On Linda Price’s kitchen countertop sits an Echo Show, an Amazon Alexa-connected speaker device with a screen. The artificial intelligence-driven Alexa voice answers Price’s questions and makes suggestions for what it thinks she should hear, watch and buy.

���������t 32 years ago, Price, a professor of marketing at the University of Oregon’s Lindquist College, and co-author Lawrence Feick published the influential paper, “,” in the Journal of Marketing. The paper—which has been cited more than 1,700 times and was featured in author Malcolm Gladwell’s multimillion selling book The Tipping Point—coined and defined the term market maven.

At the time, Price says that the concept of a market maven was a vast departure from how economists and marketers viewed consumer-to-consumer influence. Most believed that consumers were driven to maximize their utility in the market by focusing only on their interests. But the market maven is broadly interested in the market and willing to share what they find with anyone who will listen.

Price and Feick defined market mavens as people who have early awareness and high levels of information about the market, namely new products and brands. Market mavens use a diverse number of sources to get their information, are altruistic and simply enjoy shopping—they take pride in being wellsprings of information. Other consumers also recognize mavens when they talk to them, Price and Feick wrote, adding that mavens regularly influence people’s purchase decisions.

Neither Price nor Feick have studied the market maven much in recent years, but Price has noticed changes in the world of consumer influence—one big change sits on her kitchen countertop. The market maven isn’t simply a friend or co-worker anymore, she says, but an Instagram influencer, an aggregate website like Yelp or even a large business such as Amazon, Google or Apple, which she says seem to have co-opted—and at times automated—the role of the market maven.

It’s uncharted territory that shifts the field, she says, but this new-age consumer influence is studied insufficiently in academia and still poorly understood by most companies. But there are opportunities to improve: Whereas marketers had a hard time locating market mavens in the 1980s and 1990s, they can now use tools to find online influencers and communities. “When I was enchanted by the information of a market maven, I couldn’t go online and see 2,500 reviews of the local car dealership,” Price says. “Alexa is in my kitchen trying to influence what I know about the world. That’s a really interesting example of the co-opting and automation of that consumer influencer role.”

People are still market mavens offline; most everybody can recognize a maven in their life, Price says, even the young students in her university classes. But in the past, the role played by the Echo Show in Price’s kitchen would have been occupied solely by a visiting neighbor or a friend like Mark Alpert, whom Price says was her original source of insight into mavens. Price introduced Alpert—a professor at the University of Texas—to Gladwell while she was being interviewed for The Tipping Point. In the book, Price called Alpert “the perfect maven”; she told Gladwell a story about when she was looking for an Easter ham and Alpert, a Jewish man, was still able to give her the best deli to visit and the price she should pay. In interviews with Gladwell, Alpert said that he believed a market maven was someone who wanted to solve other people’s problems by solving their own; Gladwell summed up Alpert by saying that “There’s something automatic, reflexive, about his level of involvement in the marketplace.

“Alpert is almost pathologically helpful,” Gladwell wrote. “He can’t help himself.”

Pathologically helpful is a good way to describe the content radiating from the smart devices in homes, offices and pockets across the world. Most of us know a maven, someone who takes an almost-obsessive interest in the market, but all of us have access to thousands—perhaps millions—of new-age mavens through searching Google, asking Alexa a question or seeing what the latest trends are on Instagram. When Price and Feick wrote their first paper on market mavens, there was no thought of this kind of digital influence expanse; they saw consumers who drove word-of-mouth communication through interactions, like Alpert helping his friends find the best place to eat or find the best deal on a washing machine, but not consumers becoming de facto publishers and creative directors as we now see through Instagram influencers such as Kayla Itsines (who will recommend food and fitness products) and Mariano Di Vaio (who will tell you what to wear and how to style your hair). Brands of the time were sure they were in control of influencing consumers through ad campaigns, dubious of word-of-mouth and consumer-to-consumer influence.

“I came from a world where the people didn’t pay attention to word-of-mouth because they didn’t think it mattered. I thought better all along,” Price says. “And now everybody wants to study word-of-mouth because they know it matters.”

Marketers Must Become Netnographers

Executives at Beiersdorf, a German personal care company, were initially unsure if they would be able to find consumers online who were passionate about deodorant. They wanted to find consumers who could give them information to improve the launch of a new deodorant for their Nivea brand and started searching for customer intel online. “Lo and behold people are discussing everything,” says Robert Kozinets, who has been studying online consumers and communication for more than two decades.

In 1998, he co-authored a paper, “On Netnography: Initial Reflections on Consumer Research Investigations of Cyberculture,” in Advances in Consumer Research—the paper has been cited more than 3,700 times. Kozinets and his co-authors were the first to create and define netnography, a method of online ethnographic research of consumers and communities. Through netnography, companies such as Beiersdorf have found that there are experts in everything—even deodorant and sweat stains.

Beiersdorf hired Munich-based innovation company HYVE, which used netnography to find health, laundry and even weightlifting groups that were discussing the link between deodorant and sweat stains. Deodorants themselves don’t cause sweat stains (they’re caused by sweat mixing with skin bacteria), but HYVE researchers used netnography to find people online who were attributing their yellow-stained shirts to shoddy deodorants. After HYVE surveyed and read web postings by experts of varying niches—including The Undershirt Guy, “the world’s undershirt and underwear expert”— Beiersdorf’s chemical engineers were able to formulate a product that would protect clothing from sweat stains. Eventually, the company launched Nivea Black & White Invisible Deodorant, a product that promised to eliminate sweat stains from clothing. The product won a “Best in Category” award from the GfK Group and, in a press release, Beiersdorf celebrated its launch as “the most successful deodorant launch ever seen in the almost 130-year history of the company.”

