Mastodon. Discord. Geneva. We’ve recently seen a sudden surge in the social media sector, possibly due to the tenets of Web3, as people ditch larger platforms and flock to ones that provide better security, tighter data privacy and less algorithmic manipulation. The niche subcultures these newer platforms cultivate, focused around specific topics and industries, serve as a throwback to the early internet, rife with forums like Yahoo! Groups and Reddit.

But for Black users, creators and developers, the exodus to smaller, closed social networks isn’t just motivated by a need for security. It’s driven by a quest for ownership. By launching proprietary apps and communities, Black creatives are able to reclaim culture, gatekeeping it from brands looking to appropriate norms and rehash them without providing credit. This is important to consider in a world where the pay gap between Black and white influencers is 22%, and where Black users are 35% more likely to trust any Black media over any general media.

Black-owned social networks offer increasingly equitable methods of monetizing content, more moderation and less censorship, offering digital safe spaces for Black users to present their most authentic selves. This means gaining and maintaining audience trust and credibility. An example of this is Spill, a forthcoming Black-owned social app that aims to prioritize culture, inclusivity and pay equity. Founded by ex-Twitter employees Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell and DeVaris Brown, Spill has integrated blockchain in order to credit creators for their ideas as well to compensate them for content that goes viral on the platform. Set to launch this quarter, it already has over 50,000 users on its waitlist. There’s also Valence, a social platform for Black professionals frequently compared to LinkedIn, which has raised $7 million from investors.

Pretty much any tech platform can attract a Black audience—Clubhouse proved that—but the difference with these Black-owned apps is that they are built from the start with Black inclusivity in mind, making them more likely to stand the test of time.

But what does all of this mean for marketers? Should CMOs drop “Big Social” from their multicultural marketing mixes for good? Are the days of social executives using Twitter lookalike audiences to target “followers of Fenty Beauty” gone? Not necessarily—but it does mean that marketing leaders must begin to integrate Black-owned communities and apps into marketing plans in a way that is authentic and sustained.

Research and segmentation 

The best place to start is researching the Black audience segments you’d like to target based on the level of alignment with your brand. Just like the users in any other audience, recognize that Black users are not a monolith—we are gamers, comic book nerds, musicians, consultants, scientists, historians and more. We all have different purchasing habits, attitudes toward brands and intersections with other identities. Once you have created personas that include these variables and have identified segments that align with your goals, find out where your target users live online. This might be on Black-owned apps, but it could also be in newsletter mailing lists, on blogs or on websites directly. Many of these channels address specific segments of the Black community—for example, Black Girl Gamers, a multiplatform community of over 8,000 Black women that share a passion for gaming.

Once you have figured out the networks you’d like to tap into, the next step is to learn the rules for brands engaging within these spaces. Each Black online community has its own unique set of rules, guidelines and ways of speaking. For example, Black Twitter, the community of Twitter users that discusses Black culture, has made mainstream a variety of terms including “tea” and “on fleek.” The growth in Black-owned communities will result in even more unique dialects online, perhaps driven by companies like Spill, which is “leaning into meme culture” throughout its user experience. Brand leaders should learn these vernaculars, not as a means to co-opt or appropriate them, but to better understand themes and trends that make their audiences tick. This, before enlisting Black employees or agencies to create content that resonates.

Quality beats quantity 

Whether or not smaller, community-focused platforms are the future of social media is generally a point of contention for marketing leaders. Some state that the small scale of these platforms mean they can never beat Twitter when it comes to audience reach. But when it comes to multicultural marketing, quality definitely beats quantity. For minoritized audiences, scale isn’t achieved by putting out a message to as many as possible, but by reaching the people who are most likely to engage with or act upon a message. This might mean developing a presence within multiple smaller, targeted networks rather than just one or two larger ones. Digital strategist Sara Wilson coined these smaller networks “digital campfires”—according to Wilson, “If social media can feel like a crowded airport terminal where everyone is allowed, but no one feels particularly excited to be there, digital campfires offer a more intimate oasis where smaller groups of people are excited to gather around shared interests.”

A key benefit for companies that involve digital campfires in their marketing is the ability to reach people in a highly engaged state rather than when they’re mindlessly scrolling. Black users choose to be a part of a community—they don’t choose to be a part of an audience.

Leverage influencer communities 

It isn’t just Black tech leaders who are building their own communities to have more autonomy over their content and its monetization. Black influencers are, too. As more and more Black influencers consider their futures on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, creator-owned apps and newsletters should not be ignored.

Boasting an Instagram following of over a million users, Black lifestyle influencer and tech entrepreneur Hannah Bronfman has launched beauty and wellness community app HBFIT to have more freedom over what she shares online. On a recent podcast, Bronfman enthused, “I don’t know where Instagram is going to be in five years. Long-form content and storytelling is what I truly love to do, and there’s not really a platform anywhere for that, so I thought I’d make it myself. This isn’t like a Patreon. This is my own app that I own, and I think that is starting to look like what, maybe, the future of influencing is.”

Overall, the benefits of companies that adopt a community-led multicultural marketing approach, in contrast to one led by Big Social, shouldn’t be taken lightly. You’ll be able to convert Black users into long-standing brand advocates by reaching them in more inclusive environments where they are fairly compensated for their ideas.