“Even though it was off-brand, even though it was very controversial within the company, they ended up basically creating a sub-brand that opened up new opportunities. It all came from listening to people online,” says Kozinets, who is currently a professor of journalism and chair in strategic public relations and business communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “What marketers are dealing with now is really many layers of substrata of expertise. … You’ve got all sorts of different product categories and different elements of product categories that intersect with one another in really unexpected ways.”

If Price were to renew her interest in studying market mavens, she says that she’d start with influencers. Influencers are often people like The Undershirt Guy, niche specialists who grow an authentic audience and spread the word on the products they genuinely enjoy. Price wouldn’t be alone in her research; Kozinets studies influencer networks and hosts influencers in his Influencer Relations class at USC. Marketers have also been increasing their testing of and reliance on influencers: MediaKix predicts that by 2020, marketers will spend as much as $10 billion on influencer marketing.

Influencers are driven by both sides of the market, Price says, as they use and publicize products they care about, but they also know their niche market better than anyone else. Researchers and marketers now also have an advantage because of tools such as netnography, textual analysis and social network analysis, Price says. With these tools, marketers can find who is spreading information online, how they’re spreading it and who else is listening, whether through a focused group of people who follow a specific influencer or a less focused review aggregation website, such as Yelp or Google.

Modern influencers differ from the market maven in one big way, Kozinets says: Influencers focus their knowledge on their followers rather than the market. The classic market maven may know a lot about brands that sell underwear and undershirts, but The Undershirt Guy has a small following of people who message and interact with him about what kinds of underwear they like and dislike. More than the products, he’s likely to know a great deal about what other people who are passionate about underwear want.

“Expertise has really changed, in particular from the side of being an expert in a product or product category to being an expert in a particular audience, their perspective and their needs,” he says. “In a way, you have proxies for consumer groups. They’re very valuable because they can give you feedback. If you’re trying to find an influencer for your product and you keep getting the answer, ‘No, this is not a brand for me,’ then you probably don’t have a good product. If you’re rejected by influencers, it’s very similar to being rejected by customers.”

All the dimensions of the market, including the market maven, have broken down into deeper niche categories, Kozinets says. He compares parsing the new world of influencers—including the size rankings of macro-, micro- and nano-influencers—to discovering a new jungle and trying to name its different species. Practitioners are ahead of academics in their work to discover these new aspects of how customers communicate online about their products.

Even so, he says that while many newer companies use online research and Big Data research methods, many legacy companies have trouble consistently finding and using information gleaned from influencers and other online niche experts. “You need information that’s right now,” Kozinets says. “That’s all there online.” As Kozinets and two coauthors wrote in a 2018 paper—titled “Evolving netnography: how brand auto-netnography, a netnographic sensibility, and more-than-human netnography can transform your research”—the world is changing whether marketers change with it or choose to ignore the discussions customers are having online. “What comes next is anyone’s game,” they write.

The New Maven is an Object

Although Price says that she’d study influencers if she were to re-focus on the market maven, she can’t help but wonder if today’s true market maven sits on her kitchen counter. “Do I believe that Alexa is out to help me?” Price asks with a laugh. “No, I do not. But she is reliably always there.”

Market mavens aren’t always with you, but they are always authentic—Price says that the magic of the fleshy market maven lies in its authenticity. Alexa can’t possibly be authentic, she says, as there will always be an algorithm written and guided by a company—its purpose will always be to make money rather than altruistically share knowledge. But these devices and their influence can’t be ignored; Gartner predicts that consumer homes across the world will have 12.8 billion intelligent and Internet of Things-ready devices by 2020, up from about 4 billion in 2016. Our strong ties to human market mavens seem to have stagnated, Price says, while our weak ties to AI and smart objects have become expansive.

But are ties to these electronic, AI-driven voices actually weak? Donna Hoffman, a professor of marketing and co-director of The Center for the Connected Consumer at The George Washington University School of Business, believes the ties we form to these AI voices may be stronger than most people realize. In her career, Hoffman has researched these IoT objects and found that the links between the devices and consumers can be strong due to how often people interact with them.

“There is routine, habitual interaction, but it’s different kinds of interaction that happens over time,” Hoffman says. “As that happens, these relationships can acquire a great deal of strength and capture a number of emotions or behavioral components. They might become increasingly hard to break.”

The relationships will become even stronger when these AI-based mavens begin to make purchases for their owners. Instead of the fleshy maven telling you what’s new on the market, the object maven will automatically order and ship new detergent or toilet paper to your house when it notices that these items have run low. This is exactly what companies want, Hoffman says; once object mavens have the trust and control of purchasing decisions in the home, they become the ultimate influencer—the market maven who controls the market.

Brands controlling the role of the maven should raise some interesting questions, Hoffman says. “If I say, ‘Alexa, I need more toilet paper,’ what is she…” in the background, Hoffman’s Alexa chimes in, adding toilet paper to Hoffman’s shopping cart. “Oh god, no Alexa! Remove! Remove the toilet paper. My god. For example, what did she just add? I didn’t go to the website. I didn’t read reviews. I didn’t choose a brand. I didn’t look at the prices. What did she just do? One of the first things that’s going to happen is there’s going to be a lot of price discrimination and that’s already happening on Amazon.”

Price discrimination is when a customer is charged different prices for the same product, according to Investopedia—at its worst, sellers charge each customer the maximum price. Hoffman says that this will happen because many consumers will decide to abdicate the decision-making process in shopping—whereas the classic market maven, like Alpert, would lead friends to the best product at the best price, consumers who abdicate their role as researcher will allow object mavens to select whatever item at whatever price it chooses. How an object maven arrives at its choice would likely be a mystery. “Maybe it’ll be the brand I used last time,” Hoffman says. “But what if she decides to put in a new brand because that brand paid more for virtual shelf placement? I think that there are a lot of interesting implications.”

Brands have potential to become a trusted adviser—a loved voice—in a relationship the consumer relies on. The relationship between brands and consumers will deepen as consumers rely more on brand-driven smart objects. Hoffman says that the potential for this kind of relationship would give brands many new opportunities to market through the suggestions of an object maven, but would create a world fraught with privacy concerns, discrimination and data security. What happens when consumers come to trust a voice that is essentially a brand’s proxy?

“It’s a big concern as we start to wonder if these different service processes driven by AI are causing us to go from a loss of agency to a loss of free will,” Hoffman says. “But as we start to lose agency—like, I can’t control what Facebook serves on the timeline, what kind of things that decide I need to see—I can go to a situation where I can’t even control what products Alexa would let me buy. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting there.”

That’s a huge shift from the early days of the internet. In a 1996 paper from Hoffman and co-author Tom Novak—titled “Marketing in hypermedia computer-mediated environments: Conceptual foundations” and cited more than 7,200 times—they wrote that marketers must adjust and create new marketing concepts or risk their own demise due to customers having more control and information than ever. “We have argued that the traditional one-to-many model, with its attendant implications and consequences for marketing theory and practice, is simply not applicable in this new hypermedia environment,” they wrote.

But a 2018 paper from Hoffman and Novak, titled “Relationship Journeys in the Internet of Things: A New Framework for Understanding Interactions Between Consumers and Smart Objects,” they ask marketers to consider smart objects less as objects and more as beings with varying levels of agency, autonomy and authority. What will emerge from a relationship between humans and devices, especially as those devices begin to appear more like humans and less like machines? “As the number and capabilities of smart, Internet-connected objects increase, so do the complexities of the dynamic and evolving assemblages that emerge from consumer-object interaction,” they write.

The Marketer’s Road Forward

How can marketers manage the uncertainty of this new jungle of mavens? In Hoffman’s world of IoT, object mavens, it remains to be seen; she says that no brand is doing it well yet. The big three digital corporations—Amazon, Apple and Google—all serve as proverbial toes dipping into the water, but no company yet has met the full potential of taking the role of a digital maven.

“But this is what we have right now,” Hoffman says. “We can observe what kinds of things are happening.”

Brands and researchers are actively observing how the big-three companies run their object mavens, Hoffman says. One of the things she’s currently studying with Novak is the role of trust in the relationship between humans and smart objects. What will make people give up authority and give an object more authority to make decisions on their behalf?

“These companies aren’t just thinking, ‘Let’s just get these objects in the home,’ they’re thinking, ‘How can these objects start to make decisions?’” Hoffman says. “As they make these decisions, they [become] influencers.”

For fleshy influencers—those who get to know their followers and what they want en masse—Kozinets says that the first step for marketers is to pay attention to what’s happening online in niche groups.

“If you’re not spending a half-hour to an hour a day out there online observing what’s going on, you’re gonna miss a lot,” Kozinets says. “If you’re a marketer and you’re trying to follow trends or understand what to launch or what to do or what to take off the shelf today, you need information that’s right now. And that’s all there online.”

Price suggests that marketers look for influencers whom the company could have an authentic relationship with rather than the influencers who have the largest number of followers. Brands that look for taste influencers should also seek those who have a broad portfolio, she says, a portfolio partially sponsored by brands, but one the influencer has expertly and lovingly curated.

“That means that you are looking for evidence in the influencers’ Instagram and in their posts and in their followers that they influence or care about the followers,” Price says. “Because what you’re trying to do in that case is understand the C2C transaction that’s vital in understanding networks of care and helping.”

Price cites the cultural phenomenon that is Japanese organization guru Marie Kondo; she says that Kondo’s Netflix show, “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo,” is an example of “grabbing hold of people’s lives” by going beyond cleaning clutter and into understanding their goals, projects and relationships. By going beyond simply selling or—in Kondo’s case—pushing a system for tidying your house, Price says that authentic relationships can form between brands and people.

“The power of the market maven was that they weren’t pushing a particular brand or a particular product category, but they were pushing good ways to live your life in the marketplace,” Price says.

No one knows if the new-age maven—the influencer, the aggregator, the smart object, the brand co-opting the maven’s role—can help consumers live their best lives in the marketplace. Price, Hoffman and Kozinets all say that the roles played by new-age mavens and their relationships with customers need more research. But it’s far-fetched to think that any new-age mavens could have quite the same effect as the personal interactions between a classic market maven and their friends. But where the classic market maven stagnates—your knowledgeable friend can’t be there in every grocery aisle, nor can they satisfy every curiosity during morning coffee—marketers can find new opportunities to guide, influence and perhaps even become the maven.

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It isn’t just your imagination: shorter ads—six seconds in most cases—are more popular than ever. “A six-second bumper appears in pretty much all briefs that we get,” says Dean Challis, head of communications strategy at global ad agency . These short ads—sixes, he calls them—started appearing in most Droga5 creative briefs in the past two years.

Although six-second ads have become commonplace online, the shorter-ad trend is 25 years in the making, according to Thales Teixeira, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. In the 1980s, TV commercials were anywhere from 60- to 90-seconds long, and the content was mostly informative. In the 1990s, 30-second ads—more dynamic and entertaining—became the norm, before 15-second ads became more common in the 2000s.

“When you go online, history repeats itself,” Teixeira says. Advertisers cut ads to five seconds, he says, but most soon realized that shorter ads can’t simply be pulled from longer spots—there must be something that sets short ads apart. “Fast-forward to today, what we see are ads that are made for the internet, not made for TV and then repurposed,” Teixeira says.

Short ads aren’t likely to flame out as a trend. According to Teixeira’s research, the cost of consumer attention has increased by seven to nine times in the past two decades. He believes the increase is due to an abundance and variety of content online. People have an endless number of options for what to watch; why would they choose an ad?

This is where unskippable six-second ads become essential; these ads capture anywhere from 8% to 11% more attention per second than longer ads, according to a . Advertisers have caught on: A surveyed 305 brand marketers and agencies to find that 81% believe unskippable six-second pre-roll ads are effective.

Build a Ladder of Engagement

These days, few people get information on products from watching ads, Teixeira says. Brands need to find ways to make ads more entertaining to capture viewer attention. To create a series of entertaining ads, Teixeira suggests building a “ladder of engagement.”

The ladder of engagement is akin to winning the attention of a new friend, Teixeira says. Just as you’d spend a few minutes chatting before inviting them to coffee, then to dinner on another evening, a brand builds its ladder of engagement step by step. Brands can start with a five-second ad, then a 15-second ad, then 30 seconds, then try to get consumers to visit their website.

“The height of the first step has to be very, very small,” he says. “Unless you’re Apple, you can’t expect that any consumer will sit through more than five seconds without knowing your brand. … The idea is that people will get little chunks of information, as opposed to getting all the information in one longer ad because people just skip through that.”

A methodical, entertaining reveal also avoids what Teixeira calls an “aversion to persuasion”; he says that many viewers stop paying attention when an ad is informative. If you tell a story instead of trying to persuade, Teixeira says that viewers are more likely to keep watching. “One of the first jobs of the ad is to remove this barrier to be persuaded,” he says.

To do so, Teixeira says brands should include relatable characters and use more engaging than informative content. Once viewers are entertained by the ads, he says they won’t automatically click away once they see the brand’s logo and realize that they’re watching an ad. Insurance companies—think the or series—have been striking this balance for years, Teixeira says.

Advertisers can know if the ladder of engagement is working by keeping track of how many people watch the ad until the end, Teixeira says. Longer ads that try to convey too much information tend to get skipped, he says, but modern advertisers must realize that buying an ad isn’t buying attention—it’s buying an opportunity to communicate.

“The advertiser’s first role is not to throw away the potential attention that they bought,” he says. “Don’t screw up and don’t lose what you’ve already paid for.”

A big piece of moving up the ladder of engagement is creating emotion, Teixeira says. In a 2018 Journal of Marketing paper, “,” Teixeira and co-authors say that giving Netflix viewers a sample of the emotions they’ll feel when they watch a show or movie was effective. “We used facial expression analysis to really understand what [expressions] are most emotional and just put those scenes in the movie trailer,” he says. “In some cases, you can actually get people to feel the intensity of emotion in a short period of time. Not as intense as a beautiful movie, but it goes pretty far.”

Teixeira warns against pushing nonstop emotions in ads. Think about a high-pitch beep that never ends, he says—it’s annoying, but people get used to it and it blends into the background. “What people never, ever get used to is that periodical beep-beep-beep,” he says. “Those car alarms will drive you nuts for five minutes, five hours or five days. So that’s what you need to do with the emotions in ads.”

Keep Brand Awareness

Challis—whose role at Droga5 is to ensure media is considered at the start of the creative process—says that sixes will never replace longer ads, but they now play a role in brand awareness for nearly every brand in Droga5’s roster. Instead of a ladder of engagement, Challis believes short ads are a way to remind viewers of the campaign’s core message. Sixes can also be used to improve specific parts of the customer journey, he says.

“In most instances, they will work within a system with a longer-form asset—be that a longer-form video or whatever will form the base of the campaign messaging,” he says. “Then sixes can be used to target specific audiences. … Whether you want to target people on their coffee break or other points [of the day], you can do that quite smartly and cost effectively in that format.”

In 2018, Droga5 created a series of short ads to go along with the Under Armour “Will Finds a Way” campaign. The initial ad was about 75 seconds long and featured a voiceover from actor Dwayne Johnson on how different young athletes chose to train. The accompanying sixes went into more depth on the stories of the young athletes.

“When [a six is] working off of a main campaign, you use it to remind people of what the main campaign was and you can retarget people who have been exposed to the initial message,” Challis says. “You know you’re not getting wastage.”

To ensure ads aren’t wasted, Challis says Droga5 looks at the typical reach and frequency numbers, but ideally wants to build a multivariate model that shows how the ads lead to business success. What success is will always depend on what the campaign set out to achieve—if the campaign for a consumer product rolled out over time, Challis says they’d look at how the sixes affected site visits.

By knowing sixes will follow the campaign’s centerpiece, Challis says the creatives at Droga5 can more easily plan shoots and production. Instead of starting a shoot with plans to merely get what they need for a 30-second ad, they can plan for what they’ll need in the sixes and build them out during production. Challis says this helps them plan for how the messages will be sequenced and allows the story to continue after the main ad runs, akin to having a ladder of engagement after the campaign’s centerpiece.

“Then we can also look at the context in which it appears,” he says. “If you’re looking at it on YouTube, for instance, you target certain types of content … that’s going to follow it. If you’ve got sports content or comedy afterward, how do you make that six seconds relate to the thing you’re about to see?”

Dos and Don’ts of Creating Short Ads

�ٰ���’T simply cut down a 30-second ad. “It just doesn’t work,” Challis says. “You can’t think about multiple scenes. Think a one-scene story or even message.”

DO think about how you can grab attention. Most creatives are still thinking about how they can create content that will get people to buy their products, Teixeira says. Instead, they should think about how they can hold people’s attention.

�ٰ���’T forget to brand.Brands must entertain in short ads, Teixeira says, but they can’t forget to inform. “You can’t just entertain for free,” he says of the ladder of engagement process. “You’re still an advertiser. You have to ease into the pitch.”

DO have clarity on the role of the short ad. “From a design standpoint, having clarity on what the take out of the ad is and how it fits into the broader work [is important],” Challis says. “Because with a six-second hit, you don’t have a huge amount of time to take away a message.”

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Goal

Supermarket standout is a brand that needs no introduction. The refrigerated-aisle mainstay has dominated butter sales since its introduction in the 1920s. What’s less known is that the company is an agricultural co-op composed of more than 3,600 “farmer-to-fork” member-owners, about half of whom are dairy farmers. In 2018, Land O’Lakes promoted this under-told story as a key differentiator for its brand.

The new ethos first showed up in a subtle but significant way on product packaging last year. The phrase “farmer-owned” was added to the right corner of Land O’Lakes labels, just above the brand name. But the co-op story required more oomph than remixed detail work. Land O’Lakes undertook a new initiative called to draw a more human face on the brand and tell its co-op story.

“All Together Better was built on the premise of inclusion, one of the core values at Land O’Lakes,” says Catherine Fox, senior marketing director at Land O’Lakes. “In an increasingly divided world, we want to be a unifying force, celebrating the boldness, strength and grit reflective of the female farmers who make up the Land O’Lakes cooperative.”

All Together Better is no one-off; it will be the company’s core brand identity for the foreseeable future. The message required a showstopping debut campaign that would set the table for whatever came next, something that features traditional farmers who form the backbone of the agricultural giant. The added twist: The campaign would feature all women in farming.

“When you Google farmers, only pictures of male farmers come up,” says Anne Marie Hite, senior vice president and creative director at The Martin Agency. “Then you go on these farms and there are tons of women doing all this work.”

A USDA agriculture census finds that 30% of farmers are women. It doesn’t hurt to highlight female farmers when this gender is more likely to be the primary household shopper, according to market research company The Hartman Group.

“Our ultimate goal was to sell butter,” Hite says. “These days, people want to buy products from companies they believe in and have a higher purpose. Land O’Lakes has that, it wasn’t something we needed to fabricate.”

Action

There needed to be a song; it had to be catchy, novel and exultant all at once. Hite and her colleagues drafted a female retelling of the children’s classic, “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” Called “She-I-O,” it eschewed aging patriarchal farmers altogether in favor of the ladies of livestock. The song was good enough to win over Land O’Lakes marketing brass, but skilled hands were needed to turn the idea into an earworm.

Dozens of musicians were evaluated to turn the nursey rhyme into a product jingle with some manner of authenticity. The team selected Emmy Award-winning country singer Maggie Rose, saying she reflected the project’s emotional heart. They also brought on songwriter Liz Rose (no relation), whose collaboration with Taylor Swift won the pair a Grammy in 2010. “We left them in a room for three hours,” Hite says. When we came back in, Maggie had her guitar, and they played us this amazing song. It was pretty close to what we ended up with.” The song was recorded soon after in a Nashville studio and filming of the campaign music video took place on two actual Land O’Lakes member farms in Pennsylvania. The final cut flicks between female farmers at work and a glammed-up Maggie Rose performing in a red jumpsuit with her band in an empty storage shed.

“Authenticity was key, which is why the video features the Dotterer sisters, their cousins and their daughters, just a few of the many real-life female farmers from Land O’Lakes,” says Anna Squibb, Land O’Lakes senior manager of integrated marketing.

The footage was shot by veteran music directors and female filmmaking team Charlotte Fassler and Dani Girdwood. Another crew, , also produced a three-part digital documentary series called, “In Their Words,” which told the stories of the women working the farms.

“My favorite moment of the whole process was when Maggie Rose and her band were on the farm,” Hite says. “All these women and their daughters were standing around Maggie and the directors as they played the song. I turned around and they all were crying. This is their story.”

Everything was timed to drop on Women’s Equality Day on Aug. 26, 2018. The cultural moment served as a natural amplifier of the ad’s message and allowed Land O’Lakes to pursue a charitable tie-in. For every “She-I-O” music video share or comment received via social media, the brand donated one dollar to Feeding America, with a $100,000 cap. Squibb notes that hunger disproportionately affects women and that 3.1 million food-insecure households are led by single women.

Finally, in a bit of brand-affirming synergy—which the Land O’Lakes team swears is in no way related to “She-I-O”—the company’s first female CEO, Beth Ford, took over leadership in the same month the advertisement went live.

Results

“We were monitoring Twitter all night to see what people were saying,” Hite says. “[We saw] things like, ‘I’m never buying another brand of butter again,’ and, ‘I love Land O’Lakes.’ It obviously resonated on such a deep level with women and what it meant for their daughters.”

A month after the initial push, a 90-second ad was shown during the season 15 premiere of “The Voice” on Sept. 24. Hosts Kelly Clarkson and Blake Shelton were both impressed enough by the song to share it on social media without being paid to promote it. The ensuing buzz was enough momentum to briefly place the track into iTunes’ Top 20 rock songs.

The more traditional goals of the campaign were more than satisfied. All told, the advertisement generated 420 million earned impressions, with 75 million via social media. “She-I-O” was talked about in 777 media outlets, including AOL, Fast Company, Today, Vox and Food & Wine. Numbers provided by The Martin Agency show a 70% increase in word-of-mouth and 10-point improvement in purchase intent. Land O’Lakes also met its $100,000 charitable contribution cap.

For Hite, the results validated the campaign’s unique mix of business as usual and passion project. “We all went through a mourning process after it was over because you don’t get those every day,” she says. “We felt so honored to be telling that story, especially when you get out there and meet the farmers.”

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In 2018, the alleging that the social media platform had violated the Fair Housing Act. Facebook had done this, the complaint alleges, by allowing advertisers to discriminate against users based on sex, race, religion and even by interests such as “mobility scooter” and “deaf culture.”

“Facebook mines extensive user data and classifies its users based on protected characteristics,” the HUD complaint said. “Facebook’s ad targeting tools then invite advertisers to express unlawful preferences by suggesting discriminatory options, and Facebook effectuates the delivery of housing-related ads to certain users and not others based on those users’ actual or imputed protected traits.”

After the complaint, by saying that “there is no place for discrimination” and removed 5,000 ad target options. “While these options have been used in legitimate ways to reach people interested in a certain product or service, we think minimizing the risk of abuse is more important,” Facebook said in a blog post.

But the charges of discrimination by Facebook aren’t new; for the past three years, Facebook has been consistently hounded by charges that its platform allows for discriminatory targeting. A 2016 investigation by ProPublica found that and, a year later, found that . In 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union and three women claiming that they were blocked from seeing job ads posted by 10 businesses that were using Facebook’s ad system to show job postings only to men—if true, this would likely be a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects employees and job applicants from discrimination based on sex, race, religion and national origin.

These dark ads are made to be seen by specific groups but unviewable by others; some may refer to them as microtargeting or nano-targeting. The public became most aware of dark ads during the Cambridge Analytica controversy in 2018, when The Guardian reported that President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign relied heavily on dark ads, often running 50,000 to 60,000 variations of Facebook advertisements each day. Brad Parscale, digital media director of Trump’s 2016 campaign and campaign manager for the 2020 campaign, told Bloomberg that they used these dark ads to target black voters. The aim of the ads was lowering voter turnout for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, Bloomberg reported.

Dark ads, especially those based on immutable characteristics such as sex and race, pose an interesting question to advertisers and marketers: When is it OK to exclude someone from seeing an ad? When is it OK to target based on an immutable characteristic, such as sex or race?

A New Opportunity

Guilherme Pires, co-author of Ethnic Marketing Theory, Practice and Entrepreneurship and professor of marketing at Australia’s Newcastle Business School, says that ethnic minority customers face several challenges in the market—bias, price discrimination, invisibility, language-related problems and perceived low critical mass.

“Invisibility is, in my view, a major source of concern because the implications for perceived critical mass detract from their being targeted,” Pires says. “In fact, even when critical mass is not the issue, a business may avoid targeting a specific group on account of negative reactions from other groups and, in particular, the mainstream.”

When used well, dark ads could overcome these visibility and critical mass problems, Pires says, as they allow marketers to target individuals with tailored value propositions. This can make dark ads relevant and beneficial for the targeted group while being inconspicuous to others.

“The possible ethics issue, in my view, has to do with the ‘how’ and ‘what’ is actually done,” Pires says. “Has permission been granted by the consumer to be targeted with dark ads? Has the content been abused, such as by containing pictures, endorsements or other content that is false, misleading or in some other way abused? Are there clear and easy ways for consumers to terminate undesired communications and get compensation for malpractice?”

These questions are relevant to all customers, Pires says. In Ethnic Marketing Theory, he and co-author John Stanton write that marketers must be especially aware of how people’s culture affects their behavior—and self-aware of how their own culture affects their behavior.

“The increasing visibility of minority ethnic groups … has heightened business awareness of the opportunities offered by ‘new’ markets based on multiple ethnicities within national borders,” Pires and Stanton write. “Yet, the perceived effectiveness of the increased multicultural marketing efforts to take advantage of those opportunities were estimated at only four of each 10 cases.”

Targeting by Exclusion

Targeting by group is ineffective, says Felipe Korzenny, author of Hispanic Marketing: A Cultural Perspective and professor emeritus of advertising, integrated marketing and management communication at Florida State University. But Korzenny says that targeting by exclusion, as had been allowed on Facebook, is clearly exclusionary.

“If you say, ‘I would like to reach everyone except for people in same-sex relationships,’ that would be exclusionary to sexual [orientation],” Korzenny says, as an example.

But Korzenny says that it would be OK to target by exclusion if the exclusion is based on a behavior rather than a trait. Even still, Korzenny says that targeting by exclusion or group will be much less effective than targeting by past behavior. “That’s what the big marketers do,” he says, citing Amazon as the best example of a company that targets consumers by how they behave. “They reach you believing that you will continue to behave in a certain way in the future and that is a lot more accurate than saying ‘Hispanic.’”

To further highlight the ineffectiveness of targeting by ethnicity rather than behavior, he notes that Hispanics share many common traits—the Spanish language, the Catholic religion, roots in Spain, an affinity for lime flavor—but if a marketer tries to sell lime soap, targeting people who have previously bought lime-scented items will cast a wider net than only targeting Hispanics. After all, there will be individuals who aren’t Hispanic who would love lime-scented soap and individuals who are Hispanic who detest lime-scented soap.

Another easy way to see why targeting by racial group can be ineffective: Imagine trying to target white people, a group that has come to encompass multiple ethnic backgrounds and live in all regions across the U.S. Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans have similarly expansive histories and backgrounds.

While there are some good ways to target by group—people who send money to Mexico are likely Mexican, Korzenny says, and people shopping for black haircare products are likely black—targeting or excluding by race, sex, sexual orientation or other immutable traits is largely ineffective and, at worst, unethical.

“You can almost always find a set of behaviors that would give you more bang for your buck because you might be able to include a bunch of other groups that do the same thing,” he says. While data-based behavioral targeting is likely more expensive than group targeting, Korzenny says that it’s also more precise.

Regarding exclusionary ads, Korzenny notes that—as the HUD complaint shows—it’s illegal to exclude people by traits they can’t change.

“That has been a gain by our society,” Korzenny says. “There’s still a lot of backward [thinking] going on. But most marketing departments probably have people who are a little more sophisticated than that.”

Editor’s note: On March 19, Facebook reached a settlement with civil rights groups and announced it will make “.”

For more information on marketing place inclusion and exclusion, .

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Yet in February of this year, , wiping out more than 25% of its valuation. The anticipated cost savings had failed to materialize. In 2016, GE acquired Baker Hughes for $30 billion only to find that expected synergies in revenues and costs did not transpire. In 2018, , marking down the valuation of Baker Hughes to less than $15 billion.

These examples echo the findings of a of 1,000 corporate executives. The survey identified several impediments to merger and acquisition success: expected sales not materializing (33%), execution and integration gaps (32%), failure to achieve expected cost synergies (26%), failure to achieve expected revenue synergies (23%) and lack of cultural alignment (20%). CMOs, guided by a customer focus, can play a critical role in overcoming these hurdles.

M&As are likely to fail when senior leaders focus on operations and finance at the expense of focusing on customers. In 2010, when Continental Airlines and United Airlines merged, much was made of the potential operational and financial synergies. Yet an analysis by marketing researchers found that United customers were less satisfied than Continental customers: In 2009, Continental scored 68 in the American Customer Satisfaction Index, 12 points higher than United. Even in 2018, the parent company United Continental Holdings ranked lowest in customer satisfaction at 67, compared to the airline average of 73 and Southwest’s score of 80. Despite the operational and financial synergies, United Continental’s stock has lagged behind Southwest’s since the merger. To avoid a similar outcome, CMOs can take three steps to bring a customer-focused approach to M&As.

Measure Customer Satisfaction and Its Drivers for Both Companies Before and After the M&A

Research shows that customer satisfaction is a reliable and consistent predictor of sales. By measuring the level of customer satisfaction and the weight of satisfaction drivers, CMOs can quantify the relative health of each company’s customer base. Let’s say an industrial company we’ll call ParentCO wanted to acquire a competitor that we’ll call TargetCO. The CMO of ParentCO helped conduct a study measuring customer satisfaction and its drivers for both companies. Results showed that TargetCO’s customer satisfaction was lower than ParentCO; further, TargetCO’s customers were dissatisfied with its sales and bidding process and its product quality, both key drivers of overall satisfaction.

Prior to the acquisition, the CMO helped TargetCO develop specific goals in terms of satisfaction targets along with an operational plan to improve the sales process and product quality. The COO and CMO worked together to monitor the post-merger goals, achieving a 12% increase in overall customer satisfaction for TargetCO and a 23% sales improvement within two quarters. By developing measurable customer KPIs that link to operational KPIs, the CMO and COO led the merger to success.

Have a Dual Focus

Many companies emphasize either revenue expansion through customer satisfaction or cost reduction through efficiency initiatives. Some companies have a dual focus—simultaneously achieving revenue expansion through satisfied customers and cost reduction through efficiency initiatives.

of 77 Fortune 100 firms between 1994 and 2000 sought to answer this question by measuring customer satisfaction and cost efficiency. It found that only firms that could simultaneously achieve cost reduction and customer satisfaction—a dual focus—showed an increase in long-term firm value. For an average firm with a market value of $46 billion, achievement of dual focus was worth $1.61 billion in firm value.

showed this same effect for merging firms. The study compared firms that implemented a dual focus to those that did not. Results showed that among merging firms, only those with a dual focus showed an increase in firm value. Firms that focused only on customer satisfaction or only on efficiency failed to realize these gains. Strategically, a singular focus on efficiency—at the expense of customer satisfaction—can reduce the chances of achieving a successful merger.

At Kraft Heinz, management was so focused on improving manufacturing efficiency that it failed to incorporate the shifts in customer needs—healthier products, nutritional labeling and organic ingredients—in its offerings. As the CFO and COO focus on financial and operational efficiency, the CMO must ensure that customer needs are being satisfied and incorporated in the strategic plan. One effective way to accomplish this is to quantify the impact of each efficiency initiative on overall customer satisfaction through rigorous measurement. Another approach is to use a customer satisfaction survey to develop and monitor customer KPIs that drive sales.

Align Your Marketing Resources

Merging companies often bring different types of marketing resources to the table: sales force, marketing collateral, social media presence, customer databases, consumer research expertise and product pipeline. A purposeful alignment of marketing resources after a merger can influence the return of the merger or acquisition. If the motive for an M&A is to consolidate, then the firms should align their marketing resources to be as similar as possible.

An alignment of marketing resources can ensure synergies among the firms, present a unified value proposition to their combined customer base and ensure that customers are less likely to switch to competitive offerings. As an example, the motive behind the Kraft Heinz merger was to consolidate. From all available accounts it seems that Kraft Heinz was mostly focused on manufacturing efficiencies with little attention paid to aligning marketing resources. Thus, even as its costs declined, its sales stagnated.

To align marketing resources, CMOs at merging companies should set a joint task force involving senior marketing executives from both firms. The task force can develop an inventory of marketing resources, rate the quality of resources each firm brings to the table and identify areas that require alignment. In the case of the industrial company example discussed earlier, a similar task force identified specific initiatives to align marketing resources: migrate the different CRM systems to a single platform, harmonize the sales force incentive plan, and mandate that both companies adhere to a unified brand standard and use a single advertising agency. Because these alignment opportunities were identified in the pre-merger stage and a plan of action was developed, they were achieved within a relatively short period of time after the merger, thus accelerating revenue expansion.

What Now?

M&As require a customer-based perspective led by the CMO to mitigate the downside and maximize their upside. Three crucial strategies for this include focusing strategy by measuring customer satisfaction and its drivers, achieving a dual focus through simultaneous revenue expansion and cost reduction, and developing a concrete road map for aligning marketing resources. CMOs can play a critical role to implement these three strategies and ensure that companies can satisfy their customers’ needs and meet shareholder goals after a merger or acquisition.

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How do you develop business relationships online? If you’re a solo marketing consultant or at a small agency, this is on par with keeping the lights on and your internet connection up. Even if you have a cushy job at a great company, we all know how fast that can change.

But putting yourself out there and promoting your services can seem pushy, tacky and even cheap. A lot of the time, networking is pushy—far too many people think they’re networking when they’re just shooting out cold emails, impersonal LinkedIn invites and auto direct messages on Twitter—none of which the senders would respond to themselves.

Nobody Likes Automated Networking

Whether a cold email or an automated social media message, this sort of networking turns people off.

Looking in my own LinkedIn inbox, I have three messages from three different accounts with the identical greeting and first sentence. How personalized (or persuasive) is that? Some of the notes in my account include fake typos, too—a trick to mask the automation.

This is why personalizing your messages is still effective; so few people do it. Personalizing your messages isn’t hard, either. Look at people’s activity on social media, see what they share, what they comment on and what they like. Click through and actually look at their websites. It takes three minutes or less.

Incredibly, much of the networking or outreach done doesn’t even go this far. If you can add a small personal touch and actually make yourself useful, you’ll get dramatically better results.

“But…” you argue, “That takes a lot of time! I don’t have that much time.”

And you don’t—I don’t. None of us do. Even if you’re at home, unemployed and have no scheduled commitments for the next month, you still probably don’t have that much time.

Fortunately, there is a way to do relationship-building that’s far better than the automated DM and invites. It’s called social selling. Our friends in sales have been doing it for years. Marketers, however, seem to have held back on this a bit. Maybe we’ve been thinking, “That’s a sales thing. I’ll leave it to them.”

But marketers need some of the skills sales pros have, just as sales pros have had to learn strategies from marketing. Consultative sales uses an educational approach to sell in the same way marketers use content marketing to educate their buyers.

Social selling uses that same no-sell, no-ask, educational approach to send personalized communications that genuinely attempts to be helpful. But to do that you’ll need some great content to share.

Content Curation for One-to-One Networking

This doesn’t have to be your own content. Content curation has always been the best way to fill up a social media feed. Curation is basically just sharing other people’s content and adding a bit of your own commentary. And third-party content, incredibly, is often than the content that brands publish themselves.

There are plenty of services, including Quuu and Feedly, that can help you find great content to share. But that’s only phase one. Unfortunately, it’s only as far as some of us take it. To do social selling, or just to build a legitimate network, you need to find good content for specific people you’re connected to.

I read a study one day and found an interesting tidbit about surveys. I have a connection who’s a CEO at a survey company I wanted to write for, so I sent him a note about what I learned. Not only did he reply, but he also invited me to his private Facebook group filled with high-value networking and a group of smart, friendly people. The CEO also asked what my availability was for some work and what my rates were.

That’s more of a response than I would have gotten from sending seven cold-pitch emails, even if they were highly personalized with a valuable piece of advice tailored for each person.

Normally, it takes me 40 minutes to send a hyper-personalized pitch email. Sending seven of those emails would have taken 280 minutes for the same results that I got from 15 minutes of sending a relevant article.

Sending personalized, curated content will get you further than automated messages. But there’s still more work to do.

Build Your Network Intentionally with a ‘Make Friends With’ List

The trick to building a genuine network is to limit who you connect with.

Sure, there are people who can do more than and people who can go to 20 conferences annually and make connections with 20 people at each. That’s great and I aspire to that level of connection, but that’s industrial-grade networking.

Fortunately, that level of super-networking isn’t necessary to build an enviable network than moves you forward. Consider what Tim Hughes, author of , says about network size: “First and foremost, community is not measured in the number of followers you have. We are aware of people with 400 followers who, because of their niche, have been able to build a community.”

To build a community or a network, you’ll need content to attract people’s attention, to share to your social media feeds and to directly send to prospects to nurture your relationship with them. This is why that list of 400 is so important. If you had to send a personalized note with a relevant article to 5,000 people, you’d go crazy. But with just 400 people, you can send one article a day to each person on your list.

Frankly, you might not even want to do that. If 400 seems too much, make up a “Make Friends With” list of 50-200 people you’d like to connect with. You’re not going to be best friends with them, but you’d like to build the type of relationship where they would open and respond to an email you’d send them. They might say “yes” if you asked them to present a webinar or do a podcast interview. They’d take a call from you, maybe even meet you for coffee.

If you pick your list carefully, 50-200 of the right people are enough of a network to change your business or to catapult you toward being recognized as a thought leader or an influencer, which is what 19% of say they’d like to be.

Just don’t only go after the industry superstars. Here’s a possible mix for your list:

• 10% rockstars of your industry and in business overall.
• 30% those who might hire you.
• 30% near your career level who may become stars.
• 10% starting out in their careers or who haven’t yet started their careers.
• 20% in tangentially related industries, or who do things you’re enthusiastic about.

As you build your list, think about where you want to be in five to 10 years. Do you want to be the VP at your company? Do you want your own agency? Do you want to write a bestseller or be an event organizer? Choose people you genuinely admire, but who might also help you to get where you want to go.

Gaining a client, getting a job or generating more influence requires a network. It doesn’t even need to be a big network, just a strong one.

Instead of spamming people to make connections, be helpful and listen. Be generous with your expertise and connect with people you genuinely admire and want to support. Should you see an opportunity to help them, carefully offer help with no strings attached.

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One of the company’s early office design decisions was moving to an agile model where staff sit wherever they feel most productive. This move allowed them to reduce the office size by 1,500 square feet while increasing collaboration and social areas. This included a café, large communal entry and stepped meeting zone that can facilitate everything from coffee nooks to movie nights. There is no receptionist; guests register on a touchscreen in the entryway.

While almost all spaces can be reserved, there is also a quiet zone for focused work. Interior design firm created this space from one that traditionally would be used for IT or storage, as it has intrusive duct work. Instead of hiding that equipment, Unispace made it a divider and used the system operation, in conjunction with furniture, as white noise.

Unispace exposed the columns and floors down to the original terracotta and partially enclosed them with a wire mesh (below, right). Hanging melted globes serve as a transition point between the café and workplace. A graffiti artist created a mural weaving vibrant colors with Archetype’s branding and New York icons.

Interior design: Unispace

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